reblogging this again because this is from Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents and I’m reading it right now and it’s incredibly awkward to read about my entire life’s problems neatly described by a complete stranger
Fuck this is literally meeeeeeee
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents is right at the top of my psych books list along with Why Does He Do That and Trauma and Recovery.
i thought you guys would find this thread i wrote interesting
This is not just feminist BS. A LOT of medical conditions are studied more in men. I have read multiple recherche papers on everything from Autism to heart disease where they only studied men for some reason but almost none when they only studied women, with the exception of diseases that only women can get. So basically if you are a women and you share the same problem as a man the data is inherently skewed.
A lot of medical conditions are also studied mostly on WHITE men which makes it even more exclusive category. Psychology research mostly done on Western students as well which are a very specific and very different category of people from everyone else.
So we have most of our research which affects the well-being of all of us done mostly on White Western males with higher education. Just think about it.
The Stanford prison experiment tapes were so stupid when I watched them in AP psych and so stupid when I watch this film about them. Literally they could’ve all sat and played cards and got $15 a day to tell ghost stories all day and be best friends. But masculinity and whiteness and power created this violent irrationality that positioned young ass men to be met with brutality and trauma and disrespect even when it was obviously taken too far. and it makes no sense. If someone put me in a room with Black girls and said I would get paid $90 a day (that’s the equivalent apparently) to be a prison guard, do you know how fast I’d be sitting with them and learning about them and exchanging Instagrams and like.. sleeping.. like what the fuck was the point of any of that…
My psych teacher introduced us to this study and literally before she showed us was like “don’t ever confuse a study based on one type of person (white men/boys) to be an example of an Everyman situation. There is strong evidence that if this was recreated with diversity, or even just with girls, that the results would have been drastically different. This is an example of bias and sexism in the medical research community.”
“Other, more subtle factors also shaped the experiment. It’s often said that the study participants were ordinary guys—and they were, indeed, determined to be “normal” and healthy by a battery of tests. But they were also a self-selected group who responded to a newspaper advertisement seeking volunteers for “a psychological study of prison life.” In a 2007 study, the psychologists Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland asked whether that wording itself may have stacked the odds. They recreated the original ad, and then ran a separate ad omitting the phrase “prison life.” They found that the people who responded to the two ads scored differently on a set of psychological tests. Those who thought that they would be participating in a prison study had significantly higher levels of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and they scored lower on measures of empathy and altruism.”
The thing about this study is that whether or not it’s generalizable to the public is debatable at best.
But it’s certainly generalizable to the population of people who tend to be drawn to prison system and law enforcement jobs because that’s exactly the demographics that tend to show up in those positions.
“But it’s certainly generalizable to the population of people who tend to be drawn to prison system and law enforcement jobs because that’s exactly the demographics that tend to show up in those positions.”
“It asked ‘Do you really know yourself’ and asked for men to take part in a social science experiment to be shown on TV. It warned that the research would be a challenge and involve ‘hardship, hunger, solitude, anger’.
In the case of the BBC Prison Experiment, the mock prison did not devolve into the torturous, abusive hellishness of the Stanford Prison Experiment–even though the experimenters very deliberately attempted to create conditions that would destroy cohesion among the prisoners and encourage authoritarian behavior from the guards. Prisoners were told that they might be able to be promoted to guardhood in an effort to keep them divided, shaved upon entry to the prison, and the guards were encouraged to create the rules of the prison and enforce them in any way they saw fit.
Because food–both quantity and quality–were very salient and powerful status treatment differences in the prison, there was almost immediately a showdown over food. (Prisoners were fed much, much smaller and worse-tasting food than the guards, and indeed prisoners were made to serve the guards their meals and watch them eat in part so everyone would be aware of these status issues.)
The guards almost immediately felt guilty and attempted to share their sausages with the prisoners by giving them the guards’ leftovers… and the prisoners immediately go “not until we consult with the other prisoners,” and then collectively decide to refuse absolutely to take small rewards from guards in lieu of the right to good food.
Guards tried repeatedly throughout the study to get prisoners to see them as basically equal, bar the circumstances of their current positions; prisoners instead repeatedly pointed out the actual circumstances of their current situation placed them at very different power levels indeed and insisted that guards actually change the system in order to make the conditions fair and equal. In general, prisoners quickly and collectively exploited the guards’ shame at the unequal conditions in order to receive fair treatment.
