Magna
est veritas et praevalebit
The Grand Challenge of Getting to
Know Oneself
Spending one's life in a daily
routine, hiding in one's limited personal world, trying to put up with the
present negativity, turns a large proportion of society into self-loving
loners, materialists, they even get trapped in nihilism. It points to the
deficit of humanitarianism in the modern society and demonstrates the inability
of the power structures to reform, and develop democratic institutions, thus
unwittingly furthering retrograde tendencies, socially unfavorable development.
What is necessary for a person
to stop, if only for a moment, in his/her life marathon, to look around, to get
to know oneself and evaluate one's role in society, to understand that under no
circumstances should we put up with the spreading of lies and evil, with
pathetic existence within a personality-degrading environment? Why do we have
to concentrate all our energy and willpower to avoid adapting to the bad, to
the inhumane, to avoid becoming outcasts.
The
Inconvenient Truth about Your “Authentic” Self
To actually feel authentic, you might have
to betray your true nature
- By Jennifer
Beer on March 5, 2020
Everyone
wants to be authentic. You want to be true to yourself, not a slavish follower
of social expectations. You want to “live your best life,” pursuing your
particular desires, rather than falling in line with whatever everyone else
thinks happiness requires. Studies have even shown that feelings of
authenticity can go hand in hand with numerous psychological and social
benefits: higher self-esteem, greater well-being, better romantic relationships
and enhanced work performance.
But
authenticity is a slippery thing. Although most people would define
authenticity as acting in accordance with your idiosyncratic set of values and
qualities, research has shown that people feel most authentic
when they conform to a particular set of socially approved qualities, such as
being extroverted, emotionally stable, conscientious, intellectual and
agreeable.
This
is the paradox of authenticity: In order to reap the many of the benefits of
feeling authentic, you may have to betray your true nature.
From
a psychological science standpoint, a person is considered authentic if she
meets certain criteria. Authentic people have considerable self-knowledge and
are motivated to learn more about themselves. They are equally interested in
understanding their strengths and weaknesses, and they are willing to honestly
reflect on feedback regardless of whether it is flattering or unflattering.
Most
important, authentic people behave in line with their unique values and
qualities even if those idiosyncrasies may conflict with social conventions or
other external influences. For example, introverted people are being authentic
when they are quiet at a dinner party even if social convention dictates that
guests should generate conversation.
But
a number of studies have shown that people’s feelings of
authenticity are often shaped by something other than their loyalty to their
unique qualities. Paradoxically, feelings of authenticity seem to be related to
a kind of social conformity.
In
these studies, people are first asked to characterize the qualities that
reflect their true self. Afterwards, they complete assessments—daily or once a
week over a period of multiple weeks—about the extent to which their behavior
reflected their qualities and the extent to which they felt authentic. We would
expect that people feel most authentic on days where their behavior closely matches
their unique pattern of values and qualities.
Consider
two people who differ in the degree to which they avoid quarreling with other
people. Let’s say that Jane is agreeable, and John is antagonistic. On a day
where each quarrels with someone, Jane would be expected to report feeling less
authentic than John because she has engaged in a behavior that is inconsistent
with her idiosyncratic qualities.
Instead,
research finds that people report feeling most authentic when their behavior
confirms to a specific pattern of qualities: namely, when they are extroverted,
emotionally stable, conscientious, intellectual and agreeable. That is, we feel
most authentic when we act like a cross between the perfect party guest and the
perfect co-worker. Therefore, despite their personality differences, research
suggests that both Jane and John would report feeling
inauthentic on a day where they quarrel with someone.
In
our lab and other labs that study authenticity, we tend to study people from
countries where parenting practices and institutions play a role in reinforcing
behaviors that are socially outgoing, even-keeled, dependable, competent and
pleasant to others.
Research
has shown that we view people as less than fully human when they fail to
conform to societal conventions. For example, people with soiled clothes do not
conform to societal conventions surrounding hygiene, and they tend to be
treated as less than completely human.
