(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best social psychology & interactions books

Ok, this is a serious topic, and I commend you for your courage in posting it. I will thus give you a serious analysis that I hope will CYV. I must first state to any and all who are reading this reply, present or future, that I am offering up an expository and scientific response to OP's stated view for the purpose of insightful discussion. This response does not, in any way, form, or fashion, endorse ANY social or political views on how pedophiles ought to be dealt with beyond what all current laws and common social practices dictate.

ok, with that out of the way...

Starting with the ground-breaking work of Dr. Kinsey in the 1940s and 50s, we now have a vast and detailed body of scientific knowledge about human sexuality. Before Kinsey, human sexuality was understood to be "girls like boys and boys like girls" and this fit nicely with all evolutionary and psychological understanding of the human experience... in fact, anything that deviated from this maxim was considered a psychological disorder and thus was thought to be caused by factors that were extrinsic to the individual (for example, gay men were thought to be gay because they were "mothered" too much and lacked "fatherly discipline" in their youth.)

But paramount to his research, and all the research of human sexual behavior that followed, is the surveyed documentation that descriptive human sexual desires (read: "kinks" or "turn-ons") are not solely derived from, nor explained by, environmental influence nor psychological complexes like the "fear of death" that you mentioned.

Consider individuals with a foot fetish. Is there a clear evolutionary concept explains this? Further, if you take a sample of all individuals with a foot fetish, you would find that your sample is, for all intents and purposes, identical in character to a sample of all living human beings (save only the fact they have a foot fetish.) As far as we know, nothing MAKES a person sexual turned on by feet... they just "are."

Another example. Some, but not all, men are attracted to large female breasts. On initial examination, this has evolutionary grounding in that men ought to be attracted to women capable of nurturing children. However, an equally sized population of men are attracted to small to medium sized breasts. And what of the size of female posteriors? Or the height of potential female partners? Or the body size of potential female partners in heterosexual men? Again, results vary significantly across populations so much so that both environmental and individually unique psychological factors can be ruled out as a source cause.

We should then look at homosexuality. It is well understood that there are no known environmental or individual psychological condition factors that predict homosexuality. So "nurture" can be ruled out as a "cause" of sexual attraction to the same sex, and as far as we know, there is no "cause" that transforms an individual from a so-called "default state" of heterosexuality. Baby, you were born that way! Right? Well... not exactly. While there are some genetic predictors of homosexuality, these predictors are never fully reliable in predicting gender biased sexual orientation... even in homozygous twins!

And this is to say nothing of other strong and prevalent sexual kinks such as BDSM, stockings, incest, vinyl, quicksand (yes, this is a thing), cheerleaders, dadbods, vampires, waifus and husbandos, lipstick, smoking, glasses... the list is VAST!

So do our unique sexual desires come from Nature or Nurture? or some combination of both? As far as the best science is concerned, the answer is maybe and neither of these. maybe and niether of these.

Thus, we turn to Pedophilia. This is not my scientific field, so there are surely better people to address this question than me, but what I can tell you is that research is VERY sparse. To study this would be career suicide for most research psychologists. Just go to Google Scholar and type in 'pedophilia' and you will see for yourself.

What I can tell you, is that it is most likely that pedophelia most likely follows the same pattern as all of the other sexual preferences and kinks that the field has studied in depth. If this is the case, it is most definitely the attribute of being a child or appearing child like that turns the pedophile on, and not a psychological desire to vampirically "drain energy" from vibrant youthful sources as you state in OP. We do know at least that there are strong differentiations in individuals who exhibit these preferences. They are:

• Pedophile -- an individual who is dominantly sexually attracted to pre-pubescent children
  
• Hebephile -- an individual who is dominantly sexually attracted to pubescing adolescents.
  
• Ephebophile -- an individual who is dominantly sexually attracted to individuals who have recently completed pubescence.
  
  For each of these descriptors, we know that the potency of the individual's sexual arousal strongly falls off between each group. So, a typical pedophile is strongly sexually attracted to pre-pubescent children and they might be moderately-to-slightly sexually attracted to pubescing adolescent (the domain of a Hebephile) and mildly to not-at-all sexually attracted to a fully, yet recently, pubescent adolescents (the domain of a ephebophile) and definitively not-at-all sexually attracted to adults. We also know from anecdotal evidence that pedophiles typically exhibit signs of their sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children during their own puberty. We also know that these individuals tend to be male, but are not exclusively male.
  
  It is also important to note that multiple studies have dispelled the age-old myth that males are predominantly attracted to younger partners. For neurotypical heterosexual males, peak attractiveness of female partners is measured to be about age 23, which strongly correlates to peak fertility. In other words, a 15 year old boy is most likely to rank a 23 year old female as "most attractive" when all other factors besides age are controlled. Strangely enough, this trend is also observed in homosexual men!
  
  Ultimately, your conception of pedophilia as an attraction to "youthful energy" or "pureness" does not fit with the data, insofar as "pureness" is a descriptor that an adult could, in theory, imbue. There is still much to be learned and I hope more researchers will find the courage and capability to study this further!
  
  And, as far as any suggestions for therapeutic interventions for pedophiles/hebephiles/ephebephiles goes, I respectfully decline to contribute input as my expertise is no where near sufficient to put forward meaningful contribution.
  
  I hope this helps!

> In my science classes in high school

Well, that would be an important place to learn about the scientific method. Glad you were taught it in science classes...

"I think part if the problem is the human mind isn't fully developed until it's mid-twenties, and philosophy and religous texts can be hard reads."

Eh, supposedly 25 is when it is fully developed. I think that childhood is being extended too much. In reality, people grew up way faster in the past. Even though the brain may technically fully develop at 25, I think people should be considered adults earlier than that. Would be highly problematic if we tried saying that someone is not legally an adult until 25. Besides, plenty of people have kids read the bible. I do not see why children could not understand religious and philosophical concepts. Might be helpful if the main tenants and philosophical ideas were taught but maybe not focusing on having kids read the original texts so much (particularly for philosophy... philosophers were awful writers in plenty of cases).

Oh, and regarding the relativistic morality comment, I think that it is a myth that religion gets you "objective" morality. Consider all of the different interpretations of the bible, christianity, islam, etc. I read the bible and it's quite easy to cherry pick what you consider to be literal, metaphorical, etc. People do it all the time. People justified (some still do) slavery using the bible and they also tried using the bible to argue against it. Some people overlook parts of the bible (I think there are like 8 of them) that explicitly condemn men having sex with men. Ultimately, religion provides some constraints on morality, but so does philosophy. Morality changes over time either way (dramatically) with or without religion and on the important issues, most people don't go around killing random people because they simply don't want to (same goes for stealing, raping, assaulting people, etc).

"Some things that are mostly overlooked in mainstream culture and schools are:

the power of selflessness empathy and compassion marriage and family values justice, love and charity tolerance happiness and peace"

I disagree. I think those things are hammered into us. I have no interest in marriage or "family values" and I feel inundated with such things. I wish there was less of it since we have waaaaay too many people on the earth (apparently will reach 9 BILLION in my lifetime). I also think that not everyone is prepared to be in a long term relationship or have children. If you don't want such things, I think it is a bad idea to be pressured into it. Let's not forget that Jesus and his disciples supposedly left family life behind anyway :-)

"the power of selflessness empathy and compassion marriage and family values justice, love and charity tolerance happiness and peace"

You know... looking over that list again... It's funny to me how the Republican Party in the USA supposedly is Christian, but they only really promote marriage, family values (their version), justice (their version) and happiness (their version). Otherwise, both Democrats and Republicans promote war. Republicans do not seem to speak much about tolerance. They generally focus on trickle down economics (not helping the poor).

But regardless of all of that, I highly recommend checking out the book Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment by soiologist Phil Zuckerman https://www.amazon.com/Society-without-God-Religious-Contentment/dp/0814797237 Scandinavian countries that have a lot of nonreligious people have way more help for the poor, plenty of compassion, a focus on helping everyone be happier (and Denmark has repeatedly been the happiest country in surveys), they still have family values, they are tolerant, plenty of empathy, very community oriented, peaceful, etc. If you look at the most religious countries (including the USA, which is actually relatively religious compared to plenty of countries), there is more violence and oppression.