At this point, out of curiosity, the experimenters introduced a new prisoner into the system, one who had been trained as a trades unionist…
….and this unionist prisoner quickly chose to approach a disaffected guard, empathize with his unhappiness, and turn the blame for the situation at the unequal and unfair conditions set in the prison. Those conditions, of course, were set not by the guards–they were set by the experimenters. The very first thing, then, that this unionist does is build bridges to unify all the people in the prison.
Prisoners steal the guards’ keys; guards choose instead of “cracking down” or punishing the prisoners to ask politely for the prisoners to help them find the keys, and cheerfully accept them when provided. This gives prisoners leverage for a negotiation, which is then deftly picked up by the experienced negotiator (although not without some pushback from another charismatic and decisive prisoner).
Here’s what the negotiator had to say:
Negotiations begin. pDM outlines the forum proposal. One of the Guards points out that the Prisoners are asking to be rewarded for stealing the keys. pDM responds by outlining a stark choice. Certainly the Guards can refuse to accept his plan, but the alternative is a return to conflict: “It’ll not be the keys tomorrow, it’ll be something else. It’s a game. All I’m saying is that there is a way to resolve that game”.
pDM is confident. He knows he speaks for the Prisoners. The Guards, even in their own mess, are despondent. They know that they can’t handle the Prisoners. And so they accept the new order. Even if they have given up much of their power, at least this system might work and offer them some respite:
gTM: I’m in high spirits after that. gBG: It actually went alright. This geezer is alright. We can all deal with him.
At this point, experimenters withdrew the negotiator to see what would happen to the egalitarian vision he set out. As it turned out, the prisoners peacefully overthrew the rule of guards (by, effectively, mounting a sitdown protest in the guard’s sanctuary) and decided instead to organize an egalitarian commune for the remainder of the experiment.
The Stanford prison experiment tapes were so stupid when I watched them in AP psych and so stupid when I watch this film about them. Literally they could’ve all sat and played cards and got $15 a day to tell ghost stories all day and be best friends. But masculinity and whiteness and power created this violent irrationality that positioned young ass men to be met with brutality and trauma and disrespect even when it was obviously taken too far. and it makes no sense. If someone put me in a room with Black girls and said I would get paid $90 a day (that’s the equivalent apparently) to be a prison guard, do you know how fast I’d be sitting with them and learning about them and exchanging Instagrams and like.. sleeping.. like what the fuck was the point of any of that…
My psych teacher introduced us to this study and literally before she showed us was like “don’t ever confuse a study based on one type of person (white men/boys) to be an example of an Everyman situation. There is strong evidence that if this was recreated with diversity, or even just with girls, that the results would have been drastically different. This is an example of bias and sexism in the medical research community.”
“Other, more subtle factors also shaped the experiment. It’s often said that the study participants were ordinary guys—and they were, indeed, determined to be “normal” and healthy by a battery of tests. But they were also a self-selected group who responded to a newspaper advertisement seeking volunteers for “a psychological study of prison life.” In a 2007 study, the psychologists Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland asked whether that wording itself may have stacked the odds. They recreated the original ad, and then ran a separate ad omitting the phrase “prison life.” They found that the people who responded to the two ads scored differently on a set of psychological tests. Those who thought that they would be participating in a prison study had significantly higher levels of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and they scored lower on measures of empathy and altruism.”
I Was Always On Green Because My Mama Didn’t Play That Shit.
I got a Red for the first time ever cause I launched a basketball at this girls face 😭😭 it was an accident tho I swear lmao
This traumatized so many kids. I knew someone who had no memory of this until I said the phrase “go flip your card” and suddenly they remembered everything
I went from green straight to red because I gave my friend a piggyback ride for like five seconds
America are y’all okay..?
We had to move popsicle sticks into a green, yellow or red can.
I had to move mine to yellow once for “talking out of turn”.
Literally never spoke up in class again.
