This was so much fun. I listened to the spoken version and would probably prefer to enjoy all of your posts this way. You're a terrific reader. A single take makes it all the more authentic. And the audio quality is fine.
I am writing to you specifically Adam because I think you wrote it, and to anyone who reads this, but there was a brilliant post on the concept of competition in the markets, and how if one company does something bad, then the others will have to follow it else they die, and eventually, all the companies who did that particular thing will end up in a bad place. I have been searching this for quite sometime now, it was called the concept of 'Mordok's Wrath' OR something on these lines. Really wanted to read it again and share. Do tell me if it rings a bell and if you have seen it (if not wrote it yourself) anywhere.
Great piece! I wrote my undergrad psych thesis on choice behavior, and I love pulling out those stories now, whenever there’s a good context for thinking about human irrationality (which is pretty often).
Experiment 3 where people see other participants draw balls from an urn with their own eyes, yet still discount that information made my flabber gast...
I enjoy psychology as a great hobby and useful tool for a practicing lawyer and amateur bullshit artist. BUT…I invented my own pseudo science. I call it HUMAN PHYSICS.
Like a coin subjected to Newtonian Physics, humans will ALMOST always react the same under the same circumstances…a true coin will ALWAYS land either on heads or tails except for the one time in a hundred it lands on its edge.
Likewise, humans will ALWAYS act the same way under certain stimuli.
Example…they will pull their hand away from a hot stove. The exceptions (insanity, no nerve endings, etc) are too rare and easy to recognize to mention.
Here is the first Postulate of Human Physics-
People will ALWAYS act in what they perceive to be their own self interest.
I really enjoyed this article. The connection to storytelling is incredibly important--but, I think it it also raises some interesting issues for psychology. On one hand, drawing a parallel to history makes sense. As you say, "Psychological stories are supposed to be nonfiction, so frauds and falsehoods are out." But what about fiction? Fictional stories aren't fraud, but they are factually false. Most importantly, to be convincing and compelling, fictional characters must act in a way that we judge to be lifelike (true to 'what human beings are like')--a standard that is separate from factual truth. The issue is that much psychological research would seem to be premised on the assumption that this standard remains largely unknown, which fictional storytelling suggests is not the case.
Of course, as your article suggests, psychologists would do well to create conditions for telling compelling new non-fiction stories about human behavior. Unexpected findings reported from credible sources would be very interesting. But is it possible for these to really amount to a fundamental change in our knowledge of human psychology? Or will such findings be assimilated/accepted only to the extent that the anomalous forms of behavior can be made consistent with our preexisting understanding of people? This is what is commonly done in both fictional and nonfictional stories, and, I would argue in a lot of classic social psychological research, e.g., Festinger & Carlsmith's 1957 cognitive dissonance study: While their results are commonly taken to provide strong support for 'cognitive dissonance' because of how otherwise inexplicable their empirical findings were, an alternate perspective is that the study presents an account of seemingly inexplicable behavior but then renders it consistent with a familiar part of human psychology, i.e., the idea of cognitive dissonance, which it could be argued is less a discovery/theoretical advance and instead a technical formalization of a commonsense/intuitive part of human psychology.
Anyway, I loved the article, and think that your proposal for psychology as history provides a compelling solution to the issues I mentioned.
This was so much fun. I listened to the spoken version and would probably prefer to enjoy all of your posts this way. You're a terrific reader. A single take makes it all the more authentic. And the audio quality is fine.
I am writing to you specifically Adam because I think you wrote it, and to anyone who reads this, but there was a brilliant post on the concept of competition in the markets, and how if one company does something bad, then the others will have to follow it else they die, and eventually, all the companies who did that particular thing will end up in a bad place. I have been searching this for quite sometime now, it was called the concept of 'Mordok's Wrath' OR something on these lines. Really wanted to read it again and share. Do tell me if it rings a bell and if you have seen it (if not wrote it yourself) anywhere.
Great piece! I wrote my undergrad psych thesis on choice behavior, and I love pulling out those stories now, whenever there’s a good context for thinking about human irrationality (which is pretty often).
And when it comes to mind blowing stories, I just read this paper: https://www.nber.org/papers/w30378
Experiment 3 where people see other participants draw balls from an urn with their own eyes, yet still discount that information made my flabber gast...
I enjoy psychology as a great hobby and useful tool for a practicing lawyer and amateur bullshit artist. BUT…I invented my own pseudo science. I call it HUMAN PHYSICS.
Like a coin subjected to Newtonian Physics, humans will ALMOST always react the same under the same circumstances…a true coin will ALWAYS land either on heads or tails except for the one time in a hundred it lands on its edge.
Likewise, humans will ALWAYS act the same way under certain stimuli.
Example…they will pull their hand away from a hot stove. The exceptions (insanity, no nerve endings, etc) are too rare and easy to recognize to mention.
Here is the first Postulate of Human Physics-
People will ALWAYS act in what they perceive to be their own self interest.
Challenge me.
I really enjoyed this article. The connection to storytelling is incredibly important--but, I think it it also raises some interesting issues for psychology. On one hand, drawing a parallel to history makes sense. As you say, "Psychological stories are supposed to be nonfiction, so frauds and falsehoods are out." But what about fiction? Fictional stories aren't fraud, but they are factually false. Most importantly, to be convincing and compelling, fictional characters must act in a way that we judge to be lifelike (true to 'what human beings are like')--a standard that is separate from factual truth. The issue is that much psychological research would seem to be premised on the assumption that this standard remains largely unknown, which fictional storytelling suggests is not the case.
Of course, as your article suggests, psychologists would do well to create conditions for telling compelling new non-fiction stories about human behavior. Unexpected findings reported from credible sources would be very interesting. But is it possible for these to really amount to a fundamental change in our knowledge of human psychology? Or will such findings be assimilated/accepted only to the extent that the anomalous forms of behavior can be made consistent with our preexisting understanding of people? This is what is commonly done in both fictional and nonfictional stories, and, I would argue in a lot of classic social psychological research, e.g., Festinger & Carlsmith's 1957 cognitive dissonance study: While their results are commonly taken to provide strong support for 'cognitive dissonance' because of how otherwise inexplicable their empirical findings were, an alternate perspective is that the study presents an account of seemingly inexplicable behavior but then renders it consistent with a familiar part of human psychology, i.e., the idea of cognitive dissonance, which it could be argued is less a discovery/theoretical advance and instead a technical formalization of a commonsense/intuitive part of human psychology.
Anyway, I loved the article, and think that your proposal for psychology as history provides a compelling solution to the issues I mentioned.
Hey Adam, could I request a recommendation from you for my substack?
Thanks,
Raghav