Category: Science

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What Everybody Ought To Know About Narcissism

What Everybody Ought To Know About Narcissism

What Everybody Ought To Know About Narcissism

Narcissism increased just as fast as obesity over the past 25 years, and a study today shows that it is twice that rate since 2002.”

– Psychologist Dr. Jean Twenge, author of The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement

What Is Narcissism?

The main characteristic of narcissism is self-centeredness.

Narcissism is an inflated sense of self. It is thinking that you are better than you actually are. It is a complicated trait with lots of different correlates to it, but it does include things like seeking fame, attention, vanity, and so on. However, its main characteristic is its self-centeredness.

Narcissism at base is all about trying to get more: more attention, more things, to look more beautiful – it’s always ‘more’ in these rather shallow ways.”

What Is The Difference Between Self Esteem And Narcissism?

Narcissists do not consider caring for others and relationships as being important.

One of the key differences between self esteem and narcissism is that somebody who scores high” (in this psychological examination) “for self esteem but not for narcissism, has a lot of confidence in individual areas but also cares a lot about relationships. Narcissists tend to be missing that piece about caring for others and relationships.”

Signs Of Narcissism

  • Overconfidence
  • Being delusion about one’s own greatness
  • Over-optimism
  • Taking too many risks
  • An inflated, unrealistic sense of self
  • Alienation from other people
  • Entitlement, the expectation of having things handed to you without much effort
  • Not caring about others.”

Dr. Jean Twenge Talks About The Narcissism Epidemic

Causes Of Narcissism

Narcissism As An Inborn Personality Trait

Narcissism is a personality trait, so it has the same determinants as any personality trait. Other personality traits include things like being highly anxious or being outgoing, and a good amount of it comes from being born with those tendencies.”

 

Narcissism As A Result Of Social & Environmental Influence

The culture you grow up in, parenting and other parts of the environment, play a strong role in determining how narcissistic someone is.”

Narcissism In Culture – The Social Influence Of Narcissism

Parenting

No parent ever says ‘my goal is to raise a narcissistic kid.’ It’s part of this overall individualistic culture. It comes from the ‘good intentions’ of trying to develop self esteem, from the cultural pressures of uniqueness and standing out.

Emphasizing specialness, uniqueness and standing out so much does tend to create that situation where we’re focusing on that, we’re focusing on being better [than others] and standing out.”

 

Celebrity & Reality TV Culture

Over the top reality shows, such as the popular My Super Sweet 16 – rich kids planning their birthday party, who complain if they get the $50,000 car instead of the $100,000 car – have made narcissism seem normal.

A lot of this obsession with celebrities, and of course, a lot of being a celebrity is highly narcissistic in terms of vanity and seeking fame and attention.

A study published in Academic Journal showed that celebrities are more narcissistic. Drew Pinsky had 200 celebrities fill out the narcissistic personality inventory when they came onto his show, and he found that they were more narcissistic than his control group.

He also broke it down: Who were the most narcissistic celebrities? Was it musicians, movie stars, stand-up comedians? No, it was the reality TV stars.

What’s interesting about that is that these shows are supposed to be a slice of real life, and those are the shows that are very popular right now, especially among young people, but what they really are is a showcase for narcissistic behaviors.

Reality TV has taken it to the next level of showing that this is how people really behave, that people always have plastic surgery, and always get into fights with people who are supposed to be their friends, and act badly, and are obsessed with fame.

On the Web and on reality TV, the way to get the most attention, and thus to make the most money, is to be as provocative as possible. So it really pulls for that narcissistic behavior.

It is this culture that seems to encourage this attention seeking, and also encourages that not just fame, but also infamy, is just as good.”

 

Relationships/Friendships

If you’ve grown up your whole life and everything is about you then of course it’s a lot more difficult to compromise in a relationship… if you never compromise you’re not going to be married very long, among other things. Even in a friendship the same is true. You really have to make it not about you all the time.

Narcissists are horrible relationship partners in the long run. It’s really important in a relationship to have two people who are both focused on caring for the other, and not just focused on themselves.”

 

Narcissism Contributing To The Credit Crisis

Easy credit allows people to look better off than they actually are. For a narcissist, this is great. And even for somebody who isn’t particularly narcissistic, but who got sucked into this narcissistic culture of over-purchasing with intent to pay it off through credit.

