Below are some of the most prominent life lessons I’ve learned from psychology. They are psychology lessons applied to real life. In a way, they are a psychology manual to life.
The Self-fulfilling Prophecy:
This phenomenon is the first on the list for a psychology manual because it has to be one of the most commonly repeated forms of human behavior in the world. I see people doing it all the time. Every age group is guilty of it. And it affects everyone’s personal relationships when it happens. Consider these common scenarios:
- Have you ever been invited to an outing with people you don’t know that well and felt like you wouldn’t vibe with them? When you went to said outing, you discovered, yup, I really don’t vibe with these people, and ended up having a miserable time until you left the party early?
- Are you a possessive partner who constantly frets about your SO cheating on you? Then one day, your fear comes true. Your SO has an affair. Or they leave you and immediately start seeing someone else, a “retroactive affair” to the more suspicious sorts.
- Do you believe your partner won’t do something you asked them to do correctly, and then lo and behold! They mess up just as you expected?
In each of these cases, the underlying theme is the circular workings of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Here’s a model of how the self-fulfilling prophecy works:
You can see from my lovely, little self-made infographic here that there is a cycle of behavior which repeats between two parties. You (the first party) assume someone (the other party) is a certain type of way. You then behave the way you feel towards the second party. That second party member reacts to your behavior and actions towards them accordingly. They treat you some type of way, because YOU are treating them some type of way! This fallaciously “confirms” both parties’ beliefs about the other, which then causes the same type of interaction to happen between them over and over again.
Let’s use the first example from above to insert into this self-fulfilling prophecy model. Watch the magic unfold when you do:
Can you conceptualize how making assumptions about an event before it even happens could “pre-set” your attitudes and behaviors towards it? By the time the actual event comes around and you’re “forced” to go, your presuppositions have already influenced your mind to behave a certain way. When you venture into the event in a sour mood, others take notice of your ‘tude or stiffness, and find ways to avoid you like the plague the entire time. This only confirms your belief about others and events like these (that they suck), which will only hurt your expectations about future parties and party goers all the more. And so the self-fulfilling prophecy continues.
Another common occurrence for self-fulfilling prophecies involves the jealous or possessive partner.
This jealous type of person will constantly question your commitment to the relationship. They’ll barrage you with questions; pry into your day to day routines and correspondences with others; or accuse you of cheating whenever you dare interact with someone else. If they are not hostile and aggressive and upfront with you about it, they’ll instead repress these emotions and hide their true feelings around you. These passive aggressive types will grow emotionally distant from you. And when these hidden feelings burn too hot with resentment inside, they will eventually rear their ugly heads in horrifically impressive ways.
Sometimes, crazily enough, these jealous partners are the first to have an affair, precisely because they accuse their partner of being unfaithful all the time! Might as well cheat, she might think, since he’s probably cheating on me. Sometimes these self-fulfilling prophecies run deep. Can you see how terribly this circular type of thinking can backfire?
In either case, would you want to be around someone who treats you cruelly or passive aggressively? Would you care for someone who cannot express their true feelings for you or reveal their vulnerabilities to you in a healthy manner? Can you truly trust someone who cannot wholly open up to you about their insecurities and faults? Most people do not.
So, the bigger question is, What can we do to fix this circular thinking? If we want to improve ourselves and our relationships with others, how do we prevent our self-fulfilling prophecies about other people and things from happening at all?
The answer is quite simple. You break the cycle. Somewhere on that cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy—anywhere technically speaking— you must break the habits which hold the prophecy in one unified piece. If you can shatter any part of the self-fulfilling prophecy, you can break free from the cycle.
So let’s say in example number one above, where you’re hypothetically invited to a night out with some new people, you start to feel anxious about the whole ordeal as per usual. Let’s say instead of allowing yourself to think all the negative thoughts that go along with this narrowed mindset, you instead view the experience in a more positive light. Well, you might start thinking, I might as well try one night out with these new coworkers of mine. I could just relax with a couple of drinks, hang out in the background, chat with a few people, and then leave! It doesn’t have to be too serious and I might have something in common with one of them.
With this new mindset, you change your perspective on the party you dreaded just a few days earlier. Your energy and vibes will be different when you get to the party. Knowing you can leave whenever you want and feeling little pressure to engage a certain type of way with these new people, you may even find yourself unwinding and feeling more comfortable in your own skin. You might even get along with some of your coworkers and stay out longer than you expected. Such is the power of breaking the cycle of the self-fulfilling prophecy.
Of course, the other party members can also break the cycle for you, technically speaking. Let’s say your energy and vibes didn’t change when you went to that party. Let’s say you remained your usual self at parties, sulking in a corner, judging others as they, according to the self-fulfilling prophecy, also judged you. Then someone from the party approaches you. Your self-fulfilling prophecy might have hindered you from engaging with this person to your utmost ability, but this person pays no mind to your inhibited behaviors.