This is seriously some fucked up shit, jfc.
it’s funny, because it works as a very effective means of discipline/reinforcement. the concept is simple: instead of the teacher disrupting the whole class and stopping teaching to deal with one person stepping out of line and being, themselves, disruptive, they tell you to go turn your card. then they carry on with the lesson while you do it. kidspawn’s school calls it a point out system. you get three warnings, then you have to log into a book. it takes attention away from the mistake and discourages acting out for that attention.
done properly, it puts the choice in the student’s hands. you know the consequence for an infraction, and you choose whether or not that consequence is worth your action. in a perfect setting, it would only be for actual rules, you spend less time talking to school authority figures, and parents wouldn’t flip out about it unless there was a string of repeated red cards. you don’t double punish, after all.
the best way not to get a red card is not to get a yellow card. it really does benefit everyone in a classroom setting if implemented and respected by all who use it. i find it strange that people find this ‘fucked up’. it’s not corporal punishment, which IS fucked up, and it keeps infractions from taking away from instruction time, robbing other students of their education. loss of instruction time is in no one’s best interest.
and in every setting i’ve seen it used properly (both as a student and as a parent) it works exactly like it’s intended to.
I am a teacher working toward my Masters in education, and I spent my entire kindergarten education and third grade (the only two years I had to suffer through a classroom with one of these boards) entirely on red. The Flip Your Card classroom discipline system is in fact unimaginably fucked up.
At first I worked really really hard to try to keep my card on green, or at least on yellow, but no matter how hard I tried, by the end of the day, my mom was getting a phone call all about how I was a problem. I was regularly stripped of every single privilege my teacher conceivably could strip me of. My third grade teacher gave up on taking away my recess because she just didn’t want to have to deal with me for that extra time, every single day. And every single day, there was a bright red card telling everybody, telling all the other kids, telling my parents, and telling me that I was a problem.
Here’s the thing, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t keep my card off red, so it wasn’t this behavior or that behavior that felt like the problem. It just felt like I was the problem.
I did what many kids in that situation do. I gave up. From the outside, it must have looked like I didn’t care that my card was on red, but in reality, I had given up on trying to keep it off red, because nothing worked. It wasn’t apathy. It was hopelessness and despair. In kindergarten, I just checked out and ignored the board. I flat out told my teacher that she could turn my card from then on, because I wasn’t going to. But in third grade, I hit on something worse. Instead of simply pretending the board didn’t exist, I responded to the realization that I couldn’t win by changing the perimeters of what winning was to me. If I was trouble and a problem, I was going to show everybody just how much of a problem I could be. Instead of winning because I made my teacher happy, I won by making everything into a power struggle. Yeah sure, I got sent to the principal’s office and my mom was called, but I didn’t do that thing my teacher wanted me to. Score one for me. That year, I went from difficult to hell on wheels.
This is not actually uncommon, and there are some very good sociological and psychological reasons for why I reacted the way I did. One of the most basic sociological principles is that of labeling theory. This is the idea that people go through life collecting labels, and that these labels affect how we act and how we function in society. People by and large live up to or down to the labels we are given. We can see this in the criminal justice system, where the ways in which we label and treat people, especially juveniles, who commit crimes greatly affects whether or not they will commit a crime in the future, in other words the more someone is treated as a criminal, the more they will act in criminal ways. In a similar manner, being told that you are a bad kid, a troublemaker, a problem, whether outright or through a card system, is liable to convince you of this fact and reinforce that problem behavior. This is one reason why Flip Your Card systems often worsen behavior problems in children with existing difficulties with classroom behavior.
Another failure of the Flip Your Card system is that it has no room for incremental improvement and does not promote reteaching of behavior on the part of the teachers who use it. Most kids with behavior difficulties in the age range where Flip Your Card systems are used are really struggling on learning the rules of behavior and how they should be reacting in a given situation, or learning emotional self regulation. In my case, I had a siezure disorder that wasn’t diagnosed until I was mid-way through third grade, that aside from being misidentified as behavioral problems also prevented me from learning appropriate behavior by damaging my ability to form memories during the period when they were untreated. I also have ADHD, which I can’t treat with medication, because all of them cause me to have siezures. I needed extensive reteaching, and a teacher who was willing to work with me in the moment to help me find better solutions to the situation I was responding to with bad behavior.