Look at the middle east for a glimpse into the past and how awful it was to live in a theocracy. In Saudi Arabia, atheists can be beheaded publicly just for being atheists. There are morality police (or at least there were recently). Women and men can be stopped if they're walking together to ask why they are together. Women can't let their skin on their leg show. I read the bible and I found it to be a horrible text. The old testament was filled with nonsense about sacrifice, plenty of killing, genocide, rape, war... much of it done by "god" himself. Then, the new testament is supposed to be "better" because god had his own son killed in order to make it so that humans didn't need to perform sacrifices anymore... the symbol of the religion is a human sacrifice (jesus)... that's not a "family value" that I care for and I think we can do better. It made sense for people who believed in the importance of "burnt offerings" so much that the term is mentioned to a nauseating degree in the old testament. To me? I have never performed a sacrifice, so it isn't amazing news to me that "hey! did you hear the good news!!!??? God had jesus sacrificed so that all those sacrifices don't need to be performed anymore to appease god!!!"

I just watched a video on this book "Alpha God: The Psychology of Religious Violence and Oppression" by Hector A. Garcia. https://www.amazon.com/Alpha-God-Psychology-Religious-Oppression/dp/1633880206/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=alpha+god&qid=1558237288&s=books&sr=1-1 I plan on reading it. Sounds really interesting. Take care.

> I’m not sure if there is any truth to that, but it is interesting to think about.

"Truth" in this case is complicated. It is true that some things, like oil, are scarce now. That doesn't mean we don't have plenty of it, but like /u/ARandomBlackDude said, it's not because we don't know where to find it, it is just that it is more difficult to get at.

That is true of most of the resources that people worry about: It's not that we are running low, it's just that we will have to spend more in the future.

But that is not necessarily as bad as it sounds. Oil is great for energy because it is cheap and packs a lot of energy by weight. But it's also dirty and polluting, and recovering it is really bad for the environment, so the higher it's price goes, the more it drives people to alternative fuels like electric or hydrogen.

And again, this is true of most things. If we really do start to run low, we can find an alternate.

None of this is intended to argue against conservation at all, but the people who push the "if we ever get hit with a spot of bad luck we are totaled as a species" lines are really not looking at the issue dispassionately.

Another thing to consider is that, contrary what you might think, most people are actually using substantially fewer resources today then we have in the past. Stephen Pinker talks about it in his book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress:

> All these processes are helped along by another friend of the Earth, dematerialization. Progress in technology allows us to do more with less. An aluminum soda can used to weigh three ounces; today it weighs less than half an ounce. Mobile phones don’t need miles of telephone poles and wires. The digital revolution, by replacing atoms with bits, is dematerializing the world in front of our eyes. The cubic yards of vinyl that used to be my music collection gave way to cubic inches of compact discs and then to the nothingness of MP3s. The river of newsprint flowing through my apartment has been stanched by an iPad. With a terabyte of storage on my laptop I no longer buy paper by the ten-ream box. And just think of all the plastic, metal, and paper that no longer go into the fortyodd
consumer products that can be replaced by a single smartphone, including a telephone, answering machine, phone book, camera, camcorder, tape recorder, radio, alarm clock, calculator, dictionary, Rolodex, calendar, street maps, flashlight, fax, and compass—even a metronome, outdoor
thermometer, and spirit level.

> Digital technology is also dematerializing the world by enabling the sharing economy, so that cars, tools, and bedrooms needn’t be made in huge numbers that sit around unused most of the time. The
advertising analyst Rory Sutherland has noted that dematerialization is also being helped along by changes in the criteria of social status. The most expensive London real estate today would have seemed impossibly cramped to wealthy Victorians, but the city center is now more fashionable than the suburbs. Social media have encouraged younger people to show off their experiences rather than their cars and wardrobes, and hipsterization leads them to distinguish themselves by their tastes in
beer, coffee, and music. The era of the Beach Boys and American Graffiti is over: half of American eighteen-year-olds do not have a driver’s license.

> The expression “Peak Oil,” which became popular after the energy crises of the 1970s, refers to the year that the world would reach its maximum extraction of petroleum. Ausubel notes that because of the demographic transition, densification, and dematerialization, we may have reached Peak
Children, Peak Farmland, Peak Timber, Peak Paper, and Peak Car. Indeed, we may be reaching Peak Stuff: of a hundred commodities Ausubel plotted, thirty-six have peaked in absolute use in the United States, and another fifty-three may be poised to drop (including water, nitrogen, and electricity), leaving only eleven that are still growing. Britons, too, have reached Peak Stuff, having reduced their annual use of material from 15.1 metric tons per person in 2001 to 10.3 metric tons in 2013.

> These remarkable trends required no coercion, legislation, or moralization; they spontaneously unfolded as people made choices about how to live their lives. The trends certainly don’t show that environmental legislation is dispensable—by all accounts, environmental protection agencies, mandated energy standards, endangered species protection, and national and international clean air and water acts have had enormously beneficial effects. But they suggest that the tide of modernity does not sweep humanity headlong toward ever more unsustainable use of resources. Something in the nature of technology, particularly information technology, works to decouple human flourishing from the exploitation of physical stuff.

If you're interested, a great book on the subject is Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict.

https://www.amazon.com/Big-Gods-Religion-Transformed-Cooperation/dp/0691169748

The short of it is that there were many "reasons" for religion coming to prominence. One reason was control (sort of). Not top down control but rather something more organic. The other reasons are all fascinating. The one that stood out for me was the aspect of cross cultural trust in trade dealings. When both parties had the same moral teachings it made it easier to extend trust to others. Really interesting stuff. The book also claims that where rule of law is strong, there is no need for religion for trust and acceptance.

If we're talking about resistance from other people, then I can absolutely relate and I have a ton of experience on this front.

I'm currently 32 years old. Like most of us Americans, I was raised in a society and family that reinforced pleasing others—more specifically, that if other people don't approve of your actions, then you're doing something wrong. Up until my mid-20s, I lived by this rule. That meant that, by the time I turned 28 (in other words, after a decade of being an adult), nearly everything I had and everything I was existed because they in some form satisfied the expectations of others. In essence, I was crowdsourcing my life. If my life was a canvas, I was asking everyone else to paint it. And, naturally, I had a long history of dissatisfaction and self-loathing to show for it.

Then I decided I was going to stop caring about what other people thought of me, and I was going to start living how I want. In the process of doing so, I got a lot of negative feedback from family and friends. The odd thing is, you're probably assuming that my idea of living life on my terms was rude, self-centered, or illegal; but actually, my idea of living life on my terms was very positive and altruistic. Before this time I worked for several years as a technical consultant making good money (but ultimately helping nobody but myself), and my life changes were that I wanted to work in a field that helped other people, I wanted to do volunteer work, and I wanted to go to grad school so I could become a licensed counselor. I was told by numerous people these were all "big mistakes" and that they were concerned about my well-being (important side note: since I moved out of my parent's house in May 2008, I've been entirely self-sufficient, have needed $0 from other people, and have not gotten into any trouble with the law aside from a couple speeding tickets). In fact, I haven't even told my grandfather I'm attending grad school for counseling (and currently have a 4.0 through 5 courses) because my family is convinced it'll kill him (he's still resentful that I didn't follow in his footsteps and become an engineer). So you see the pattern: the people who are aware of my preferences have spoken negatively about them and me, and people who should be aware of my preferences are not because they would be offended by them.

To reiterate: My major life changes were that I left technical consulting to work in the helping professions, I started a self-help brand on YouTube, and I became a Big Brother through the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program, where I've been a mentor for a local at-risk teen for 3.5 years. I didn't become a coke dealer or a porn star - I actually just became a nicer, happier person. And people still gave me crap!

So my big takeaway was that I have two options: I can live how everyone else wants me to live and end up hating my life because I don't want any of it, or I can live how I want to live and be happy. These are the same options we all have.

Today, my criteria for determining whether or not I do something is the following:

1. Will this thing enrich my life (in other words, will it bring me closer to success and happiness or farther from it)?
   
2. Will this thing cause me to renege on any responsibilities I've previously agreed to take on?
   
3. Will this thing likely cause any tangible harm to anyone else? (For this one, it's important to note that 'tangible harm' does not include someone I know becoming so upset with my decision that they don't know how to handle it)
   
   If the answers are 'Yes,' 'No,' and 'No,' respectively, then I do that thing. If not, I determine whether I can make changes that'll bring those answers in line, or I abandon the idea.
   