Let’s say they jump right into a conversation with you that is so bright and cheerful, it dazzles you. Suddenly you feel your mood uplifted, and you may even crack a smile and a joke with this individual. Without even trying, this wonderful person came into your life and swept you off your feet in a blur. How do you think you’d feel after such a wonderful encounter with a person like this? A little more optimistic about parties? A little more hopeful about people in general?
This quite literally happened to me years ago, on a bus ride home from Washington D.C. Exhausted after a long week of work and Judo training, I wanted nothing more than to sleep the whole ride home. I was certainly not in the mood for engaging in small-talk with strangers…or so I thought.
Suddenly this man, Jesse, emerged in my life at the perfect time. Whilst I was thinking negatively about the certain craziness going on in this world, Jesse stumbled into the seat beside me to spread love, joy, humor, and inspiration. His warm, bubbly personality was infectious. His booming voice radiated warmth and cheer. His words were sagaciously inspiring. He preached to me about the essentials in life: caring for others despite all the corruption and sociopathic tendencies the rulers who lead today embody. Focusing on what truly matters to make the world a better place for everyone.
This stranger of mine, he really let it shine that day. What I had hoped would be a peaceful ride home without any disturbances was, fortunately, quite the opposite. Wisdom and pure love beamed from this kind stranger. Jesse shattered my self-fulfilling prophecy about talking to strangers on a long bus ride home. I departed that bus a different person than when I had entered. All because of a special stranger who pierced right through my glass wall of self-fulfilling prophecies to warm my heart and touch my soul.
How many times has this happened to you in your real life? Where you felt some type of way on a given day, or just felt like being left alone when, suddenly, someone barges into your life with their animated gestures and bright smiles. They start riddling off some beautiful poetry to you, or they may say something that lifts your mood and spirit immediately. This person exits at their figurative bus stop, but they remain in your thoughts the whole way back on your bus ride home. I sincerely hope you all experience the beauty of meeting strangers like this one day.
Inspirational supporting side stories aside, every once in a while we may find our self-fulfilling prophecies melted away by the warmth of those around us. Such was the case with my story about Jesse. Realistically speaking though, these are unicorn chances in the real world. More times than not, they won’t be there to break down your prophecy walls for you. These special strangers might pop up in your life from time to time to remind you of the beauty of living, but they will exit as abruptly as they came. In other words, nine times out of ten, it’ll be up to you to recognize the walls you have up, and to figure out a way to tear them down—to break the cycle—so that you may find true inner peace and foster harmony with those around you.
But what if you’re the recipient of someone else’s self-fulfilling prophecy? What can you do then? Do as Jesse did for me, and hold others in a warmer light. By breaking your own self-fulfilling prophecies, you can break others,’ too. “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Or something like that. 😉
Recap: To wrap up important life lesson number one from this psychology manual to life: When people make assumptions about how others will behave or how certain events will proceed, they start to behave in ways that support these assumptions. This behavior consequently influences the way in which the second party feels and behaves towards them, creating a positive feedback loop known as the self-fulfilling prophecy that is quite destructive to building relationships. To prevent this from happening in your everyday life encounters with people around you, first recognize and then analyze your self-fulfilling prophecy, and then find a way to break it.
Every event preceding a traumatic experience should be re-experienced to avoid further trauma
This one sounds rather crazy, doesn’t it? How could re-experiencing an event, which produced a traumatic incident, alleviate that past trauma? Trust me when I say it’s the infallible Truth.
Personal experience has confirmed this concept for me, but it’s the psychological literature I studied in college that initially drew me to test it out in the first place. This one research essay specifically sticks out to me as familiar to what I had learned about the processing of traumatic memories.
According to psychology literature, abstaining from the discussion of past traumatic events or even avoiding reminders of these traumatic events can actually increase your chances of a PTSD flashback or other post-traumatic, stress-related responses of the body (such as panic attacks, hypertension, and tachycardia, to name a few). By avoiding these unwelcome memories of your past traumas, you are ironically highlighting them. Under these conditions, your brain will not be able to fully process that information and “transform” it into a different form of memory that wouldn’t trigger the fight-or-flight response in your body. In other words, if past trauma isn’t properly processed in the brain to the appropriate memory system, post-traumatic flashbacks or other severe bodily responses to stress will continue until it is.