One of the key outcomes of narcissism is over-confidence, which explains a lot of how we got into the” credit crisis, recession and bad mortgages “in the first place. Home buyers would think ‘I’d be able to pay for that.’ Bankers as well, not only home owners, would tell them: ‘Housing never goes down! I’m sure everything will be fine with these mortgage backed securities.’ That’s the huge downside of overconfidence, in that reality always wins in the end. This is one of the reasons why we ended up with the recession.”

Dealing With Narcissism

Remind About How Much We Have In Common As Human Beings

The key to solving some of this is reminding kids, and adults for that matter, just how much we have in common as human beings.”

– All above quotes by Dr. Jean Twenge

 

Connection With Others Holds Self Centeredness In Check

Make people feel connected and that buffers a lot of bad behaviors.

If you have compassion for others, if you feel connected to others, you’re not going to have that really toxic level of narcissism.

Communities inherently place checks on people and reign in some of that self centeredness. So the more we can have those connections with others, and that’s on a societal and community level as well as a personal level, that tends to really hold that self centeredness in check.”

– Dr. W. Keith Campbell

 

Dr. W. Keith Campbell Discusses Connection As A Means Of Dealing With Narcissism

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYGmu6NYXQo

More About Narcissism With Dr. Jean Twenge & Dr. W. Keith Campbell

Image: Modified version of Narcissism by videocrab. ©

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What Are The Consequences Of Ecological Overspending?

Since The 1970s Human Demand On Nature Is Larger Than Nature’s Renewable Production

Today, we are using 20% more than what nature can regenerate. In other words, it would take a year and more than 2 months to regenerate everything that we use within one year.

This difference is called the ‘ecological deficit,’ the difference of how much more rapidly we are using resources like forests, fish stock, putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, than nature is able to accommodate.”

Mathis Wackernagel, PhD, Executive Director of the Global Footprint Network exemplifies what he calls an “ecological bank statement” in a video presentation, excerpted below, showing how humanity today is using more than what nature can regenerate.

Ecological Bank Statement Shows Humanity’s Using More Than It Has

If we look at this bank statement and say that we’re using more than what we have, is this good news or bad news? I would say it is good news in the sense that it gives us more information. And we still have choice. We can still just not open the bank statement and recycle the envelope, or we can look at it. But if we do spend too much money, we also know what the consequences are, so there is a kind of a feedback loop. In the same way we have to think about nature from a budgeting perspective, and say, ‘what are the consequences of overspending?’”

Watch The Video [if the video is not embedded below, then you can watch it here] [3 min. 30 sec.]:

06 – Overshoot (Exceeding Ecological Limits) – GLOBAL FOOTPRINT NETWORK from WERI on Vimeo.

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Social Scientist Philip Zimbardo: Factors Other Than Character Determine Behavior [TED Talk]

As a child growing up in a tough neighborhood in the South Bronx (an inner city ghetto of New York), social psychologist Philip Zimbardo learned at an early age that

the line between good and evil (which privileged people like to think is fixed and impermeable – with them on the good side and others on the bad side); I knew that line was movable and permeable.”

In this TED video [23 minutes] Zimbardo presents three factors which can determine the likelihood of evil acts from healthy, normal well-intentioned people:

Bad Apples, A Bad Barrel Or Bad Barrel-Makers?

The 3 factors influencing the transformation of human character towards evil can be summarized as:

• Dispositional: Inside the person. This is the factor most often considered by culture, religions and government as the cause of behavior.

• Situational: Outside the person. This is the factor pointing to the influence of a person’s immediate surroundings, typically one in which a person’s normal, habitual behavior is not possible.

• Systemic: The power structure that creates and sustains the situation.

Since the inquisition we’ve been dealing with problems at the level of the individual and it doesn’t work.”

He recommends a paradigm shift of focus

away from the medical model which focuses only on the individual, towards a public health model that recognizes situational and systemic vectors of disease.”

 

Promoting Heroism As The Antidote To Evil

Zimbardo suggests the following:

• Promote the heroic imagination of kids in our educational system.

We want kids to think, ‘I’m a hero in waiting,’ waiting for the right situation to come along to act heroically.”

• Motivate people to overcome the natural tendency towards passive inaction in social situations [as demonstrated in the Bystander Experiment].