   Okay, that's some analysis on the matter. Now I'm going to specifically answer your question.
   
   The reason people try to tell others what to do and try to make it difficult for people to live their lives is because of our evolutionary history. Creatures we can generally consider humans came into existence roughly 2 million years ago (this would be Homo erectus). Our specific species, Homo sapiens, generally evolved from that species roughly 250,000 years ago. From 2,000,000 years ago until roughly 5,000 years ago, human beings lived in small, roving bands of roughly 40-80 individuals. In order for the group to survive, everyone in the group needed to satisfy a certain role and everyone needed to be working toward the same goals. If a nomadic tribe lived in northern Europe 50,000 years ago, for example, when winter was approaching, if half the tribe decided to not plan for the winter and the other half didn't, the entire tribe would perish because they would not have been adequately prepared for the winter. As a result of their deaths, the people who didn't see a need to plan would not pass on their genes to future offspring, and thus, the world would be composed of slightly less people who didn't plan for things. What this means is, the people who survived the last 2 million years generally saw value in making sure everyone in their tribe agreed with them - that nobody stepped out of line or 'went rogue'. As a result, humans who exist today tend to want everyone around them to do what they think is best; to fall in line. To not stand out. After all, standing out 100,000 years ago got you killed. (Note: if evolutionary psychology interests you, consider reading Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind by David Buss).
   
   This answers the first question you pose in the title. As to the second question—when you fail or slip, why is the fall harder than ever?—the reason is because when we already know there are people who think that what we're doing is stupid, they're almost waiting for us to fall. They're waiting for the moment when things go wrong so they can be proven correct. What these people don't realize, however, is that even failure is progress. For example, if I end up graduating from grad school but for some reason I can't pass the licensing test to become a counselor, I still have a master's degree to my name and I still learned tons of skills and knowledge. Some people around me will probably say "You should've stuck to consulting," but that's wrong because it discredits all the value I got through trying a new path.
   
   How do you overcome this? By teaching yourself to not give a f-ck what everyone else thinks. This is literally something you have to teach yourself - and it's something I still struggle with. We're so evolutionarily wired and societally-trained to fall in line and be like everyone else. The entire concept of social media is essentially a method for determining our value based on what other people think. If we post something smart or funny but it doesn't get any likes, then it was stupid and we're losers. On the other hand, if we post a photo of ourself half-naked, we'll get tons of likes (well, maybe not me, but some people will). So this is why I say learning to not care about the opinions of others takes time and effort. It's a skill like playing guitar is a skill.
   
   Perhaps your question was more about why we're met with such internal resistance when we make life changes. If so, then the answer is much more simple: our minds have been conditioned, through months and years of experience, to think or act a certain way, meaning that when we try to change our habits it'll take time.
   
   Hope any of this helps.
   
   -------------------------------------------------
   
   I wrote a memoir that walks through some important life events that occurred during my first decade of adulthood, and it talks about how I learned to listen to myself and follow my vision. If this sounds like something that would interest you, there's a free PDF copy available on my website.

I'll give some advice because I've had some similar situations in my own life. I'm using "you" but...if the OP is for someone else or background, this is meant to be general advice.

"Therapy" is a great panacea for an answer, but most therapists aren't really equipped to deal constructively with multiple personalities. There is a tendency to see multiples as an illness...thus "identity disorder."

If you read Douglas Kenrick you come to the understanding that nobody is a "single identity." It is just that most people in society have the cracks plastered over seamlessly.

I'd recommend the Kink Aware Professionals list for a start. Look for professionals who will do therapy online (Skype, or even email) and ask questions about their attitudes toward multiple personalities.

In the meantime, you may want to try some self therapy. Writing letters to your other identities that explain things to them can be helpful. Getting them to communicate. Trying to see if you can get more than one of them to manifest in your mind at the same time and discuss what triggers them. I've seen some very hostile and self-destructive personas settle down when they became involved with the others.

In my experience many people have found they can get their personalities to talk more amongst themselves, and communicate better, and that tends to curb the most extreme aspects of their acting out. Understanding they're part of a group and not alone.

Hypnosis can be a good tool for this, though I think most professional hypnotists would be reluctant to touch this sort of situation, or want to "fix" it in the wrong way. I've known a number of scene tops who worked through hypnosis with bottoms who had multiple personalities, but it is not something I would try without someone who has both prior experience and excellent scene recommendations as a safe and consensual partner.

You could try self-hypnosis, using audio recorded on a phone, or just meditation techniques. I think for anyone whose mind works this way, trying to introduce some meditative/reflective practice to create a calmer center can be useful.

I've also gotten some anecdotal suggestions that Ayahuasca may be helpful in allowing overall perspective, but I can't speak for that personally. I do know it can be a powerful experience in regards to depression.

Political psychology, although typically considered a subfield, covers a wide range of variables (e.g., personality, decision-making, behavior, beliefs, emotion, conflict) from multiple levels of analysis (e.g., individual, group, state, system). Given that your thesis will inevitably consume a great deal of your time and effort, you'll want to focus on an area of political psychology that you find particularly interesting. Here are some resources that can help you pinpoint a topic:

• Political Psychology (the most prominent academic journal dedicated to political psychology)
• Political psychology (Wikipedia) [the list of prominent political psychologists toward the bottom of the page provides a decent starting point]
• The Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology (Huddy, Sears, & Levy)
• Introduction to Political Psychology (Cottam, Dietz-Uhler, Elena Mastors, & Preston)
• Political Psychology: Neuroscience, Genetics, and Politics (Marcus)

However, it occurs to me that providing you a few links and telling you to "read!" might not be the most helpful approach, since I'm pointing you toward a forest when you eventually need to locate a specific tree. Does your college/university offer any courses that relate to political psychology? If so, I would consider taking them (or at least reaching out to the professors that offer them). [Note: Even if there aren't classes dedicated to the subject, your university likely has related courses (e.g., American politics, social psychology) that might be useful]. In my opinion, taking courses or talking to professors will likely benefit you even more than independent reading.

And lastly, since you asked, here are some specific areas of research (that I find intriguing), along with relevant recent publications (that I have enjoyed):

• The structure and determinants of political ideologies: 1, 2, 3, 4
• Personality characteristics in the political domain 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
• The dynamics of political information processing: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
• The efficacy of biological and neuroscientific explanations of political behavior: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Maybe one the aforementioned topics will interest you. If not, there are plenty other research foci out there (you might have noticed that I failed to include a topic related to foreign policy, a literature to which I haven't paid much attention recently). Best of luck!

Ekman is awesome, as is Gardner. Milgram's Obedience To Authority is pretty good, in my opinion, for someone interested in human emotion and motivation. As is Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect. Those kind of look into the darker aspects of motivation and conformity.

One of the more positive books I've read is Thoughts Without a Thinker by Mark Epstein. It looks at psychotherapy and general human behavior through the eyes of Buddhism. Oh, Eckman also co-wrote a book with the Dalai Lama on human emotion that you might find interesting.

I wish I had more time to read these days (and more money to spend on books!). Those are the only recommendations I can really give for your interests. Good luck to you!

Oh boy, haha. Way to open Pandora's box here.

My own work is primarily on British riots, but I have a broader interest in mass movements in general. I'll recommend the book I mentioned in my comment - Eric Hoffer's The True Believer and Bill Ayers' Fugitive Days to start. Ayers is somewhat controversial because Ayers, but that book is incredibly thought-provoking and valuable.

Less controversial but no less thought-provoking (and currently relevant considering our depressing state of climate-change denial) is Keith Thomas' Man and the Natural World - it's a book about our changing perceptions of the world around us.

Finally, before I give you an 80-page list, I'm going to recommend this one. Peter Novick's That Noble Dream - I don't expect anyone but nerds like me to read this, but if more people understood the study of history itself as a constantly changing profession and philosophy (as well as science) I think the general population would see the value in it more. History isn't a static thing, and the way we approach it has changed dramatically in 150 years.