There is a lot of neuroscience and neuropsychology involved with these studies, more dense in material and esoteric in nature than what I will impart in this little psychology manual. But I will quote from this research essay some of the notable remarks that summarize this information and convey the message clearly:
By deliberately focusing attention on the content of the flashbacks, individuals can effectively recode the additional sensory information associated with periods of intense emotion into verbally accessible memory. In so doing, providing the danger has ceased, the information will acquire a context which includes temporal location in the past, cessation of immediate threat, and restoration of safety…[This depends on] the person’s willingness to attend to and process flashback content rather than distract themselves from these often unwelcome experiences. Sustained attention to flashbacks should theoretically promote information transfer and lead more rapidly to amygdala inhibition. (bolded words by me)
The amygdala is the part of the brain area involved with the body’s fight or flight response. Inhibiting the amygdala’s activity in the brain would therefore reduce stress responses to danger—stress responses like PTSD flashbacks.
This research essay is basically supporting the idea that attending to traumatic memories, by allowing these memories to proceed through the brain’s memory systems unhindered, allows the mind to fully process these memories so they are no longer perceived as a present threat. Once the brain “acquires a context” for these traumatic memories as part of the past, and not the present (“temporal location in the past”), they can proceed through the brain’s memory processing system where they will be encoded as just another bad memory from the past. Once a traumatic memory is processed completely in the brain “as just another bad memory,” it will no longer trigger those highly emotionally charged responses of fear and survival that inundate so many unfortunate trauma survivors.
Now, you might ask, how exactly can you apply these findings to your day to day life as a trauma victor? The answer is in the heading of this section: Every event preceding a traumatic experience should be re-experienced to avoid further trauma.
So what does that look like in a real life situation? Let me give you a relatively common example. Have you ever met someone who abstains from alcohol entirely due to a past traumatic experience with it?
A consistently drunk parent stumbling home at night in a raging, violent stupor, for instance, will often leave a taste in the children’s mouths more bitter than the liquor which caused it to happen. This association between alcohol consumption and severely abusive behavior leaves a very impressionable mark on the children. The bruises may fade from the skin, but these unrefined memories, if left unattended to, will imprint forever in the children’s minds. In their young minds, alcohol becomes associated with violence. The children could grow up and reflexively decide to abstain from drinking alcohol entirely just to evade this unaddressed, perceived threat from their pasts.
Here’s the problem. When you abstain from that which is directly associated with your past trauma, you are essentially ingraining this unpleasant association forever in your brain. You’re forcing yourself to remember unpleasant memories every single time you evade or abstain from this association.
Let’s say a friend offers you a drink at a party and you abstain. If they ask why, you truthfully say it’s because your father was a raging, abusive alcoholic. Your friend might sympathize and lay off about it from there on out, but now the image of your abusive, alcoholic father is on your mind at a party where you’re supposed to be having a nice, relaxing time. Even if your friend hadn’t pried this information from you, you’d still be reminded of your father at this party because it is literally flowing with alcohol everywhere, which your mind has been trained to perceive as a threat.
This effect doesn’t leave at the party, either. An advertisement showcasing your father’s favored bottle of liquor could conjure the same images and trigger the same emotions. Seeing that same advertised bottle of booze on the shelves at the grocery store could unsettle you. Any alcohol-related ‘triggers’ can bring you right back to those harrowing experiences you had endured as a child with your alcoholic father. In your mind, alcohol now equals childhood abuse.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. You actually can cut that link between alcohol and abuse. Remember that the psychology literature supports allowing yourself to fully feel and attend to those traumatic memories to inhibit the fight or flight response in the body. There’s one additional step to break free from trauma’s strangling grip. Create happy, new memories of the event to supersede traumatic, old ones. In the example above, this includes taking that first cautious sip of wine or beer alongside loved ones.
It might seem counterintuitive to encourage someone to drink the very substance that is bound to their traumatic past. But that glass of beer or wine in hand can and should be enjoyed with our precious loved ones, despite traumatic experiences with it from the past. It does not have to be one extreme or the other (i.e., alcoholism vs. abstinence). One (responsible) sip at a time, and we can craft a new, hoppier association with alcohol (pun very much intended).
Think of it this way. As they create more and more new memories associated with alcohol, trauma survivors will eventually have more happy memories than sad or traumatic ones. Eventually, the number of good memories associated with alcohol will outnumber the traumatic ones to such an extent that the brain will hardly, if at all, associate alcohol with abusive childhood. With that link broken, the mind will finally be able to heal and the heart will finally open up again. Trust me when I say it is possible, for I also conquered a traumatic memory relating to alcohol.
I’ll keep it short because I already wrote a blog post similar to this incident. In 2013, I was celebrating a hard-earned ‘A’ grade (after the curve lol) on an infamous Organic chemistry exam with friends in a college apartment dorm. We cheerfully drank to this hard-earned victory a bit too ambitiously.