• Teach children to think and act socio-centricly, rather than ego-centricly.

• Unlike childhood heroes such as Superman and Wonder Woman who have special powers, children need to be told that heroes can come from everyday people.

Source: Zimbardo quotes, cartoon and video from YouTube/Philip Zimbardo: Why Ordinary People… 

Source: Popeye word cloud courtesy Terry McCombs

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Malcolm Gladwell Explains Why Human Potential Is Being Squandered [PopTech Video]

Sociologist and best-selling author, Malcolm Gladwell, uses the term “Capitalization” to discuss

the abundance and scarcity as it applies to people.” More specifically, Gladwell sees “capitalization” as “the rate at which a given community capitalizes on the human potential… what percentage of those who are capable of achieving something actually achieve it.”

Gladwell’s most recent book, Outliers: The Story of Success, investigates human potential, how it is squandered, how that trend can be reversed, and the reasons why some succeed so much more then others.

Through his research Gladwell discovered that,

Cap rates are really low. They are much lower then you think they are and that’s why I think this is such a worthy topic for investigation.”

Here is a clip with highlights from Gladwell’s talk at Pop Tech on this issue [11 min.]:

3 Conditions Which Constrain The Capitalization Of Human Potential

1. Poverty.

… is the obvious thing that limits the exploitation of human potential.”

2. Stupidity.

… where institutions get in the way of the development of human potential.”

3. Culture.

When we look at these different rates of capitalization, 20 and 30 years later, what we’re seeing is the consequence of those early ingrained cultural notions…”

Why Is This Important?

It is important because I think when we observe differences in how individuals succeed in the world our initial thought is always to say, to argue that that is the result of some kind of innate difference in ability.

And when we look at the different rates that groups succeed we think that that reflects some underlying innate trait in the characteristics of that group. And that is wrong… what capitalization rates say… is there’s another explanation and that has to do with poverty, with stupidity, and with culture.”

Low ‘Capitalization’ = Room For Improvement

We have a scarcity of achievement… not because we have a scarcity of talent. We have a scarcity of achievement because we’re squandering our talent. And that’s not bad news that’s good news; because it says that this scarcity is not something we have to live with. It’s something we can do something about.”

Here is Gladwell’s full talk at PopTech [19 min.]

Here is Gladwell’s description of his new book Outliers: The Story of Success

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Neuroscience Reveals: Your Consciousness Is Connected To Everyone Else’s [TED Talk]

All that’s separating you from another person is your skin. Remove it and you have removed the barrier between you and other beings. So there is no real independent self aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world and inspecting other people, you are in fact connected not just by facebook and internet, you are connected by your neurons.”

Neuroscientist Vilyanur S. Ramachandran, Ph.D., outlines the fascinating functions of mirror neurons. Only recently discovered, these neurons allow us to learn complex social behaviors, some of which formed the foundations of human civilization as we know it.

Ramachandran is director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, and an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute. According to his research, we have whole chains of neurons which talk to each other, so 

there is no real distinctiveness of your consciousness from somebody else’s consciousness… And this is not mumbo-jumbo philosophy” he says, “it emerges from our understanding of basic neuroscience.”

Watch Ramachandran’s TED Talk [7 min.] about the neurons that shaped civilization:


Ramachandran looks deep into the brain’s most basic mechanisms. 

[The human brain is] a lump of flesh of about 3 pounds… but it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space. It can contemplate the meaning of infinity, ask questions about the meaning of its own existence… It’s the greatest mystery confronting human beings”

Also he notes that

there are 100 billion neurons in the adult human brain. And each one makes something like 1,000 to 10,000 contacts to other neurons in the brain… the number of permutations and combinations of brain activity exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.”

By working with those who have specific mental disabilities caused by brain injury or stroke, he can map functions of the mind to physical structures of the brain.

So if you are a patient with a phantom limb, and you see another person’s arm being touched, you feel it in your phantom. And the astonishing part is, if you have pain in your phantom, and you squeeze and massage the other person’s hand, that relieves the pain in your phantom hand, almost as if the mirror neuron were obtaining relief from someone else being massaged.”

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The Asch Experiment: Can Social Influence Distort Your Perception?