Hey man I feel for you. I was home schooled and it was a very long time before I figured out social skills. There are two books that did wonders for me. So much stuff clicked after I read them. The first is Interaction Ritual - Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior: Erving Goffman. The studies in it are interesting and it quickly brought into the light a lot of social behaviors that people unconsciously use. The second is Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre: Keith Johnstone. Don't be fooled this isn't just about acting it's about translating skills you already have and use daily to work in those times when your mind goes blank. It's also really funny in parts.

​

I also highly recommend upgrading your lifestyle to get good sleep, exercise, meditate and diet. REM sleep improves emotional control, Exercise gives you more energy and a mood lift. Meditation reduces anxiety. Diet helps with all of the above. That said, telling you to read a book, get some sleep and exercise isn't going to help you unless you have the energy to devote to it which kind of leads to a chicken and egg problem.

​

The sexual marketplace will change in your favor after about 27. So keep improving yourself, don't waste energy on black holes and trust that you are still developing into someone awesome.

1. Immediately join whatever teacher union is most popular in your area, probably AFT or NEA. If problems arise, the district's not on your side, but a union will be.
   
2. Get to know your department and try to find a willing mentor to share advice and material with. You'll need someone who can keep your head above water while you learn the craft.
   
3. Read up on classroom behavior management and sociology principles. Content knowledge is far less of a demand than knowing how to run a well-managed classroom. Elliot Aronson's The Social Animal was very enlightening for me as a young teacher struggling to understand behavior issues.
   
4. Be prepared for a very demanding first few years. You'll make thousands of decisions a day interacting with young people that you won't need to make later as a veteran, and it'll exhaust you. Take your vitamins, eat right, and exercise. It'll help with the stress.
   
5. Bonus: Start forming your teaching philosophy, the "purpose" of your job. [Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed](http://www.amazon.com/Pedagogy-Oppressed-Anniversary-Paulo-Freire/dp/0826412769/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1448939458&sr=1-1&keywords=paolo+friere) continues to shape my approach to the job, 22 years down the road.
   
   Teaching is a fantastic job, but it's demanding and complicated. Stick with it and you'll be rewarded one day by realizing that teaching isn't what you do, it's who you are. Good luck.

Under the banner of heaven is a good, but you're right that it's not the full picture. I'd recommend "No man knows my history" by Brodie for an objective attempt at presenting the history. Bushman's "Rough Stone Rolling" was written as a replacement of Brodie's work and will give you [most of] the same information with apolegetics mixed in.

A good rule of thumb. If it's historical, but not apologetic, then many members will consider it "anti". It's a duality in the religion, especially among the older groups. Either you're defending the LDS church, or you're against the church.

In fact, if you're interested in history, check out this entire list. Even though it has nothing to do with Mormonism, I highly recommend when prophecy fails as an insight into religious devotion when presented with counter evidence.

Note the article is from 2010 so this is hardly news. Even back then, though, it was hardly news for anybody who's actually researching religion.

To my knowledge, no expert who published (or still publishes) in peer-reviewed journals about religion ever took the idea seriously. The meme idea, in general, and the idea of a "virus of the mind", in particular, was never a thing. It's useless for research. At best, someone mentions it as "some say" in what looks to me as a kind nod to Dawkins, but nobody ever used it. Anthropologist and terrorism expert Scott Atran was maybe the most kind by trying to test it. He rejected it, because it was clear that religious texts or ideas basically mutate all the time.

That doesn't mean that social science cannot learn from evolutionary biology. But it usually focuses on stuff that is useful. For instance, the penetration of a population by some concept is often modeled as a diffusion process.

Another totally new interesting tool comes from genetics. This is called a Neighbor-net, which allows you to reconstruct a family "tree" is you have the right data.

For instance, there's a discussion in the study of religion whether the concept of "Big Gods" could have allowed or supported the creation of big states. Not everybody is yet convinced. Pascal Boyer argues against it based on historic data. An application of the Neighbor-Net to data from the pacific recently helped researchers to figure out what came first: "Bigger states", or "bigger gods"? The most probably solution to describe the data suggest bigger states came first.

Stuff like this is tremendously helpful.

The meme idea not so much.

Sure, but it's not exactly easily accessible for the layman.

Check out the Polisci teams at UCLA and U Mich Ann Arbor, they do some of the best work in this stuff.

Try reading some books by David O. Sears. That's probably the easiest way to get into this stuff.

Or, if you want the closest thing to a survey overview, but still probably pretty dense and made for post-undergraduates, try the Oxford Handbook.

HAHA. VERY true. The "Rush Revere" books I believe are a certain exception to the judging a book by its cover rule.

However, this is the book I recall reading that statistic in, written by this guy, who I'm pretty sure isn't crazy. At the very least, he isn't an ultra-chauvinist neo-con like many of the sources that dispute the 77% statistic.

The animal drive to pursue altered states of mind is fundamental, right up there after eating and sex-- and often ahead of them. Framing this as a black & white issue requiring absolute abstinence, as 12-step programs do, is misleading, ridiculous and insulting to any thinking person many addicts. The copious usage of caffeine, nicotine and antidepressants among 12 steppers reveals the dishonesty of this approach.

To go on and use charged language like 'clean', and then on top of this implying that someone who's been sober for years but slips up once has been knocked back to square zero, is utterly reprehensible can contribute to setbacks for a lot of folks.

I went to a bunch of 12 step meetings, mostly AA. It puts way too much pressure on people to adopt a zero tolerance perspective which I am convinced absolutely does more harm than good (except perhaps in a small minority of cases that don't come anywhere close to outweighing the harm done to everyone else). The fact that it is treated universally as The Only Way to deal with addiction is disgusting to me.

We are not powerless. [Edit: Not all of us addicts are, anyway.] It is an important part of being a responsible adult to take ownership of your actions. Yeah, it's fucking difficult as hell to do certain things - or resist doing others - but aside from avoiding death from extreme withdrawal, it's not at all impossible.

I have enjoyed more success and happiness in my struggles with depression and substance dependence when I faced them head on and started being brutally honest with myself and my loved ones about what I was doing. Honesty [edit: for me] does not mean telling everyone that I'm a victim of a disease and need to go to pseudo-church meetings all the time now because otherwise my sickness will overwhelm me-- it means admitting that I like to get too fucked up too often and that I have the capacity to change that. There's nothing wrong with asking for help, but not everyone has that option, and trying to do it on your own is clearly at least as effective as building a fantasy where believing your 12-step higher power is making it possible, and I would strongly argue that it's much healthier [edit: for a lot of us].

I've been reducing my dependence gradually. There have been slip-ups, but I see this as far more sustainable than any approach I ever encountered 'in the rooms'. Yeah, sure, moderation is tough as hell for an addict. It's also totally worth it [edit: again, for me]. The feeling of accomplishment is far greater than simply avoiding a drink for months on end, and one slip-up doesn't reset your progress. It used to be that once I started drinking, I was going to have at least a 12 pack, if not twice that. Guess what? I can have a single beer now with a meal, then walk away and not have another for days and be fine. I can also do the same thing with a sugar-free vodka drink when I'm watching calories. AA told me this was impossible. They were wrong.

Edit: I used some pretty strong and possibly unfair language when I first wrote this. The point I'm trying to make is that for me, the struggle against temptation became a lot easier when I began exploring the possibility that AA was incorrect about me never, ever being able to drink 'normally' again. I came to realize that the option to alter my consciousness is a precious, integral part of my existence and it didn't work for me to throw the baby out with the bathwater just because it got out of control for a while. It only made my cravings and my sense of being unable to control them worse. Willpower is like a muscle, it needs exercise. How do you know whether you can develop it if you don't try, repeatedly, over a decent period of time? If you love getting altered but are having trouble controlling that desire, it may be possible for you to achieve better balance with effort. It's not for every addict, of course... but neither is 12 step.

> Do you think role models/idols of same sex are better for that particular person, or is that completely unnecessary? Provide your reasons.

From Joseph Henrich's The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter:

> Automatically and unconsciously, people also use cues of self-similarity, like sex and ethnicity, to further hone and personalize their cultural learning. Self-similarity cues help learners acquire the skills, practices, beliefs, and motivations that are, or were in our evolutionary past, most likely to be suitable to them, their talents, or their probable roles later in life. For example, many anthropologists argue that the division of labor between males and females is hundreds of thousands of years old in our species’ lineage. If true, we should expect males to preferentially hang around, attend to, and learn from other males—and vice versa for females. This will result in novices learning the skills and expectations required for their likely roles later in life, as mothers, hunters, cooks, and weavers.