Long story short, I blacked out for the first time in my entire life. I woke up that night to a colleague taking advantage of me. The hurt and betrayal was unreal. I found myself lost and stumbling through a confusing new world for months after that incident. But you know what I did the very next week after that fateful night? I took a sip of self-redemption. I willed myself to drink again, to swathe the terrible memory over with a happy one again.
At that time I had recently learned in my Memory psychology class that traumatic memories stayed traumatic because they kept being treated like they were traumatic. Instead of time eroding this traumatic memory into “just another bad memory,” it becomes the one defining memory that holds your undivided attention. It becomes the one traumatic memory which defines your life and dictates your life choices (like abstaining from alcohol) from there on out. But why should we allow ourselves such unnecessary suffering? Why should we yield to these past experiences and subject ourselves over and over again to such distressing thoughts? Why not unlearn the trauma and relearn pleasure instead? This is what I set out to do when I decided to drink alcohol again one week after my very traumatic memory with it.
I can proudly say that I’ve successfully overcome my trial with this trauma. With the sole exception from writing this out right now, I haven’t thought about that traumatic memory for quite some time now. And even as I think about this memory while writing at this moment about it, it doesn’t deter me or trigger me in any way. Whenever I go out with friends to drink and have a good time, the trauma doesn’t even cross my mind. And depending on my mood that day, the sight or thought of alcohol leaves either a neutral or even good impression on my mind. This is true freedom from suffering’s past.
Recap: If you wish to be liberated from your past traumas, you must be prepared to face them head on. Confront your traumas rather than evade them. Dare yourself to experience or re-experience that which is associated with your past trauma. Take the leap (or take that sip!) and allow yourself to feel pleasure instead of pain. You deserve it.
The Confirmation Bias
“There is an obvious difference between impartially evaluating evidence in order to come to an unbiased conclusion and building a case to justify a conclusion already drawn.”
—Raymond S. Nickerson, Review of General Psychology
1998, Vol. 2, No. 2, 175-220
Ah, what good is a psychology manual without the good, ol’ confirmation bias. The concept where people have the tendency to shine light on information supporting their own hypotheses, but hold up blinders to any other information disconfirming their beliefs.
The confirmation bias is a renowned phenomenon everyone knows from somewhere in the (i)clouds of today’s social media climate. It has been the topic of many online creators’ content on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. The tribalist outbursts exchanged between those who (somehow) side with the Republicans or Democrats in the Facebook comments section of politically-charged articles, only prove it’s here to stay. In fact, it’s easier now than ever before to find any dumpster pile of misinformation to support your beliefs and opinions (confirm your own bias), while trashing all the other ones that don’t align with them.
This presents a rather interesting conundrum. How is it that the confirmation bias is so well-established in the literature and well-known among the general public, yet continues to prevail in every social setting imaginable? Wouldn’t mere awareness of this social faux pas incentivize people to avoid behaving like this?
Apparently not. From what I’ve read in the psychology literature (and what I’ve personally witnessed online and in-person), people not only fail to practice what they preach, but also fail to notice when they’re confirming their own biases. Is it intentional, habitual, or simply a cognitive deficiency of the mind that causes this? The answer is any or all of the above, according to this psychology review. Depending on the individual’s personality, their circumstances, and even what’s at stake, the confirmation bias can be intentional or unintentional; a rarer occurrence or more habitual; due to cognitive deficiencies or not.
In the most rare cases, the confirmation bias is used intentionally to deceive so that one may reap a benefit for oneself at everyone else’s expense. Searching only for evidence supporting that climate change is fake news so that you may continue your environmentally unfriendly business practices is a notable example of an intentional confirmation bias (commonly practiced in the neoliberal version of the United States, which has certainly not aged well by the by). Plenty of similarly intentional confirmation biases persist in society today. But are there situations where the confirmation bias occurs although not intended?
Psychology researchers would affirmatively say yes. Multitudes of studies from the linked research paper above have concluded that, nine times out of ten, the confirmation bias is actually unintentional. (How that is so will be explained down below.) The fact that people most likely confirm their own biases unintentionally isn’t cause for celebration, though. It is certainly just as alarming not to recognize our own biases when we probably should. Ignorance may be bliss for the ones serving it, but the recipients who know better certainly don’t appreciate the dish. Intentional or not, the confirmation bias is a pain in the arse for those on the receiving end. But at least we can rest assured knowing that most people aren’t intentionally trying to commit this psychological faux pas on us.
There is a task psychologists have implemented in many different studies to demonstrate the confirmation bias among subjects. I performed this task myself in a psychology class years ago. It is called the Wason card selection task. I will recreate it below. Solve for the correct answer:
Which cards would you have to turn over in order to determine the truth or falsity of the following statement?
If a card has a vowel on one side then it has an even number on the other side.
