'ABSTRACT: Gender Differences in Automatic In-Group Bias: Why Do Women Like Women More Than Men Like Men? by Laurie A. Rudman and Stephanie A. Goodwin -- Four experiments confirmed that women's automatic in-group bias is remarkably stronger than men's and investigated explanations for this sex difference, derived from potential sources of implicit attitudes. In Experiment 1, only women (not men) showed cognitive balance among in-group bias, identity and self-esteem, revealing that men lack a mechanism that bolsters automatic own-group preference. Experiments 2 and 3 found pro-female bias to the extent that participants automatically favored their mothers over their fathers or associated male gender with violence, suggesting that maternal bonding and male intimidation influence gender attitudes. Experiment 4 showed that for sexually experienced men, the more positive their attitude was toward sex, the more they implicitly favored women. In concert, the findings help to explain sex differences in automatic in-group bias and underscore the uniqueness of gender for intergroup relations theorists.'

The "depletion effect" from Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow: 'Kahneman's book revolves around his distinction between knee-jerk "System 1" thinking and logical "System 2" thinking. When the costs of cognition rise, we use System 2 less, giving impulsive System 1 freer reign.' -- 'I propose a simple account of how we generate intuitive opinions on complex matters. If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another, substitution... Faced with a genuinely difficult question, [people] answer a different, easier question, then conflate the answer to their question with the answer to your question. ...substitution is a plausible explanation of not only the absurdity of many popular views about how the economy works, but people's certainty about these absurdities.'

"Culture is about a large group of people having a set of shared, chronically accessible, constructs."

'While both he and Appleby understand the principle that newspapers pander to their readers' prejudices, only Hacker has realized the importance and implications of the principle. You are likely better at this game than you know. Examine your own reading tastes, and the books you quote most often. How do you think you appear to others? This is not blatant stereotyping, it is blatant archetyping. A subtly different (and morally more defensible) approach to typecasting people. Sure you'll go wrong sometimes, but you'll be right more often. Drawing conclusions from people's reading (or TV watching) tastes is one of the most robust ways to read people. It is really hard to fake your personality on this front. Most people are far too cautious about making such judgments out of a sense of political correctness. Don't be. The more you use this tactic, the better you'll get at it.'

'A story that is neither necessary, nor sufficient to explain wild success has become both necessary and sufficient. “If you do it this way, you WILL succeed, and this is the only way you CAN succeed.” That’s actually the definition of a process: a manufactured, self-serving history justifying a conservative, “cleaned up” necessary-and-sufficient “do-over” evolution path that ends in a promised high-value-adding state that isn’t. Quite a nice piece of sleight of hand, isn’t it? What actually happened: luck, special conditions, and talents conspired to create a messy story that was neither necessary nor sufficient, and led to a high-value position, with most of the value already added, and a state that efficiently milks that position for a while. -- The real secret to getting from “good” to “great” is selective rule breaking. “Good” imitators either try and achieve modest success, or fail, by applying formulas religiously. But the “greats” find “good” formulas to break.'

'The point of reciprocal exchange is to help those in need so that they will help you when you are in need. In a market exchange, the market price is charged whether or not the buyer is in need. As a result, our economic intuitions favor reciprocal exchange—market exchange is uncaring and cold-hearted toward people when they are in need! This is why so many people are unwilling to allow free markets in anything involving the poor and needy: it simply feels wrong to charge poor people for necessities. In such situations, market exchange runs against our altruistic feelings, which form the basis of reciprocal exchange. ...there are many more examples of folk economics ..we are a highly social species, and social organization has been a very important factor in our evolution—much of the brain is dedicated to dealing with the social environment. A free society cannot exist where folk economics runs rampant ...just as everyone is born ignorant of math, so everyone is born a folk economist.'

'When you want to believe something, when you need something to be true, you will look for patterns; you connect the dots like the stars of a constellation. You will take the random and give it purpose, transmutate the chaotic into the systemic, see chance as fate. Your brain abhors disorder. You find patterns where there are none, see faces in clouds, demons in bonfires. The psychologist Ray Hyman has spent most of his life studying the art of deception. Before he entered the halls of science, he worked as a magician and then moved on to mentalism after discovering he could make more money reading palms than performing card tricks. The crazy thing about Hyman’s career as a palm reader is, like many psychics, over time he began to believe he actually did have psychic powers. The people who came to him were so satisfied, so bowled over, he thought he must have a real gift. Subjective validation cuts both ways.'