We will conform to the group. We’re very social creatures. We’re very much aware of what people around us think. We want to be liked. We don’t want to be seen to rock the boat so we will go along with the group even if we don’t believe what people are saying, we still go along.” *

This is a conclusion from what is known as “The Asch Experiment,” an experiment originally conceived in the 1950’s by Social Psychologist Solomon Asch, demonstrated in the video below [2 min.]:

The 3 Levels of Distortion

As indicated in Martin Shepard’s video about conformity  [10 min.], “Asch proposed conformity could be explained by distortions occurring at any of three levels: perception, judgment and action.”

  • At the action level: subjects believe the majority are wrong, but go along with them anyway.
  • At the level of judgment: subjects perceive there is a conflict but reject their own judgment, concluding the majority are right.
  • At the level of perception: subjects’ perceptions are genuinely distorted by the majority’s answers”.
  • “If it’s true that the subjects’ perceptions are genuinely distorted, that means that group opinion has the potential to affect an individual’s information processing on a very profound level.” **

* Source: YouTube/The Asch Experiment

** Source: YouTube/Conformity 

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The Bystander Effect: Old Experiments Still Relative To Today’s Social Influences

And there you have a group of (effectively) strangers who were exerting the pressure not to intervene, not to help; and it’s very difficult to rebel!”

This Bystander Effect is demonstrated in the following video [3 min.]:

Using Other People’s Behavior As Clues To Reality

There are, in fact, many reasons why bystanders in groups fail to act in emergency situations, but social psychologists have focused most of their attention on two major factors. According to a basic principle of social influence, bystanders monitor the reactions of other people in an emergency situation to see if others think that it is necessary to intervene. Each person uses others’ behavior as clues to reality. Since everyone is doing exactly the same thing (nothing), they all conclude from the inaction of others that help is not needed. This is an example of pluralistic ignorance or social proof.

The other major obstacle to intervention is known as diffusion of responsibility. This occurs when observers all assume that someone else is going to intervene and so each individual feels less responsible and refrains from doing anything.”

Bystander Effect Extends To Cyberspace

The bystander effect also extends beyond reality and into cyberspace. Specifically, in a study performed by Markey (2000), the experiment focused on the amount of time it took a bystander to provide assistance. The researchers examined the effects of the gender of an individual seeking help by measuring participant response time (dependent variable). The perceived gender was manipulated by the usage of a male or female screen name in an Internet chat room (independent variable). The treatment conditions examined the number of people present in the chat (two to nineteen), and then asked the stimulus question: ‘Can anyone tell me how to look at someone’s profile?’

The findings reflect a correlation between the number of people present in a computer-mediated chat group and the amount of time it took for an individual to receive help. The higher the number of participants, the longer it took for someone to help. This research reveals that bystander interventions in Internet chat groups reflect the same patterns as interaction in non-computer based environments.”

The Bystander Effect was first demonstrated in the laboratory by John Darley and Bibb Latane in 1968. These researchers launched a series of experiments that resulted in one of the strongest and most replicable effects in social psychology.” 

1st quote source: YouTube Video: Bystander Effect
2nd & last quote source: Wikipedia/Bystander Effect
Other quote sources: http://www.psychwiki.com/wiki/Bystander_Effect 
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New Twitter Study Shows Global Happiness On The Decline

In case you didn’t know, or have yet to receive a tweet about it, twitter is now being used for research. For instance at Cornell University a study was conducted which looked through over 500 million tweets to gauge users moods throughout the day: It turns out that we start our days positively (positive tweets), then our moods begin to decline throughout the day (at around midnight they pick back up again).

A more recent study at the University of Vermont has also been conducted in which, “… more then 46 billion words written in Twitter tweets by 63 million Twitters users around the globe…” were analyzed.

From this the researchers immersed themselves in a new perspective,

In these billions of words is not a view of any individual’s state of mind. Instead, like billions of moving atoms add up to the overall temperature of a room, billions of words used to express what people are feeling resolve into a view of the relative mood of large groups.”

Like in the Cornell study,

The Vermont team then took these scores and applied them to the huge pool of words they collected from Twitter. Because these tweets each have a date and time, and, sometimes, other demographic information—like location—they show changing patterns of word use that provides insights in the way groups of people are feeling.”

The implications of such research?

The new approach lets the researchers measure happiness at different scales of time and geography… and stretched out over the last three years, these patterns of word use show a drop in average happiness.”

