It occurs to me, I've known several people who allow their thinking to be heavily influenced by someone else—that is, by a particular other person. In two cases it was a domestic partner, in one case a work colleague, and in one case the head or leader of a political movement.
This is apparent when the person's conversation is very heavily laced with "X. says. . . ." They make the person being quoted sound like an expert and someone qualified to expound on just about any and every subject, when you know they almost surely are not.
Why are the thoughts and opinions of that other person so important? You might think that Person B (the one doing the quoting) regards Person A as more intelligent or more knowledgeable. But I think that's too simple or too obvious an explanation.
I think it's a matter of strong or dominant personalities. Or at least of who is relatively more dominant. Some people seem to be naturally submissive or prone to assume a submissive posture. (We are talking thought here, not anything physical or sexual. There might be some correlation between the two, but I'm not including that within my scope here.) These submissive people might even seem to want to be told what to think. Or they have subordinated themselves out of any of several possible motives, such as trying to keep peace in the family (my father comes to mind: my mother was definitely a strong personality).
You just want to ask those people why the ideas of the other are so important. Why is he or she qualified to talk like and expert on that subject? Or, you want to ask, Why don't you think for yourself?
But—there is the dynamic going on which I'm trying to point out here, and you're not going to change anything—much as you might wish you could. Maybe you just get tired of hearing, "X. says. . . ."
Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Does Education Make Us Liberal?
It's widely known that better-educated people tend to be more liberal—or "progressive," as we might prefer to say since certain segments have done their best to make liberal a dirty word.
And studies have shown this, studies that have broken down voting patterns in the electorate by groups according to years of education.
(Big and important parenthesis: Of course not all college graduates, or even advanced-degree holders, are automatically liberal. It seems to me that people with certain degrees are less likely to be liberal. For example, people with MBAs are, not surprisingly, quite pro-business and often conservative according to other parameters as well. Maybe engineers are not the most liberal sorts, either.)
But the liberally-educated are liberal. (Is it a coincidence that the word liberal has these two uses?) For a long time I've contemplated why this should be so. I think important components of that education which produces liberals are literature, anthropology, psychology, and logic.
Literature and the other arts, I think, are the cornerstone of all this. I think that people who have been made acquainted with literature have undergone several processes: They have had their minds opened to a wider variety of experience and thus perhaps been made to have a more relativistic and less absolutistic viewpoint. (Studying anthropology should do this, too.) They have been exposed to writers' wisdom as to much of life and human experience, such that the reader can be sitting and reading in the most isolated and even (dare I say?) backward time or place and even so, through reading, travel the world and gain experience and wisdom and knowledge of other places and times.
Many writers, filmmakers, and artists of every sort are forward thinkers. Thus the audience whom these artists reach becomes exposed to less conventional viewpoints and perhaps encouraged to question a lot of received ideas and "truths." Remember, if it hadn't been for the value of education and the disseminating of the ideas of the forward thinkers, the radicals, many of us would probably still believe that the Earth is flat.
Psychology, too, teaches us valuable things. The people who have taken even Psych 101 and have learned about human perception would never pay much heed to the idea of seeing Jesus' or the Virgin Mary's face on a tortilla.
Studying logic might make us more immune to being swayed by, say, political advertising that slams an individual, rather than keeping to the issues. (In logic this is known as the argumentum ad hominen, attack on the person.) Nor as easily swayed by a lot of people who use whatever platform they've got to stir people up by means of rhetoric which, when examined, proves not logically sound. There are a lot of demagogues and such who simply use propaganda that will work on the less wary and will be seen through by those who know more about argumentation. Propaganda was used so well by Göbbels in Nazi Germany but propaganda was not new then and it has not disappeared since.
It might be another subject, how powerful interests manage to recruit masses of people to the views they want them to have, and I have touched on this in other postings.
Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein
And studies have shown this, studies that have broken down voting patterns in the electorate by groups according to years of education.
(Big and important parenthesis: Of course not all college graduates, or even advanced-degree holders, are automatically liberal. It seems to me that people with certain degrees are less likely to be liberal. For example, people with MBAs are, not surprisingly, quite pro-business and often conservative according to other parameters as well. Maybe engineers are not the most liberal sorts, either.)
But the liberally-educated are liberal. (Is it a coincidence that the word liberal has these two uses?) For a long time I've contemplated why this should be so. I think important components of that education which produces liberals are literature, anthropology, psychology, and logic.
Literature and the other arts, I think, are the cornerstone of all this. I think that people who have been made acquainted with literature have undergone several processes: They have had their minds opened to a wider variety of experience and thus perhaps been made to have a more relativistic and less absolutistic viewpoint. (Studying anthropology should do this, too.) They have been exposed to writers' wisdom as to much of life and human experience, such that the reader can be sitting and reading in the most isolated and even (dare I say?) backward time or place and even so, through reading, travel the world and gain experience and wisdom and knowledge of other places and times.
Many writers, filmmakers, and artists of every sort are forward thinkers. Thus the audience whom these artists reach becomes exposed to less conventional viewpoints and perhaps encouraged to question a lot of received ideas and "truths." Remember, if it hadn't been for the value of education and the disseminating of the ideas of the forward thinkers, the radicals, many of us would probably still believe that the Earth is flat.
Psychology, too, teaches us valuable things. The people who have taken even Psych 101 and have learned about human perception would never pay much heed to the idea of seeing Jesus' or the Virgin Mary's face on a tortilla.
Studying logic might make us more immune to being swayed by, say, political advertising that slams an individual, rather than keeping to the issues. (In logic this is known as the argumentum ad hominen, attack on the person.) Nor as easily swayed by a lot of people who use whatever platform they've got to stir people up by means of rhetoric which, when examined, proves not logically sound. There are a lot of demagogues and such who simply use propaganda that will work on the less wary and will be seen through by those who know more about argumentation. Propaganda was used so well by Göbbels in Nazi Germany but propaganda was not new then and it has not disappeared since.
It might be another subject, how powerful interests manage to recruit masses of people to the views they want them to have, and I have touched on this in other postings.
Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein
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