Some interesting research has been attempting to give an evolutionary psychology explanation for psychological projection.
Using Silence of the Lambs, Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead and Koyaanisqatsi, no less.
We project emotions on others based on our own emotional state, but those projections are functional: We don’t project fear if we’re afraid — we project anger, the object of our fear. And this fear depends in large part on our pre-existing biases. If we’re predisposed to see a member of a particular group as threatening, then we’re likely to project anger on that person, based on our fear of that group.
The Boston Globe has an interesting article discussing the noted ‘marshmallow experiment’ of delayed gratification and the future of research in this area.
A 4-year-old is left sitting at a table with a marshmallow or other treat on it and given a challenge: Wait to eat it until a grown-up comes back into the room, and you’ll get two. If you can’t wait that long, you’ll get just one.
Some children can wait less than a minute, others last the full 20 minutes. The longer the child can hold back, the better the outlook in later life for everything from SAT scores to social skills to academic achievement
Jonah Lehrer continues with the problem of relying on our prefrontal cortex for issues of self-control.
[…] working memory and self-control are both located in our prefrontal cortex. Having to remember [a large number of items occupies] neurons that would otherwise help us decide what to eat, which causes us to become more reliant on our impulsive emotions. While we tend to think of self-control as being an innate trait, it is actually dependent on a range of extrinsic factors, all of which affect the way our brain responds to a given situation.
Our decisions really are swayed by the computational limits of our brain.
A recent study has identified the age at which children begin attempting to appear racially unprejudiced.
One hundred and one children, predominantly White, half of whom were aged 8 to 9, the other half being aged 9 to 10, participated in a task reminiscent of the board game “Guess Who?” Presented with photos of 40 individuals who varied according to four key dimensions, the children’s task was to find out with as few yes/no questions as possible which one of those individuals’ photos the researcher had in their hand.
Crucially, for half the children, race was one of the key dimensions. Among these children, the younger kids actually outperformed the older ones, and they did so because they were unafraid to ask questions about race. For the other half of the children, coloured stickers replaced race as the fourth identifying dimension, and in this case, as you’d expect, the older children outperformed the younger ones.
Side note: I freaking love Guess Who?
Jesse Bering of Scientific American argues that, due to the very nature of our consciousness, almost everyone has a tendency to imagine the mind continuing to exist after the death of the body.
People in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to the mind at death. My psychological research has led me to believe that these irrational beliefs, rather than resulting from religion or serving to protect us from the terror of inexistence, are an inevitable by-product of self-consciousness. Because we have never experienced a lack of consciousness, we cannot imagine what it will feel like to be dead. In fact, it won’t feel like anything—and therein lies the problem.
[…]
The problem applies even to those who claim not to believe in an afterlife. As philosopher and Center for Naturalism founder Thomas W. Clark wrote in a 1994 article for the Humanist:
Here … is the view at issue: When we die, what’s next is nothing; death is an abyss, a black hole, the end of experience; it is eternal nothingness, the permanent extinction of being. And here, in a nutshell, is the error contained in that view: It is to reify nothingness—make it a positive condition or quality (for example, of “blackness”)—and then to place the individual in it after death, so that we somehow fall into nothingness, to remain there eternally.
via Richard Holden
Negative campaigning has been a constant of American elections for as long as I can remember, and is now making its way into mainstream UK politics. Seed looks at how evolution can explain both the appeal and recent failings of negative campaigning.
Advertisers, like neuroscientists, started out with a so-called cognitive model of decision making — a model driven by logic, rationality, and the precise weighing of options. But this model “has been thrown out completely,” says David Bonney, a former psychology researcher who has conducted studies for huge advertising firms such as DDB on the impact of emotional advertising. “Emotion, we’ve realized in the last decade, drives all decision making.”
The human brain, faced with a daily onslaught of information, uses emotion to tag certain events as worth remembering and using for decision-making. A parking space is forgotten; a death is remembered. Negative words and actions probably have a greater impact because they elicit stronger emotions.