'Simon Johnson was feted for his article, 'The Quiet Coup' – mostly because it bashed Wall Street. For Johnson, as for many authoritarian apologists, central banking itself is never to blame. He wants to tear down Wall Street (fine with us) but he wants to salvage the EU. Simon Johnson was feted by the alternative press because he appealed to a certain alternative-media viewpoint – that Wall Street was the font of all evil. This is a sort of prejudice, in our estimation, rather than reality. Now, with Greece collapsing, and with the EU itself in danger of disintegrating, there are those in the alternative media that are perhaps once again succumbing to preconceived notions. In this case that there is some sort of master plan – that the EU is basically a 50-year-old power-elite sting, a trap that has now been sprung. We suggest a simpler conclusion: Sometimes a rose is just a rose. Sometimes the power elite slips up and (in its greed) over-reaches.'

'The Curse of Development: The depth of any transaction is limited by the depth of the shallower party. If the situational developmental gap between two people is sufficiently small, the more evolved person will systematically lose more often than he/she wins. -- #1. The less-developed person does not know what he/she does not know, and is typically attempting to operate from their regressed comfort zone of strength, which to you represents a zone of unrewarding mediocrity that you are attempting to leave/have left behind. This lends your opponent confidence. #2. Your own knowledge is fresh, unstable and not yet ingrained as second nature. You are acutely aware of, and anxious about, your beginner status in your new level. This makes you lack confidence. #3. To win through persuasion, you must teach (a superior-inferior transaction) without first reversing the default unfavorable status relationship (you, not confident, low-status, he/she confident, high-status)'

'...where the biases of individuals enter into market transactions, potentially changing the perception of fundamentals of the economy. -- A current example of reflexivity in modern financial markets is that of the debt and equity of housing markets. Lenders began to make more money available to more people in the 1990s to buy houses. More people bought houses with this larger amount of money, thus increasing the prices of these houses. Lenders looked at their balance sheets which not only showed that they had made more loans, but that their equity backing the loans—the value of the houses, had gone up (because more money was chasing the same amount of housing, relatively). Thus they lent out more money because their balance sheets looked good... This was further amplified by public policy. Many governments see home ownership as a positive outcome and so [grant first home owners with financial subsidies such as the exemption of a primary residence from capital gains taxation.]'

'Forgas's explanation is that happy people focus more on their own desires. "Positive mood is in a sense an evolutionary signal, subconsciously informing people that the situation they face is safe and non-threatening," he says. This encourages people to rely more on their own thoughts and preferences, with selfishness the result. Grumpiness or sadness, on the other hand, produces more vigilant, outward-looking thinkers. "A negative mood produces a thinking style that is more detailed and attentive, and pays more attention to the demands of the external environment," says Forgas. This latest finding adds to a wealth of data suggesting that being happy isn't all it's cracked up to be. In previous studies, Forgas has found that happy people are less able to develop a persuasive argument, more gullible and worse at remembering objects in a shop window than their unhappy fellows. Happy people are also more likely to be influenced by stereotypes...'

'#This is a superpower in error-causing psychological tendency: bias from consistency and commitment tendency, including the tendency to avoid or promptly resolve cognitive dissonance. Includes the self-confirmation tendency of all conclusions, particularly expressed conclusions, and with a special persistence for conclusions that are hard-won: It's very important to not put your brain in chains too young by what you shout out. #Bias from deprival super-reaction syndrome, including bias caused by present or threatened scarcity, including threatened removal of something almost possessed, but never possessed: People do not react symmetrically to loss and gain. #Bias from liking distortion, including the tendency to especially like oneself, one's own kind and one's own idea structures, and the tendency to be especially susceptible to being misled by someone liked: Once you realize that you can't really buy your thinking you have learned a lesson that's very useful in life.'

'Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard. On the face of it, it’s a rather intuitive idea. But psychologists are only beginning to uncover the surprising extent to which fluency guides our thinking, and in situations where we have no idea it is at work. -- “Every purchase you make, every interaction you have, every judgment you make can be put along a continuum from fluent to disfluent. If you can understand how fluency influences judgment, you can understand many, many, many different kinds of judgments better than we do at the moment.” “Disfluency functions as a cognitive alarm. It sets up a cognitive roadblock and makes people think, and it triggers a sense of risk and concern.” “Fluent things are familiar, but also boring and comfortable. Disfluency is intriguing and novel."'

