3/24 notes: Citizen Journalism

How the Modern World Makes Us Mentally Ill

• The modern world can be good, but its also powerfully geared to cause anxiety and depression
• 6 features of modernity make us like this, and each has a cure
• The first is meritocracy, if you are not successful, its because you are untalented and lazy
• People who are unsuccessful treat their lack of success as if they deserve to be a failure
• The cure for this is understanding that good people have the ability to fail, even with talent. Luck is just as much responsible for success as anything else
• The second is individualism, which states that every person has a certain path and destiny, however if you do not succeed and fail to exceed an ordinary life, then you are a failure as a whole
• The cure for this is understanding that there are good parts about being normal, and that everyday life can be beautiful in its own way
• The third is secularism, stating that no force exists past your own
• Religion was used to combat this throughout history
• The cure is to understand that there are forces that can heal us in our pain, and we can view the world in a variety of different ways
• The fourth is romanticism,  which states that there is a person who is our other half, who will finally complete us and make us happy
• This outlandish idea makes many people unhappy in their current relationships if it doesn’t feel like total fulfillment of the self through another person
• The cure is to realize that that idea is unrealistic, and that one person is a whole, not a half
• The fifth is the media, and it utilizes fear mongering to keep us consuming the news and their content
• News tends to lean towards the negative happenings in the world
• The cure is to try and fix the problems of the world through the media instead of just trying to gain ratings and attack others
• The sixth is perfectibility, the idea that everyone can achieve perfection
• The cure is to understand that no one can be perfect, and that there is a real flaw in our society which promotes that idea
• Our efforts should be redirected towards discussing our imperfections with others who we trust, and subsequently working on them together

Social Thinking

• Why do people do bad things?
• Social psychology focuses on the power of the situation
• Social psychology allows us to understand why villains act like villains and heroes ask like heroes
• Attribution theory states that we can explain someone’s behavior by crediting their stable enduring traits, or the situation at hand
• Its hard to tell whether someone’s behavior is situational or based on disposition
• Fundamental attribution error states that the tendency for observers, when analyzing another’s behavior, to underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate the impact of personal disposition
• 7 in 10 women report that men have read polite behavior as hitting on them
• Political views are strongly influenced by how we view problems like homelessness
• Central Route Persuasion involves calling on basic thinking and reasoning to convince people of something
• This is what happens when people are influence by evidence and the actual context of the message
• There’s also peripheral route persuasion which is based on incidental cues like personal attractiveness or relatability
• It happens when you’re not paying attention, which is why certain ads are so effective
• Our attitudes can be affected by our behaviors
• Foot-in-the-door phenomenon is the tendency for people to accept a big request after they’ve firstly agreed to some smaller requests
• Moral action strengthens moral convictions, and the same goes for amoral actions and convictions
• A great example of this is the Stanford Prison Experiment
• This was a 14 day experiment of a bunch of men who volunteered, half were made prisoners and half were made guards
• Neither was given instructions past that, and then the role playing took over
• The prisoners were greatly affected by the process of arrest which occurred, and the guards became increasingly hostile and vicious
• The experiment only lasted 6 days because of the horrible ways in which the guards treated the prisoners, and after the experiment ended, both parties saw themselves return back to normal
• This reinforced that the power of a given situation can easily override individual differences in personality
• The theory of cognitive dissonance is the notion that we experience discomfort when our thoughts, beliefs, or behaviors are inconsistent with each other
• People might modify their actions based on the actions that occur 
• This mismatch between what we do and who we think we are induces tension— cognitive dissonance—and that we tend to want to resolve that tension