Oct 6, 2023 04:17 PM
Why are we afraid of being cosmically alone?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...ally-alone
KEY POINTS: Terrifying as it is to think there may be advanced civilizations out there, the absence of such civilizations is equally eerie. The fear of cosmic solitude may mirror people's fear of isolation in their own lives. Curiosity can provide an antidote to the fear of cosmic loneliness. Stories can enhance people's understanding of complex scientific concepts... (MORE - details)
These are the mental processes required to tell a convincing lie
https://psyche.co/ideas/these-are-the-me...incing-lie
INTRO: Dishonesty can have serious consequences [...] Lying often requires a significant proportion of one’s mental bandwidth, and it becomes more difficult when fewer cognitive resources are available. For instance, it might be relatively easy to invent an excuse for missing a work meeting while you’re sitting at home, but telling a convincing lie over the phone while navigating through traffic is more challenging.
Sometimes honesty prevails simply because lying would require too much effort. In fact, research suggests that, in addition to more obvious factors – such as moral beliefs about honesty and corresponding emotions such as guilt – the tendency to lie is constrained by the cognitive effort it requires.
As with any mental process, there are significant individual differences in the extent to which lying taxes cognitive systems. Identifying the sources of these individual differences should be helpful for understanding someone’s tendency to lie and their proficiency in doing so.
The cognitive cost of lying has been explored using experimental tasks, such as the ‘die-under-the-cup’ task – in which participants predict the outcome of a die roll or a coin flip, and then are rewarded based on the self-reported accuracy of their predictions. The overall dishonesty of a group of participants can be estimated based on how much their self-reported accuracy deviates from chance levels.
Although findings have been mixed, studies have found that participants were more honest when under time pressure or when concurrently performing a secondary task, which suggests that reducing the availability of cognitive resources makes it harder to lie.
These results concur with neuroimaging research that found that levels of brain activity in frontal and parietal regions were greater when participants lied than when they told the truth.
Taking a more individual-focused approach to the subject, Sebastian Speer and his colleagues developed a paradigm called the ‘spot-the-differences task’. In this setup, participants are shown a pair of similar images that have either one, two or three minor differences. Yet the participants are told that each image pair contains three differences. On each trial, the participants are asked to study an image pair and indicate whether they can detect three differences; yeses are rewarded. Using this task, researchers can identify individual participants’ honest and dishonest responses, and also examine the patterns of brain activity associated with them.
The researchers found that activity in the nucleus accumbens – a brain structure associated with reward processing – predicted the frequency of dishonesty in this task. They concluded that a propensity towards dishonesty results in part from a strong automatic response to anticipated reward.
Interestingly, generally honest participants showed more brain activity in a neural network associated with self-referential thinking. The researchers interpreted these findings as evidence that such individuals are strongly motivated to maintain a moral self-concept.
The findings suggest, then, that being dishonest (when one stands to gain from it) may be less difficult for more reward-sensitive individuals, as well as for those who are less strongly motivated to maintain a positive self-image. There is plenty of evidence that reward-sensitive people are generally more motivated to seek wealth, social status and hedonic pleasure. However, the rewards associated with these behaviours, at least when dishonesty is involved, are likely to be tempered in individuals driven by a desire to see themselves as ethical, good and honest... (MORE - details)
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...ally-alone
KEY POINTS: Terrifying as it is to think there may be advanced civilizations out there, the absence of such civilizations is equally eerie. The fear of cosmic solitude may mirror people's fear of isolation in their own lives. Curiosity can provide an antidote to the fear of cosmic loneliness. Stories can enhance people's understanding of complex scientific concepts... (MORE - details)
These are the mental processes required to tell a convincing lie
https://psyche.co/ideas/these-are-the-me...incing-lie
INTRO: Dishonesty can have serious consequences [...] Lying often requires a significant proportion of one’s mental bandwidth, and it becomes more difficult when fewer cognitive resources are available. For instance, it might be relatively easy to invent an excuse for missing a work meeting while you’re sitting at home, but telling a convincing lie over the phone while navigating through traffic is more challenging.
Sometimes honesty prevails simply because lying would require too much effort. In fact, research suggests that, in addition to more obvious factors – such as moral beliefs about honesty and corresponding emotions such as guilt – the tendency to lie is constrained by the cognitive effort it requires.
As with any mental process, there are significant individual differences in the extent to which lying taxes cognitive systems. Identifying the sources of these individual differences should be helpful for understanding someone’s tendency to lie and their proficiency in doing so.
The cognitive cost of lying has been explored using experimental tasks, such as the ‘die-under-the-cup’ task – in which participants predict the outcome of a die roll or a coin flip, and then are rewarded based on the self-reported accuracy of their predictions. The overall dishonesty of a group of participants can be estimated based on how much their self-reported accuracy deviates from chance levels.
Although findings have been mixed, studies have found that participants were more honest when under time pressure or when concurrently performing a secondary task, which suggests that reducing the availability of cognitive resources makes it harder to lie.
These results concur with neuroimaging research that found that levels of brain activity in frontal and parietal regions were greater when participants lied than when they told the truth.
Taking a more individual-focused approach to the subject, Sebastian Speer and his colleagues developed a paradigm called the ‘spot-the-differences task’. In this setup, participants are shown a pair of similar images that have either one, two or three minor differences. Yet the participants are told that each image pair contains three differences. On each trial, the participants are asked to study an image pair and indicate whether they can detect three differences; yeses are rewarded. Using this task, researchers can identify individual participants’ honest and dishonest responses, and also examine the patterns of brain activity associated with them.
The researchers found that activity in the nucleus accumbens – a brain structure associated with reward processing – predicted the frequency of dishonesty in this task. They concluded that a propensity towards dishonesty results in part from a strong automatic response to anticipated reward.
Interestingly, generally honest participants showed more brain activity in a neural network associated with self-referential thinking. The researchers interpreted these findings as evidence that such individuals are strongly motivated to maintain a moral self-concept.
The findings suggest, then, that being dishonest (when one stands to gain from it) may be less difficult for more reward-sensitive individuals, as well as for those who are less strongly motivated to maintain a positive self-image. There is plenty of evidence that reward-sensitive people are generally more motivated to seek wealth, social status and hedonic pleasure. However, the rewards associated with these behaviours, at least when dishonesty is involved, are likely to be tempered in individuals driven by a desire to see themselves as ethical, good and honest... (MORE - details)