Greene and Paxton had hypothesized that if deciding to be honest is a conscious process—the result of resisting temptation—the areas of the brain associated with self-control and critical thinking would light up when subjects told the truth. If it is automatic, those areas would remain dark.
What they found is that honesty is an automatic process—but only for some people.
artwork { Alexander Calder, Big Red, 1959 | Sheet metal and steel wire }
Pica is a medical disorder characterized by an appetite for substances largely non-nutritive (e.g., clay, coal, soil, feces, chalk, paper, soap, mucus, ash, gum etc.) or an abnormal appetite for some things that may be considered foods, such as food ingredients (e.g., flour, raw potato, raw rice, starch, ice cubes, salt).
In order for these actions to be considered pica, they must persist for more than one month at an age where eating such objects is considered developmentally inappropriate. The condition’s name comes from the Latin word for magpie, a bird which is reputed to eat almost anything.
We are liars and lie catchers, and the sport runs from the banal to the breathtaking, from personal to public. Right now, someone somewhere is lying about “having plans tonight.” Meanwhile, someone else is discovering that his or her spouse has methodically concealed an affair. And take a look at the news of the past couple of weeks: Barry Bonds was charged with perjury. City employees were accused of fabricating companies to siphon taxpayer money. Lies are all around us.
Sometimes, of course, dishonesty is the best policy. Lying, for all the bad it might cause, is an indispensable part of keeping our day-to-day lives running smoothly.
“Everybody lies — every day; every hour; awake; asleep; in his dreams; in his joy; in his mourning,” Mark Twain wrote in his 1882 essay “On the Decay of the Art of Lying.”
Much of the time we don’t even know it. Lying is a necessary, near-involuntary practice that keeps the fabric of society from unraveling. Example:
“How are you?” a co-worker asks.
“Fine, thanks,” you say, when in truth you’re not fine. Life is a hellish morass, and this person is getting in the way of your dutiful self-pity. But to respond in such a dour manner would turn a passing pleasantry into an awkward, socially debilitating episode.
Take your average 10-minute conversation between two acquaintances. In that span, the average person will lie two to three times. That’s not cynicism. That’s science.
In theory the one person we should never, ever, lie to is ourselves. Surely lying to ourselves is counter-productive? Like calmly and deliberately shooting yourself in the foot or taking a hot toasting fork and plunging it into your eye?
But look around and it’s not hard to spot the tell-tale symptoms of self-deception in other people. So perhaps we are also deceiving ourselves in ways we can’t clearly perceive? But is that really possible and would we really believe the lies that we ‘told’ ourselves anyway? That’s what Quattrone & Tversky (1984) explored in a classic social psychology experiment published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. (…)
The study suggests is that for many people self-deception is as easy as pie. Not only will many people happily lie to themselves if given a reason, but they will only look for evidence that confirms their comforting self-deception, and then totally believe in the lies they are telling themselves.
artwork { Pietro Perugino, Mary Magdalene, c. 1500 }
Within a few years, e-mail and Twitter moved the art of letter writing to the trash bin. And in an age when all psychic life is being understood in terms of neurotransmitters, the art of introspection has been become passé. Galileos of the inner world, such as Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), have been packed off to the museum of antiquated ideas. Yet I think that the great and highly quirky Dane could help us to retrieve a distinction that has been effaced.
These days, confide to someone that you are in despair and he or she will likely suggest that you seek out professional help for your depression. While despair used to be classified as one of the seven deadly sins, it has now been medicalized and folded into the concept of clinical depression. If Kierkegaard were on Facebook or could post a You Tube video, he would certainly complain that we, who have listened to Prozac, have become deaf to the ancient distinction between psychological and spiritual disorders, between depression and despair. (…)
While Kierkegaard would have agreed that happiness and melancholy are mutually exclusive, he warns, “Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair.”
related { Kierkegaard, Metaphysics and Political Theory }
Compulsive hoarding is a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a neurobiological condition, most likely genetically based. OCD comes in a wide variety of forms, of which hoarding is only one. Compulsive hoarders may collect only certain types of things, or they may indiscriminately save everything. We are not talking here about collecting things that are valuable or important such as art, coins, or stamps. (…)
Some of the things most commonly saved include newspapers, magazines, lists, pens, pencils, empty boxes, pamphlets, old greeting cards, junk mail, old appliances, outdated books and even assorted labels, string, rubber bands, plastic containers, bottles, and bottle caps. In the most extreme cases, people have been known to save such things as empty matchbooks, used tissues, old cigarette butts, bird feathers, old cars, discarded paper cups, used aluminum foil, paper towels, lint, and hairs. Some of these sufferers will even rummage through other people’s trash, and bring home obvious junk that to them, seems quite useful or repairable. (…)
In 1932, Homer Lusk Collyer (1881–1947) purchased a building across the street at 2077 Fifth Avenue for $8,000. He planned to divide it into apartments and to rent them. This plan was never realized, as he suffered a stroke in 1933, becoming blind as the result of hemorrhages in both of his eyes. With one exception, he was reportedly never seen outside of his home again.
