A brain-scanning study of people making financial choices suggests that when given expert advice, the decision-making parts of our brains often shut down.
The problem with this, of course, is that the advice may not be good.
"When the expert's advice made the least sense, that's where we could see the behavioral effect," said study co-author Greg Berns, an Emory University neuroscientist. "It's as if people weren't using their own internal value mechanisms."
Berns' specialty is neuroeconomics, a once-obscure field of research that's received heightened attention since the global economic slowdown left people at a loss to explain how the market's invisible hand picked their pockets.
But within Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil” this is not the case. You can very well commit a culpable deed without having a streak of wickedness. Hannah Arendt argues, “It is, I think, a simple fact that people are at least as often tempted to do good and need an effort to do evil as vice versa.”
...To Hannah Arendt, it was more a case of thoughtlessness than a “monstrosity”, an incapacity to “think from the point of view of others"... And in such a system, one confronts two kinds of people, intellectuals who have the conviction and the mind to rebel, and the others who consider themselves as “normal” and value conformism and obedience to the rules of the state...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/
Joseph Stiglitz: "...It’s not the conspiracies that wreck the world but the series of wrong turns, failed policies, and little and big unfairnesses that add up. Still, those decisions are guided by larger mind-sets. Market fundamentalists never really appreciated the institutions required to make an economy function well, let alone the broader social fabric that civilizations require to prosper and flourish. Klein ends on a hopeful note, describing nongovernmental organizations and activists around the world who are trying to make a difference. After 500 pages of “The Shock Doctrine,” it’s clear they have their work cut out for them."
Certainly these days, its easy to point fingers at mistakes made by financial experts, but in Nicholas Kristof's Learning How to Think article, he reminds us of the "Dr. Fox effect" to which it seems all sorts of educated groups (college students, medical professionals, academics) are susceptible (..but one wonders whether less educated groups are less susceptible?)...
With access to the Internet, "experts" are even more accessible than ever before - so it is wise for students to develop a regular habit of thinking critically and analyzing what they see or read. UCLA professor Patricia Greenfield goes as far as to suggest that technology is producing a decline in critical thinking and analysis...
As technology has played a bigger role in our lives, our skills in critical thinking and analysis have declined, while our visual skills have improved, according to research by Patricia Greenfield, UCLA distinguished professor of psychology and director of the Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles.
We have already taken the first steps on our journey to a new form of literacy—“digital literacy.” The fact that we must now distinguish among different types of literacy hints at how far we have moved away from traditional notions of reading...
If you think you may be immune to the Fox effect, you are probably not. Experts come in all different varieties - including mentors, peers, and social networks. From famous experiments in the 1950s, Dr. Solomon Asch showed that, if surrounded by people (7 in this case) who come to an apparently incorrect conclusion, only 1 in 4 resist the incorrect conclusion - and still this person is likely to conform 50% of the time.
Beware of Pity: Hannah Arendt and the power of the impersonal
None of Drakulić’s experience in creating fictional characters could help her understand such a mind, which remained all the more unfathomable because of Jelisić’s apparent normality, even gentleness. “The more you realize that war criminals might be ordinary people, the more afraid you become,” she wrote. What Drakulić discovered, in other words, is what Hannah Arendt, at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in Jerusalem, some forty years earlier, called “the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”
Zimbardo: A Ten-Step Program to Build Resistance and Resilience
Here is my 10-step program toward resisting the impact of undesirable social influences, and at the same time promoting personal resilience and civic virtue. It uses ideas that cut across various influence strategies and provides simple, effective modes of dealing with them...
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