10 Posts found for source_year: 2019

Human beings are creatures of mimicry. We are evolutionarily supercharged to do one thing better than anyone else: learn by watching and copying others. And the most important thing we learn is how to want. 

As we grow up and live our lives, we watch others and learn what it is we ought to want. Aside from the basics, like food, water, shelter and sex, our … [ Read more ]

Author: Alex Danco | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology

Orwell never intended his novel to be a prediction, only a warning. And it’s as a warning that 1984 keeps finding new relevance.

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Unfreedom today is voluntary. It comes from the bottom up.

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We are living with a new kind of regime that didn’t exist in Orwell’s time. It combines hard nationalism—the diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatred—with soft distraction and confusion: … [ Read more ]

Author: George Packer | Source: The Atlantic (June 8, 2019) | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Literature | Arts, Politics & Public Policy

Each thing we preconceive blinds us to what actually is — a tendency that, when it rises to the level of social perception in the form of stereotypes, metastasizes into a status quo that makes the powerful all the more powerful and the power-poor all the poorer.

Drawing on the pioneering psychologist William James […] Lippmann writes:

For the most part we do not first

… [ Read more ]

Authors: Maria Popova, Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (August 4, 2019) | Subjects: Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge

Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural ability and determination. But there’s a third ingredient that’s not as well understood: an obsessive interest in a particular topic.

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Which leads us to the second feature of this kind of obsession: there is no point. A bus ticket collector’s love is disinterested. They’re not doing it to impress us or to … [ Read more ]

Author: Paul Graham | Subjects: Ability | Skill, Excerpts, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Humans suck. We are impossible to please.
We have so many conflicting needs and desires, it’s a marvel that we can
even wipe the correct ass.

I’ve long written about how humans evolved to be constantly dissatisfied in some way. I’ve written about how, in life, it’s impossible to escape suffering. In fact, in one of the most popular sections of my … [ Read more ]

Author: Mark Manson | Subjects: Happiness, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

There are three major styles of attachment: secure, anxious and avoidant. […] A person’s attachment style is largely influenced by whether or not they bonded successfully with their primary caregivers – parents or otherwise – in childhood, though more recent research suggests that genes, and our romantic history as adults, may also be influential factors. Analysis of studies in North America and Europe found that … [ Read more ]

Author: Elle Hunt | Source: The Guardian (November 5, 2019) | Subjects: Character, Excerpts, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

Researchers have created a new way to classify arrogance on different levels across a spectrum.

The team acknowledges everyone seems to have some degree of arrogance, so in addition to the literature review, the researchers suggest a way to classify the different levels of arrogance a person could exhibit.

The team devised a system that identifies three types of arrogance:

• Individual arrogance—an inflated

… [ Read more ]

Author: Eric Stann | Source: Futurity (October 22, 2019) | Subjects: Attitude, Character, Psychology | Behavior

Most of us have heard of Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs, but Maslow doesn’t have a monopoly on self-actualization. A look at the work of Carl Rogers.

Authors: Carl Rogers, Matt Davis | Source: Big Think (September 17, 2019) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Psychology | Behavior

A 2014 article in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on “motive attribution asymmetry” — the assumption that your ideology is based in love, while your opponent’s is based in hate — suggests an answer. The researchers found that the average Republican and the average Democrat today suffer from a level of motive attribution asymmetry that is comparable with that of Palestinians and … [ Read more ]

Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: The New York Times (March 2, 2019) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

New research published in Current Biology confirms this feeling: people with radical beliefs actually think differently than those without. Specifically, radicals have less metacognitive sensitivity than moderates.

Metacognition refers to the ability to be aware of and analyze one’s own thinking. Metacognitive sensitivity is similar, but more specific: it refers to the ability to distinguish between one’s correct and incorrect judgements.

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First, the researchers developed … [ Read more ]

Author: Matt Davis | Source: Big Think (February 15, 2019) | Subjects: Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior