Tag Archives: personality

Obama or Romney? Leave the decision to your parents! – Michael Kraus (Psych Your Mind)

Posted on October 28, 2012 by | Comments Off on Obama or Romney? Leave the decision to your parents! – Michael Kraus (Psych Your Mind)
Tell your parents that obedience
 is overrated! (source)
Whenever I teach a group of undergraduates I always hope that I will be shaping their young political minds in meaningful ways. I hope that our discussions in class will open their eyes to the various and important social issues of our time, and maybe lead to greater awareness of injustice, unfairness, and inequality in society. I've often thought that this is my most important role as a Professor. I also think that this is one of the concerns of parents who send their children to college--the fear is that the liberal education will forever change the political attitudes that will shape the rest of their adult lives.

While we don't know how much the college experience shapes political attitudes, new research published in Psychological Science, and written by researchers at the University of Illinois, suggests that liberal and conservative political beliefs are shaped by early childhood parenting environments.

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Psilocybin for Anxiety and Depression in Cancer – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

Posted on October 28, 2012 by | Comments Off on Psilocybin for Anxiety and Depression in Cancer – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

A recent study of people with advanced-stage cancer found that a single dose of psilocybin led to lasting improvements in anxiety and depression. Psilocybin might enhance mood by shifting attention away from negative and towards positive emotional information.

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Psilocybin and Brain Function – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

Posted on October 21, 2012 by | Comments Off on Psilocybin and Brain Function – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)
A brain scanning study found that psilocybin reduces activity in brain areas associated with self-awareness. Could this explain how mystical states of awareness occur? The implications, although intriguing, are much less clear than the authors of this study let on.

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Norms for the Big Five Inventory and other personality measures – Sanjay Srivastava (The Hardest Science)

Posted on October 17, 2012 by | Comments Off on Norms for the Big Five Inventory and other personality measures – Sanjay Srivastava (The Hardest Science)

Every once in a while I get emails asking me about norms for the Big Five Inventory. I got one the other day, and I figured that if more than one person has asked about it, it’s probably worth a blog post.

There’s a way of thinking about norms — which I suspect is the most common way of thinking about norms — that treats them as some sort of absolute interpretive framework. The idea is that you could tell somebody, hey, if you got this score on the Agreeableness scale, it means you have this amount of agreeableness.

But I generally think that’s not the right way of thinking about it. Lew Goldberg put it this way:

One should be very wary of using canned “norms” because it isn’t obvious that one could ever find a population of which one’s present sample is a representative subset. Most “norms” are misleading, and therefore they should not be used.

That is because “norms” are always calculated in reference to some particular sample, drawn from some particular population (which BTW is pretty much never “the population of all human beings”). Norms are most emphatically NOT an absolute interpretation — they are unavoidably comparative.

So the problem arises because the usual way people talk about norms tends to bury that fact. Continue reading →

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Personality, Intelligence And “Race Realism” – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

Posted on October 13, 2012 by | Comments Off on Personality, Intelligence And “Race Realism” – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

 Researchers with an agenda based on "race realism" would have people believe that all the "socially desirable" characteristics that people can have are clustered together, and as a corollary all the unpleasant and antisocial traits cluster together too. More pointedly, the desirable traits are supposedly concentrated in certain racial groups (e.g.

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The Magical World of Parapsychology – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

Posted on October 10, 2012 by | Comments Off on The Magical World of Parapsychology – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)
Parapsychologists seek to validate the existence of a spiritual dimension to reality but have repeatedly failed to establish an evidence base. Claims of paranormal phenomena appear to be incompatible with modern science.

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Precognition and the search for the soul, part 1 – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

Posted on October 8, 2012 by | Comments Off on Precognition and the search for the soul, part 1 – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

In 2011, Daryl Bem, who has the distinction of being both a respected social psychologist and an investigator into the paranormal, published a remarkable paper describing a series of experiments which he claimed provided evidence that people can be influenced by events before they have happened.

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DMT, Aliens, and Reality—Part 2 – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

Posted on October 4, 2012 by | Comments Off on DMT, Aliens, and Reality—Part 2 – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

In Part 1 of this article, I discussed Rick Strassman’s research on DMT. In particular I focused on the phenomenon of DMT users frequently encountering non-human entities of various kinds. These experiences have a striking similarity to alien abduction. Even more strangely, many participants came away convinced that these entities are somehow real.

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For the Love of Humanity: The Psychology of Thinking Globally – Juli Breines (Psych Your Mind)

Posted on October 3, 2012 by | Comments Off on For the Love of Humanity: The Psychology of Thinking Globally – Juli Breines (Psych Your Mind)
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When was the last time you thought about the fact that you are a member of the human species? For most of us, this aspect of our identity is not front and center. More relevant are things like gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, political party, sports team affiliations, and all of our other group memberships, large and small. Not only do we stake our identity and often also our sense of self-worth in these groups, but we tend to be more helpful towards those who belong to them, often at the expense of those who do not. A significant minority of people, however, seem less concerned with group distinctions. For example, while many turned a blind eye, some individuals risked their lives to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. In interviews conducted by Kristen Renwick Monroe for her book, The Heart of Altruism, many of these individuals described a sense of common humanity, or "belonging to one human family." By contrast, those who did not offer help were less likely to possess this feeling of expanded kinship.

In a recent article published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, psychologists Sam McFarland, Matthew Webb, and Derek Brown developed a new scale for measuring individual differences in this attribute, the Identification With All Humanity scale (IWAH). The scale involves a series of questions assessing the degree to which someone identifies with "all humans everywhere" ("identifying" includes things like feeling love toward, feeling similar to, and believing in), independent of how much they identify with people in their own community and country. They then examined how scores on this measure relate to various personality traits and behaviors. Here are some highlights from the findings.
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The Politics of Dreaming – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

Posted on September 23, 2012 by | Comments Off on The Politics of Dreaming – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)
Dreaming and a person’s political orientation are connected. Liberals tend to recall their dreams more frequently than conservatives. Additionally, conservatives tend to report more mundane dream content, whereas liberals have more bizarre dreams. Differences in openness to experience may explain these findings. Liberals may be more imaginative than conservatives.

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