Most people answer A and 4 or B and 7. (I answered the former.) The correct answer is actually a combination of the two, A and 7! When you flip over the card containing A, you can verify if the above statement is true by observing whether an even or odd number is present. An even number would confirm the statement is true, while an odd number would prove the statement false. If there is indeed an even number behind the A card, we can only be sure that the rule holds true if we also select the card containing the number 7. If there is a vowel behind the 7, only then can we be absolutely sure the statement is false. No other card combination above besides A and 7 yields this positively affirming and contrapositive coupling. In other words, to prove whether the statement above is true or false, you need both a confirming (affirming) card that proves the concept true, and a disconfirming (contrapositive) card which fails to prove the opposite is true. (See how it gets a little less intuitive in the last part? Keep that in mind.)
If you’re confused by this, that’s totally understandable. The Wason card selection task received criticism due in part to its abstractness. This card selection task is hardly applicable to real life situations. Random numbers and letters have very little meaning to us unless we give them meaning in the workforce or in our day to day lives (or if you’re into numerology, I suppose).
In the simplest terms, finding evidence to support our beliefs is just one part of the process in finding the whole and complete Truth. The strongest evidence you could hope to find for your case, however, must include the failure to find any reasonable evidence that runs counter to your hypothesis. Failing to prove the opposing side’s accuracy, through your most earnest efforts to do so, is the most favorable evidence for you. Here’s a very perfect example of why that is:
For decades now, there has been an ongoing debate on whether fats in the diet make you fat and at risk for heart disease. Numerous studies have striven to verify the truth of this statement by searching for confirming, supportive evidence (the A card) to such claims. But these studies ignored the number 7 card almost completely. They failed to search for and address evidence which could prove their premise entirely false.
Clever anthropologists worked around this issue and focused their attention on the number 7 card, by observing the diets of the last remaining hunter gatherer tribes of the world. Hunter gatherers hunt animals for their survival, and animal meat is very high in fats. By testing for the blood, muscle, and bone health of these hunter gatherers consuming high levels of animal fats in their diets regularly, these anthropologists could either confirm the “fats make you fat” claim, or fail to disconfirm the opposite (“fats make you lean”).
Lo and behold, anthropologists were amazed to find that, compared to the average, modern-day human, hunter gatherers were the healthiest in bone density, musculature, and cardiovascular profiles. By recording the stunningly healthy profiles of all the hunter gatherers and comparing them to their more civilized counterparts’, this 7 card experiment failed to confirm the fats make you fat statement true. More importantly, it also failed to disconfirm the opposite, that fats make you lean instead.
The anthropologists could not prove, no matter how hard they tried, that the contrapositive—fats make you lean and healthy–was untrue. If anything, their recorded data proved just that! Hunter gatherers are the leanest, fittest, and healthiest of any humans today, most likely because their diet is highest in fats. (There is a LOT of evidence nowadays to back up this claim, too).
Wouldn’t you be more convinced that fats do not make you fat and unhealthy after observing all these supremely healthy hunter gatherers eating animal fats on the daily? Compared to reading laboratory-intensive studies ‘proving’ only one biased side to be true, you now have solid evidence right before your eyes showing those biased studies cannot be true.
Of course, you could counter that hunter gatherers exercise more regularly than we do and that is why they are so lean and fit and healthy—a plausible rebuttal. Anthropologists considered this counterargument, too. They decided to test this theory out. They recorded the total number of hours hunter gatherers spent hunting and gathering their food each week. They were once again startled to find that hunter gatherers actually spend significantly less time working for their food than we do in the ‘civilized’ world! While we work an average of 40 hours a week, hunter gatherers only ‘work’ 15-20 hours each week! (They also spend quite a lot of time smoking). Simply chalking up their peak fitness levels to their weekly exercise routines is hardly sufficient enough.
Herein lies the issue concerning the confirmation bias, illuminated by the card selection task. People have a tendency to search only for positive or confirming values for evidence, not negative or disconfirming values. This is a cognitive deficiency of the brain. Our minds are better able to understand and conceptualize positive values over negative ones. (The old adage, “seeing is believing,” conveniently highlights our penchant for positive values, despite the fact that there are plenty of things we believe to be true that we cannot see with our eyes.) But in order to have the most level-headed impartiality on any issue, you must look out for both. You must have confirming evidence for your hypothesis, but also address disconfirming evidence that goes against your hypothesis.
The confirmation bias, however, is usually an unintentional one. So how can we make it so people do not subconsciously and unintentionally confirm their own biases by failing to look for the validity in evidence opposing their beliefs? There is one minor solution for this issue that I finally discovered while scouring through the research paper linked above. Ask those inflicted with confirmation bias to provide alternative reasons to their beliefs about an issue. By encouraging them to look for alternate explanations to their theories and hypotheses, you are introducing different values and variables into their brains to consider which they had not considered before. This does not guarantee they will change their stubborn ways, but it will at least crack open the door to open-mindedness.
