e-Claire

Is Your Brain on Idle?

Always fascinated by the working of the human mind, I am getting a goodly kick out of this piece at Cool Blue Blog. Here's a sample:

...you are the owner of a hunter-gatherer brain, which was just the machine for the job of hunting and gathering, which we humans did to survive thousands of years ago. ...We humans conserve cognitive energy whenever we can. ...Thinking hard burns about three times more calories than does idling. So how do we avoid effortful thinking? By finding shortcuts that work most of the time. ...To learn more about mindless behavior and persuasion, proceed to the " Mindless" page . (My students can learn more about mindful behavior and persuasion by entering the URL for the "Mindful" page.) [soooo college prof... -C]

The first part of the "Mindless" site is written in that most aggravating of undergrad styles: the I-know-something-you-want-to-know-and-I'm-not-gonna-teeell-you. But here is an interesting bit I found:

The premiere framing institution of our time, the American media dramatically shapes the way we view current issues. As early as 1920, a scientist named Lippman proposed that the media would control public opinion by focusing attention on selected issues while ignoring others. Known as the "agenda-setting" hypothesis, the idea that people were easily susceptible to media influence was soon derided as an overly simplistic misperception of the viewing audience. Through most of this century, media pundits claimed that the public wasn't susceptible to simple "hypodermic" injections from the media (and you can still hear this defense put forward by today's media moguls). But the agenda-setting hypothesis has been revisited recently by scientists like Krosnick & Miller (1996), who have traced surges and declines in presidential popularity to media contextualizing. ...Media personalities often explain national changes in mood by denigrating the fickle, mindless American public. Remember when Dan Rather attributed the 1994 Republican wins to a public that threw a "tantrum"? ...Seemingly inconsequential changes in issue presentation have been shown to cause dramatic shifts in public preference.

The site discusses some of the most common methods of influencing others, some of which are used everyday by Madison Avenue and the "news" media. He discusses what he calls framing which is the art of placing some idea in an intentionally chosen context. [like the OJ trial went from OJ guilty vs OJ not guilty to a battle between the attys trying to frame it as wife beater male vs female victim VS ethnic minority victim vs. racist police force . Well, we know which frame won that one... And how successful reframing something can be. Some useful info there, if only to be able to recognize this shit when it is slung our way. Wouldn't wanna be caught waiting around for one of those beef "hypodermic injections" from the media, now would we? [baaaaaad girl, baaa] Go See . . .

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