So,
when it comes time to actually make a judgment about our own authenticity, we
may use criteria that are closer to how we judge the authenticity of an object
such as food. A passion fruit tiramisu may be unique, but the authenticity of
tiramisu is judged by its conformity to a conventional recipe. Similarly, it
appears that the more we conform to social conventions about how a person
should act, the more authentic we feel.
We
want to believe that authenticity will bring us benefits. It’s not surprising
that businesses such as Microsoft, BlueCross BlueShield, and Gap have worked
with consultants to leverage authenticity in the workplace. However, until we
learn more about whether being authentic reaps the same
benefits as feeling authentic, we are left with a tough
decision between loyalty to our true selves and conformity to social convention.
4 Examples That Will Confirm You Were Born to Be a Leader
Do you have a natural bent
for people and relationships? That's a good starting point.
By Marcel Schwantes Principal and founder, Leadership From the Core@MarcelSchwantes
Ever wonder if you're true
leadership material? Perhaps you've been told you are, but the
question is, by
what standard? Thousands of leadership books are
written each year, many of them with marketing agendas to rehash and repackage
what has been talked about for decades.
What is true about
leadership that will remain unchanged through the centuries is this: It's
about people and relationships. And that requires that leaders have
a natural bent for both. If you're not into either, you're not a leader.
And you can start with the
proven fact that great
leaders aspire to lead by serving the needs of their people. You
don't need flavor-of-the-month books and expensive formal training to learn
this concept.
But you do need to develop
and measure yourself against the standards of great leadership (which
I strongly propose to be servant leadership). Here are four top
leadership characteristics I have witnessed that float to the top. Do
any describe you?
1. You have an innate desire to make
people better at what they do.
A core element of intrinsic
motivation, as described in Daniel Pink's classic bestseller Drive, is being able to develop
mastery in one's work. Obviously, this requires hiring people with the ambition
and drive to learn and grow.
Once that is in place, a
sign of leadership greatness is creating a learning organization that relies
upon the knowledge of individual contributors, rather than the classical
hierarchical organization, which relies on the knowledge of the top of the
hierarchy.
Leaders who are looking
ahead to develop the skills, competencies, and leadership of others have a
distinct advantage. As they create the framework for people to
develop and progress in mastery, the intrinsic motivation that Daniel Pink
writes about is unleashed.
Robert Greenleaf, the
founder of the modern servant leadership
movement, writes in his classic book Servant Leadership: "When the business
manager who is fully committed to this ethic is asked, 'What are you in business
for?' the answer may be: 'I am in the business of growing people
-- people who are stronger, healthier, more autonomous, more self-reliant,
more competent. Incidentally, we also make and sell at a profit things that
people want to buy so we can pay for all this.'"
2. Your highest leadership priority is to
develop trust.
Nowadays, leaders can't rely
on positional authority alone to get things done. Work environments are now
flatter, decentralized, dispersed, and virtual. And yet, more than ever, they
are faced with business challenges that call for higher levels of innovation,
knowledge, and soft skills.
How can leaders ensure
that a team is staying cohesive, collaborating at a high level, and headed in
the same direction to develop great product and keep customers
happy?
The secret is trust. And the
foundation for trust is integrity.
When leaders operate from
integrity, they gain the trust and respect of their people. Leaders are
seen as dependable and accountable for their actions. People feel psychologically
safe in their presence, which increases their influence.
SAS Institute, voted one of Fortune magazine's Best Companies to Work For twenty-one years
in a row, didn't arrive there by accident. It's industry-low turnover is
merely 2 percent; the pillars of its culture are based on "trust
between our employees and the company," says CEO Jim Goodnight.
3. You rely on your instincts and
gift of intuition.
Great leaders can sniff out
the signals in the environment and sense what's going on without having
anything spelled out for them. They rely on off-the-charts intuition for timing
and the best course of action.
That's a paraphrase
by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones after their extensive research that led to
their book Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?
They refer to these
inspirational leaders as good "situation sensors." In essence, these
leaders are keen on collecting and interpreting soft data, detecting shifts in
climate and ambiance, and reading the silences and nonverbal cues of others.
The authors found these
sensors have the capacity to accurately judge whether relationships are working
-- a gift of intuition not many have.
4. Your whole reason for working and doing
business is to change lives.
Richard Branson, billionaire
founder of Virgin Group, said, "There's no point in starting a
business unless you're going to make a dramatic difference to other people's
lives. So if you've got an idea that's gonna make a big difference to other
people's lives, then just get on and do it."
Even if you're not an
entrepreneur with a big dream, and find yourself navigating the
political corporate landscape, great leaders instinctively know how to
reinforce the mission of their organizations and make it jump out of posters
and plaques on lobby walls.
They use their company
mission to engage and energize workers; they structure and craft their
jobs in a way that allows them to tap into this energy; and they find ways to
inject more purpose and meaning into people's work that is aligned with
the mission.
Branson also says,
"With you and your employees approaching your work with renewed energy and
commitment, you'll find that there's little that you can't accomplish
together."
Now I ask you, the leader:
Could any of your team members accurately describe your mission? When was the
last time you had an authentic conversation about how their
work aligns with the company mission?
Assessing
the Big Five personality traits using real-life static facial images
Abstract
There is ample evidence that
morphological and social cues in a human face provide signals of human
personality and behaviour. Previous studies have discovered associations
between the features of artificial composite facial images and attributions of
personality traits by human experts. We present new findings demonstrating the
statistically significant prediction of a wider set of personality features
(all the Big Five personality traits) for both men and women using real-life
static facial images. Volunteer participants (N = 12,447) provided their face
photographs (31,367 images) and completed a self-report measure of the Big Five
traits. We trained a cascade of artificial neural networks (ANNs) on a large
labelled dataset to predict self-reported Big Five scores. The highest
correlations between observed and predicted personality scores were found for
conscientiousness (0.360 for men and 0.335 for women) and the mean effect size
was 0.243, exceeding the results obtained in prior studies using ‘selfies’. The
findings strongly support the possibility of predicting multidimensional
personality profiles from static facial images using ANNs trained on large labelled
datasets. Future research could investigate the relative contribution of
morphological features of the face and other characteristics of facial images
to predicting personality…:
Misbehaving:
The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard H. Thaler
Economics
-- Psychological aspects; Consumer Behavior.
Traditional
economics assumes rational actors. Early in his research, Thaler realized these
Spock-like automatons were nothing like real people. Whether buying a clock
radio, selling basketball tickets, or applying for a mortgage, we all succumb
to biases and make decisions that deviate from the standards of rationality
assumed by economists. In other words, we misbehave.
http://www.worldcat.org/title/misbehaving-
the-making-of-behavioral-economics/oclc/891611164
Knowledge resistance: How we avoid insight
from others
Why
do people and groups ignore, deny and resist knowledge about society's many
problems? In a world of 'alternative facts', 'fake news’ that some believe
could be remedied by ‘factfulness’, the question has never been more pressing.
After years of ideologically polarised debates on this topic, the book seeks to
further advance our understanding of the phenomenon of knowledge resistance by
integrating insights from the social, economic and evolutionary sciences. It
identifies simplistic views in public and scholarly debates about what facts,
knowledge and human motivations are and what 'rational' use of information
actually means. The examples used include controversies about nature-nurture,
climate change, gender roles, vaccination, genetically modified food and
artificial intelligence. Drawing on cutting-edge scholarship as well as
personal experiences of culture clashes, the book is aimed at the general,
educated public as well as students and scholars interested in the interface of
human motivation and the urgent social problems of today…:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/47814401-knowledge-resistance
Several studies suggest that
individuals widely prefer to remain ignorant about information that would
benefit them when it’s painful—and sometimes when it’s pleasurable
In our information age, an
unprecedented amount of data are right at our fingertips. We run genetic tests
on our unborn children to prepare for the worst. We get regular cancer
screenings and monitor our health on our wrist and our phone. And we can learn
about our ancestral ties and genetic predispositions with a simple swab of
saliva.
