Right off the bat, the title struck me as odd:

Dare you protest against God? Perspectives from a CWRU psychology study

From this atheist's perspective, it seems the question is something of a schizophrenic one. Because 'God' exists in the mind -- at least by an semi-stringent scientific standards we must conclude that -- the question is really about protesting against an imagined entity. Which is kinda crazy.

But sure, from another perspective, we can see the study as an investigation of types of belief and the cognitive response to internal dissonance between ideas.

The survey finding -

The researchers discovered if a person views God as cruel, then protest toward God is seen as more acceptable.

But when people see God as a kind and loving authority figure, then protest seems less acceptable. "In this case, protest could appear disrespectful to a good and fair leader," says Exline.

A couple things. First, isn't this a bit obvious? From a social standpoint, protesting against a loving parenting or village elder or some other authority figure certainly makes less sense than protesting against a cruel one.

Second, the description seems to reflect a focus on the individual removed from his/her social groups. My guess is that there is an integral cultural component to the issue. People don't pull their beliefs about a god out of a magic hat. They generally acquire them from others. Also, one's religious social group likely also influences beliefs about what type of relationship with this god is normative and/or expected.

Finally, as you might expect, my larger issue is reflected in the lead sentence:

Is it OK to protest God's actions—or inactions?

Ah . . . What god? Is this a precisely defined variable? Not only does the sentence assume the existence of a god, but also that this god performs actions, or at least can.

Really?!

In the least, scientists should quit perpetuating the idea that "God" is a neatly circumscribed variable. Why not "a god," "your/their god".... I know, it's more work. But science is work.

Isn't it possible that what the finding basically tells us is that whether or not a person thinks it's okay to protest against their god depends in part on what type of god a person believes? And right here we are back to my major issue. What type of god. Different types of 'god' does not equate to one GOD. Not in my book.

[recycled material - first appeared here]

Does living at home breed violence?

Say what?!

"Home" belongs in the same category as Mom, apple pie and baseball, doesn't it?

New research suggests the benevolence of living at home with parents . . . depends. It depends upon the sex and age of the individual.

The news release to the study bore this title: Young men living at home with parents are more violent. Okay, they've discovered a correlation, but is the link between variables causal or inertly predictive or something else?

Here's the data the correlation consists of -

Professor Jeremy Coid and Dr Ming Yang surveyed over 8000 men and women. Participants answered questions about violent behaviour over the past 5 years and mental health problems.

Their results showed for the first time that staying in the parental home is a stronger risk factor for young men's violence than any other factor.

A "risk factor." What's a risk factor? Good question.

Is living at home the equivalent of a young, adult male's non-religious madrasah? Here is how Coid interprets/explains his finding:

"And these [violent/antisocial behaviors] are more common among young men who do not have responsibilities of providing their own accommodation, supporting dependent children, or experiencing beneficial effects on their behaviour from living with a female partner.

"Young men who live at home are also more likely to receive financial support from their parents than in the past when the pattern was reversed. However, in this study their earnings or benefits were the same as those who had left home and taken on greater social responsibility. They therefore had more disposable income which may have partly explained why they had more problems with alcohol."

So living at home may not be a malevolent social influence as much as it provides a haven for individuals needing a more constructive social environment and role within it.

But we cannot be as confident of the explanatory layer to this finding as we can the data it is based upon. And frankly, the data itself is not all that solid.

An interesting finding; a thought provoking conjecture. I await further research.

Why not diagnose as phobic all aversive and oppositional behavior? Because the underlying reasoning is defective, and because a term as serious as phobia should not be used to categorize a person or people with reckless abandon....

Language is a powerful tool. Sure, it would be nice if we could classify all behavior and persons we didn’t like as pathological, hence undeserving a legitimate place in the world. But it just isn’t that simple. Furthermore, by doing so we undermine a better understanding.

It is my belief that anti-homosexual behavior and belief has a number of causes, most of them cultural -- ignorance/inexperience and an acquired prejudice chief among these. An aversion to "strange" behavior may be part of it as well. Observations of chimpanzees have found that the will merciless attack one of their own that becomes partially paralyzed due to illness. Children in our own species will be verbally attacked, and worse, for so much as looking and dressing 'funny.'

I also speculate that there may be a "deeper," innately psychological element involved. It has been noted that men are much averse to the idea of homosexual men than they are to homosexual women. Why? Men are attracted to women (whether or not they recognize the women may "play for the other team"). Blame our genes. It makes good sense. Two women being frisky with one another -- well, what man would be put off by women behaving sexually? There's a chance a man could join in. Or so a part of the brain hopes. Better, yet, in such a scenario, there is no competition from another male.