(the book goes into this in a lot more detail)

You know, I started reading Joseph Campbell's stuff years ago. I really quite enjoyed it and I'm sure that some of what I read seeped into my subconscious and likely informed my work indirectly. For reasons that are lost in the dim recesses of my memory, though, I don't think finished reading any of his work and I haven't drawn on any of it directly.

I don't know of any books currently out there that tackle sacred stories head on from an evolutionary perspective. The final chapter of my dissertation looks at sacred texts as being like the chromosomes and genes of genetic evolution, which is related to your question about cultural borrowing but isn't directly on point. Plus, you know, it's a dissertation so--boring!

That said, if you're interested in books that look at religion from an evolutionary perspective there are some good ones out there. The first one that I'm aware of, and that in many ways started me on this journey is Darwin's Cathedral by David Sloan Wilson. More recent books include a new one by Dominic Johnson, God is Watching You and a closely related book by Ara Norenzayan, Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. There are others as well, but those are the three that first popped into my mind.

This book actually goes into that! http://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/dp/0691128715 -
I would recommend it to any Nate Silver fan as I believe this work really put forth a lot of ideas pre-Nate Silver's popularity. It's a lot more rigorous and in-depth than Silver's Signal and Noise though.

As well as this publication made public domain by the CIA that gets into why too much information can lead to worse decisions: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/psychology-of-intelligence-analysis/PsychofIntelNew.pdf

The co-founder of my old fund used to say that "Psychology of Intelligence Analysis" is the #1 book he recommended for trading. I would say that after you learn basic terminology and basic markets info (like what a stock is, the S&P 500, what value investing is), this is absolutely required reading before you read somebody's analysis - and it's now free!

I’ve been reading Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073TJBYTB/) and he makes some plausible arguments for how inequality, while bad, is not the metric to measure the health of our society. Poverty, which has been ever decreasing, is the measure for how successful our programs and approaches are, with inequality as a secondary metric to measure and work on. So we can take heart that many of the programs and progress of the last 70 years have truly increased the quality of life for most Americans. A corollary to this is: don’t rail to pull money from the richest; instead, take steps to make the poorest less poor.

I’m massacring his point, I’m sure, but it is interesting. Thinking of it not in terms of a zero sum game is worthwhile. My take was: it’s not the whole “a rising tide lifts all ships” schtick; it’s more about fixating less on the Waltons and their ilk, and more focusing on everyone else. There will be peaks when some people make off with a vulgar amount of cash/wealth, but as long as overall quality of life continues to rise for everyone, we’re doing well.

Worth thinking about.

First of all, it is an unfortunate byproduct of the far left that we now view 'diversity' as only meaning diversity in skin color, when there are so many more differences--of culture, religion, gender, class, and opinion--worth considering. Not even dwelling on the actual difficulty of calculating a society's 'diversity,' let's consider this: one way to look at science is that there are pieces of cultural knowledge that we all share. In order to make a discovery, formulate an opinion, or analyze something, one has to rely on previously learned, whether conscious or unconscious, concepts. It's impossible to talk about anything without using the cultural lexicon you've inherited since birth. What is a cultural lexicon? It is the values, norms, information, and ways of looking at the world that are the product of a culture. Joe Henrich, a professor of anthropology and cognition at Columbia, argues in his book The Secret of Our Success that the reason that science emerged out of Greece instead of, say, China, was a matter of the culture of the Ancient Greeks.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Secret-Our-Success-Domesticating/dp/0691166854
The East has traditionally followed a more holistic, interconnected philosophy, as opposed to the West, which is much more analytical and reductionist. Henrich shows that the way agriculture emerged in these respective countries, with China's shared system necessary for wet rice farming and Greece's individual farmers made Greeks more inclined to analyze something's separate parts. This is the foundation of science. (The etymology of 'analyze' is literally to break something apart.) Thus, the shared cultural lexicon of individual contribution and separate rather than all-encompassing inquiry allowed Greece to be the birthplace of modern science. Discoveries do not just come out of nowhere; the people who discovered new concepts owe themselves to the shared concepts they used to explore it. There are some discoveries that were, in a sense, inevitable--evolution, for example. This does not detract from Darwin's skill as a thinker, but the theory of evolution would've been (and was) formed without him. It was just a matter of who came first. Thus, the more cultures you have the more cultural lexicons you have and thus the more discoveries you are able to have. There are simply concepts and artworks and discoveries that are not going to be able to be made when someone is stuck in their paradigm. The black community is a great example of this: they have made sizable contributions--the works of Toni Morrison and the creation of hip-hop, for example--that depend of a shared system of ideas. Quite simply, the more diverse a society is the more concepts are able to be worked with, and the more discoveries are able to be made that depend on those concepts.

Books that I highly recommend for improving social interactions:

The Magic of Rapport

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Interaction Ritual

Joe Henrich proposes a theory in his recent book that cultures perform cranial deformation as a difficult-to-fake signal of cultural membership. The idea is that you have a vested interest in (quickly) finding out if a stranger shares your cultural norms and values, but you can't directly observe many of these. But you can observe outward cultural identifiers such as clothing, tattoos, piercings, etc.

These cultural markers are more effective if they are costly, and cranial deformation is a good candidate because it must be done from infancy, which means you can't possibly have just done it to yourself this morning so you could sneak into someone else's tribe. It proves that you really have been part of that culture since birth.

The book list just keeps growing in so many different directions that it's hard to identify which I want to tackle next (I also have a tendency to take meticulous notes while I read and that slows the process down even further!). Some of the topics I intend to read about once I'm done with the books mentioned:

• God: A Human History
  
• Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith
  
• The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
  
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
  
• Occult America
  
• When Prophecy Fails
  
• Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
  
• Cosmos
  
• Norse Mythology
  
• Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
  
• Guns, Germs, and Steel
  
• Misquoting Jesus
  
• On Bullshit
  
• The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe
  
• Why People Believe Weird Things
  
  Plus a bunch of books by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Carl Sagan, and others. There are way too many. And all the fiction books I want to read too! It's not that I didn't read books before, but my faith transition has sparked an intense desire to study and learn far greater than I ever experienced before.

His book The Better Angels of Our Nature changed my life, and my entire outlook on the world. I've given away 4-5 copies since then, and I encourage everyone to read it. I also loved The Blank Slate. About to start his new book, Enlightenment Now.

I just so happen to be studying under a couple of authors within the Intro to PoliPsych book mentioned by /u/zaval, so I'm deep into this. If I'm going to be effective in providing some help, though, I need a few more details from you:

First, what topic within political psychology interests you? Are you interested in American politics or international politics? Group behavior or elite decision-making? Psychology of voters?

Second, is your thesis just a review of the field in general? If so, why do you need only recent publications? Much of the stuff being done right now has its roots much further back, so you'll likely need to cite at least a few sources from as far back as the 70s.

Finally, if I had to make some recommendations blind, I'd definitely second the suggestion of the textbook and Haidt. I'd also add the "Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology" and the International Society of Political Psychology's journal, "Political Psychology".

I'm so sorry. It makes it even more sad when their "proof" is just delusion. Anyone can be deluded into believing the most unbelievable things, these people believed they were getting communications from outer space from "Sandana", and that a flood was coming, but it never did . . . yet, they still believed, and they conveniently believed it was their "devotion" that saved the planet from a major flood. Cognitive dissonance, HOORAY!

I think it is important to note that by the time the highest level shocks were administered, the confederate had gone silent, pretending to be dead. And yet the participants still administered the highest shock levels. Milgram also replicated the experiment with various levels of proximity. Even when the participants had to physically force the confederate's hand down to receive the shock, and could literally see the confederate screaming and writhing in pain, eventually passing out at the highest shock levels, the participants still repeatedly administered the highest shock levels.

Now the reason these experiments are so amazing is because the experimenter (the authority figure) was a complete, utter stranger to the participants, yet they often trusted his authority and carried out the experiment to completion, even as they could tell that they were harming another person. If this is how people respond to authority figures that are complete strangers, imagine how they would respond to authority figures that they are more familiar with such as superior military officers. These experiments go a long way in explaining why seemingly good people can do horrible things when ordered to do so (I particularly think of the My Lai Massacre). This does not necessarily excuse their actions, but it does help explain them.