Yet there’s some information
that many of us do not want to know. A study of more than 2,000 people in
Germany and Spain by Gerd Gigerenzer of the Max Planck Institute for Human
Development in Berlin and Rocio Garcia-Retamero of the University of Granada in
Spain found that 90 percent of them would not want to find out,
if they could, when their partner would die or what the cause would be. And 87
percent also reported not wanting to be aware of the date of their own death.
When asked if they’d want to know if, and when, they’d get divorced, more than
86 percent said no.
Related research points to a
similar conclusion: We often prefer to avoid learning information that could
cause us pain. Investors are less likely to log on to their stock portfolios on
days when the market is down. And one laboratory experiment found that
subjects who were informed that they were rated less attractive than other
participants were
willing to pay money not to find out their exact rank.
More consequentially, people
avoid learning certain information related to their health even if having such
knowledge would allow them to identify therapies to manage their symptoms or
treatment. As one study found, only
7 percent of people at high risk for Huntington’s disease elect to find out
whether they have the condition, despite the availability of a genetic test
that is generally paid for by health insurance plans and the clear usefulness
of the information for alleviating the chronic disease’s symptoms.
Similarly,participants in a laboratory experiment chose to
forgo part of their earnings to avoid learning the outcome of a test
for a treatable sexually transmitted disease. Such avoidance was even greater
when the disease symptoms were more severe.
Emily Ho, now at
Northwestern University, and her colleagues recently developed
a scale to measure people’s relative aversion to potentially
unpleasant but also potentially useful information. (You can learn about your
own tendency to avoid information here.)
The researchers presented 380 participants with various scenarios designed to
test their desire to know across three domains (personal health, finances and
other people’s perceptions of them), with each scenario presenting the
possibility of a favorable or unfavorable outcome for the participant.
Scenarios included subjects learning their risk for a particular medical
condition, finding out the performance of an investment opportunity they missed
and knowing the truth about how well a speech they gave went.
The seriously
information-averse were a minority, although a substantial one: On average,
participants reported that they would definitely or probably not want to
receive such information 32 percent of the time. About 45 percent would avoid
finding out how much they would have gained by choosing a more profitable
investment fund in the past; 33 percent would prefer not to know what someone
meant when describing them as quirky; and 24 percent would not want to be aware
of whether a friend liked a book they had given that person as a birthday gift.
The researchers also
documented personal characteristics of the participants, some of which proved
to be significant variables. While the degree to which people wanted to avoid
information wasn’t associated with gender, income, age or education, subjects
who were higher in extraversion, conscientiousness and openness to new
experiences were more prone to seek out such information. Meanwhile those with
high neuroticism scores showed the opposite tendency. (Among those who were
more open to such information, there was often at least one domain in which
they opted to remain uninformed.) In a second study, participants rated the
same series of scenarios twice, four weeks apart. Their responses remained
stable over time.
Not surprisingly, Ho and her
team found, the motivation to avoid information impacts our behavior. In one of
their experiments, participants completed the initial survey on knowledge
avoidance. Two weeks later, they had the option to visit a Web site with
potentially valuable information that they might find painful to learn. For
instance, one site compared the average salaries of men and women across
occupations. Another contained health data about people’s individual risk of
burnout. Participants’ tendency to avoid information, as measured by the
initial survey, correlated with avoiding such Web sites.
This general body of
research suggests that deliberate ignorance is a widespread preference not only
in relation to painful news and events, such as death and divorce, but also
pleasurable ones, such as birth. When Gigerenzer and Garcia-Retamero asked
their 2,000-plus participants if they wanted to learn about positive life
events, most preferred ignorance over knowledge. More than 60 percent indicated
not wanting to know about their next Christmas present. And about 37 percent
said they’d prefer not to find out the sex of their unborn child. This result
might have something to do with the possibility of disappointment, but the
bigger issue, this research shows, is that people enjoy the suspense.