But two guys getting frisky?! The heterosexual man's genes 'say,' "Hey, that ain't no party you want to get involved in . . . there's absolutely no future in if for me!"

This is certainly conjecture on my part. A grain of salt is warranted.

For the same set of reasons that most men are hyper-attuned to physical signs of sexual maturity of the female variety, they are also attuned to behavioral signs of sexual receptivity, and are attracted to these.

A shapely sweater, a flirtatious smile . . . . be still thine beating heart.

But wait! What if the behavior and the body don't mix? What if a male body is giving of behavioral signs normally attributed to adult females -- individuals the male's selfish genes perceive as potentially mate-worthy? This could be disastrous, sexual-reproduction-wise.

I also speculate that the human primate, an intensely social species, is also finely attuned to detecting deceit. If you are suckered and used by others, your own prosperity will suffer.

So to me, part of the knee-jerk male aversion to homosexual males (that can be overcome by education and learning) is akin to their brain blaring out this signal: "Warning, warning! Beware, something is wrong with that individual -- it looks like a male but is not behaving as one!"

Is that the case, or part of if? I wonder. Yet until I see supporting research, I'm not going to take it too seriously.

Meanwhile, other students and teachers of psychology have attributed an aversion to male homosexuality as Freud might. The claim that these men are actually afraid of something within themselves.

Could that be? Is there any good evidence for it? Because so many Freudian ideas have been found wanting (schizophrenia being caused by detached mothering, etc.), I have never given the idea much credit. But maybe I should change my tune. New research seems to suggest there may be something to the idea. Was I wrong to dismiss is?

In the news release,Is Some Homophobia Self-Phobia? I read these words by co-author Richard Ryan, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester:

The findings provide new empirical evidence to support the psychoanalytic theory that the fear, anxiety, and aversion that some seemingly heterosexual people hold toward gays and lesbians can grow out of their own repressed same-sex desires.

Wow. Could it be? As a vigilant skeptic, I wondered what type of data the conclusion was based upon.

Here are a few brief paragraphs detailing the methods and outcome:

To explore participants' explicit and implicit sexual attraction, the researchers measured the discrepancies between what people say about their sexual orientation and how they react during a split-second timed task. Students were shown words and pictures on a computer screen and asked to put these in "gay" or "straight" categories. Before each of the 50 trials, participants were subliminally primed with either the word "me" or "others" flashed on the screen for 35 milliseconds. They were then shown the words "gay," "straight," "homosexual," and "heterosexual" as well as pictures of straight and gay couples, and the computer tracked precisely their response times. A faster association of "me" with "gay" and a slower association of "me" with "straight" indicated an implicit gay orientation.

A second experiment, in which subjects were free to browse same-sex or opposite-sex photos, provided an additional measure of implicit sexual attraction.

Through a series of questionnaires, participants also reported on the type of parenting they experienced growing up, from authoritarian to democratic. Students were asked to agree or disagree with statements like: "I felt controlled and pressured in certain ways," and "I felt free to be who I am." For gauging the level of homophobia in a household, subjects responded to items like: "It would be upsetting for my mom to find out she was alone with a lesbian" or "My dad avoids gay men whenever possible."

Finally, the researcher measured participants' level of homophobia -- both overt, as expressed in questionnaires on social policy and beliefs, and implicit, as revealed in word-completion tasks. In the latter, students wrote down the first three words that came to mind, for example for the prompt "k i _ _." The study tracked the increase in the amount of aggressive words elicited after subliminally priming subjects with the word "gay" for 35 milliseconds....

[We discovered that] participants who reported themselves to be more heterosexual than their performance on the reaction time task indicated were most likely to react with hostility to gay others, the studies showed. That incongruence between implicit and explicit measures of sexual orientation predicted a variety of homophobic behaviors, including self-reported anti-gay attitudes, implicit hostility towards gays, endorsement of anti-gay policies, and discriminatory bias such as the assignment of harsher punishments for homosexuals, the authors conclude.

Now that's interesting. But while the experiment design was fairly ingenious, and may be telling us something about human 'psychodynamics,' I'm hesitant to accept that it provides solid evidence for the hypothesis that a repressed sexuality may underlie anti-homosexual attitudes and behavior.

Why? First, I don't know what the number of subjects was and how large the effect was. Crucial information. I'm also wary of verbal self-reports, such as in "my parents did this" [when I was a child]. They are are notoriously unreliable. No person is a perfect witness, even and perhaps especially when it comes to the events of their own life.