Homer’s brother, Langley Collyer (1885–1947), gave up his job to nurse his brother back to health. No physician was ever consulted. Langley apparently believed that the cure for his brother’s blindness was for him to eat 100 oranges a week, and to keep his eyes closed at all times, in order to rest them. The brothers possessed a large library of medical books, and it would seem that Langley felt he had the information and knowledge necessary to treat his brother.
{ OC Foundation | Continue reading }
Burglars tried to break into the house because of unfounded rumors of valuables, and neighborhood youths had developed a fondness for throwing rocks at the windows. They boarded up the windows. In an attempt to exclude burglars, Langley used his engineering skills to construct booby traps and tunnels among the collection of items and trash that filled the house. The house soon became a maze of boxes, complicated tunnel systems consisting of junk and trash rigged with trip wires. Homer and Langley Collyer lived in “nests” created amongst the debris that was piled to the ceiling.
Their gas, telephone, electricity and water having been turned off because of their failure to pay the bills, the brothers took to warming the large house using only a small kerosene heater. For a while, Langley attempted to generate his own energy by means of a car engine. Langley began to wander outside at night; he fetched their water from a post in a park four blocks to the south (presumably Mount Morris Park, renamed Marcus Garvey Park in 1973). He also dragged home countless pieces of abandoned junk that aroused his interest. In 1933, Homer, already crippled by rheumatism, went blind. Langley devised a remedy, a diet of one hundred oranges a week, along with black bread and peanut butter. He also began to hoard newspapers, so that his brother could catch up with the news once his sight returned. (…)
On March 21, 1947, an anonymous tipster phoned the 122nd police precinct and insisted there was a dead body in the house. A patrol officer was dispatched, but had a very difficult time getting into the house at first. There was no doorbell or telephone and the doors were locked; and while the basement windows were broken, they were protected by iron grillwork. Eventually an emergency squad of seven men had no choice but to begin pulling out all the junk that was blocking their way and throw it out onto the street below. The brownstone’s foyer was packed solid by a wall of old newspapers, folding beds and chairs, half a sewing machine, boxes, parts of a wine press and numerous other pieces of junk.
A patrolman, William Baker, finally broke in through a window into a second-story bedroom. Behind this window lay, among other things, more packages and newspaper bundles, empty cardboard boxes lashed together with rope, the frame of a baby carriage, a rake, and old umbrellas tied together. After a two-hour crawl he found Homer Collyer dead, wearing just a tattered blue and white bathrobe. (…) But Langley was nowhere to be found. For weeks there was no sign of Langley.
On Saturday, March 30, false rumors circulated that Langley had been seen aboard a bus heading for Atlantic City, but a manhunt along the New Jersey shore turned up nothing. Two days later, the police continued searching the house, removing 3,000 more books, several outdated phone books, a horse’s jawbone, a Steinway piano, an early X-ray machine, and even more bundles of newspapers. More than nineteen tons of junk had been removed, just from the ground floor of the three-story brownstone. Still unable to find Langley, the police continued to clear away the brothers’ stockpile for another week, removing another 84 tons of rubbish from the house.
On April 8, 1947, workman Artie Matthews found the dead body of Langley Collyer just ten feet from where Homer had died. His partially decomposed body was being eaten by rats. A suitcase and three huge bundles of newspapers covered his body. Langley had been crawling through their newspaper tunnel to bring food to his paralyzed brother when one of his own booby traps fell down and crushed him. Homer, blind and paralyzed, starved to death several days later.
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }
The last name of the title characters of E. L. Doctorow’s new novel, “Homer & Langley,” is Collyer, and the book’s brothers do, in fact, turn out to be versions of those infamous New York pack rats, whose overstuffed Harlem brownstone made their name synonymous with obsessive-compulsive collecting.