If you're particularly interested in these experiments, I highly recommend read Milgram's book, Obedience to Authority. It's a very easy read and one of, if not the, classic works of psychology.

yes the key point is humans are not rational , rather rational thought is a cultural trait which also only acts superficially .

Humans are social imitators first and foremost.

I think a lot of psychological concepts need to be revised and build into the theoretical framework of cultural evolution and dual inheritance theory .

I am convinced it will change a lot of social sciences and how we view humans as a species .

We are much more a collective species than isolated individuals

This book https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Our-Success-Evolution-Domesticating/dp/0691166854

made me completely rethink what humans are and I am convinced cultural evolution is here to stay and further research will also transform psychology as a field , could take a while though.

Basically a great deal of human psychology is dynamic , driven be cultural group selection , but this cultural selection also has an influence on gene selection .

Cultural selection is much faster than gene selection which explains why the same group of humans can behave completely differently in just a couple of hundert years, nothing much has changed genetically but a lot has changed culturally.

This what make humans special compared to other animals

Sure! There's Bob Altemayer's "The Authoritarians", Leon Festiger's "When Prophecy Fails", and anything about The Great Disappointment:

>The Great Disappointment in the Millerite movement was the reaction that followed Baptist preacher William Miller's proclamations that Jesus Christ would return to the Earth in 1844, what he called the Advent. His study of the Daniel 8 prophecy during the Second Great Awakening led him to the conclusion that Daniel’s “cleansing of the sanctuary” was cleansing of the world from sin when Christ would come, and he and many others prepared, but October 22, 1844 came and they were disappointed. However, it paved the way for the Adventists who formed the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. They contended that what had happened on October 22 was not Jesus’ return, as Miller had thought, but the start of Jesus’ final work of atonement, the cleansing in the heavenly sanctuary, leading up to the Second Coming.

Tens of thousands of people (maybe more but I only feel comfortable saying 5 digits) across the US in the 19th century were convinced Jesus would return on a very specific day. He did not return as you might have guessed. A very very popular grassroots national religious movement died almost immediately. Instead of just disappearing though, it's practitioners basically just created new belief systems to deal with this change and entirely new religions were formed that still exist to this day. Even when proven 100% wrong about very substantial and elemental beliefs of their religion, the answer isn't to question it's necessity but to make a new one.

The phrase 'cognitive dissonance' gets thrown around a lot but it's in large part described first by Leon Festiger in that book I mention above.

Ultimately most of these people will just do their church, spend time on it, a few will even do good. Religion can be a negative force in some contexts but usually trying to crack down on it is far far worse than the religious practitioners themselves will be by default save certain examples (small death cults).

Oh you would probably enjoy this book:
The Secret of Our Success

Also fun fact: The US dropped the A-Bomb on Japan and thus thrust the world into the atomic age before Watson and Crick discovered what our own DNA looked like. @_@

I found this book called "Intoxication: The Universal Drive for Mind-Altering Substances". It talks about animals in nature who intentionally consume drugs. It has a whole chapter on cannabis and one for alcohol, among other slightly more exotic psychoactive compounds. I believe I've shared this before, but find it incredibly relevant to this conversation. Kudos to the OP for inspiring such a thoughtful debate. http://amzn.com/1594770697

Wonderment, visionary experiences, and shared insights can be quite magical, if not magic.

Paul Devereux, in his book, "The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia", makes the case that much drug use is actually quite "natural", from a historical perspective.

Ronald K. Siegel, in his book, "Intoxication: The Universal Drive for Mind-Altering Substances", makes the same claim from a more scientific perspective.

Are you sure you're not just focusing on the "straight-edge" part of modern culture?

> At the UK’s Tavistock gender clinic
>Tavistock

There's that name again.

Also, related previous thread; and one on /r/TheMotte.

>It's hard to believe we would countenance experimentation on children like this under any circumstances

"Odd thing it is—the word 'experiment' is unpopular, but not the word 'experimental'. You mustn't experiment on children: but offer the dear little kiddies free education in an experimental school attached to the N.I.C.E. and it's all correct!"

An anthropology professor at Harvard, Joseph Heinrich,
wrote a book on this topic (and others) that I strongly recommend.

Henrich, Joseph (2016). The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating our Species, and Making us Smarter. Princeton University Press

Here is an interview with Tyler Cowen about his book.

Most people say that the change was pushed by the catholic church during and especially after the fall of the roman West, so it can't have much to do with roman law.

This theory is actually pretty popular in hbd circles. Steve Sailer used in early aughts to explain why american state building efforts in Iraq were doomed to fail.

HBDchick blogged a lot about this.

Yes. Look into the Tavistock institute. They created the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, and figures like Timothy Leary were CIA assets. I

https://conspiracy-corner.com/tavistock-institute-invented-rock-roll/

Good book.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/reviews/B015M9SR44/ref=cm_cr_arp_mb_paging_btm_2?ie=UTF8&pageNumber=2

Okay I usually post this when girls ask questions like that. You should get your hands on some of the few good seduction books for women, and besides that, there is some books written for both genders. If you're a nerd and need something more scientific, look into evolutionary psychology which also has a lot of knowledge about mating strategies. If you don't care much for scientifically backed stuff, but want a good communication training, then there's some good nlp books out there.

This. I took a class taught by Aronson, and it was the likely the best class I had as an undergrad. It definitely lead me into social science. "The Social Animal" is one of the handful of books I will always have on my office bookshelf.

Not really, since I bought the German translation but this one seems pretty solid: http://www.amazon.com/The-Crowd-Study-Popular-Mind/dp/0486419568

Calibration exercises may not be common outside the rationality sphere, but they certainly didn't start within the rationality sphere either. AFAIK, Philip Tetlock started the trend in Expert Political Judgement when he ran a series of experiments comparing expert predictions to random university undergrads. The experts outperformed, but they could further be divided into foxes and hedgehogs - those who know many things, and those who are quite certain of one thing.

Anyway, Silver quotes Tetlock in his book The Signal and the Noise, so I'm guessing that's where he got the idea.

Biologically it comes from the avoidance of cuckoldry and ensuring that your genes are the ones passed on to her offspring. Also the same rational for the suppression of women from society at large - so that you don’t inadvertently end up raising someone else’s child. If she can’t speak to men and has only had sex with you, then you can be certain it’s your child.

Incredibly primitive. Check out Alpha God by Hector Garcia for more on this stuff. It’s fascinating. https://www.amazon.com/Alpha-God-Psychology-Religious-Oppression/dp/1633880206

When prophecy fails

Edit: This post has come and gone, and my comment got downvoted a bit. I choose to believe it's because I didn't properly explain the context, so here goes:

This book is by (mostly) Leon Festinger, who developed the theory of cognitive dissonance in the early 60s. The book explains, in part, why evidence doesn't change people's minds very often. In fact, evidence contradicting an opinion seems to make most people double down, or dig in with their position even deeper. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful and (generally) empirically supported explanation for why that happens.

My comment, though lacking in details, was intended to direct people toward a source that, though several decades old, still provides an evidence-supported explanation for why the thing in this empirical study happens. In other words, it's a pretty reasonable explanation for why Republican men became more sexist (not less, as rationality would predict) after Blasey Ford's testimony. Because of cognitive dissonance.

It's ironic how we try to limit the offenders to a certain subreddit. The internet creates an anonymity which unconsciously pushes us towards associating/identifying with others like us on the internet. This is what Reddit so popular and at times so formulaic with the: DAE and constant circle jerk of certain ideas.

The crowd creates a togetherness but this togetherness leads to a emotional based decision-making and views of issues , vast simplifications of problems and rash decisions as less people challenge the views of the masses or choose not to go against the grain. Things like KONY 2012, #Occupy, SOPA, few people online truly understand, but many have an emotional response to.

This is not a trait that we can merely throw on a few outcasts and go about our business, a lot of us have to take responsibility for acting in a similar fashion to one degree or another. If we look at Reddit's reaction to: Chris Brown, Woody Harrelson, whichever mod is deemed to be unpopular today, or even the way the majority of the people will react to the member deemed 'responsible' for someone else committing suicide, it is clear that this thought process is something that affects the entire website. The idea of vigilante justice assumes that you have the moral high ground just as much as the culprits at the latest event that has everyone up in arms.