The best possible way to tackle someone’s confirmation bias, however, is to present facts to them running counter to their claims that are unable to be proven false. You must provide factual information that is both falsifiable under laboratory conditions yet irrefutable in spite of it all. No matter how much research and experimentation is done to dispute it, that which cannot be disproved shall remain the golden champion of Truth.
Obviously, this is way easier said than done. With so much misinformation pouring out from fake news sites and corrupted pseudo-institutions like ThinkTanks, it’s difficult to filter out the fake stuff from the real stuff. Add to that the fact that many scientific studies are privately funded by questionable sources, and that scientists also suffer from confirmation biases as much as we do, and you’ll soon find the complete and whole Truth of a matter requires much time and patience to uncover.
But where there’s a will, there’s a way. The indomitable Truth can reveal itself, with enough passion and dedication spent on an area of study. Anybody who puts enough time and effort into unbiased independent research and discovery can and will one day find the ultimate Truth to their questions. Blessed are those who dedicate their entire lives towards discovering the Truth to questions of the world and don’t stop until they do. Because knowledge is true power, and the Truth shall set us free.
Recap: The confirmation bias belongs in this psychology manual because, despite our best intentions, we’re all susceptible to it. It’s important not only to raise awareness of this issue, but to also implement strategies that counter the confirmation bias so we can all find the complete and whole Truth to a matter. Some strategies to do this suggested in the literature are 1) force others to suggest alternatives to their theories, so they may open their minds to different possibilities; and 2) uncover the indomitable Truth to a question through dedicated research that cannot be proven false, no matter how hard others may try to disprove it. Warning: easier said than done.
Psychological Reactance— My theory on why politics has become so tumultuous of late
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. —Isaac Newton
This section of my psychology manual will be kept briefer because the concept is simple enough, but please do not mistake the shorter length for less importance. By all accounts, this might be one of the most salient philosophies to take home in this psychology manual. Especially in today’s tempestuous atmosphere.
Psychological reactance is a motivational state first studied by psychology Professor Brehm in 1966. It has a simple format, but large implications for real world issues. According to Psychological Reactance Theory (PRT), when people’s choices or freedoms are threatened or removed, their motivation to restore those threatened freedoms or choices increases to an exaggerated extent. A chain reaction occurs when they experience a loss of a freedom they had once enjoyed. They start to view the denied freedom or choice as more attractive than it once was. They drastically increase their efforts to attain or participate in the threatened or eliminated choice.
Factors that determine the magnitude of aroused reactance as a result of an eliminated freedom are:
- One’s initial expectation of freedom— If someone is certain of a freedom they’re entitled to, they will react more strongly when it is removed. Conversely, if the individual does not feel entitled to a specific freedom, they don’t care much when it is eliminated.
- The strength of the threat— The larger the threat or perceived loss to people, the more severe the reactance. Smaller threats may go unnoticed or receive less backlash.
- The importance of the threatened freedom— How important an issue or threatened freedom is to a specific individual determines how aroused and angered they become when it is denied them.
- The implication that the threat carries for other freedoms— If a freedom is significant enough, it is most likely interconnected with other freedoms. The more interconnected freedoms are with one another, the more threatening the loss of just one of them can be for all the others. Quick example: Roe v. Wade was overturned last year. Because women’s rights are so interconnected with other historically oppressed groups’ rights, people are starting to wonder which historically oppressed group’s rights will be next. Some are already suspecting gays’ rights to marriage to be next on the chopping block.
You may already see plain as day the connection I’m making between psychological reactance theory (PRT) and the current political climate. Specifically in the US (and generally other countries, too), one freedom after another has been slowly whittled away at the hands of the lead poisoned Boomers and Silents running office the past forty aching years. Each retracted freedom unleashes a new wave of psychological reactance among citizens. A few examples that immediately come to mind include:
- Restricting gun policies—Whatever your stance on gun ownership is does not change the fact that removing this right from those who are diehard Second Amendment supporters is doomed to receive backlash. As we can see, psychological reactance is quite strong for this one. Gun owners are lining up left and right in protests and messages to the White House to stay away from their guns or lose their vote. Even more interesting, and adding further to the psychological reactance theory (PRT) is the fact that, under these new gun restrictions, gun ownership in America is rising right now! Clearly, restricting gun ownership is only making it that much more appealing to own a gun for those who feel threatened by this significant loss of freedom.
