a few months back I was talking to someone who mentioned offhand that being manipulative was the normal human condition. which blew me away. then yesterday ran across this MMPI description:
Amorality -...
High: Justifies manipulativeness by projecting own selfish opportunistic and exploitive tendencies onto others.
Low: Denies that other people are selfish, opportunistic, and manipulative.
...A unique scale. It's not as pathological as "Amorality" sounds. It would be better to call it, "Manipulativeness", or what Alex Caldwell (1988) likes to call it, "Opportunism"...
and in combination with other recent events it got me thinking about how we as a species - not just the Opportunists - do infer motives, and I think projection is the way we all do it - i.e. an awful lot of the inference comes from just mentally putting our own psyches into the other person's, uh, shoes. So as a mirror it can be informative.
(digression - footwear metaphor complaint - of course it hurts when the shoe is on the other foot! this is to be expected, says nothing about the intrinsic worth of the shoe.)
Lectures on The Emerging Mind are still in process but if all are as good as the first one (Phantoms in the Brain), read. The explanation of why we laugh will shed scales from your eyes.
definition for today:
witzelsucht (vit'sel-zoocht) [Ger.] - "A mental condition characteristic of frontal lobe lesions and marked by the making of poor jokes and puns and the telling of pointless stories, at which the patient himself is intensely amused."
and a very interesting article from Paul Krugman on the evolutionary psychology of investing (The Ice Age Cometh), and why we do so badly at it...
The more I look at the amazing rise of the U.S. stock market, the more I become convinced that we are looking at a mammoth psychological problem. I don't mean mammoth as in "huge" (though maybe that too), but as in "elephant". Let me explain...
No comments:
Post a Comment