We all have these little cliques that are supposed to do XYZ. r/funny makes a joke out of everything, r/atheism looks down on religion, etc etc ad nausem. Let's not try and blame one subset of individuals for something the whole site is guilty of. They are of the same mindset as everyone else, it is just their mindset and circle-jerk is deemed as less productive from our own 'moral high grounds'.


TL;DR: Read The Crowd by Gustav Le Bon

> Must be a horrible world you live in that everything is part of a conspiracy.

I never implied that everything is part of a conspiracy.
Is it hard for you to accept that people come together and make plans for their own benefit?

> Have you thought about moving to Russia where the press and government never lies?

Now you are just being silly. But I'll respond anyway, because I hope you come around.

Russia lies too, they have a stake in Iran's natural gas. If the US wins in Syria, then they won't be able to sell LNG to Europe for as much profit. I don't think they are trying to assist Syria because of altruistic intentions.

In short, main stream / state run media is not trustworthy. In any country.

If I could leave you with one last suggestion, consider reading "The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind".
https://www.amazon.com/Crowd-Study-Popular-Mind/dp/0486419568

Seems pretty interesting:

https://www.amazon.com/Big-Gods-Religion-Transformed-Cooperation/dp/0691151210

Haven't read it myself though, thinking of buying it.

I have not read, but have heard good things about Aronson's Social Animal from academics and "laypeople."

My social psych class used Brehm, Kassin, and Fein's text. It is a solid no-frills textbook that doesn't require previous knowledge of psychology.

Might I recommend The Tall Book, which goes into detail about why the world is built for short people.

• Don't know the author or anything, just six and a half feet tall and happened to enjoy the book.

Tunnepohjainen suhtautuminen asiaan ei auta. Kuten tässäkin ketjussa on todettu, päihteiden käyttö periytyy meille jo eläinkunnasta. Suhtaudumme siihen tyypillisesti liian mustavalkoisesti. Ehkä syynä on liian laaja kategorisointi ("Mitä hyötyä päihteistä?").

Suosittelen perehtymään Ronald K. Siegelin kirjaan Intoxication: The Universal Drive for Mind-Altering Substances.

> History shows that people have always used intoxicants. In every age, in every part of the world, people have pursued intoxication with plants, alcohol, and other mind-altering substances. In fact, this behavior has so much force and persistence that it functions much like our drives for food, sleep, and sex. This "fourth drive," says psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel, is a natural part of our biology, creating the irrepressible demand for intoxicating substances.

Not OP, just helping out with some formatting (and links!) because I like these suggestions.

> 1) The Magic Of Reality - Richard Dawkins
>
> 2) The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
>
> 3)A Brief History Of Time - Stephen Hawking
>
> 4)The Grand Design - Stephen Hawking
>
> 4)Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari (Any Book By Daniel Dennet)
>
> 5)Enlightenment Now - Steven Pinker
>
> 6)From Eternity Till Here - Sean Caroll (Highly Recommended)
>
> 7)The Fabric Of Cosmos - Brian Greene (If you have good mathematical understanding try Road To Reality By Roger Penrose)
>
> 8)Just Six Numbers - Martin Reese (Highly Recommended)

Here's a list of their work. They haven't produced many books. Mostly articles. If you're interested in Evolutionary Psychology, I'd recommend checking out [this](https://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Psychology-New-Science-Mind/dp/0205992129/ref=sr_1_1? ie=UTF8&qid=1523978075&sr=8-1&keywords=evolutionary+psychology+buss) book. I believe they wrote a few chapters in it

Have you read The Tall Book? If not, I really recommend it, I loved it!

it's not you. it's the pro-Ukrainian circlejerk, which transmogrifies hipster redditors into bloodthirsty patriots. your comment is vaguely anti-American, and while that would get you upvoted most of the time on reddit in the Ukranian circlejerk it makes you a tool of Russian oppression.

the entire episode has been a wonderul illustration of time-honored truisms regarding crowds. it's become tiresome, though, and with any luck it will have quieted down in a few weeks to allow reddit to back to cats.

I don't think it's real, but Steven Pinker has written two books with basically the same message:

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Enlightenment Now

The classic treatise on Cognitive Dissonance is When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger (the Psychologist who coined the term). It's a fascinating read. Festinger and a few of his students infiltrated a Chicago-based UFO cult in the 50s. They observed firsthand what happens in a religious group when presented with undeniable evidence that their beliefs are false.

If you want to understand the psychology of belief, this is an invaluable book.

There is a height where being tall stops being benefitial because of health reasons and I believe it's around 6'6". I would recommend checking out The Tall Book by Arianne Cohen, she dives into that and also some of the statistics behind why it's probably better to be 6'3" than 6'6".

https://www.amazon.com/Tall-Book-Celebration-Life-High/dp/1596913088

You want studies or a book?

One of the most profound books i have ever read is this on how states rise and fall. It's the most enlighting thing I have ever read, it changed how I view the world fundamentaly

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0452288193/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_0452288193

Its a popular book without the mathematical models behind it

Here is the mathematical version

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0691116695/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_0691116695

But its quite expensive and only available as hardcover but there should be a different version coming out soon


For the study on cooperation this

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0996139516/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1517513099&sr=8-2&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=Peter+turchin&dpPl=1&dpID=41Ux9xQvfIL&ref=plSrch


On cultural evolution this books makes an incredible strong argument

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0691178437/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_0691178437


On how religion influences pro social behaviour this

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0691169748/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1517513482&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=Ara+Norenzayan&dpPl=1&dpID=61TgLU80vIL&ref=plSrch

Hmm. You might want to start with Eric Hoffer's The True Believer (1951), on fanaticism and mass movements. It's short and accessible.

After that, maybe a book on the emotional power of nationalism -- William Pfaff, The Wrath of Nations (1993).

Finally, a book that just came out: Pankaj Mishra, The Age of Anger.

Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?

also by Tetlock

http://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/dp/0691128715/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1449363140&sr=8-1&keywords=expert+political+judgment

I agree, I think as long as you start on the basis that the "church is true", you will cling to any vague parallel to validate the basis that the "church is true".

I'm in the middle of reading "When Prophecy Fails" by Festinger et al. and it confirms all of this. They studied a cult that believed that they were receiving messages from outer space from "Sandana", that they were going to be picked up by flying saucers, and that most of the world was going to be flooded on December 21, 1954.

Paul Krugmen did a good write up about it here relating it to predictions of the "economic collapses".

>"Back in the 1950s three social psychologists joined a cult that was predicting the imminent end of the world. Their purpose was to observe the cultists’ response when the world did not, in fact, end on schedule. What they discovered, and described in their classic book, “When Prophecy Fails,” is that the irrefutable failure of a prophecy does not cause true believers — people who have committed themselves to a belief both emotionally and by their life choices — to reconsider. On the contrary, they become even more fervent, and proselytize even harder."

Rollo May had not encountered modern brain research. Free Will is not what it seems, and our assumptions about it can lead to “limerent shame.” https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Brain-Unconscious-Presidents-Control/dp/0385525222/ref=nodl_

> Religions are there solely to give power to people who came up with a good story and should lose all government benefits and protection.

The history of religion is a lot more complicated than that. I've covered the Catholic Church's history quite a bit already, but religion itself was essential to the development of societies past simple hunter-gather groups in the first place, among other things. I have no interest in writing a thesis on Reddit, so just know that religion is not nearly as black and white as /r/atheism would have you believe.

OR failing taking an actual course, read this book :http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1429203161/ref=olp_product_details?ie=UTF8&me=&seller=

An enjoyable, fascinating read

My favorite is The Social Animal by Elliot Aronson.

The red pill is essentially applied evolutionary psychology. The most prominent red pill book is Rollo Tomassi's The Rational Male. These theories explain a lot of social problems we have, as described in The Misandry Bubble. MGTOW use this information (part 3) to increase the quality of the individual man's life (part 5).

