Eupraxsophy

With some bravery, a little conscious effort, and even just a smidge of creativity, we can begin to reverse the damage and actually start to reconnect with others on a basic, human level. Let’s put our brains into it people.

Gaslighting is a term, often used by mental health professionals (I am not one), to describe manipulative behavior used to confuse people into thinking their reactions are so far off base that they’re crazy.

Gaslighting can be as simple as someone smiling and saying something like, “You’re so sensitive,” to somebody else. Such a comment may seem innocuous enough, but in that moment, that person is making a judgment about how someone else should feel.

While dealing with gaslighting isn’t a universal truth for women, we all certainly know plenty of women who encounter it at work, home, or in personal relationships.

And the act of gaslighting does not simply affect women who are not quite sure of themselves. Even vocal, confident, assertive women are vulnerable to gaslighting.

Why?

Because women bare the brunt of our neurosis. It is much easier for us to place our emotional burdens on the shoulders of our wives, our female friends, our girlfriends, our female employees, our female colleagues, than for us to impose them on the shoulders of men.

It’s a whole lot easier to emotionally manipulate someone who has been conditioned by our society to accept it. We continue to burden women because they don’t refuse our burdens as easily. It’s the ultimate cowardice.

Whether gaslighting is conscious or not, it produces the same result: it renders some women emotionally mute.

These women aren’t able to clearly express to their spouses that what is said or done to them is hurtful. They can’t tell their boss that his behavior is disrespectful and prevents them from doing their best work. They can’t tell their parents that, when they are being critical, they are doing more harm than good.

When these women receive any sort of push back to their reactions, they often brush it off by saying, “Forget it, it’s okay.”

That “forget it” isn’t just about dismissing a thought, it is about self-dismissal. It’s heartbreaking.

No wonder some women are unconsciously passive aggressive when expressing anger, sadness, or frustration. For years, they have been subjected to so much gaslighting that they can no longer express themselves in a way that feels authentic to them.

They say, “I’m sorry” before giving their opinion. In an email or text message, they place a smiley face next to a serious question or concern, thereby reducing the impact of having to express their true feelings.

Interestingly, I display similar behavior, and am subsequently seen as feminine for it. Indeed, men and women alike criticize me (and in the former’s case, reject me) based on this trait.

What are your thoughts or experiences?

College-aged women judge promiscuous female peers – defined as bedding 20 sexual partners by their early 20s – more negatively than more chaste women and view them as unsuitable for friendship, finds a study by Cornell developmental psychologists.

Participants’ preference for less sexually active women as friends remained even when they personally reported liberal attitudes about casual sex or a high number of lifetime lovers.

These suspensions don’t work for schools. Get rid of the “bad” students, and the “good” students can learn, get high scores, live good lives. That’s the myth. The reality? It’s just the opposite. Says the NEPC report: “…research on the frequent use of school suspension has indicated that, after race and poverty are controlled for, higher rates of out-of-school suspension correlate with lower achievement scores.”

Why certainty seems to matter more than honesty. 

For me, cruelty seems to entail a strange kind of double think.   We’re able to figure out how to be cruel  because our victims are similar to us.  Cruelty can’t exist without some degree of empathy — the ability to model the way other people think and feel.  So, we lean into that feeling of kinship and connection, and then exploit it to hurt the other person in precisely the way we do not want to be hurt.  Someone being cruel swings back and forth between connection and detachment.

Through three psychological experiments, Sonya Sachdeva from Northwestern University found that people who are primed to think well of themselves behave less altruistically than those whose moral identity is threatened. They donate less to charity and they become less likely to make decisions for the good of the environment. 

This may explain why some of the nicest people I know are often the ones most wracked with self-doubt and worry about their integrity. 

Laurie Penny: The fashion for communications fasting relies on a false distinction between the digital and real world

It’s time to abandon the idea that there’s a clear distinction between the digital world and the “real” world, or that we must give up one in order to experience the other truly. Academics refer to this false binary as “digital dualism”, coined by the sociologist Nathan Jurgenson who defines it as “the belief that online and offline are largely distinct and independent realities”. In fact, the physical and digital worlds map over and around each other, and technology, from the iPhone to the telegram to the toaster oven, affects every aspect of our lives, whether or not we choose to engage with it.

