Who's Into Social Psychology?

[Luann]

I loved this article. It's all about cortisol and how it influences your social status. Who isn't interested in that?

http://decisionlab.harvard.edu/_con...._Leadership_Associated_with_Lower_Stress.pdf

 

[Makrosky]

I loved this article. It's all about cortisol and how it influences your social status. Who isn't interested in that?

http://decisionlab.harvard.edu/_con...._Leadership_Associated_with_Lower_Stress.pdf

When I studied Social Psychology in the Psychology Faculty, we never talked about hormones or biochemical things. The assumption was that science itself is a social construction, it's not true in itself. And how we obey authorities (wether scientific or not) is very determined by how the human psyche works, not because of how much serotonin or cortisol one has. We studied authors like Milgram, Moscovici, Foucault, Leo Festinger, Kenneth Gergen, Zimbardo, etc.

Nevertheless, the study you posted...hmmm.... I haven't read it entirely but, do they take into account the fact that "leaders" can have much less stress because of a myriad of intrinsic factors to their position ? Like : better paid, more holidays, more opportunities to develop your ideas, to grow professionally, etc. ?

Cheers

 

[Luann]

They do have more vacation time, better pay, respect; but then again, leaders are also exposed to lots of conditions that would be very stressful. Like reviews, responsibility, public speaking, performance expectation.

I think cortisol has something to do with how we determine who actually has authority.

 

[Makrosky]

They do have more vacation time, better pay, respect; but then again, leaders are also exposed to lots of conditions that would be very stressful. Like reviews, responsibility, public speaking, performance expectation.

I think cortisol has something to do with how we determine who actually has authority.

Good point. I don't really think social authority and the submission to it depends on cortisol, wether there's an ultimate reflection of the cortisol ammount of the organism.

 

[Greg says]

 

[Simonsays]

This is as old as the hills, i remember an old adage that the check out girl has a lot more stress than the boss , as she has the least control over her job. Ditto life..

Most people dont want to become boss ( in hierarchical companies ) as they think it will be more stressful than their current role, but the opposite is generally the case.

Ive just received an email from my middle manager imploring us all to undertake more work over the weekend as its month end to improve our productivity. He goes on to point out this is not compulsory, so dont feel you have to (but you have to , ha ,ha, every little bit , guilt trip, blah blah, )

You can bet your bottom dollar he wont be volunteering!!!

 

[Pointless]

Absolutely. A natural leader is calm and cool under stressful situations. A person that is fearful or stressed is not interested in taking on new responsibilities or managing others. Also, people in charge of appointing leaders understand this instinctively and stay away from people that are breaking down. The stress response points inward and focuses attention on survival, while the growth response points outward in expanding one's influence and power. This aspect of growth is wrapped up in what Ray Peat talks about a lot.

"If our environment restricts our choices, our becoming human is thwarted, the way rats' potentials weren't discovered when they were kept in the standard little laboratory boxes. An opportunity to be complexly involved in a complex environment lets us become more of what we are, more humanly differentiated."

From: New Page Title Here

It's tangentially related, but I hope you see the connection...

I believe that people with strong metabolisms are selected for leadership positions and demonstrate more natural aptitude for leadership. They have more opportunities for growth and expansion, and other people see that. When it becomes too much for them, and the stress response takes over, they are discarded, sometimes under the pretense of "bad performance" or whatever.

 

[Simonsays]

I think those wanting to be boss, or those desperate for power in an organisation, are usually disordered individuals, dictated to by their own ego flaws, in my humble experience of meeting/working with them in my opinion. Their status within the organisation is linked to how they see themselves They live to work, rather than work to live.

This is different to those who yearn to work or work for themselves . who want to have control over their work environment, rather then people.

Research Shows Bosses Are More Likely To Be Psychopaths

 

[Simonsays]

The photo of Pres Obama, reminded me that most who get to the very top in politics are inevitably Narcs/Psychs/Sociopaths/Borderlines, generally a combination of all traits.

Dr. Sam Vaknin - Barack Obama Is a Narcissist

 

[Pointless]

Well wage slaves have their own host of disorders. IME the most vibrantly healthy people I know are their own bosses or are deeply spiritual or religious. These people can be leaders even if they're not "bosses".

