Affordances are properties of an environment that encourage particular behaviors. Affordances range from simple objects (e.g., glass of water) to complex social cues (e.g., come-hither look). They invite action (drink me! come over here!) but the invitation may be turned down or not even noticed. No surprise there: people enter situations with certain inclinations, desires, and expectations, which sensitizes them to some affordances and not others. Not everyone acts on a help-wanted sign, unguarded purse, or unfriendly comment. And those inclined to act may not behave the same way to the same affordance. A glass of water is generally for drinking but sometimes it’s for throwing in anger. An unguarded purse may be an invitation to grab some cash or turn it in to the lost-and-found office.
Experts are fallible. Experts often disagree with each other. How, then, does one go about trusting experts? And how do we figure out which experts to trust, or not? Take, for instance, medical doctors…
Emotional trust is the feeling we can count on someone, because they are fundamentally good and will not harm us. However, emotional trust doesn’t require that we agree with their opinions or follow their advice. Cognitive trust means we are confident of another’s competence in a some knowledge or skill area. We might even follow their guidance if we trust them on an emotional level as well.
When you have strong opinions, you may be wrong. When you have weak opinions, you may be wrong. When you think it's all too complicated to have an opinion, you may be wrong. If you keep having the same kinds of opinions (strong, weak, oppositional), you're probably over-relying on heuristics and not thinking hard enough.
Homeostatic balance is a perfectly respectable concept meaning a condition of equilibrium. But my interest is in the “use value” of the word ‘balance’: what it is meant to evoke and accomplish in discursive communities…Balance is often coupled with “delicate” (over 3 million results on Google!). Delicate balance implies fragility, vulnerability, and lurking danger. Hence, reference to a “delicate balance” as a call to action, often evoked in perceived threats to biological systems, especially from outsiders – whether those outsiders are unnatural chemicals or invasive species.
Minimalist synopsis of the Milgram and Stanford Prison Experiments: subjects were willing to hurt others if they thought this was what authority figures wanted from them. Both studies serve as cautionary tales of how easily humans can be manipulated by authority figures into committing atrocious acts against their fellows. For me, the main lesson of these studies is a bit different – it is the danger of living in totalitarian environments. By “totalitarian”, I mean a social environment where there are no dissenting views expressed.
We’ve all been advised to “accept” some bad thing. You know: “it is what it is”, “embrace the suck”, and variations thereof. But what does it mean to accept something?
"Mind wandering" conjures up an image of random, accidental, and aimless thought fragments going hither and yon like a drunken sailor. My perspective is much more like Smallwood and Schooler (2006), in which they describe mind wandering as a “goal-driven process”. A lot of mind wandering does seem to be on a mission of sorts: rehearsing, planning, rehashing – as if trying to achieve resolution to some sort of unfinished business.
Think of thoughts as guests at the party of your mind. Imagine being at a family gathering and the relatives are a talkative bunch. You are “observing” the scene not as a detached bystander but as a loving, involved family member. You catch snatches of conversation, some not that interesting, some best to ignore.
Willpower consists of three competing elements: 1) I will – the ability to do what you need to do; 2) I won’t – the other side of self-control; the inability to resist temptation; and 3) I want – your true want, the ability to remember the big picture of your life. When we castigate ourselves for impulsive actions, we often say we weren’t “thinking”. I interpret that as saying we weren’t considering the Big Picture. We were operating on a concrete level, not thinking beyond the moment.
5. Switching Costs: switching to new ways of doing things involves time, money, effort, uncertainty, risk, disruption, feelings of incompetence, and changing roles/relationships. These costs are especially high during the transitional period, as the comfortable and familiar gives way to floundering, doubt and subpar performance while everyone is still learning the ropes.
Thing is, subjective and objective are not mutually exclusive. If they were, humans would not exist. Fear is a useful emotion. Without it, humans would not exist. What we perceive and feel sheds light on what is happening in the world. That doesn’t mean people don’t overreact or imagine things, only that it’s rarely “all in the head”. So what in the real world might perceptions of safety be tracking? I would guess local criminal activity, including property crimes.
Unanticipated events, insufficient time, lack of requisite skills and a multitude of other factors may prevent one from acting as intended. Actual control over a behavior depends on the ability to overcome barriers of this kind, as well as the presence of facilitating factors.
These days I often come across the idea that the brain is some kind of machine, e.g., prediction machine, simulation machine, meaning-making machine, decision-making machine, computation machine. And there’s still a lot of push-back against the idea of being a machine.
As it is, most US employees do not find their jobs engaging - just 36% according to a recent Gallup poll. But that turns out to be over twice as high as the global average. And US employee engagement has been rising steadily over the past decade, in contrast to what’s happening in the rest of the world, including Europe. Even in Germany employee engagement has been flat since 2001 and is now a dismal 17%, according to Gallup's 2020 survey.
Wellbeing is often described as a combination of happiness and life satisfaction, although some criticize the focus on feeling good as rather shallow , favoring instead a concept of wellbeing that recognizes the value of living a meaningful life. However, it may be too much to expect people to live both feel-good and meaningful lives. Sure, a good number do manage that trick (at least if you read their posts and obituaries) but many don’t - largely because what makes people happy or satisfied tends not to be what makes their lives meaningful. Here’s a summary of some relevant research…
Those who dismiss the concept of scarcity often embrace an attitude of “if there’s a will, there’s a way”. Americans are steeped in this way of thinking: You can do it! Don’t let the doubters hold you back!
The first chart is based on annual surveys of violent crime victims, covering the period of 2008-2019 and collected by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) Unfortunately, the BJS did not provide separate data for Asian victims, who are included in the ‘Other’ category... The next chart is hate crime data from thousands of law enforcement agencies, covering the period of 2015-2019 and compiled by the FBI... The last chart summarizes 2015-2019 survey data on the rate of violent victimization by race or ethnicity. This time the BJS did provide specific information on the victimization of Asians.
Root cause attributions are often part of an ideological argument that highlights the opposition between Us and Them. Some common themes:
Their explanations of human suffering are false.
The dominant view is wrong.
The so-called experts are wrong.
Old ways of thinking must be discarded.
We know the true source of human suffering
We know how to think the right way.
If word get around, posts on social media may eventually impact one’s employability. A 2017 Harris Poll of more than 2,300 US human resource professionals found that 70% of employers used social media to screen job candidates and 37% specifically looked for what other people were posting about them. And employers weren't just looking at social media – 69% used online search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing to research candidates as well.