Technology, like sexuality, is a part of life that becomes a problematic preoccupation only when you convince yourself it’s toxic. Like the dank daydreams of an abstinence preacher, deliberately avoiding something creates obsession; one imagines that Paul Miller was never more aware of the internet than when he made himself live without it.

None of which is to say that the occasional break from Twitter isn’t relaxing. But every time a new technology changes the pace and scope of human interaction, from the printed word to the pixel, some curtain-twitchers are always convinced that it’s unwholesome, sickness-inducing, and bad for the kids. People once believed that moveable type was evil because books distracted women from their work and allowed ordinary layfolk to read what was actually written in the Bible. Communications technology, though, can’t “corrupt your soul” any more than abandoning it can save your soul – and the internet is no differen

In a series of studies, Epley and Whitchurch showed that we see ourselves as better looking than we actually are. The researchers took pictures of study participants and, using a computerized procedure, produced more attractive and less attractive versions of those pictures. Participants were told that they would be presented with a series of images including their original picture and images modified from that picture. They were then asked to identify the unmodified picture. They tended to select an attractively enhanced one.

Epley and Whitchurch showed that people display this bias for themselves but not for strangers. The same morphing procedure was applied to a picture of a stranger, whom the study participant met three weeks earlier during an unrelated study. Participants tended to select the unmodified picture of the stranger.

People tend to say that an attractively enhanced picture is their own, but Epley and Whitchurch wanted to be sure that people truly believe what they say. People recognize objects more quickly when those objects match their mental representations. Therefore, if people truly believe that an attractively enhanced picture is their own, they should recognize that picture more quickly, which is exactly what the researchers found.

Inflated perceptions of one’s physical appearance is a manifestation of a general phenomenon psychologists call “self-enhancement.” Researchers have shown that people overestimate the likelihood that they would engage in a desirable behavior, but are remarkably accurate when predicting the behavior of a stranger. For example, people overestimate the amount of money they would donate to charity while accurately predicting others’ donations. Similarly, people overestimate their likelihood to vote in an upcoming presidential election, while accurately predicting others’ likelihood to vote.

What motivates us to work? Contrary to conventional wisdom, it isn’t just money. But it’s not exactly joy either. It seems that most of us thrive by making constant progress and feeling a sense of purpose. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely presents two eye-opening experiments that reveal our unexpected and nuanced attitudes toward meaning in our work. (Filmed at TEDxRiodelaPlata.)

“The person who is at 175 pounds after a huge weight loss now has a completely different physical makeup from the person who is naturally 175 — exercise benefits them less, calories are more readily stored as fat, the impulse to eat occurs far, far more often. The formerly fat person can exercise ten times the willpower of the never-fat guy, and still wind up fat again. The impulses are simply more frequent, and stronger, and the physical consequences of giving in are more severe. The people who successfully do it are the ones who become psychologically obsessive about it…”

This argument may seem spurious to a lot of people, but I have read many reports suggesting that weight gain isn’t, strictly speaking, a matter of simple willpower. There are a range of social, environmental, and psychological factors that complicate matters. In any case, as a former obese person, I could certainly relate with the above quote.

They include statements about Islam, observations on pop culture, a boast about beer pong, and trash-talk about women.

I don’t usually approve of this sort of pedantry, but I must admit that it’s eerie to see the mundane day-to-day comments of someone now seen as irredeemably evil. In my defense, I have this attitude towards a lot of evil and controversial figures.

The project will require $3 billion, 10 years of research and hundreds of scientists. The National Institutes of Health is calling it the Brain Activity Map.

Much like the Human Genome Project a decade ago, scientists are hoping brain mapping will lead to new scientific advances and breakthroughs, and that perhaps it will even unlock the secrets of conditions such as Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease.