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Category Archives: Psychology

The unrepentant megalomania of Dr Megalommatis

Dr Mega (left) and Stephen Schwartz (right), paid shills or merely educated bigots?
Have agents of Serbia’s Radical Party or perhaps renegade elements of the Serbian Intelligence Service successfully penetrated the US right-wing media establishment to conduct False Flag Operations against legitimate critics of Serbia?
Sometimes it seems that way.
It appears that someone is successfully seeding [...]

Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight

Please watch this powerful and beautiful short speech by Jill Bolte Taylor about how she came to observer her own stoke as it happened, and how it transformed her life.

TED | Talks | Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight (video)

Cultural insights

In March 2003, social psychologist Richard Nisbett published his groundbreaking book “The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why“, which challenged the received wisdom that all human groups perceive and reason in the same way. He came to the conclusion, based mostly on observation and social psychology studies,  that Asians and Westerners
“Have [...]

Kosovo Shmosovo

The happy innocent days when Serbs thought that with Slobo gone, they would be treated fairly.
I have received a number of emails from friends curious to know the inside track on the Kosovo situation from their man on the ground in Serbia.
The problem is that when one is very close to the situation, and are [...]

Open Serb hatred must be answered

Belgrade’s Holocaust Memorial - one of several in a city populated by a people famed for their resistance to the Nazis
I am used to reading lies and vitriol about Serbs and Serbia but an article emailed to me today is one of the most racist, hateful and biased articles I have read in a [...]

Physiognomy and success

Thin Slicing at work in the corporate world as the Economist declares “What the boss looks like determines how he performs”.
This may sound like voodoo. Psychologists spent much of the 20th century denigrating the work of 19th-century physiognomists and phrenologists who thought the shapes of faces and skulls carry information about personality. However, recent work [...]

Crack unit of Serbian dictator slayers?

I first heard about Otpor (”Resistance”) and Center for Applied NonViolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) in a superb Reason article from 2006 called “The 50 Habits of Highly Effective Revolutionaries“.
Last week I read that Stratfor (the civilian CIA) thinks that Hugo Chavez’s recent political reverse may be due to the CANVAS activity in Venezuela.
From [...]

Cognitive Bias

Here are two good lists of Cognitive Biases and human mental frailties.
Monkeymagic » Cognitive Bias
Why We do Dumb or Irrational Things: 10 Brilliant Social Psychology Studies

Teaching children to fear men

From the Wall Street Journal:
“When children get lost in a mall, they’re supposed to find a ‘low-risk adult’ to help them. Guidelines issued by police departments and child-safety groups often encourage them to look for ‘a pregnant woman,’ ‘a mother pushing a stroller’ or ‘a grandmother.’
The implied message: Men, even dads pushing strollers, are [...]

The Targets of Aggression

From Chronicle.com:
“‘Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd. He served a dark and an angry god.’ Thus begins Stephen Sondheim’s masterpiece, Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, a darkly comic tale of multiple murders and unwitting cannibalism. Who is this dark, angry god? And why did Todd serve him?
Set in Dickensian London, Sweeney Todd [...]