- Cancel culture—The example above infringes on the Second Amendment. Cancel culture, on the other hand, infringes on the First Amendment, because our freedom to express ourselves as honestly as we wish, without the fear of losing our livelihoods, is currently being threatened. Celebrities spreading misinformation about Covid can rankle those who know better, but should we suppress the words and opinions of these people for it, no matter how wrong they may be? By threatening to ruin their livelihoods through cancel culture, we are doing just that. Good, you might think, they should be canceled! They’re giving people the wrong information and potentially harming them because of it! To this I would say, Be careful what you wish for. For one day, they might come after you for a similar reason, even if you feel it’s misguided. Nobody will come to your rescue then. (A notable exception to free speech rights should be taken into account. Those who lead others to commit horrendous deeds, such as Alex Jones’ horribly mistaken take on Sandy Hook survivors, should absolutely be punished for it.) Freedom of speech is so important because it allows all of us to express ourselves as honestly as we feel, as opposed to suppressing our feelings so that nobody knows what we truly feel. I’d much rather the former situation than the latter, because those who hide how they truly feel are typically the most dangerous. How has cancel culture affected PRT? Simple. People are rebelling by saying whatever they want on social media nowadays. Those who appreciate their audacity to speak their minds freely will happily follow them on their social media presence, as an FU to cancel culture.
- Roe v. Wade — Overturning Roe v. Wade shocked the entire nation last year. The sheer audacity and tone deafness from the deciding members of these political branches has caused an uproar among its citizens (as it very well should). You can practically taste the bitterness in the majority of people’s mouths over this issue. So much so that young people, for the first time in thirty years, went out and actually voted in the midterms because of it! (Psychological reactance is no joke.)
It should be obvious now that removing a freedom people previously enjoyed will not be welcomed with open arms. The opposite actually occurs, where people covet the lost freedom and revolt even more strongly than before. One freedom stripped away after another over the past few decades has rendered us a conglomerate of red-faced rebels. (The Boomers in office should heed this warning, for fierce retaliation is imminent.)
But psychological reactance does not simply incite rebellion amongst the people. It can also cement misguided notions that permeate society for years to come, causing yet another wave of psychological reactance to follow from it. One psychological reactance wave upon another inevitably causes a tsunami, which floods society with discord. What do I mean by all this? Story time.
The Soviet Union of 1922 in Russia worked for a few short years, by focusing on making most people happy. But it left a select few people feeling very resentful. Specifically, those who had a lot before the Soviet Union was formed were left with very little after its formation.
Those like Ayn Rand, a blatant hypocrite (more on that in a minute), were most aggrieved by this situation. The Soviet Union seized the land and properties from wealthier families like Ayn Rand’s to provide to the masses in need. In other words, the richer families of Russia were suddenly left with very little to their names. Based on your newfound knowledge about psychological reactance, what do you suppose happened next?
The Ayn Rands of this new Soviet world retaliated. Ayn Rand herself fled to America, and started a dreadful writing career. Her psychological reactance towards the Soviet Union spawned the behemoth, Atlas Shrugged, a true monstrosity of a book. Atlas Shrugged’s exhausting pages sprung forth Ayn Rand’s trashy ‘philosophy,’ Objectivism, which would have Fyodor Dostoyevsky rolling in his grave.
Rand’s Objectivism was nothing more than a doctrine preaching selfishness and sociopathy above all else, an equal and opposite reaction to the Soviet World’s socialism from which Rand had escaped. This book, with its misguided ideology, received praise from the equally wretched Ronald Reagan, an ill omen to be sure. The Reagan administration repackaged the ideology of Atlas Shrugged into what is now called neoliberalism, poisoning America with its putrid pHiLoSopHy ever since.
Now over forty years later, most Americans rebuke neoliberalism, signifying a third wave of psychological reactance, this time against Rand’s secondary reactance to socialism. We are precipitously stacking one unstable psychological reactance onto another in today’s rocky environment, all of which stems from the pHiLoSopHy of terribly entitled agents against socialism such as Ayn Rand. Who, by the way, supposedly forgot about her hatred of socialism and “government handouts” when she started collecting those socialist handouts for herself. Social security benefits and Medicare are certified socialist policies, Ayn! Rules for thee, except for me, amirite? You gotta love the blatant dishonesty and lack of virtue in hypocrites like Rand.
As despicable as hypocrites like Ayn Rand are, it isn’t surprising she turned out the way she did under her circumstances, knowing what we know about PRT. Nor should we be startled in the slightest to see what came after her transgressions—wave after wave, reacting to reactions, of psychological reactance. Something has to give in order to redirect this chaos into something more productive and fruitful for society as a whole. I half suspect that Socialism will return once more, just as it did during the Great Depression, when wealth was being distributed to too few people and too many others were destitute because of it. This is all in accordance with psychological reactance theory.