One nagging thing that I still don’t understand about myself is why I often succumb to well-documented psychological biases, even though I’m acutely aware of these biases. One example is my failure at affective forecasting, such as believing that I will be happy for a long time after some accomplishment (e.g. publishing a new book), when in fact the happiness dissipates more quickly than anticipated. Another is succumbing to the male sexual overperception bias, misperceiving a woman’s friendliness as sexual interest. A third is undue optimism about how quickly I can complete work projects, despite many years of experience in underestimating the time actually required. One would think that explicit knowledge of these well-documented psychological biases and years of experience with them would allow a person to cognitively override the biases. But they don’t.
{ David Buss | More: BPS invited some of the world’s leading psychologists to look inwards and share, in 150 words, one nagging thing they still don’t understand about themselves. }
photo { SW▲MPY }
People often use metaphors to describe their life… Which ONE of the following do you think best describes your life?
A Journey: 51%
A Battle: 11%
The Seasons: 10%
A Novel: 8%
A Race: 6%
A Live Performance, Like a Play: 5%
A Carousel: 4%
Other: 2%
Unsure: 2%
Adelphia Communications, Barings Bank, Enron, HealthSouth, HIH Insurance, Hollinger International, Tyco International, WorldCom/MCI, Xerox…the white collar crime list goes on. But, did the executives at these companies start out as criminals or did they head down the slippery slope to criminality one misplaced step at a time? According to research to be published in the International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics, there are twelve steps to white-collar crime. (…)
The researchers have broken down the process of white-collar crime into 12 steps, with steps one to four explaining how the “players” first encounter and support each other and begin to spot the opportunity for illegal activity.
These first four steps are: The perpetrator is hired into a position of power. Second step, personality and life circumstances affect the perpetrator in such a way that they recognise their power. In the third step “drivers” who turn a blind eye or condone certain activities come into view. The fourth step sees passive participants recognizing an opportunity.
In steps 5 to 8 the truth of escalating illegal activity is hidden.
In step 5 reluctant participants are drawn into the web of deceit by the “leader”. In step 6 distrust of the other people involved emerges. In step 7, the perpetrator recognizes they have their accomplices in a vulnerable position and begin to exploit that position. In step 8 bullying tactics become increasingly common as illegal goals are aimed for.
In steps 9 through 12 the perpetrator’s actions are challenged and publicised revealing the white-collar crime.
In step 9, the crime continues, but the perpetrators, trapped in their insatiable addiction, become more blaze, taking bigger risks, and seeking more lucrative exploits.
In step 10, an undeniable paradox becomes apparent, as the participants’ values and their behavior are now obviously in conflict.
In step 11, a whistleblower steps up to the mark and the leader loses control.
Finally in step 12, blame is laid at the feet of the perpetrator at which point they either deny everything or admit their guilt and seek forgiveness by laying bare their activities.
photo { Finlay MacKay }
1) Throughout human history social activities have taken place at night. (In fact more than 60 percent of the people Piffer polled met their latest partner in the evening or night.) The evening is commonly reserved for courtship activity — dancing, drinking, having sex. Over time, the male night owl attends more social events, meets more women, and has more sex.
2) “Eveningness” is a sexually dimorphic trait. Across cultures, “more males than females stay up late at night (due to biological differences involving the timing of peak melatonin levels). Piffer speculates that men evolved to stay up late because the most reproductively successful men pass along their genes to subsequent generations. In terms of Darwinian sexual selection, evening orientation benefits males more because it gives them an increased opportunity to acquire multiple lovers — all at one go, or over time. Women, however, don’t achieve greater reproductive success by having sex with more men (it only takes one to get pregnant), which is why fewer women are evening-oriented. Men with an evening orientation have a competitive advantage over men with a morning orientation.
3) Evening-orientation, Piffer speculates, may also be a direct product of sexual selection. That is, women may actively choose night owls over morning birds. Piffer draws on the “cads-versus-dads” theory; that is, women often go for bad boys, especially at a certain stage of life, and men who stay up into the night are likelier to fall into this category.
4) Being a night owl may also be a form of “handicap signaling.” Staying up late at night (possibly drinking and smoking) can take a toll on one’s health. Only a man who is fit and healthy would be able to compensate for his lifestyle. Assuming a man seems unaffected by little sleep, his evening orientation indicates a strong constitution — a sexy quality.
{ Jena Pincott | Continue reading | Continue reading | Circadian Preference and Sexual Selection: A Novel Evolutionary Approach, by Davide Piffer }
photo { Jessica Craig-Martin }