So, the Cornell study measured mood shifts of Twitter users throughout the day and now the Vermont study shows that happiness has been declining amongst Twitter users over the past 3 years.

The researchers stress that it isn’t only “… younger people… with smartphones,” either because, “Twitter is nearly universal now… Every demographic is represented.”

One added benefit:

“… measuring happiness has been exceedingly difficult by traditional means, like self reporting in social science surveys. Some of the problems with this approach are that people often don’t tell the truth in surveys and the sample sizes are small.”

The Vermont study does not show a specific reason for why happiness is globally declining but does pose the question, 

Why does happiness seem to be declining?”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN2HAroA12w

Quotes and graph image taken from the University of Vermont. For more information about the study: http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmpr/?Page=news&storyID=12986&category=uvmhome

For more information on the Cornell Study:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6051/1878.abstract

Sad Twitter Bird image courtesy of Full Stop.

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Can Your Actions And Thoughts Influence People You Don’t Know? Prof. Fowler Explains [PopTech Video]

If you tell someone they don’t influence anybody, they’re not going to do anything. But if you tell them they influence a thousand people they’ll change their lives. And that’s why I think it’s so critical for us to understand first and foremost how and why we are connected.”

James Fowler, Professor of Medical Genetics and Political Science at University of California, is the co-author of Connected: How Your Friends’ Friends’ Friends’ Affect Everything You Feel, Think, And Do.

The book describes conclusions from statistical analysis of data that was collected as part of a heart study in Framingham, Massachusetts, tracking over 12,000 individuals for 32 years.

For the first time,” says Fowler, “we are able to get a birds’ eye view of networks like the networks that you live in.”

Here is a 9 min. clip with highlights from Fowler’s talk on social networks at Pop Tech:

Fowler describes a:

Three Degrees of Influence” concept: “Your friends’ friends’ friends’ have an impact on you. They’re going to impact whether or not you’re obese, whether or not you smoke… whether or not you’re happy, whether or not you’re lonely, whether or not you’re depressed…”

Fowler explains that this interconnection works two ways,

We shape our networks but our networks also shape us.” Therefore, “If you do a kind act to a person they’ll do a kind act to another person and that will also spread…” And that this serves an “evolutionary purpose… Human social networks are in our nature… we have grown up over hundreds of thousands of years in these social networks.”

Here is a link to Fowler’s full talk at Pop Tech [19 min.]:
James Fowler: Power of Networks

The official site of the book Connected: www.connectedthebook.com

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Biologist Elisabet Sahtouris Finds Evolutionary Purpose In Crisis

Humans within this planet now are the newest experience of the universe in what, biologically, always seems to come down to cycles: of unity to individuation, through which arises conflict, negotiations happen, cooperation is arrived at; and we go to unity again at the next higher level.

And that’s why the story of evolution is so important today, to help us understand where humanity is, and what is our next step.” 

Elisabet Sahtouris PhD, Evolutionary Biologist and Futurist

Source: Interview excerpt from Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove [9 min. video]

Humans Not the First to Create a “World Wide Web”

In her book EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution, Sahtouris describes the evolutionary cycle of other species who, like humans today, transitioned through highly competitive phases of development:

When we look anew at evolution, we see not only that other species have been as troublesome as ours, but that many a fiercely competitive situation resolved itself in a cooperative scheme.

The kind of cells our bodies are made of,  for example, began with the same kind of exploitation among bacteria that characterizes our historic human imperialism….. In fact, those ancient bacteria invented technologies of energy production, transportation and communications, including a World Wide Web still in existence today, during their competitive phase and then used those very technologies to bind themselves into the cooperative ventures that made our own existence possible.

In the same way, we are now using essentially the same technologies, in our own invented versions, to unite ourselves into a single body of humanity that may make yet another new step in Earth’s evolution possible.

If we look to the lessons of evolution, we will gain hope that the newly forming worldwide body of humanity may also learn to adopt cooperation in favor of competition. The necessary systems have already been invented and developed; we lack only the understanding, motive, and will to use them consciously in achieving a cooperative species maturity.”

Is Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Incomplete?

In the following video excerpt of an interview with Sahtouris, she explains how Darwin’s theory only describes the competitive stage of each evolutionary cycle:

Watch Video Excerpt [from 6:42 to 9:18]

Image courtesy of Wellcome Images