Ronald Siegel has suggested that desire for intoxication is your fourth drive.

http://www.amazon.com/Intoxication-Universal-Drive-Mind-Altering-Substances/dp/1594770697

If you'd like to read a book that will demonstrate the ways that our world has improved with empirical data, check out Enlightenment Now by Stephen Pinker.

I'm almost done reading it myself. It's very easy to get lost in the day-to-day bad news. This book takes the long view how nearly everything in our lifetime has gotten significantly better in spite of what we're constantly bombarded with in the media.

the hidden brain it has to do with how our unconscious brain influences our conscious decisions. It goes into how people fall prey to cults, difficulties in eyewitness testimony, and how we are almost all racially biased in one way or another. Very fascinating.

The desire to experience the nuances/differences of all five senses, particularly sensuality, hearing, and taste.

An exercise in gradually lowering the sound of a recording and still understanding the meaning.

You are correct. This was covered extensively by Freekonomics and The Tall Book.

How does Workman compare to Buss? I have only read Buss.

Furthermore, Buss is in the fifth edition now:
http://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Psychology-Science-Fifth-Edition/dp/0205992129/ref=pd_sim_14_4?ie=UTF8&dpID=51BgqsFFOWL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR124%2C160_&refRID=064KHRM92M84AG53PQ6J

Here's one option. Not sure how useful it will be for setting new goals, but it covers meaning throughout one's life.

Re-bonjour,

Pour le premier point, j'ai vu The Dunning-Kruger effect : on being ignorant of one's own ignorance.

50 pages très intéressantes montrant beaucoup d'expériences réalisées sur le sujet, mais demandant un peu de courage pour le lire. Je l'ai lu un peu rapidement, il me faudrait plusieurs lectures.

Page 257, dans une expérience, les personnes qui ont le plus "confiance" ont eu tord. Des personnes ayant tord avaient aussi le même niveau de "confiance" que les personnes ayant eu raison.

Page 277, il cite Expert political judgment de Tetlock, que je pense acheté à l'occasion. Apparemment, il distingue les "renards", ayant une pensée flexible et nuancée des "hérissons", qui font des prédictions basées sur de grandes "théories" et qui ne veulent pas en dévier. Les renards seraient plus précis dans leurs prédictions, et exprimeraient un niveau de confiance moins exubérant et plus approprié que les hérissons.

Page 289, il affirme que l'ignorance engendre une "overconfidence".

Pour le lien de ton article, je ne vais pas le lire. 11$ est un peu cher pour moi sachant que j'ai déjà une petite liste de livre à acheter pour 200€.

Je regarderais tes prochains liens pour le 2) plus tard. Pour la démocratie des crédules, je pense aussi me le commander, cela fait un petit bout de temps que j'en entends parler.

Humans have evolved certain mating strategies due to sexual selection. If you want to know more, read for instance this:
https://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Psychology-New-Science-Mind/dp/0205992129

This thread is ridiculous. Most people have absolutely no clue about human mating, and live in some fantasy world where they - consciously or unconsciously, reject human biology and evolution. Human instincts are far deeper and more influential on our behavior than current cultural trends.

Archives for the links in comments:

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So most explanations in here are... wrong. Yes, it might be advantageous for the ultra wealty to forego marriage, and in some cultures this is the norm. Some societies grant males a certain number of wives depending on their status, where the males highest up have upwards of hundreds of females to themselves. As a whole, though, according to evolutionarly psychology, polygamy is better for females then for males, and polygamy is bad for society as a whole. Let me try to give the explanation I've read in my studies;


Let's say we've got 50 females and 50 males, and they partner up in some way, monogamously. The context here is the "societal structure removed"-context, so everyone acts mathematically optimally, but they are humans, so they have a high parental investment, which is important for the reasoning. Another important bit of context is that the males and females are of "different quality", either you can think that they have some kind of "fitness value" and are ranked according to this value, or you can think of a kind of "general preference" (maybe like females generally liking fit, confident males, and males generally liking fit, petite women). So anyway, they are ranked, the first male is somehow "better quality" then the 50th male.


Ok, so let's forego marriage and accept polygamy. What happens? Well, the 50th female has a choice; she can either stay with her 50th male, or accept into a polygamous relationship with a male higher up in the chain - preferably the number 1 male. So let's say she asks to enter into the relationship with the #1 male - what does he do? He can accept and possibly lose his current girl, or deny and lose an opportunity to mate. But if his girl can only do worse since he is the best male, so the risk of losing her is small, so he accepts. Now, the 50th male has no partner. This can go on for a while, until females no longer feels that the "bubbling up" process is beneficial.

Of course, this is a very crude explanation, ranks are not cardinal like this and people have differing (though very similar) preferences - but it's very real and it does happen in real life where polygamy is accepted.

So, the #1 male get's lots of females, but what about the #50 male? He is now completely alone. So is the #49 male, and the #48, and a few more. With no chance of reproducing, these men might become depressed, alcoholic, and might resort to rape and violence as a last resort effort of reproducing.

And this effect is exactly the one we see in societies where polygamy is accepted; some men are left alone and they turn violent, leaving the society as a whole worse off.


Before you go out to start googling ways that I'm wrong in this reasoning, I know there are a couple of scientific articles about polygamy that portraits an idyllic society of free life and all that, but that article has been proven false; apparently the women in the study went out of their way to lie and deceive the scientists in the study.

This reasoning is mostly from Moral Animal by Robert Wright, but I've also read Evolutionary Psychology: A Beginner's Guide and Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind which also handle the subject but not so in-depth.

The LDS Church will never go away. It will probably decline and become a minor religion (if it hasn't always been one), and the remainders will be the hard-core zealots who pass the religion along through their families. Property will be sold, doctrines will be changed and adapted, and the failures will be re-interpreted as triumphs (lots of talk of "wheat" and "chaff").

Read the book "When Prophecy Fails", which discusses the observed psychology of a 1950s UFO cult and how the cult members deal with failure, to see it in a microcosm:

When Prophecy Fails

>I just don't know how smart people can believe it. How can the academy embrace it. It just doesn't hold up to scrutiny...

Read The Secret of Our Success. Essentially, even the very smartest among us (and the early hominids we descended from and who initially evolved these systems we still carry around with us) are idiots compared to large groups of people reality-testing their ideas over whole generations, thus we evolved to intuitively emulate other (successful) people's behaviour. So smart academics will simply observe what the most prestigious academics in their field thinks and then start thinking the same things those people think without realizing why they're doing it: When anyone disagrees, then, as long as it's possible to handwave away their arguments, the arguments will just be shouted down by the mob - which will simply intuit that the most prestigious people are correct, and the upstarts wrong, and so will not look any further into it but just go along with the mob in laughing at that obvious idiot. Why dig into the research data when all these prestigious people are saying it's wrong? They're prestigious, so (your heuristics tell you) they're probably right. You've got better things to do with your time!

So usually, only when those people at the top die or are somehow unambiguously discredited will people start seriously considering new ideas. Thus, the adage that science advances one funeral at a time.

Then just toss in the stuff that people like Jonathan Haidt write about, like the tribalism, or the religious-like moral code that seems to spontaneously emerge in the absence of a pre-existing one, or the enormous bias people are towards finding reasons to believe what they already feel like is true, etc., and maybe add a dash of cynical self-interest among people looking to appeal to the seeming powers-that-be in order to advance their own careers, and that probably explains most of it.

On a slightly more positive note, it is possible to get these - or, well, any - people to consider whether what they believe is wrong, but to do so you need to disconnect them from their intuitive or 'system 1' thinking and activate their deliberate or 'system 2' thinking, and doing that isn't always easy. Apparently, when it comes to morality, one way to do that is to expose them to the thing you want to ask them about, but then wait like 5 minutes after exposure before actually asking them about it. By then their initial moral reaction will have died down and they can more calmly and rationally examine the problem. Another way is to trigger an error in their intuitive system that it can't resolve, which will then activate their conscious system which you can actually have a conversation with. Doing that is easier said than done though, especially as triggering any specific error in the intuitive system only really works once before a resistance is developed to it - intelligent people especially are very good at coming up with reasons for why any given error is not actually an error at all and then conditioning their intuitive system not to respond to it again.

Of course, for cynics who know they're wrong but are just using the agenda as a vehicle to advance themselves, no argument is likely to work.

Anyway. That's probably mostly why even very intelligent people believe very stupid things.