'REPETITION, NOT TRUTH -- People, including you, believe the examples they can think of right away to be most representative and therefore indicative of the truth. This is called the "availability heuristic". Repetition creates the illusion of truth. Let's reconsider the Internet. [A searched] page's relevance is determined by how many other relevant pages link to it. Repetition, not truth. Your search engine will then present a set of ranked pages to you, determining availability. Repetition determines availability, and both together the illusion of truth. Hence, the Internet does just what you would do. It isn't changing the structure of your thinking, because it resembles it. It isn't changing the structure of your thinking, because it resembles it. It isn't changing the structure of your thinking, because it resembles it.'

What flavour your propaganda? State flavour? Soros flavour? Iliberal Liberal with a dash of Hipster flavour? Environmentalism flavour *SPECIAL OFFER HALF PRICE*? Godless Heathens! flavour? Irrational Nationalism flavour? Anti-Russia flavour with bitter Anti-China aftertaste? How about Neo-Con flavour with *FREE Soldier Toy (Made In China)*? You can't go wrong with Classic Fear flavour. BBC (Big Brother Cock-snot) flavour, perhaps?

'Confirmation bias is a tendency for people to confirm their preconceptions or hypotheses, independently of whether or not they are true. People can reinforce their existing attitudes by selectively collecting new evidence, by interpreting evidence in a biased way or by selectively recalling information from memory. People tend to test hypotheses in a one-sided way, focusing on one possibility and neglecting alternatives. This strategy is not necessarily a bias, but combined with other effects it can reinforce existing beliefs. The biases appear in particular for issues that are emotionally significant (including some personal and political topics) and for established beliefs that shape the individual's expectations. Confirmation biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs.'

'...habits are more powerful than intentions, and what you direct your habits at determines your eventual result. ...look at the habits, or the consistent patterns, that a system will engender. -- The whole blogosphere is a festival of bullshit, where people search for truth and meaning despite the total absence of economic incentives to produce it.'

'A sense of uncertainty about the future generates a strong threat or 'alert' response in your limbic system. Your brain detects something is wrong, and your ability to focus on other issues diminishes. Your brain doesn't like uncertainty - it's like a type of pain, something to be avoided. Certainty on the other hand feels rewarding, and we tend to steer toward it, even when it might be better for us to remain uncertain. Like an addiction to anything, when the craving for certainty is met, there is a sensation of reward. The ability to predict, and then obtain data that meets those predictions, generates an overall toward response. It's part of the reason that mind games like solitaire, Sudoku and crosswords are enjoyable. They give you a little rush from creating more certainty in the world, in a safe way. ...the one thing that's certain is that people will pay lots of money to at least feel less uncertain. That's because uncertainty feels, to the brain, like a threat to your life.'

"The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship upon them. Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding." — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

'The conservative-socialist meme ignores the evermore clamorous libertarian movements in the US and abroad. -- It is great to read this article in the Guardian, a leftist British newspaper of note, because the machinery of mainstream media manipulation is laid out for anyone to see here. It ignores the American constitutionalist/libertarian movement [and instead] focuses on "Conservative" female firebrands who partake of the right wing statist meme. -- Many of the memes of the monetary elite are beginning to collapse in our humble opinion. They seek to scare people into helplessness by overwhelming them with notions of catastrophe. Then the solution that is offered is some sort of government action, the bigger (and more global) the better. Lost in the translation is the control that the monetary elite generally has over government - and thus the benefits that accrue to it (wealth and power) if people can willingly be made to accept more government say in their lives.'

'If a climate-change sceptic suggests that the Sun, rather than man, is responsible for climatic variations he is denounced as evil, a heretic, someone whose words are so foul and twisted that they will be “partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths from starvation, famine and disease in decades ahead.” In other words, question the environmentalist consensus, and you are endangering life itself — your words are literally poisonous. Yet when a climate-change activist openly calls for calamitous events and the deaths of thousands of people as a way of focusing our leaders’ minds on the problem of climate change, no one bats an eye. So warped is environmentalist morality that those who raise legitimate questions about politics and science are accused of killing people with their words, while those who actually talk about the need for people to die are patted on the back.' -- Fundamentalism will eat itself.

