Secure attachment provides a foundation for resilience and a sense of control. A secure toddler can always return to home base, where she will be safe and loved. Or at least she will have faith that the caregiver will return. That certainty encourages exploratory behavior – going where baby has not gone before – which in turn increases tolerance of uncertainty and a willingness to power through anxiety....resulting in a succession of discoveries and delights, setting the stage for more confident explorations.
Of course, early experience is not destiny.
You can’t fix a problem you don’t understand correctly. And you can’t begin to understand a problem unless you see it as a problem. And you won’t perceive it as a problem unless it conflicts with some ideal of what you want the world to look like: a vision of the good (not just a vision of a fixed bad).
In that spirit, here’s an outline of my ideal society – at least today’s version…
…Put another way: emotions and values are part of a cognitive team that includes appraisal of the situation at hand, embedded in a wider understanding of how the world works in general.
Based on the above considerations, I’m going to guess that about half of self-described Black Americans would qualify for reparations - roughly 22,500, 000 individuals currently alive, plus 250,000 Black children born to eligible parents within the first 18 years of program implementation, after which the reparations program would no longer accept new applicants. A tax on households in the top 20% income bracket would pay for the reparations program…Here’s a possible budget…
According to John Zaller and Stanley Feldman in A Simple Theory of the Survey Response: Answering Questions versus Revealing Preferences, people normally don’t have a “single, fixed, and firm attitude on issues but instead have many, potentially opposing considerations”. That is, most people have mixed feelings about policies and political issues - not counting ideologues and political activists, who tend to view ambivalence as a weakness easily exploited by one’s adversaries.
In other words, Americans stayed home much more than normal in 2020. As a consequence, the potential victim pool shrank for burglars, robbers and thieves. But people aren’t just potential victims of crime; they are also potential witnesses and a lack of witnesses emboldens criminals. So even though most crimes went down in 2020, individuals who left the relative safety of their homes for the relatively empty streets (to and from bars, restaurants, work, parties, etc.) may have been more at risk of criminal victimhood than in prior years. At least in some areas, and especially in the evenings.
Affordances are properties of an environment that encourage particular behaviors. Affordances range from simple objects (e.g., glass of water) to complex social cues (e.g., come-hither look). They invite action (drink me! come over here!) but the invitation may be turned down or not even noticed. No surprise there: people enter situations with certain inclinations, desires, and expectations, which sensitizes them to some affordances and not others. Not everyone acts on a help-wanted sign, unguarded purse, or unfriendly comment. And those inclined to act may not behave the same way to the same affordance. A glass of water is generally for drinking but sometimes it’s for throwing in anger. An unguarded purse may be an invitation to grab some cash or turn it in to the lost-and-found office.
Experts are fallible. Experts often disagree with each other. How, then, does one go about trusting experts? And how do we figure out which experts to trust, or not? Take, for instance, medical doctors…
Emotional trust is the feeling we can count on someone, because they are fundamentally good and will not harm us. However, emotional trust doesn’t require that we agree with their opinions or follow their advice. Cognitive trust means we are confident of another’s competence in a some knowledge or skill area. We might even follow their guidance if we trust them on an emotional level as well.
When you have strong opinions, you may be wrong. When you have weak opinions, you may be wrong. When you think it's all too complicated to have an opinion, you may be wrong. If you keep having the same kinds of opinions (strong, weak, oppositional), you're probably over-relying on heuristics and not thinking hard enough.
Homeostatic balance is a perfectly respectable concept meaning a condition of equilibrium. But my interest is in the “use value” of the word ‘balance’: what it is meant to evoke and accomplish in discursive communities…Balance is often coupled with “delicate” (over 3 million results on Google!). Delicate balance implies fragility, vulnerability, and lurking danger. Hence, reference to a “delicate balance” as a call to action, often evoked in perceived threats to biological systems, especially from outsiders – whether those outsiders are unnatural chemicals or invasive species.
Minimalist synopsis of the Milgram and Stanford Prison Experiments: subjects were willing to hurt others if they thought this was what authority figures wanted from them. Both studies serve as cautionary tales of how easily humans can be manipulated by authority figures into committing atrocious acts against their fellows. For me, the main lesson of these studies is a bit different – it is the danger of living in totalitarian environments. By “totalitarian”, I mean a social environment where there are no dissenting views expressed.
We’ve all been advised to “accept” some bad thing. You know: “it is what it is”, “embrace the suck”, and variations thereof. But what does it mean to accept something?
"Mind wandering" conjures up an image of random, accidental, and aimless thought fragments going hither and yon like a drunken sailor. My perspective is much more like Smallwood and Schooler (2006), in which they describe mind wandering as a “goal-driven process”. A lot of mind wandering does seem to be on a mission of sorts: rehearsing, planning, rehashing – as if trying to achieve resolution to some sort of unfinished business.
Think of thoughts as guests at the party of your mind. Imagine being at a family gathering and the relatives are a talkative bunch. You are “observing” the scene not as a detached bystander but as a loving, involved family member. You catch snatches of conversation, some not that interesting, some best to ignore.
Willpower consists of three competing elements: 1) I will – the ability to do what you need to do; 2) I won’t – the other side of self-control; the inability to resist temptation; and 3) I want – your true want, the ability to remember the big picture of your life. When we castigate ourselves for impulsive actions, we often say we weren’t “thinking”. I interpret that as saying we weren’t considering the Big Picture. We were operating on a concrete level, not thinking beyond the moment.
5. Switching Costs: switching to new ways of doing things involves time, money, effort, uncertainty, risk, disruption, feelings of incompetence, and changing roles/relationships. These costs are especially high during the transitional period, as the comfortable and familiar gives way to floundering, doubt and subpar performance while everyone is still learning the ropes.
Thing is, subjective and objective are not mutually exclusive. If they were, humans would not exist. Fear is a useful emotion. Without it, humans would not exist. What we perceive and feel sheds light on what is happening in the world. That doesn’t mean people don’t overreact or imagine things, only that it’s rarely “all in the head”. So what in the real world might perceptions of safety be tracking? I would guess local criminal activity, including property crimes.
Unanticipated events, insufficient time, lack of requisite skills and a multitude of other factors may prevent one from acting as intended. Actual control over a behavior depends on the ability to overcome barriers of this kind, as well as the presence of facilitating factors.
These days I often come across the idea that the brain is some kind of machine, e.g., prediction machine, simulation machine, meaning-making machine, decision-making machine, computation machine. And there’s still a lot of push-back against the idea of being a machine.