Likewise, Flip Your Card systems do not recognize incremental progress. I have a student who just last week refused to come inside when it started thundering, because he wanted to stay outside and spend time talking to his little brother through the fence between the toddler and preschool playgrounds. This is normal for him. Separation from his brother causes him a lot of stress. But I was able to get him to come inside with a little persuasion and a kiss from his brother, and as soon as we were inside, he washed his hands and went to the cozy corner to calm himself down. This is progress. This is in fact the kind of progress that I told his mother about with pride at the end of the day. Once he was calm, I also talked with him about how he should be proud of himself for using some of the skills he was working on to calm himself, and what we could have done differently together outside. Under a Flip Your Card system, his behavior was the kind where he would be required to flip his card to yellow, his progress ignored. What I did instead was to construct a label for him of a student who is working hard on behavior, and affirm for him that I can see the progress and effort he has made. I also established us as partners in helping him reach behavioral and social emotional goals.
Another problem with things like the Flip Your Card system is that much like zero tolerance systems, or any system that are supposed to make things fairer by taking out teacher judgement is that they do not in fact take out teacher judgement. One of the big discussions right now in computing is that the way in which algorithms for job searches or hiring software, or worse algorithms for software used in the criminal justice system, are biased on racial and gender lines, both because of the algorithms themselves and because of the biased information fed into them. This is another example of that. A supposedly unbiased system that becomes very biased because of its nature and because of incorrect input. I already talked a little bit about how students with disabilities that affect their behavioral and social and emotional development are penalized by this system, but another factor is that disabled students, students of color, and especially disabled students of color, are much more likely to be asked to flip their card for behavior that would go unremarked upon for a white or non-disabled student. This is also true of so-called zero tolerance policies. This means that the toxic effects I outlined previously of labeling children as bad fall especially heavily on childen who are already especially vulnerable to being funneled into the school to prison pipeline.
Flip Your Card systems and other similar systems (and throughout this essay I talk about the Flip Your Card system, but Move Your Clip, Name on the Board, behavior charts, and all such similar systems are analogous) also do not promote student choice and autonomy as ouyangdan asserts. They are a classically behavioralist model of classroom management, one that functions on a system of reward and punishments. Reward and punishment systems increase student feelings of powerlessness and decrease their feelings of control. Giving a child a choice between a punishment and doing what you want them to is not giving them a real choice. It’s the same as a bully saying “give me your lunch money or I’ll beat you up, it’s your choice.” These behavioralist systems of classroom management also decrease students’ intrinsic motivation to behave, and replaces it with an extrinsic modivation. This can be seen in my case when my intrinsic modivation to try to behave for my teacher and my fellow students was overriden with the extrinsic modivation of the Flip Your Card board, which didn’t work because I gave up on avoiding the punishment. With my intrinsic motivation leached away and the extrinsic modivation proving ineffective… But this can also be seen in kids who behave well in class. Instead of learning the whys of good behavior and learning to regulate their emotions and reach consensus, and other skills of living in civil society, they learn that to be good is to be obedient and avoid punishment, to please the person In Charge. This is what happened with @thecityhorse higher up in this thread. They learned that speaking up in class brought pain, so they stopped, at a detriment to their education and their psyche.
So why are behavioralist approaches like the Flip Your Card chart so popular? One reason is that for most students they work in the short term very well. Humans like to avoid humilation and pain. This makes them convenient for teachers to implement, even if they cause other problems. Another reason is that they look fair to most adults even though they are not. Also it’s impossible to discount how thouroghly we as a society believe in certain ideas about a child’s place as obedient and subservient to adults, especially parents and teachers, and view enforcing this idea as a good in and of itself. Most people, even teachers, who absolutely should know better, and have in fact been learning better in teaching programs for decades, don’t step outside this paradigm. Behavioralist systems of reward and punishment reinforce this obedience.