Discuss -- #More access to information doesn’t bring people together, often it isolates us. -- Elizabeth Kolbert: "People’s tendency to become more extreme after speaking with like-minded others has become known as “group polarization,” and it has been documented in dozens of other experiments. In one, feminists who spoke with other feminists became more adamant in their feminism. In a second, opponents of same-sex marriage became even more opposed to the idea, while proponents shifted further in favor. In a third, doves who were grouped with other doves became more dovish still." -- The Internet is becoming a vast petri dish for the group polarization phenomena. As Sunstein puts it “The most striking power provided by emerging technologies,” is the “growing power of consumers to ‘filter’ what they see.” -- Birds of a feather...

Three problems with stories: #1. Stories are too simple. #2. Stories end up serving dual and conflicting functions #3. Markets and politicians don't always send us the right stories. -- "We should be more suspicious of stories. They're like a kind of candy we're fed: when we consume political information, when we read novels, when we read non-fiction books. Narratives tend to be too simple; stories strip away detail. We're too inclined to tell the 'Good vs Evil' story. You can't make a movie and say it was all a big accident. No, it has to be a conspiracy. A story needs intention. A story is not about spontaneous order. Another simple story line: 'We have to get tough.' This is a story we fall back upon all too quickly when we don't really know why something happened and we want to blame someone. The single central way we screw up is that we tell ourselves too many stories or we are too easily seduced by stories. -- Don't let stories make you too happy. Be more comfortable with messy."

'[The] “you are in a minority, you are wrong” message DOES dissuade a lot of people. It is remarkably poisonous. And it discourages people from taking concrete action.' -- Comment: craazyman: "The issues of central banking, credit, regulation and capital ratios are so esoteric and so remote that few Americans can really build a world view around them. Not out of lack of intelligence but simply because it’s a completely foreign language. There is nothing in this crisis to grab on to — intellectually and ideologically — for most people. Just a stewing frustrated rage that something isn’t right with the big picture. There’s no center, no point of communal traction that could be sloganeered into a reference point to rally around. And so people acquiesce to a state of affairs that they know is messed up, but they don’t know quite why or what to do about it – other than tune out the morons on TV and try to survive the night in the jungle." -- Blurtman: "The Depression Will Not Be Televised."

Remembered prediction: "...you don't remember what you actually predicted. But you revise your memory of what you actually predicted continuously to make it consistent with current events. Not only you do that with your prediction, you also do that with your intentions." -- Feedback preference -- 'Confirmation bias: ...like politicians they do tell you what they did for you not what they didn't do for you. -- Psychological bias: Never take advice from someone wearing suit and tie. It works. It liness up perfectly to the Mediocristan (simple, social, observable) vs Extremistan (complex, virtual, unobservable) distinction. -- Our skepticism is domain dependent. -- Rare Events: Elephants are matrimonial; the ladies dominate, and the old ladies are kept around. Guess why, because they remember droughts, they remember what happened in 1906 or where they have to go to find water, so remember rare events. ...these few have a lot of knowledge, they don't have theories.'

Newsy [creates] short video clips with their own reporters highlighting how various sources reported the same news item. The sources comprise a gamut of news organizations and blogs around the world, including CNN, Al-Jazeera, BBC, ABC, The New York Times and Fox News. The service’s core demographic is presumably adventurous news junkies who think they can gain a better understanding of what they may already think they know well by seeing it though a different prism. -- “The media is losing credibility in peoples’ minds, and one of the reasons [for that] is this myth that people are only interested in hearing their version of the story. We are interested in hitting what I consider to be the larger percentage of the population, who understand that we live in a global marketplace…. The person who is paying attention to [the news] on a global basis and is paying attention to multiple sources and multiple perspectives will probably have a competitive advantage over the person who isn’t.”'

'The news doesn't just influence our values. It changes the way we think so that certain values become inevitable.' -- Comment: Joseph Bergevin: "I agree that our reality is one of convenience more than comprehension, but I don't see a way around this. People don't care about truth, they care about other people. If an effort or cost doesn't advance their esteem with others, most people don't see its value. You just can't make them care about things they don't - only sell it in terms of what they do."

