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October 15 - October 15, 2024
Which do you think, for example, has a higher suicide rate: countries whose citizens declare themselves to be very happy, such as Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Canada? or countries like Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, whose citizens describe themselves as not very happy at all? Answer: the so-called happy countries. It’s the same phenomenon as in the Military Police and the Air Corps. If you are depressed in a place where most people are pretty unhappy, you compare yourself to those around you and you don’t feel all that bad.
How you feel about your abilities—your academic “self-concept”—in the context of your classroom shapes your willingness to tackle challenges and finish difficult tasks. It’s a crucial element in your motivation and confidence.
What matters, in determining the likelihood of getting a science degree, is not just how smart you are. It’s how smart you feel relative to the other people in your classroom.
That the best students from mediocre schools were almost always
a better bet than good students from the very best schools.
“happy-bottom-quarter” policy. In one of his first memos after taking office, he wrote: “Any class, no matter how able, will always have a bottom quarter.
law professor Richard Sander, more than half of all African-American law students in the United States—51.6 percent—are in the bottom 10 percent of their law school class and almost three-quarters fall in the bottom 20 percent.
That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
want to explore the idea that there are such things as “desirable difficulties.” That concept was conceived by Robert Bjork and Elizabeth Bjork, two psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles, and it is a beautiful and haunting way of understanding how underdogs come to excel.
A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? What’s your instinctive response? I’m guessing that it is that the ball must cost 10 cents. That can’t be right, though, can it? The bat is supposed to cost $1.00 more than the ball. So if the ball costs 10 cents, the bat must cost $1.10, and we’ve exceeded our total. The right answer must be that the ball costs 5 cents. Here’s another question: 2. If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? The setup of the question tempts
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Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT).
The psychologist Jordan Peterson argues that innovators and revolutionaries tend to have a very particular mix of these traits—particularly the last three: openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness.
But crucially, innovators need to be disagreeable. By disagreeable, I don’t mean obnoxious or unpleasant. I mean that on that fifth dimension of the Big Five personality inventory, “agreeableness,” they tend to be on the far end of the continuum. They are people willing to take social risks—to do things that others might disapprove of.
Bombing, it became clear, didn’t have the effect that everyone had thought it would have. It wasn’t until the end of the war that the puzzle was solved by the Canadian psychiatrist J. T. MacCurdy, in a book called The Structure of Morale.
“the morale of the community depends on the reaction of the survivors, so from that point of view, the killed do not matter.
remote misses.
“is a feeling of excitement with a flavour of invulnerability.”
near miss leaves you traumatized. A remote miss makes you think you are invincible.
why were Londoners so unfazed by the Blitz? Because forty thousand deaths and forty-six thousand injuries—spread across a metropolitan area of more than eight million people—means that there were many more remote misses who were emboldened by the experience of being bombed than there were near misses who were traumatized
Too often, we make the same mistake as the British did and jump to the conclusion that there is only one kind of response to something terrible and traumatic. There isn’t. There are two—which brings us back to Jay Freireich and the childhood he could not allow himself to remember.
Marvin Eisenstadt started a project interviewing “creatives”—
What frightened them was their prediction about how they would feel once the bombing started.
Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.
We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration.…The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage.
Wintrobe said. He was not wrong. His was the empathetic response. But it is also the response that would never have led to a cure.
It was an image, as one journalist put it, that would “burn forever…the thin, well-dressed boy seeming to be leaning into the dog, his arms limp at his side, calmly staring straight ahead as though to say—‘Take me, here I am.’” For years, Martin Luther King and his army of civil rights activists had been fighting the thicket of racist laws and policies that blanketed the American South—
Brer Rabbit understood Brer Fox in a way that Brer Fox did not understand himself. He realized his opponent Fox was so malicious that he couldn’t resist giving Rabbit
plan Walker devised for Birmingham was called Project C—for confrontation. The staging ground was the city’s venerable
German shepherd lunged at a boy. He leaned in, arms limp, as if to say, “Take me, here I am.” On Saturday, the picture ran on the front page of every newspaper around the country.
Hudson’s photograph is not at all what the world thought it was. It was a little bit of Brer Rabbit trickery. You got to use what you got.
Rebellion and Authority became
General Freeland believed Leites and Wolf when they said that “influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism.” And Leites and Wolf were wrong.
has been said that most revolutions are not caused by revolutionaries in the first place, but by the stupidity and brutality of governments,” Seán MacStiofáin, the provisional IRA’s first chief of staff, said once, looking back on those early years. “Well, you had that to start with in [Northern Ireland], all right.”
If the teacher doesn’t do her job properly, then the child will become disobedient.
When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters—first and foremost—how they behave.
“principle of legitimacy,” and legitimacy is based on three things. First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice—that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today. And third, the authority has to be fair. It can’t
treat one group differently f...
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69 percent of black male high school dropouts born in the late seventies have done time behind bars.)
What Jaffe proved was that the powerful have to worry about how others think of them—that those who give orders are acutely vulnerable to the opinions of those whom they are ordering about.
culminating every year in a massive march on the twelfth of July that marks the anniversary of the victory by William of Orange in the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, when Protestant control over Northern Ireland was established once and for all.
Loyalists march by each summer in their bowler hats and sashes with flutes, they inevitably pass by the neighborhoods of the people whose defeat they are celebrating.
In marching season, violence always erupts in Northern Ireland.
General Freeland was trying to enforce the law in Belfast, but he needed to first ask himself if he had the legitimacy to enforce the law—and the truth is, he didn’t.
He was in charge of an institution that the Catholics of Northern Ireland believed, with good reason, was thoroughly sympathetic to the very people who had burned down the houses of their friends and relatives the previous summer. And when the law is applied in the absence of legitimacy, it does not produce obedience. It produces the opposite. It leads to backlash.6
Lawlor was a young wife and mother, living what she had expected would be a normal life in modern Belfast. But then she lost her home. She was threatened and harassed. Her relatives down the hill were imprisoned in their homes. Her brother was shot and killed. She never wanted any of it, nor asked for any of it, nor could even make sense of what happened. “That was my life, my whole new life,” she said.
hundreds of small things that the powerful do—or don’t do—to establish their legitimacy, like sleeping in the bed of an innocent man you just shot accidentally and scattering your belongings around his house.
Fundamental to our analysis is the assumption that the population, as individuals or groups, behaves “rationally,” that it calculates costs and benefits to the extent that they can be related to different courses of action, and makes choices accordingly.
The threat of arrest and punishment worked.
Even when pressed, the criminals interviewed by Decker and Wright “remained indifferent to threatened sanctions.”
put the fear of God into California’s would-be criminals—to make them think twice before crossing the line. But that strategy doesn’t work if criminals think like this.