Behavioralist approaches to classroom management are so normative that it can be hard to think about what the alternatives to them are, and when I talk to people about the alternatives to behavioralist methods, they express scepticism about the effectiveness of these methods. The biggest method I use is to get to the root of a behavior. Johnny screems during play, which causes Tommy to hit him. Tommy gets scared when Johnny screams in a way that seems aggressive, so we work on reading body language and what to do when we’re scared. Johnny screams because he gets wound up and overwhelmed playing chase, so we work on stopping and leaving the game before he gets that overwhelmed. I do a lot of teaching my students to recognize and name their own emotions, and recognize and name each other’s emotions, and think about what caused those emotions. I teach them ways to calm down, to get what they want and need in acceptable ways, and I build a relationship of mutual respect in which they want to do things for me and for their classmates because they care about us. This is that intrinsic motivation I talked about. And yes, many of the kids I work with have some pretty severe behavioral challenges. This was also the method that worked with me as a child. My fourth and fifth grade teachers both worked hard to develop relationships of trust and respect with me, and worked with me on processing my emotions and understanding the needs and feelings of others. This method really does work, and it promotes empathy, self-awareness, and moral self-reliance, which are important lifelong skills.
God fucking bless the “worried well” who seek psychotherapy. They can mostly keep their lives/jobs/families running, but want an increase in their mood or quality of life, and come to me for a tune-up. They talk about existential questions and childhood dreams and personal fulfillment, and worry that they’re “whining” or “taking up [my] valuable time.”
I like them for them, of course; I find their lives and worries interesting and valuable, and enjoy the work we do together. But also?
They make the more “serious” work I do possible. People with the greatest need for therapy are frequently the least able to pay for it. When one of my clients loses their job and benefits, they need therapy more, not less. And in private practice I can only afford to keep treating them for free if I have enough people on my caseload who are paying me full price. My ability to volunteer at a homeless shelter and talk to them about grief and trauma is strongly dictated by how many upper-middle-class people pay me $200 an hour to talk about optimal job performance.
And emotionally, it is an honest fucking joy sometimes to get out of a session with someone whose childhood abuse makes their entire life difficult, and spend an hour talking to one of my worried writer clients about anxiety management and creativity and nothing too deeply painful.
So if you’ve ever paid a therapist but felt self-indulgent or whiny or like your problems “weren’t serious enough”: please know you’re valuable and important. Not just for yourself (though you are), but because your presence in that therapy room makes a lot of other things possible.
i was tense because as someone who has trauma in her history but looks to a lot of people like “worried well” (to the point it took me years to be properly diagnosed with PTSD, ugh) i expected bashing from this post
THANK YOU for doing a very different thing ❤
I mean, once upon a time the worried well had confession with priests, or village elders/wise old men and women, or shamans/people in touch with the spirit world to listen to them and advise them on how to lead a happier, wiser life. Now that we’re a secular society that treats shamanism etc. as superstition, and locks old people away? All the worried well have is self help books, psychotherapy, people they know in person who are probably no wiser than they are, and talking to people on Tumblr. Of all these options, psychotherapy seems the most likely to actually help. Going to psychotherapy when you’re not severely mentally ill fills an important need that society isn’t otherwise filling, so it’s not shameful to go.
Also, the boundary between “worried well” and mentally ill/traumatized can be blurry sometimes. At one point I was in therapy for severe depression. But now, with my lower grade trauma, social anxiety, excessive shame, and just Needing Someone To Talk To In Order to Deal With Emotional Stuff And Reflect in General? That’s “worried well” compared to a lot of people here on Tumblr.
A related idea (which I’ve had before) is that if you do have a serious trauma, you’re wasting your/the therapist’s time if you aren’t talking about the most traumatic thing possible every single moment of therapy. But sometimes you’re not ready to go there, and that’s okay. Sometimes, your work or family need you to focus on more minor problems, like anxiety management or writer’s block. And getting unstuck on something like that can make you feel so much better about yourself, and more capable of change in general. I would think that could only help you deal with the serious trauma.
I think all the talk about participation trophies is bs, mostly because I saw in real-time how Conservatives in the US constructed the myth in the 80s and how it has always been used to attack both the idea that children should feel good about themselves about anything other than pushing around and policing other kids, and the idea parents should be good to their kids; while promoting the idea that kids were properly property that parents ought to be able to treat however they damn well please with zero outside intervention. But also because I frankly never saw the damn things to begin with. I saw plenty of trophies, and all the ones I saw were given out for perfectly sensible reasons, visibly appreciated by the kids receiving them.
BUT, having said that, I DO think there is a certain well-intentioned tendency in the parenting of securely middle-class parents
(can’t speak to other classes because this is the only parenting I ever saw)
of the Boomer and X gens that had some unintended negative repercussions, and that is the tendency to play down mistakes.
