I remember watching an episode of Penn and Teller’s HBO series “Bullshit!” and reacting to something Penn Jillette said with an enthusiastic “huzzah!”
What had he said? That more people should read the Bible. Because we need more atheists.
Which made sense to me. The first time I read the whole dang thing through as an adult I was amazed by what was in it. And further amazed that people could consider it a holy book.
But I’m not your average reader. In fact, there is no such animal as an average reader. As new research suggests. In, How you read the Bible is tied to fellow worshippers’ education, Baylor researcher finds, I read:
Regardless of a person’s educational background, he or she is less likely to approach the Bible in a literal word-for-word fashion when surrounded by a greater number of church members who went to college, according to a Baylor University sociology researcher.
Oh. So blunt familiarity with the Bible may not help liberate folk. Notice that the finding was not about the individual’s education level, but that of their peers. Social environments matter.
For me this reinforces the idea that atheists and humanists need to speak up more. Why? We are members of many social groups. And a social group can influence the thinking of others, even if it is ever so subtly.
Yes, it is conventient to write-off bullying as merely a case of one bad apple messing up things for others… As if the entire social phenomenon can be entirely accounted for by the influence of one anti-social personality.
But maybe there is more to it than that — as the following quote from a scientific news-release proposes:
“People have traditionally framed bullying as social incompetence, thinking that bullies have low self-esteem or impulse problems,” said Patricia Hawley, KU associate professor of developmental psychology. “But recent research shows that bullying perpetrators can be socially competent and can win esteem from their peers.” [source]
Oh-oh. Looks like we can’t pin 100% of the blame on the bullies themselves. Damn. Don’t you hate it when things get complicated?
The following quote further argues that bullies aren’t simply warped individuals, but are fundamentally like you and me. It may be that they different strategies and opportunities for winning social status:
“It changes the rewards structure,” Hawley said. “At the end of the day, the goals of the bully are like yours and mine — they want friendship and status. They have human goals, not pathological ones.”
Hmm. So maybe if bullies were capable of winning blue ribbons for something else, their victims could rest easier.
Food for thought, certainly.
If the human brain is a toolkit, individuals tend to have not only somewhat different kits, but they also have favored ‘tools.’ And perhaps these tools, these capacities, influence how we perceive our world.
Research published in September of last year offers this proposition:
Intuitive thinking may influence belief in God
Does thinking style (variable one), influence belief in a supernatural “numero uno” (variable two)?
First, a nitpick about the news release and actual paper: The consistent, unqualified use of the word “God.” There are quite a few assumptions that go into the use of “belief in God,” or simply “God.” I’ve raised these before. Suffice it to say that a more scientific wording would be “a god” or “an ultimate god.”
That said, the studies that generated the finding were quite innovative and perhaps revealing. In the first study, the researchers from Harvard University measured intuitive problem-solving in individuals, via a number of math problems that lent themselves to intuitive short-cuts that resulted in incorrect answers. The finding:
Participants who gave intuitive answers to all three problems were 1 ½ times as likely to report they were convinced of God’s existence as those who answered all of the questions correctly.
Interesting. Is belief in a god the result of taking a similar sort of mistake-prone, cognitive short-cut? Notice that intuition does not equal true. Nor does it always equal false.
A second study was equally revealing:
In another study, with 373 participants, the researchers found they could temporarily influence levels of faith by instructing participants to write a paragraph describing a personal experience where either intuitive or reflective thinking led to a good result. One group was told to describe a time in their lives when intuition or first instinct led to a good outcome, while a second group was instructed to write about an experience where a good outcome resulted from reflecting and carefully reasoning through a problem. When they were surveyed about their beliefs after the writing exercise, participants who wrote about a successful intuitive experience were more likely to report they were convinced of God’s existence than those who wrote about a successful reflective experience.
It seems if we encourage intuitive thinking and the mental short-cuts it entails we are likely to promote more error-prone thoughts and conclusions/beliefs.
Of course, there is way more to the question of why people believe in an ultimate god than this. But thinking style may be a factor.
Girls and boys are different. But is it culture that does it? Or are they “naturally” different? My guess is that, generally speaking, nature slants the field of possible behavior and culture does the rest.
New research into friendship dynamics among elementary age girls and boys seems to muddle the question of gender differences more than it clarifies it. But maybe any previous, presumed clarity was premature, anyway.
A lead paragraph to the news release states:
In a Duke University study out Tuesday, researchers found that pre-teen girls may not be any better at friendships than boys, despite previous research suggesting otherwise. The findings suggest that when more serious violations of a friendship occur, girls struggle just as much and, in some ways, even more than boys. [source]
Okay, so boys and girls are similar in that they don’t like violations of friendships. The researchers did find a difference, however, in the strength of their dislike.
The girls also reported they were more bothered by the transgressions, felt more anger and sadness, and were more likely to think the offense meant their friend did not care about them or was trying to control them.
In reading the news release a second time I was left with a number of questions, including these: What type of friendships are we talking about? What type of transgressions and conflict of interests? Would the results be the same in different settings, in different cultures, and for different age groups?
As for this one study, I have no strong feeling about its significance. What I do take away from it is that we should be cautious when we nod in agreement to simplistic stereotypes about males and females.
[recycled material - first appeared here]
Video games = bad. Right? Wrong. Why? Because it is a hasty answer to a bogus questions: Are video games good or bad?
Critical thinkers will examine and critique a question before answering it. Video games–which video games? Good or bad–in what ways? And, importantly–good OR bad? Is this black/white thinking helpful?
While the vast majority of research into video games has focused on the violent type and how they might influence human beings to be more aggressive/violent, there have been a few studies on other types of video games having a more beneficial affect on behavior. But there are a few. A new one has just been published in the June 2009 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. And the science behind it seems relatively solid.
The article presents the findings of three separate studies, conducted in different countries with different age groups, and using different scientific approaches. All the studies find that playing games with prosocial content causes players to be more helpful to others after the game is over.
Co-author Brad Bushman said,
These studies show the same kind of impact on three different age groups from three very different cultures.
Good. I like that. But then I think Brad got a bit carried away with this statement,
The resulting triangulation of evidence provides the strongest possible proof that the findings are both valid and generalizable.
Boy do I hate the word “proof.” Fine, use it in mathematics. But for forensics and psychology and virtually all of science, I find the term inappropriate. Proof has too much certitude and finality infused into it. Evidence is better.
That said, we can now see how the question, “Are video games good or bad?” is a bogus question, particularly if we expect a brief answer.
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[source] University of Michigan (2009, June 18). Some Video Games Can Make Children Kinder And More Likely To Help. ScienceDaily.
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