Archive for the social behavior Category

Raising Children Without Religion

Posted in social behavior with tags , on October 2, 2015 by nvm.m

Raising Children Without Religion May Be A Better Alternative, Suggests New Research | Bustle

  1. The idea of reason superseding superstition is already an old project. It predates the creation of the United States (and certainly was the model used to create it). I wonder how many mainstream Americans have heard of the Encyclopedia movement. The personalities behind it were without a doubt much more interesting (and probably more sincere) than Richard Dawkins after his recent turn from a fair to decent geneticist into a (theatrical) dilettante philosopher .

  2. The currently fashionable onslaught on religion seems to have strong emotional reasons, that is, the moral outrage at the atrocities committed by some terrorist religious factions (two come to mind at this point, geographically located in opposite parts of the world).

  3. Is religiousness or lack thereoff associated with morality? I find it striking the public’s inability to understand the difference between association and causation.

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Neuroeconomics

Posted in Neuroscience, social behavior with tags , , on January 12, 2013 by nvm.m

While common opinion would say that any individual with a cognitive deficit (including the affective component) would be at a disadvantage at most complex (socially relevant) tasks, this is not necessarily true.
My personal experience is full of examples (like the fact that concrete thought enables you well for medical school). However, it is always nice to bump into some published evidence, like the advantage of brain-damaged investors.
On a wider perspective, predicting a system’s behavior approaching it as a black box can only guarantee an adequate predictive model if the number of observations is considered infinite. Otherwise, for practical purposes, some cases justify looking into its inner structure and workings, as it appears to be in the case of  neuroeconomics.

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Results only

Posted in social behavior with tags on June 4, 2011 by nvm.m

After spending a couple of decades at a variety of institutions, big and small, I have become familiar with most of the stock phrases used in team meetings and orientation talks. Among them, one of the most overused is, “I only care about the results… It’s all that counts“. At this point in my career, whenever I happen to hear that expression, or any of its variants, I immediately look for the exit. In my experience, the individuals who regularly use it are exactly the same people who believe that “the ends justify the means“.

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Linearization lowers anxiety

Posted in Neuroscience, social behavior with tags , , on May 25, 2011 by nvm.m

One of the interesting features of the approach called getting things done is establishing a priority that makes it easier to follow a sequential list of tasks. By relieving the individual from the need for reformulating priorities on every step of her daily activities, it allows for faster results with a lower level of stress.
Sorting out a set in a multidimensional space through unidimensional relationships is an intensive process, especially when that is required within very narrow time constraints (as it usually happens in ‘real life’). This type of processing is highly associated with what some people call (vaguely) “executive functions“. The ability to reformulate our (perceptive) world in such a way can be significantly compromised in persons who suffer conditions that affect their “executive abilities“. The anxiety and frustration derived from this type of demand obviously adds up to these people’s suffering, and impair them even further. This positive feedback probably contributes to the time distortion they tend to experience.
Within an anthropological framework, it is interesting that, once some vulnerable individuals fall into this “cognitive vortex”, modern societies do very little to pull them out of it. We have endless sources of entertainment (to alienate us from the real problems), but very few tools to rebuild our work methods and restructure our life. Once facing the major existential dilemma of engineering our life, the most straightforward solution is to forfeit our “executive functions” altogether, and let others structure our life “for our own good”. As contemporary society becomes more demanding and dehumanized, we are witnessing the emergence of cults, societies, gangs or clubs of all flavors (most of them totalitarian in nature). They all offer a cheap way to structure our life from outside, according to some narrow-minded vision of the world, hence lowering people’s baseline anxiety. The result is a proclivity for establishing vertical hierarchies within society and for increasing struggles (often violent) between various fanatic ideologies. Until we acquire (individually) critical thinking, we can anticipate the flourishing of revamped breeds of fascism and a delightful cornucopia of “jihads” (of all flavors).

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