Let me lay a scene:
A child is doing something and they make a mistake. They say to their parent “I’ve made a mistake”. Now these parents, interpreting Dr. Spock’s advice through their own experiences of(almost invariably) having been raised by real assholes whose idea of “parenting” was mean-spirited insults and physical abuse and even worse, respond to this by doing the exact opposite of what they’re parents would have done, they Negate it. “No, NoNo,” the parent says, “it’s fine, it’s Fine! You’re doing perfect :)”
Now, what the parent THINKS they’re doing in this situation is building the child’s confidence in their abilities. What they are REALLY doing, though, is teaching the child to doubt their own ability to assess situations, and particularly their own performance. The child had an idea in their head of how things should have turned out, likely based on instructions. Things didn’t turn out that way and maybe they also realize they didn’t follow the instructions correctly. So they say, based on the evidence, “I made a mistake”. Yet the parent -from a place of kindness!- tells them they didn’t. So they learn that their judgement is flawed. Is it any wonder that kids constantly exposed to this grow up to be perfectionists, to NEED to know they’ve done everything possible in their minds to make something right because they can’t trust how they think or feel about it, who always ask for the opinions of others, particularly superiors, on how their work turned out before moving on?
Instead, I feel like they should have responded like this:
Kid: “I made a mistake” Parent: “You think so buddy?” K: “Yes” P: “Why do you think you made a mistake?” K:”Because of this.” P: “Hmm, could be. What do you think you did wrong?” K: “I think I did this wrong. I was supposed to do THIS, and I did this instead.” P: “Hmm, well, that makes sense. But Even though you made a mistake, that doesn’t mean everything’s messed up.” K: “It doesn’t?” P: “Nope! We can fix it *optional head ruffle* :] *proceeds to troubleshoot the problem or start the project over again with supervision, to avoid the mistake together*” –End Scene–
This is just as positive, affirms the child’s judgement, teaches them to pay attention to and think critically about their feelings and thoughts and actions, and it shows them that mistakes aren’t this terrible and shameful thing to be avoided, but rather normal, everyday obstacles that can be overcome with dedication, a calm mind, and thinking things through.
There is an alternate to this that is worse. The child, while doing the project, is confused about something and asks for parental advice; the parent says “do it this way.” This way doesn’t work out, and the child says “I made a mistake” or “I did this wrong and it didn’t work”(because, of course, it’s a very rare child who will say to a parent “your advice was wrong” from the get go). The parent then says, “No no; it’s find, it’s Fine; it’s perfect: Everything is Perfect, you’re just worrying about nothing, don’t beat yourself up about it.”
This is worse because, not only does it do all that the first example does, but it also teaches the child that the parent expects to be treated as if they’re omnipotent and incapable of making mistakes. This has a whole host of other, terrible, repercussions all its own: the child now feels responsible for their parent’s emotional state, they will be anxious over questioning the parent in other, possibly more urgent, situations, they will learn that one shouldn’t admit mistakes and errors leading them to react negatively to them -and moreso to being called on them- in future, and it will make it difficult for them to question authority figures generally, since humans naturally conceive of authority figures through familial/parental metaphor.
And of course, both bad -but well meaning!- responses put the child in a position of having to argue for their mistakes and flaws, against your “defense” of them as something they can never be: a perfect person. AND of having to go against your position if they want to repair the mistake to their liking. These are really shitty positions to put anybody in, let alone a kid.
I mean, I get the impulse, I really do, and obviously there are much worse things parents can do to their children, but it’s really no surprise that a gen raised this way would display the perfectionism, self-doubt, preference for outside input, difficulty finishing projects, and anxiety over performance in formal settings that so often get associated with Millennials.
Your professor will not be happy with you if he says the Stanford Prison Experiment shows human nature and you say it shows the nature of white middle class college-aged boys.
Like he will not be happy at all.
For real though. That experiment. Scary shit.
This reminds me of a discussion that I read once which said Lord of the Flies would have turned out a hell of a lot differently if it was a private school of young girls (who are expected to be responsible and selfless instead), or a public school where the children weren’t all from an inherently entitled, emotionally stunted social class (studies have shown that people in lower socioeconomic classes show more compassion for others).
