Tag Archives: Psychology

On the Dunning-Kruger effect’s continuing relevance

The Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that unknowledgeable people lack the very expertise they need to recognise their lack of expertise. They thus overrate their knowledge and performance. Put more technically, deficient cognition (i.e., expertise) leads to faulty metacognition (i.e., self-evaluation of expertise). In contrast, highly expert people underrate their skills socially because they overestimate the knowledge level of their peers (Kruger & Dunning, 1999).

The effect has been uncovered in many settings involving medical residents, gun owners, tournament chess players, debate teams, beginning aviators, and hospital lab techs (Dunning, 2011). In a 2021 study, people who were the least able to separate fake from real news demonstrated little awareness of their failures but the most willingness to trust false news and spread it to others (Lyons et al., 2021).

A garden of schizophrenics – Engelsberg Ideas

in the 1970s, performing a kind of psychological analysis of some of the most ancient books of human culture, the American academic Julian Jaynes came up with a wild and radical hypothesis, namely that, at about 3000 BC, the world was a ‘garden of schizophrenics’.

Jaynes conducted an exhaustive reading of human writings in the Axial Age – that period between approximately 800 and 200 BC which marked a radical transformation in Chinese, Indian and Western civilisations. It was during this period that the religions and philosophies that form many of the pillars of modern culture were produced. Studying these foundational texts, Jaynes argued that, during this period, human consciousness also underwent a radical transformation.

He argued that the first humans described in these books behaved – in different traditions and in different parts of the world – as if they were hearing and obeying voices that they perceived as coming from gods or muses, what today we would call hallucinations. And then, only as time went on, they began progressively to understand that they were the creators and owners of these inner voices. And with this, they acquired introspection: the ability to think about their own thoughts.

— Read on engelsbergideas.com/essays/a-garden-of-schizophrenics/

The Culture of Narcissism | Christopher Lasch | W. W. Norton & Company

When The Culture of Narcissism was first published in 1979, Christopher Lasch was hailed as a “biblical prophet” (Time). Lasch’s identification of narcissism as not only an individual ailment but also a burgeoning social epidemic was groundbreaking. His diagnosis of American culture is even more relevant today, predicting the limitless expansion of the anxious and grasping narcissistic self into every part of American life.
— Read on wwnorton.com/books/The-Culture-of-Narcissism/

Brain Cell DNA Refolds Itself to Aid Memory Recall | Quanta Magazine

More than a century ago, the zoologist Richard Semon coined the term “engram” to designate the physical trace a memory must leave in the brain, like a footprint. Since then, neuroscientists have made progress in their hunt for exactly how our brains form memories. They have learned that specific brain cells activate as we form a memory and reactivate as we remember it, strengthening the connections among the neurons involved. That change ingrains the memory and lets us keep memories we recall more often, while others fade. But the precise physical alterations within our neurons that bring about these changes have been hard to pin down — until now.
— Read on www.quantamagazine.org/brain-cell-dna-refolds-itself-to-aid-memory-recall-20201102/

What comes first: ideas or words? The paradox of articulation | Aeon Essays

… (a) seemingly contradictory observation is that articulating our thoughts, in the hard cases, is a purposive activity that doesn’t simply consist in producing words mechanically, in a kneejerk way. The words that immediately come out of us when we are struck by our thoughts (eg, ‘How outrageous!’, ‘What a mess!’) might hardly reflect what we think at all. They could come to us as a result of habit, their repetition by other speakers, or just our affinity for the way they sound. The danger of giving in to the mindless flow of such words was highlighted by George Orwell, who in ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946) warned that the buzzwords that fly in most readily will ‘construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent – and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.’ To succeed in articulation, we need to chisel away at imprecise formulations, while guarding against any words that would blur or change what we think.

The careful selection that we exercise in the process stands in tension with the ignorance that we hope it will remedy. The point of searching for words, in the hard cases, is to clarify what we’re thinking; and the clarity that we’re after seems to consist in the knowledge that we’re thinking some specific thought. At the same time, our choices of words make sense to us, and so it seems that we must make them for a reason. But it is hard to see how we could have a reason to accept or reject any words if we don’t already know which thought we’re trying to express.
— Read on aeon.co/essays/what-comes-first-ideas-or-words-the-paradox-of-articulation

Philosophy of Humor (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The hypothesis that laughter evolved as a play signal is appealing in several ways. Unlike the Superiority and Incongruity Theories, it explains the link between humor and the facial expression, body language, and sound of laughter. It also explains why laughter is overwhelmingly a social experience, as those theories do not. According to one estimate, we are thirty times more likely to laugh with other people than when we are alone (Provine 2000, 45). Tracing laughter to a play signal in early humans also accords with the fact that young children today laugh during the same activities—chasing, wrestling, and tickling—in which chimps and gorillas show their play face and laugh-like vocalizations. The idea that laughter and humor evolved from mock-aggression, furthermore, helps explain why so much humor today, especially in males, is playfully aggressive.

— Read on plato.stanford.edu/entries/humor/

The Neurology of Flow States – Issue 91: The Amazing Brain – Nautilus

During what psychologists call “flow states,” where one is completely immersed and absorbed in a mental or physical act, people often report an altered sense of time, place, and self. It’s a transportive and pleasurable experience that people seek to achieve, and that neuroscience is now seeking to understand. A great example of flow state is found in many improvised art forms, from music to acting to comedy to poetry, also known as “spontaneous creativity.” Improvisation is a highly complex form of creative behavior that justly inspires our awe and admiration. The ability to improvise requires cognitive flexibility, divergent thinking and discipline-specific skills, and it improves with training.
— Read on m.nautil.us/issue/91/the-amazing-brain/the-neurology-of-flow-states

Current Controversies in Philosophy of Religion // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame

Draper opens the collection with a vision for philosophy of religion: that it broaden its focus by paying more attention to non-Western religions and to philosophical issues that concern religion in general (like how religion might make progress, or the philosophical significance of the diversity of religions); that it distance itself from theology (or at least reform its now-too-intimate relationship with special revelation); that its practitioners become more knowledgeable about religion in general or specific religions in the way that philosophers of science are often knowledgable about science in general or specific sciences; and that philosophers of religion correct the discipline’s history of one-sided inquiry by “making a serious effort to spend some of their time constructing arguments and developing positions that contribute to the development, understanding, or defense of a worldview that those philosophers do not themselves hold”
— Read on ndpr.nd.edu/news/current-controversies-in-philosophy-of-religion/

Garden of Painterly Delights | The New York Review of Books |

During World War I, when soldiers thought longingly of home, their minds often turned to the garden. Indeed, they made small gardens in the trenches, planting bulbs in empty brass shell-casings. In a catalog essay, the Garden Museum’s director, Christopher Woodward, quotes Ford Madox-Ford’s No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction (1929), on the soldier’s dream of return, not to a landscape but “a nook rather,” at the end of a valley “with a little stream, just a trickle level with the grass of the bottom. You understand the idea—a sanctuary.” So the focus of the show is not on great estates but on domestic landscapes and individual plants, and implicitly on the garden’s allegorical power: the myths of Eden.
— Read on www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/03/16/garden-of-painterly-delights/