Second, the meaning of word associations via reaction time also strikes me as a bit of a reach. Is it not possible, for example, that a person could be aroused by tabooed behavior? Studies have shown, for example, that the vast majority of adolescents that get excited by violent video games never go on to commit violent crimes Is it possible that a significant number of the most enthusiastic game players score lower than average on their self-ratings of love of these games? Would we then conclude that they are repressing a desire? Or is it more complicated than that?

My guess is that the whole matter is more complicated than we care to admit. Does a repressed homosexuality play a role in antipathy displayed toward homosexuals? It might. But until I find more and better evidence supporting the hypothesis, my belief remains that the more salient variables include ignorance coupled with an acquired prejudice (by way of family, peers, and community). In other words, the matter seems more cultural than personally psycho-pathological.

[recycled material - first appeared here]

A recent study out of the University of Buffalo has clearly revealed that the confirmation bias influences human cognitive habits in many areas of life. (Nearly all?) In their study, researchers looked into political beliefs and how even outright bogus ones can be easily supported.

Briefly, the confirmation bias consists of of the tendency to notice events and information that confirm your belief coupled with the failure to acknowledge events and information that could challenge and disconfirm your belief. In the article, Study Demonstrates How We Support Our False Beliefs, co-author Steven Hoffman says,

"Our data shows substantial support for a cognitive theory known as 'motivated reasoning,' which suggests that rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief, people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe.

"In fact," he says, "for the most part people completely ignore contrary information."

Bingo, the confirmation bias in action. In this case, the belief in question was the bogus link between Saddam Hussein and the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

A couple points in the article deserve to be highlighted. First, Hoffman says,

"The argument here is that people get deeply attached to their beliefs."

How often has it been a public relations problem that scientists are seen as coldly aloof, residing in their ivory towers of frigid facts? How often in public debates do the advocates of nonsense come across as more passionate, hence persuasive? And yet it is she who lacks deep attachments who should be trusted more.

Second, and in a related fashion, personal investment in a belief makes it much more difficult to move beyond.

"We refer to this as 'inferred justification,'" says Hoffman "because for these voters, the sheer fact that we were engaged in war led to a post-hoc search for a justification for that war.

I wonder if it is more difficult for active members of churches to jettison their belief, for they have spent so much time and energy and perhaps money that they would prefer their thinking and action not stand on a questionable foundation. And so they buttress it with justifications and rationalizations.

Or so I think. But I could be wrong. I await further educational experiences, whether or not they confirm or disconfirm my present thinking.

Why not diagnose as phobic all aversive and oppositional behavior? Because the underlying reasoning is defective, and because a term as serious as phobia should not be used to categorize a person or people with reckless abandon....

Language is a powerful tool. Sure, it would be nice if we could classify all behavior and persons we didn’t like as pathological, hence undeserving a legitimate place in the world. But it just isn’t that simple. Furthermore, by doing so we undermine a better understanding.

It is my belief that anti-homosexual behavior and belief has a number of causes, most of them cultural -- ignorance/inexperience and an acquired prejudice chief among these. An aversion to "strange" behavior may be part of it as well. Observations of chimpanzees have found that the will merciless attack one of their own that becomes partially paralyzed due to illness. Children in our own species will be verbally attacked, and worse, for so much as looking and dressing 'funny.'

I also speculate that there may be a "deeper," innately psychological element involved. It has been noted that men are much averse to the idea of homosexual men than they are to homosexual women. Why? Men are attracted to women (whether or not they recognize the women may "play for the other team"). Blame our genes. It makes good sense. Two women being frisky with one another -- well, what man would be put off by women behaving sexually? There's a chance a man could join in. Or so a part of the brain hopes. Better, yet, in such a scenario, there is no competition from another male.

But two guys getting frisky?! The heterosexual man's genes 'say,' "Hey, that ain't no party you want to get involved in . . . there's absolutely no future in if for me!"

This is certainly conjecture on my part. A grain of salt is warranted.

For the same set of reasons that most men are hyper-attuned to physical signs of sexual maturity of the female variety, they are also attuned to behavioral signs of sexual receptivity, and are attracted to these.

A shapely sweater, a flirtatious smile . . . . be still thine beating heart.

But wait! What if the behavior and the body don't mix? What if a male body is giving of behavioral signs normally attributed to adult females -- individuals the male's selfish genes perceive as potentially mate-worthy? This could be disastrous, sexual-reproduction-wise.