Information avoidance can be
a problem, of course, if it keeps us from learning things that would help us
make smarter choices (those regarding our health, for example, or our
finances). But declining to learn available information does allow us to forego
some of the suffering that knowing the future may cause—and to enjoy the sense
of suspense that pleasurable events provide. There seems to be some magic in
the maybe.
SOCIAL
IDENTITY
The third edition of Social
Identity builds on the international success of previous editions, offering an
easy access critical introduction to social science theories of identity, for
advanced undergraduates and postgraduates. All of the previous chapters have
been updated and extra material has been added where relevant, for example on
globalisation. Two new chapters have also been added; one addresses the debate
about whether identity matters, discussing, for example, Brubaker; the second
reviews the postmodern approach to identity. The text is informed by relevant
topical examples throughout and, as with earlier editions, the emphasis is on
sociology, anthropology and social psychology; on the interplay between
relationships of similarity and difference; on interaction; on the
categorisation of others as well as self-identification; and on power,
institutions and organisations. Richard Jenkins is Professor of
Sociology at the University of Sheffield, UK. Trained as an anthropologist, he
has done research in Ireland, Britain and Denmark. Among his other books are
Foundations of Sociology (2002), Pierre Bourdieu (second edition 2002) and
Rethinking Ethnicity (second edition 2008)
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
1 Identity matters 1
2 Similarity and difference
16
3 A sign of the times? 28
4 Understanding
identification 37
5 Selfhood and mind 49
6 Embodied selves 60
7 Entering the human world
74
8 Self-image and public image 90
9 Groups and categories 102
10 Beyond boundaries 118
11 Symbolising belonging 132
12 Predictability 148
13 Institutionalising
identification 156
14 Organising identification 169
15 Categorisation and
consequences 184
16 Identity and modernity
revisited
200 NOTES
207 BIBLIOGRAPHY
213 INDEX 238
The Science of Fate: The New Science of Who We Are - And How to Shape Our Best Future
by Hannah Critchlow
'A truly fascinating - if unnerving -
read'. 'Acute, mind-opening, highly accessible - this book doesn't just
explain how our lives might pan out, it helps us live better'. 'A humane
and highly readable account of the neuroscience that underpins our ideas of
free will and fate'.
Acute, mind-opening, highly accessible - this book doesn't just explain how our lives might pan out, it helps us live better.'
https://www.amazon.com/Science-Fate-Future-Predictable-Think/dp/1473659280
Strange
Tools: Art and Human Nature
by Alva Noë
A philosopher makes the case for thinking of works of art as tools for
investigating ourselves.
The philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë argues that our obsession with
works of art has gotten in the way of understanding how art
works on us. For Noë, art isn't a phenomenon in need of an
explanation but a mode of research, a method of investigating what makes us
human--a strange tool. Art isn't just something to look at or listen to--it is
a challenge, a dare to try to make sense of what it is all about. Art aims not
for satisfaction but for confrontation, intervention, and subversion. Through
diverse and provocative examples from the history of art-making, Noë reveals
the transformative power of artistic production. By staging a dance,
choreographers cast light on the way bodily movement organizes us. Painting
goes beyond depiction and representation to call into question the role of
pictures in our lives. Accordingly, we cannot reduce art to some natural
aesthetic sense or trigger; recent efforts to frame questions of art in terms
of neurobiology and evolutionary theory alone are doomed to fail.
By engaging with art, we are able to study ourselves in profoundly novel ways.
In fact, art and philosophy have much more in common than we might think.
Reframing the conversation around artists and their craft, Strange
Tools is a daring and stimulating intervention in contemporary thought.: https://www.amazon.com/Strange-Tools-Art-Human-Nature/dp/0809089165
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