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.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
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
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
Saturday, September 19, 2009
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
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
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