By Owen Paine on Monday January 30, 2006 03:59 PM
Science to the rescue. Thus
the
January 30 Washington Post:
Emory University psychologist Drew Westen put self-identified Democratic and Republican partisans in brain scanners and asked them to evaluate negative information about various candidates. Both groups were quick to spot inconsistency and hypocrisy -- but only in candidates they opposed .Now comes the money quote:"When presented with negative information about the candidates they liked, partisans of all stripes found ways to discount it, Westen said.
When the unpalatable information was rejected, furthermore, the brain scans showed that volunteers gave themselves feel-good pats -- the scans showed that "reward centers" in volunteers' brains were activated.Hmmmm. Is it conditioning? I say nope -- it's hard wiring.
The psychologist observed that the way these subjects dealt with unwelcome information had curious parallels with drug addiction, as addicts also reward themselves for wrong-headed behavior.This could explain a lot. The poor soul who just can't stay away from one or the other of Orthrus' heads -- he's not so different from the starveling junkie sniffling and shivering on a windswept street corner, impatient to put his troubled heart temporarily beyond the reach of the world's pain. He's not doing himself any good -- on the contrary -- but the warm feeling he gets, for those few minutes, is the only warmth he's got.
Comments (3)
Conditioning can cause a response to become hardwired in. Martin Seligman tortured dogs over a period of four years to study "learned helplessness". After he was done with them, they were barely capable of moving. Now, of course, he's peddling learned optimism and Authentic Happiness™. These voters ought to be checked to see if they've been seligmanized. It sounds like they got both of his therapies.
Posted by J. Alva Scruggs | January 31, 2006 2:50 AM
Posted on January 31, 2006 02:50
t'is it
a manifestation
of
original wiring ???
or something more complex and contradictory
like
a coommon
result
of
"historic" struggles
betwixt
a pain/pleasure driven network
sunk in
a wildly impoverished ideological environment ???
ie
is the two party system
a recipe for
such a pandemic
of
reactive
self protective
irrational ultimately soul destroyng
spontaneous
rewiring
hard to tell
where structure meets
conjuncture
with just a one time
look see
into a pack of these monarchless
self organizing networks
Posted by jsp | January 31, 2006 10:48 AM
Posted on January 31, 2006 10:48
Nicely done.
Posted by J. Alva Scruggs | January 31, 2006 2:45 PM
Posted on January 31, 2006 14:45