Wikipedia can save the world through helping us understand ourselves
better
Some human traits work to block progress in facing problems of
Anthropogenic Climate Destabilization
Unique to our species, our human psychology, built from years of survival tests,
leaves us with traits unsuited for modern times. These can explain human
inactivity in the face of this impending catastrophe.
Consider a quick sampling of Wikipedia’s social psychology entries :
=== see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Social_psychology ===
Denial See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial - postulated by Freud; a condition “in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence.”
=====================
Bystander Effect.. A common explanation of this phenomenon is that,
with others present, observers all assume that someone else is going to
intervene and so they each individually refrain from doing so and feel less
responsible. This is an example of
how diffusion
of responsibility leads
to social
loafing. People may also assume that other bystanders may be more
qualified to help, such as being
a doctor or police
officer, and their intervention would thus be unneeded. People may also
fear losing face in front of the other bystanders, being superseded by a
superior helper, offering unwanted assistance, or the legal consequences of
offering inferior and possibly dangerous assistance. Another explanation is
that bystanders monitor the reactions of other people in an emergency
situation to see if others think that it is necessary to intervene. Since
others are doing exactly the same, everyone concludes from the inaction of
others that other people do not think that help is needed.
=====================
Groupthink is
a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and
reach consensus
without critically
testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. During
groupthink, members of the group avoid promoting viewpoints outside the
comfort zone
of consensus thinking.
A variety of motives for this may exist such as a desire to avoid being seen
as foolish, or a desire to avoid embarrassing or angering other members of the
group. Groupthink may cause groups to make hasty, irrational decisions, where
individual doubts are set aside, for fear of upsetting the group’s balance.
The term is frequently used pejoratively, with hindsight.
The bandwagon
effect …is the observation that people often do and believe
things because many other people do and believe the same things. The effect is
often pejoratively called herding
instinct, particularly when applied to adolescents. People
tend to follow the crowd without examining the merits of a particular thing.
The bandwagon effect is the reason for
the bandwagon
fallacy’s success.
===========================
Diffusion of responsibility is a
social phenomenon
which tends to occur in groups of people above a certain critical size when
responsibility is not explicitly assigned.
Diffusion of responsibility can manifest itself:
This mindset can be seen in the phrase “No one raindrop thinks it caused the
flood”.
===========================
An argumentum ad
populum (Latin:
“appeal to the people”),
in logic,
is
a fallacious
argument that concludes
a proposition to
be true because many or all people believe it; it alleges that “If many
believe so, it is so.”
In ethics this argument is
stated, “If many find it acceptable, it is acceptable.”
This type of argument is known by several
names[1],
including appeal to the masses, appeal to
belief, appeal to the majority, appeal to the
people,argument by consensus, authority of the many,
and bandwagon fallacy, and
in Latin by
the names argumentum ad populum (“appeal to the
people”),argumentum ad numerum (“appeal to the number”),
and consensus gentium (“agreement of the clans”). It
is also the basis of a number of social phenomena,
including communal
reinforcement and
the bandwagon
effect, the spreading of various religious beliefs, and of
the Chinese proverb
“three
men make a tiger”.
===================
wisdom of repugnance, or the ‘yuck’
factor describes
the belief that
an intuitive (or
“deep-seated”) negative response to some thing, idea or practice should be
interpreted
as evidence for
the intrinsically harmful
or evil character
of that thing. Furthermore, it refers to the notion
that wisdom may
manifest itself in feelings
of disgust towards
anything which lacks
“goodness”
or wisdom, though the feelings or the reasoning of such ‘wisdom’ may not be
immediately explicable
through reason.
====================
Somebody Else’s Problem ..is an effect that causes people to
ignore matters which are generally important to a group but may not seem
specifically important to the individual.
=====================
Optimism bias… tendency for people to be over-optimistic about
the outcome of planned actions…over-estimating the likelihood of positive
events and under-estimating the likelihood of negative events.
====================
The Banality of Evil … describes the thesis that the
great evils in history generally,
and the
Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics
or sociopaths but
rather by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and
therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.
===================
pluralistic ignorance is a process which involves several
members of a group who think that they have different perceptions,
beliefs, or attitudes from the rest of the group. While they do not
endorse the group norm, the dissenting persons behave like the other group
members, because they think that the behaviour of the other group members
shows that the opinion of the group is unanimous. In other words, because
everyone who disagrees behaves as if he or she agrees, all dissenting
members think that the norm is endorsed by every group member but
themselves. This in turn reinforces their willingness to conform to the
group norm rather than express their disagreement. Because of pluralistic
ignorance, people may conform to the perceived consensual opinion of a
group, instead of thinking and acting on their own perceptions.
In a series of studies conducted to test the effect of pluralistic
ignorance, Prentice and
Miller[3] studied
the consequences of pluralistic ignorance
at Princeton
University. They found that, on average, private levels of comfort
with drinking practices on campus were much lower than the perceived
average. In the case of men, they found a shifting of private attitudes
toward this perceived norm, a form
of cognitive
dissonance. Women, on the other hand, were found to have an increased
sense of alienation on the campus but lacked the attitude change detected
in men, presumably because norms related to alcohol consumption on campus
are much more central for men than for women.
Pluralistic ignorance may partially explain
the bystander
effect: the observation that people are more likely to intervene in an
emergency situation when alone than when other persons are present. If
people monitor the reactions of others in such a situation, they may
conclude from the inaction of others that other people think that it is
not necessary to intervene. Thus no one may take any action, even though
some people privately think that they should do something. On the other
hand, if one person intervenes, others are more likely to follow and give
assistance. For example, in the murder case
of Kitty
Genovese: About a dozen witnesses failed to help Genovese when she was
stabbed to death in 1964. Most of the witnesses only heard the murder
(i.e. they were
not eye
witnesses) and were both unsure of what was happening and unable to
monitor the reactions of other people. Nevertheless, pluralistic ignorance
may explain their inaction if at the time they were reasoning: “Others
must also hear what is happening - if no one else is doing anything about
it, then it must not be an emergency.”
=====================
The term was coined in 1952
by William
H. Whyte in Fortune: …We are not talking about mere
instinctive conformity …what we are talking about is a rationalized conformity
— an open, articulate philosophy which holds that group values are not only
expedient but right and good as
well.
[edit]Consequences
of Pluralistic Ignorance
Very helpful in conceptualizing the issues. Thanks.