Learned Helplessness— One of the main reasons I don’t watch the news anymore
The last concept I will describe in this psychology manual will be kept brief because I want to focus on one specific aspect of it.
Learned helplessness theory was a conjoined effort on the part of three psychology researchers, Maier, Peterson, and Seligman in 1966, and has prevailed ever since due to its pivotal discoveries.
The concept is simple enough. Individuals experience an event that is beyond their control and come to believe that their actions are independent of (noncontingent) the outcome they desire. In other words, these individuals expect future events to unfold in the same way—outside of their control, independent of whatever they decide to do. Because they expect noncontingency between their actions and the outcomes of future events, they learn that nothing can be done about it and proceed to behave passively. Passive behavior includes inaction as well as a lack of motivation to do anything to resolve a situation.
To sum it up, learned helplessness requires all three criteria to be diagnosed as such:
- Noncontingency between a person’s actions and outcomes
- The expectation that outcomes will continue to be noncontingent in the future
- Passive behavior as a result of these expectations about the future
Only when all three of these symptoms are present can a person be diagnosed with learned helplessness.
Here’s where it gets interesting, though. A noncontingent event does not have to be experienced by an individual personally for him to acquire learned helplessness. It’s been discovered that people can learn helplessness just by observing others in a noncontingent situation! Just by watching others in a situation where the outcome is independent of whatever actions they decide to pursue renders the viewer helpless as well.
Aside from being quite fascinating, the discovery of this vicarious helplessness is also very applicable to real world issues. After all, where do we find ourselves constantly watching others in helpless situations? Hello internet, viral videos, and corrupt news channels! That’s right. Watching that viral video of someone getting robbed on YouTube; or viewing the daily news to find that an earthquake split neighboring homes in two can cause learned helplessness in the viewers.
This is quite alarming, considering we are plugged into the internet all the time in the modern world. We are constantly exposed to dramatic news online and on TV, YouTube videos, and social media. Television news channels are the most divisive of them all, broadcasting only the most dramatic, wacky, and extreme news pieces on a daily basis to their impressionable audiences.
This isn’t new news, either. Levine (1977) performed an analysis on major television newscasts in the ‘70s and found that 71 percent of the news portrayed some form of learned helplessness. That is a staggering exposure to vicarious learned helplessness. Levine’s analysis isn’t perfect, as he and other researchers never followed up on their research analysis over the following decades. The experts on learned helplessness theory, Seligman, Peterson, and Maier, consider Levine’s study a ‘middling example’ of learned helplessness. But if I were a betting woman, I’d bet my assets that news channels today have gotten far more nuclear in eliciting vicarious learned helplessness in its viewers.
Think about school shootings, and how much unnecessary exposure the shooters get on television. Considering eight times out of ten, school shooters commit suicide, it’s safe to say that school shootings are the new form of sensationalized suicide. Yet the old, lead poisoned Silents, Boomers, and older GenXer CEOs of the top six largest media news conglomerates continue to crank out story after story of these school shootings. They sensationalize school shootings, genocide, and suicide, for sensational profits. All the while, we the viewers are left feeling more and more helpless than ever as we watch from the sidelines these horrendous crimes threatening the nation without penalty or resolution.
The good news is, individuals with learned helplessness symptoms recover over enough time. Even greater news comes with the finding that the afflicted can receive therapy, usually in the form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), to aid in their relearning of response-outcome contingency which empowers them to believe their actions do make a difference for an outcome. They may also be “immunized” to learned helplessness when they are previously exposed to similar experiences in controllable situations.
This is wonderful news for those who are aware that they are suffering from learned helplessness. But what about those who go about their daily lives completely unaware of the tenacious hold which learned helplessness binds them in? Those who watch TV news all the time are most susceptible, but every one of us has been impacted by online news and videos all the same. I know for a fact I’ve been influenced by vicarious learned helplessness to an extent, whenever I feel alert or anxious around a socially awkward man, for instance. Articles of male perpetrators strangling women to death for ignoring their catcalls cross my mind whenever I encounter weirdos behaving in kind. It’s almost instinctual to behave so cautiously in today’s tense atmosphere.
What a tragedy it is to suspect every human we encounter. How disappointing that we look on society with paranoia and disdain. It shouldn’t be this way, and it certainly does not have to. But as long as we remain glued to these news channels, it certainly will. Media monopolies and their sociopathic endeavors to divide and profiteer from the masses shall continue teaching us helplessness, so long as we’re willingly learning helplessness.
This concludes the current content for my psychology manual to life, but this certainly isn’t the end. I will be adding new findings and muses to this throughout the following months. I’ll let you know when I add more content along the way! I sincerely hope you learned something new and are able to successfully implement it in real-world situations. 🙂