I also speculate that the human primate, an intensely social species, is also finely attuned to detecting deceit. If you are suckered and used by others, your own prosperity will suffer.

So to me, part of the knee-jerk male aversion to homosexual males (that can be overcome by education and learning) is akin to their brain blaring out this signal: "Warning, warning! Beware, something is wrong with that individual -- it looks like a male but is not behaving as one!"

Is that the case, or part of if? I wonder. Yet until I see supporting research, I'm not going to take it too seriously.

Meanwhile, other students and teachers of psychology have attributed an aversion to male homosexuality as Freud might. The claim that these men are actually afraid of something within themselves.

Could that be? Is there any good evidence for it? Because so many Freudian ideas have been found wanting (schizophrenia being caused by detached mothering, etc.), I have never given the idea much credit. But maybe I should change my tune. New research seems to suggest there may be something to the idea. Was I wrong to dismiss is?

In the news release,Is Some Homophobia Self-Phobia? I read these words by co-author Richard Ryan, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester:

The findings provide new empirical evidence to support the psychoanalytic theory that the fear, anxiety, and aversion that some seemingly heterosexual people hold toward gays and lesbians can grow out of their own repressed same-sex desires.

Wow. Could it be? As a vigilant skeptic, I wondered what type of data the conclusion was based upon.

Here are a few brief paragraphs detailing the methods and outcome:

To explore participants' explicit and implicit sexual attraction, the researchers measured the discrepancies between what people say about their sexual orientation and how they react during a split-second timed task. Students were shown words and pictures on a computer screen and asked to put these in "gay" or "straight" categories. Before each of the 50 trials, participants were subliminally primed with either the word "me" or "others" flashed on the screen for 35 milliseconds. They were then shown the words "gay," "straight," "homosexual," and "heterosexual" as well as pictures of straight and gay couples, and the computer tracked precisely their response times. A faster association of "me" with "gay" and a slower association of "me" with "straight" indicated an implicit gay orientation.

A second experiment, in which subjects were free to browse same-sex or opposite-sex photos, provided an additional measure of implicit sexual attraction.

Through a series of questionnaires, participants also reported on the type of parenting they experienced growing up, from authoritarian to democratic. Students were asked to agree or disagree with statements like: "I felt controlled and pressured in certain ways," and "I felt free to be who I am." For gauging the level of homophobia in a household, subjects responded to items like: "It would be upsetting for my mom to find out she was alone with a lesbian" or "My dad avoids gay men whenever possible."

Finally, the researcher measured participants' level of homophobia -- both overt, as expressed in questionnaires on social policy and beliefs, and implicit, as revealed in word-completion tasks. In the latter, students wrote down the first three words that came to mind, for example for the prompt "k i _ _." The study tracked the increase in the amount of aggressive words elicited after subliminally priming subjects with the word "gay" for 35 milliseconds....

[We discovered that] participants who reported themselves to be more heterosexual than their performance on the reaction time task indicated were most likely to react with hostility to gay others, the studies showed. That incongruence between implicit and explicit measures of sexual orientation predicted a variety of homophobic behaviors, including self-reported anti-gay attitudes, implicit hostility towards gays, endorsement of anti-gay policies, and discriminatory bias such as the assignment of harsher punishments for homosexuals, the authors conclude.

Now that's interesting. But while the experiment design was fairly ingenious, and may be telling us something about human 'psychodynamics,' I'm hesitant to accept that it provides solid evidence for the hypothesis that a repressed sexuality may underlie anti-homosexual attitudes and behavior.

Why? First, I don't know what the number of subjects was and how large the effect was. Crucial information. I'm also wary of verbal self-reports, such as in "my parents did this" [when I was a child]. They are are notoriously unreliable. No person is a perfect witness, even and perhaps especially when it comes to the events of their own life.

Second, the meaning of word associations via reaction time also strikes me as a bit of a reach. Is it not possible, for example, that a person could be aroused by tabooed behavior? Studies have shown, for example, that the vast majority of adolescents that get excited by violent video games never go on to commit violent crimes Is it possible that a significant number of the most enthusiastic game players score lower than average on their self-ratings of love of these games? Would we then conclude that they are repressing a desire? Or is it more complicated than that?

My guess is that the whole matter is more complicated than we care to admit. Does a repressed homosexuality play a role in antipathy displayed toward homosexuals? It might. But until I find more and better evidence supporting the hypothesis, my belief remains that the more salient variables include ignorance coupled with an acquired prejudice (by way of family, peers, and community). In other words, the matter seems more cultural than personally psycho-pathological.