How to "Pay Attention"

Alas, I wish that I had always been as black-heartedly evil as I am now, but such is not the case.  Back when I was a young man, I was constantly at the behest of drones who felt the need to mention every single inane thought that would pop into their thick skulls.  Because I was a naïf, I felt that they each needed attention paid to them.  Curse my young devotion to kindness!  But, my foolish nicety came with a spectacularly evil side-effect:  I gained the unconscious ability to use body language to tell people that I was paying attention to them.  Once properly developed, this ability can be used to make people believe you are an amazing listener, when really are you are good at is paying attention to your own important thoughts and lying about it.

There are several signs that a person is listening:

• Not fidgeting
• Maintaining eye contact
• Nodding
• Leaning forward
• Copying posture

These are self-explanatory, but an evil audience is known for having it's mentally deficient, so I will explain these further.

Fidgeting is a sign of boredom, so the less one wiggles, plays with something, or otherwise interacts with things other than the person being ignored, the better.  Eye Contact means that you look at the person's face more often than not.  Nodding is a nearly universal sign of agreement, and is taken as encouragement to continue.  Note well that nodding too much can be worse than nodding too little. Leaning Forward is easiest to display when sitting down, but can be done while standing.  Like nodding, it is best not to lean forward too far, otherwise you look weird.  

Copying Posture gets its own paragraph, because it is one of the few that is least likely to be obvious.  To let someone know that you agree with them, you should begin to mirror their body movements or limb positions.  If they slouch, you slouch.  If they move their hands, move yours in the same way.  Do not magnify their posture or movement, merely copy it.

These basic tricks will have others believing that you are listening to them and want to hear more. But be wary! Sometimes you will run into someone who is a little too keen. These members will be able to spot someone who is truly not paying attention, but you have one last trick up your evil, grubby sleeves:  Echoic Memory.

Echoic memory is a type of sensory memory.  Like all sensory memory, it is perfect but short lived.  For a period of about four seconds after hearing something, you will have perfect recall of that thing you heard.  This is why children and teenagers are able to repeat what their mother's have commanded them to do, and then forget about it the next second.  This insidious type of memory can be used to your advantage because it allows you to repeat back to the person what they have said in the last four seconds.  But make sure to do it in your own words, because that is also a sign of paying attention.

For more information, I have provided a list of websites that list more ways of paying attention.  Make certain that you only use the aspects that don't actually require you to pay attention!

Business Skills:  Attentive Listening

Attentive Body Language

Destroying Compassion

Ugh, compassion.  What a load of tripe. Honestly, the only reason I'm glad it exists is because of the joy I get in taking advantage of those foolish enough to be compassionate.

But enough about me.  According to this article, our good friend the news is chipping away at the compassion of our youth.  It makes sense, really, being bombarded with images of death and colorful juxtopositions, it is quite easy to become desensitized to this.  By preventing real, adult compassion from reaching the eyes of our youth, we are effectively depriving them of the ability to connect with the abused emotionally.

"If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states and that would have implications for your morality"

Evil parents, I heartily applaud your efforts at getting your children to watch the news.  The world will be a much worse place if only everyone were like you.

Brain Drain

Ever been envious of those people who seem to be able to do everything at once?  Those, multitaskers, if you will?  Fear not, fellow deviants, for psychology once again comes to the rescue of those more intelligent, yet decidedly less popular.

You see, as it turns out, those who multi-task frequently are actually causing irreparable damage to their prefrontal cortex!  This leads to difficulty deciding what stimuli are relevant, and which are irrelevant.  In fact, prolonged multitasking actually makes one WORSE at multitasking, when it comes down to it.

So please, encourage those self-righteous, namby-pamby do-it-alls to keep up the good work.  Soon enough, they'll come crawling to a psychologist with their mind in shambles, and we'll make bank.

For more information, try Stanford Study or How to Multitask

Ruining Self-Motivation

How many times have you run across someone who loves something for seemingly no reason and you wished that they could no longer feel that joy, even when you're not around? Well, consider your wish granted, because today you are going to learn about how motivation and extinction can be used in tandem to bring about your evil desires!

MOTIVATION

For the purposes of this entry, there are two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic.  Intrinsic motivation is motivation that occurs within a person.  Think of your eager-to-exercise roommate that wakes up every day at 5 am and goes for a two mile run before eating a healthy breakfast.  The same fool who doesn't realize that his roommate likes to sleep in, but can't because the light is left on when he goes out for his run.  Yeah, he's intrinsically motivated.  Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, is motivation that comes from outside oneself.  Like the motivation for getting a job is money, and the motivation for shooting your neighbor's dog is so it will stop defecating on your lawn.  These aren't actions that the average person would enjoy in and of themselves, but are enjoyed because of the results.  If that dog never died when I shot him, I probably would have no reason to continue doing so.  Unless it was fun.

Well, now that you mad psychologists in-training know a bit about these two types of motivation, I'll let you in on a little secret - you can make an action that is intrinsically motivated become extrinsically motivated.  The way to do this is to start rewarding the dupe in question each time he or she does something for an intrinsic reason.  Does he like jogging?  Start giving him gifts each time he jogs!  Does she like to watch tv late at night? Start paying her to watch tv.

By now, you're probably saying "Wait a second, this doesn't sound very evil at all!"  But you couldn't be more wrong.  You see, humans are interesting creatures in that an extrinsic reward system supplants an intrinsic one every time.  Basically, they lose the old reason for performing their obnoxious behavior, and get a new one.  There are convoluted explanations for why this happens, but all that matters for our purposes at the moment is that it does actually happen.

EXTINCTION

At this point, your puppet now becomes mostly dependent on your rewards for continuing its behavior.  So what do you do?  You stop rewarding them, of course.  With no more rewards, the behavior soon stops.  So long as your pawn became mostly dependent upon your rewards for its behavior, the behavior will definitely become extinct.

And don't forget, once you've finally accomplished this step, make certain to laugh as manically as possible!

For further reading, I recommend this Wikipedia article: Overjustification Effect