 

[Pointless]

What do you think causes narcicism, psychopathy, sociopathy, and BPD?

 

[Simonsays]

Childhood trauma, basically being raised in an "unempathetic environment". The first six years are the most important, in the shaping of personality.

The genetic arguments have been defeated by many many studies, but still endless time and money is still being wasted looking for the relevant gene or genes.

Professor Robert Plomin, the world’s leading geneticist, said in 2014 of his search for genes that explain differences in our psychology: ‘I have been looking for these genes for fifteen years. I don’t have any’.

Just look at Obamas early life as an example, on the major events alone, not even the day to day.

"Mixed-race marriages were even less common then. His parents went through a divorce when he was an infant (two years old). Obama saw his father only once again, before he died in a car accident. Then his mother re-married and Obama had to relocate to Indonesia, a foreign land with a radically foreign culture, to be raised by a step-father. At the age of ten, he was whisked off to live with his maternal (white) grandparents. He saw his mother only intermittently in the following few years and then she vanished from his life in 1979. She died of cancer in 1995".

 

[Sucrates]

When I studied Social Psychology in the Psychology Faculty, we never talked about hormones or biochemical things. The assumption was that science itself is a social construction, it's not true in itself.

Do you know where this idea came from? I assume it springs from the Frankfurt School but any information would be interesting.
Thanks

 

[Pointless]

Thanks simonsays, that makes sense.

Friedrich Nietzsche once said that the Middle Ages were the alcoholic poisoning of Europe. He saw nations and peoples in a biochemical and organic way. You can learn a lot about a people by looking at their collective cortisol and adrenaline, or their prolactin, or their sex-differentiated steroids. We live in a time of great stress. Even though we live in relative safety, our stress response is chronically turned on, from PUFAs and being stuck in a routine and from so many formative relationships gone sour.

I work in a retail environment. Of course, it's very stressful. I don't let it get to me, but most people don't have the capacity to deal with stress like I do. I noticed that whenever the pressure is off and things are taken care of, people pretty much stop doing anything. I've seen it over and over. The place runs on stress. Without stress, everything shuts down. Then the work piles up until it's overwhelming, then we have to work overnight or bust our butts to just barely get by. It works the same way with a stressed body. If you block the stress hormones without supplementing sugar and thyroid, there's little energy being produced. The body becomes addicted to stress, just like the store I work at needs stress to function.

Back to the national scale, I think that if you stopped all the wars going on around the world and the economy was exploding and the wealth gap closed considerably and health care and housing were provided for free... the country would probably collapse. If it didn't collapse, there would be a huge catharsis before reaching stability. That's why you see the US government causing so much trouble around the world. This conflict is necessary to keep our corrupt system chugging along, and it reflects the state of the people living in the system. And vice versa, the people reflect the system...

So yes I am into social psychology lol

I wanna put people on milk and OJ lol but it's just crazy. The worst thing about taking the path less traveled is that it's so hard to help people with what you've learned because people are plugged in to the herd mentality. Not only that, people want a quick fix...

 

[Luann]

I see this as well at my place of work. It's like the response to down time or less work load is just to not work at all. It's kind of toxic if you ask me. I also think a lot of people there are not healthy either which will cause a desire to be sleepy or not want to move around much.
And what you said about needing stress just to get by, is the reason I thought I was copper toxic. I often have to be moving at high speed just to feel normal or get out of bed. It's 0 or 60 with me but that has evened out since I've been on Peat, now I can have a steady pace. Steven King in his book The Langoliers writes about a man who needs stress so he doesn't "implode", and writes that there is a fish near the ocean floor that needs pressure from the outer water just so it doesn't blow up. Kind of a fun picture. But I do wonder if PUFA gives us that need to seek stress, since the harm to the body makes us want to just lie around if we don't have a big scary event in the near future.

 

[Luann]

Thanks simonsays, that makes sense.

I noticed that whenever the pressure is off and things are taken care of, people pretty much stop doing anything. I've seen it over and over. The place runs on stress. Without stress, everything shuts down. Then the work piles up until it's overwhelming, then we have to work overnight or bust our butts to just barely get by. It works the same way with a stressed body. If you block the stress hormones without supplementing sugar and thyroid, there's little energy being produced. The body becomes addicted to stress, just like the store I work at needs stress to function.