'With journalists being laid off in droves, ideologues have stepped forward to provide the “reporting” that feeds the 24-hour news cycle. The collapse of journalism means that the quest for information has been superseded by the quest for ammunition ... [the] goal is not to educate the public but to win. -- ...speaking wholly for himself, without fear or favor. This is what gives reporters the power to stir up trouble wherever they go. They can shake preconceptions and poke holes in presumption. They can celebrate the unnoticed and puncture the hyped. They can, as the old saying goes, afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. The honest, disinterested voice of a true journalist carries an authority that no self-branded liberal or conservative can have. Journalism, done right, is enormously powerful precisely because it does not seek power. It seeks truth. Those who forsake it to shill for a product or a candidate or a party or an ideology diminish their own power.'

Never trust the political opinion of someone in debt or with a stock market gambling problem -- '...here's the big thing about "mainstream" journalism... Upton Sinclair said it best: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." ...the safest place during a stampede is the middle of the herd. Establishment journalists with mortgages, car payments and children in private schools saw what happened to the Dixie Chicks. Why couldn't it happen to them? The United States had been attacked. Feelings ran high, especially in New York and Washington. -- Long under siege for "liberal bias," media careerists now find themselves confronted with people they see as passionate amateurs. But what's really driving these jokers up the wall is economic and intellectual competition from the Internet: people with first-class minds and a passion for truth that some of them can barely remember.'

'... when volunteers read about two job candidates whose resumes were printed side-by-side, right-handers tended to choose the person described on the right, but left-handers chose the one on the left, again being unconsciously swayed by their experience of space more than the conventions of language and culture. ...neuronal circuits that control concrete perceptions and actions also handle abstract thoughts. Casasanto calls it the Body-Specificity Hypothesis. And it implies that people with different physical characteristics, such as being right- or left-handed, form different abstract concepts, corresponding to those physical traits. For southpaws, the left side of any space has positive moral, intellectual, and emotional connotations; for righties, the right side does.'

'"Journalism, like social work, tends to attract individuals with a keen interest in bettering the world.” In other words, journalists self-select based on a desire to help others. Socialism, with its “spread the wealth” mentality intended to help society’s underdogs, sounds ideal. Most journalists take a number of psychology, sociology, political science, and humanities courses during their early years in college. Unfortunately, these courses have long served as ideological training programs—ignoring biological sources of self-serving, corrupt, and criminal behavior for a number of reasons, including lack of scientific training; postmodern, antiscience bias; and well-intentioned, facts-be-damned desire to have their students view the world from an egalitarian perspective. Instead, these disciplines ram home the idea that troubled behavior can be fixed through expensive socialist programs that, coincidentally, provide employment opportunities for graduates of the social sciences.'

'Transparency gives the reader information by which she can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases. Transparency brings us to reliability the way objectivity used to. Transparency prospers in a linked medium, for you can literally see the connections between the final draft’s claims and the ideas that informed it. Paper, on the other hand, sucks at links. At the edges of knowledge — in the analysis and contextualization that journalists nowadays tell us is their real value — we want, need, can have, and expect transparency. Transparency puts within the report itself a way for us to see what assumptions and values may have shaped it, and lets us see the arguments that the report resolved one way and not another. Transparency — the embedded ability to see through the published draft — often gives us more reason to believe a report than the claim of objectivity did. Objectivity without transparency increasingly will look like arrogance. And then foolishness.'

'Studies show the brain is wired to get a quick high from reading things that agree with our point of view. The same studies proved that, strangely, we also get a rush from intentionally dismissing information that disagrees, no matter how well supported it is. Yes, our brain rewards us for being closed-minded dicks. So with a little prodding, the followers will happily close themselves in the same echo chamber of talk radio, blogs and cable news outlets that give them that little "They agree with ME!" high.' -- Oh dear.

"raise[s] questions about potential conflicts between the intended message and news content. The ad agency that arranged the promotion said the coffee cups would most likely be whisked away if KVVU chooses to report a negative story about McDonald’s."

"Figuring out the right balance of man and machine is one of the great challenges of our time." -- Cory Doctorow: "... ranking algorithms are editorial: they embody the biases, hopes, beliefs and hypotheses of the programmers who write and design them."

"Some lab coats from Oxford University say that the gene LRRTM1 appears to have a big say in whether you'll be a lefty or not. Roughly 10 percent of us are.... [lefties] also run a higher risk than righties of developing psychotic mental illnesses."

'200M install base. Tighter integration with Google Maps. The problem is with our short attention span, not the app.'