Or that the same premise with children raised in a different culture than the toxic and opressive British Empire and it’s emphasis on social hierarchy and personal wealth and status.
And that what we perceive as the unchangable truth deep inside humanity because of things like Lord of the Flies and the Stanford Prison Experiment, is just the base truths about what happens when you remove any accountabilty controlling one social group with an overwhelming sense of entitlement and an inability to feel compassion.
I will always reblog this.
I just wanna say that the Lord of the Flies was explicitly written about high-class private school boys to make this exact point. Golding wrote Lord of the Flies partially to refute an earlier novel about this same subject: The Coral Island by
R.M. Ballantyne. Golding thought it was absolutely absurd that a bunch of privileged little shits would set up some sort of utopia, so his book shows them NOT doing that.
This is also generally true about most psychological experiments.
There’s an experiment called “The Ultimatum Game”. It goes something like this.
Subject A is given an amount of money (Say, $100).
Subject A must offer Subject B some percentage of that money.
If Subject B accepts Subject A’s offer, both get the agreed upon amount of money. If Subject B refuses, no one gets any money.
The most common result was believed to be that people favored 50/50 splits. Anything too low was rejected; people wanted fairness. This was believed to be universal.
And then a researcher went to Peru to do the experiment with members of the indigenous Machiguenga population, and was baffled to find that the results were totally different.
Because, to the Machiguenga, refusing any amount of free money (even an unfair amount) was considered crazy.
So the researcher took his work on the road (to 14 other ‘small scale’ societies and tribes) , and to his shock found the results varied wildly depending on where the test was done.
In fact, the “universal” result? Was an outlier.
And that’s the problem. 96% percent of test subjects for psychological research come from 12% of the population. Stuff that we consider to be universal facts of human nature… even things like optical illusions, just… aren’t.
You can read an article about it here. But the crux of it is that psychology is plagued with confirmation bias, and people are shaped more by their environment than we realize.
It was the most elite unit we [ie: The Palestinian Liberation Organisation] had. The members were suicidal – not in the sense of religious terrorists who surrender their lives to ascend to heaven but in the sense that we could send them anywhere to do anything and they were prepared to lay down their lives to do it. No question. No hesitation. They were absolutely dedicated and absolutely ruthless.
“My host, who was one of Abu Iyad’s most trusted deputies, was charged with devising a solution. For months both men thought of various ways to solve the Black September problem, discussing and debating what they could possibly do, short of killing all these young men, to stop them from committing further acts of terror.
Finally they hit upon an idea. Why not simply marry them off? In other words, why not find a way to give these men – the most dedicated, competent, and implacable fighters in the entire PLO – a reason to live rather than to die? Having failed to come up with any viable alternatives, the two men put their plan in motion.“
“So approximately a hundred of these beautiful young women were brought to Beirut. There, in a sort of PLO version of a college mixer, boy met girl, boy fell in love with girl, boy would, it was hoped, marry girl. There was an additional incentive, designed to facilitate not just amorous connections but long-lasting relationships. The hundred or so Black Septemberists were told that if they married these women, they would be paid $3,000; given an apartment in Beirut with a gas stove, a refrigerator, and a television; and employed by the PLO in some nonviolent capacity. Any of these couples that had a baby within a year would be rewarded with an additional $5,000.
Both Abu Iyad and the future general worried that their scheme would never work. But, as the general recounted, without exception the Black Septemberists fell in love, got married, settled down, and in most cases started a family…the general explained, not one of them would agree to travel abroad, for fear of being arrested and losing all that they had – that is, being deprived of their wives and children. And so, my host told me, that is how we shut down Black September and eliminated terrorism. It is the only successful case that I know of.”
I’m a crazy romantic and even I didn’t expect that tying guys like these down with wives and kids would have such a radical civilising effect. I wonder if this has any implications for gangs or other violent pests?
there’s a reason extremists recruit mostly teenaged boys. they have a lot of hormonal anger and no resposibilities. they’re rejecting their parents, as teenagers tend to, but haven’t started families of their own. they’re nature’s cannon fodder, and you better believe the men who run these organizations know it.
just moving along like everyone else 