Meant ta quote you on the last post

 

[Luann]

This also ^^

The worst thing about taking the path less traveled is that it's so hard to help people with what you've learned because people are plugged in to the herd mentality.

Every time I feel like I've found an answer or made a cool thing happen, I look back and I'm more of an oddity to most of the rest of the world.

 

[Makrosky]

Do you know where this idea came from? I assume it springs from the Frankfurt School but any information would be interesting.
Thanks

Yes if by Frankfurt School you include Adorno, Habermas, etc. But I think this discussion is as old as human kind, Epistemology. The thing about the social constructivism is that that it postulates that there's no "science" outside of the cultural context where it is created. And the cultural context is subject to many forces that are not dependant on science or hormones. Other more radical philosophers are the ones like Foucault (The trouble of social constructivism). I think it's all product of postmodernism where there can't be absolute truths. You can check more info here (Social constructionism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Science is a product of humans and humans are inserted in a cultural and simbolic order, and are subject to complex relationships and cognitive biases that make science impossible to be something like 100% objective.

You can see ramifications of not taking this into account : People thinking humanity is a struggle between serotonin and dopamine, by oversimplifying Peats ideas. Or even more dangerous things, people thinking leaders should be the ones prepared to resist more stress by lowered cortisol and crazy things like that.

People thinking they are vapour machines themselves. You put some charcoal on the cauldron and you produce more steam. Then you monitor the barometer on the deck. This is the same idea that we use here : we feed some carbs and we raise metabolism and we monitor pulse and temp. Nobody before industrial revolution would think in those terms because that vision is bound to the social and historic moment we live in. Knowledge, science, or the image we have ourselves about reality and how we explain it are dynamic and keep changing. Yes, some things remain across the centuries and cultures and historical moments, but which ones ? Even the cell!!! Look at it! It looks like pure cristaline science. It's in all textbooks. And then you read Gilbert Ling and ... well...

Science can also be used to reinforce socially established patterns like geneticists and people like dawkins, david attenborough and demented people like that want to make us think life is a permanent struggle for the survival of the best adapted. I don't see a very big difference with that and the study Liubo posted and her conclusions. Or to put it more precisely : the cortisol is certainly lower in the leaders, but the interpretations you make about that is purely sociological and influenced by ideas that sit in a higher level and model our world view.

By itself, the idea that there's definitive knowledge is stupid (IMHO) because it would mean one day we'll reach an end. A definitive explanation. Or something like that. But explanations are a dialectic, they keep changing.

You can see another example : The confirmation bias. There's an authority (Peat) that says serotonin is bad. Then you enter in a forum where everyone sistematically publish things that confirm that and omit every single evidence pointing that serotonin can be good or useful for depressed patients. This happens at all levels.

I've seen in this same forum people sending papers showing evidences of things that go against Peat beliefs and him dismissing them as "science made in the last 50 years is flawed". We are all subject to these kind of things. This is terrible. There's no direct dialectic there. Who discusses with Peat ? There's only interviews in which nobody confronts him with alternative points of view or evidences. This is catastrophic (and very appealing at the same time of course).

The Peer review system is very flawed but AT LEAST you have a dialectic relationship with other peers and the editor of the journal. Peat doesn't go by that, for the good and for the bad.

This is how I see it but I'm not saying anything new. And this doesn't mean there's no value on science or talking about hormones, not at all. It means they should be placed into our historical context and not to be taken as ultimate truth for a fullfilling life full of human potential that has nothing to do with serotonin or counting calories.

One of the interesting things is that if you carefully read the papers/books of the social psychologists I mentioned in the first post is that cognitive biases, submission to authority, etc. happen at an automatical level to which you are not conscious, either as an individual or as a colectivity.

So I think Social Psychology is (or should be) (Social psychology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) more about all these things, not about correlating human capacities with biological markers. There are other fields of knowledge for doing that, which is very interesting anyway.

 

[Xisca]

It is about resilience. So it is not exactly about having been traumatised or not,
it is about having transformed the "bad" events in a way to get stronger.

 

[DaveFoster]

I was on the road to become one of those rich guys. It wasn't fulfilling, but it had moments of grandiosity and euphoria, especially with the suits. Meh.