Psychology Help and Resources

We all strive for self-improvement no matter what the walk of life we come from. The moment you cease to grow professionally or psychologically you become a vegetable. Gone are the days when people blindly believed and accepted anything. New Age offers numerous means of self-improvement. NLP has emerged as the most popular as well as effective means through which to improve oneself not only professionally but also holistically as an excellent human being.

Today hundreds of NLP self-help techniques are available to program our mind, which yields amazing results in self-improvement. While some aim to dissolve deep-rooted phobias and traumas, others are designed to help free one from negative counter-productive habits. In fact, it is these crystallized negative habits and fears that are obstacles in self-improvement. Once you set yourself free from these mental blocks a tremendous amount of energy would be unleashed and flood you with profound self-confidence and self-esteem. This would metamorphose you into a model human being capable of becoming another Bill Gates or Mahatma Gandhi.

You can try one NLP experiment and see the wonders it does for you. Like most people, you too may have your own role model. Think of your role model and conjure up a vision. Recall some wonderful accomplishments that inspired you most. Let the whole drama unfold before your closed eyes scene by scene and relive those moments. Let the thrill of your role model ’s actions permeate your entire being. Now enter into the persona of your role model and lose your own identity. It implies that you give up your cowardly character and exude the confidence and radiance of your role model.

Remind yourself that if he/she could do it so can you; take a vow to emulate him/her. Charged with that energy now resolve with full determination not to turn back in your life. Tell yourself you are no longer a mediocre person but have reincarnated into a new being full of self-esteem and confidence destined to accomplish something great that you have dreamed.

Take a few long breaths and slowly come out of your trance. Give a pat on your back. Congratulate yourself on this new self-discovery and begin a new life all over again.

As a basic principle of NLP all our thoughts, perceptions and actions are guided by the three NLP models that are visual, auditory and kinesthetic. Before you proceed to work on yourself for self-improvement through NLP you must determine your predominant NLP model. As a typical visual person you would tend to recall situations or build images in your mind. As an auditory personality, you would habitually evaluate things on the basis of how they sound and make your decisions accordingly. Similarly, as a kinesthetic characters your actions are dominated by what you feel at various times. Remember no human being exclusively belongs to one particular group at all times but is guided by the dynamics of all these three models.

However, identifying your predominant model helps you practice NLP effectively for self-improvement. Based on your own NLP model you can make necessary changes in the above experiment. For instance, if you are predominantly auditory type then concentrate more on the spoken words of your role model and the overwhelming effect on you. Similarly, if you belong to kinesthetic type then focus more on the physical action and gestures of your role model on a particular occasion that inspired you.

An inferiority complex, in the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis, is a feeling that one is inferior to others in some way.
It is often unconscious, and is thought to drive afflicted individuals to overcompensate, resulting either in spectacular achievement or extreme antisocial behaviour..

Social cognition is the study of how people process social information, especially its encoding, storage, retrieval, and application to social situations.

There has been much recent interest in the links between social cognition and brain function, particularly as neuropsychological studies have shown that brain injury (particularly to the frontal lobes) can adversely affect social judgements and interaction.

People diagnosed with certain mental illnesses are also known to show differences in how they process social information.

There is now an expanding research field examining how such conditions may bias cognitive processes involved in social interaction, or conversely, how such biases may lead to the symptoms associated with the condition. It is also becoming clear that some aspects of psychological processes that promote social behaviour (such as face recognition) may be innate.

Studies have shown that newborn babies, younger than one hour old can selectively recognize and respond to faces, while people with some developmental disorders such as autism or Williams syndrome may show differences in social interaction and social communication when compared to their unaffected peers..

Nothing worthwhile in this world is achieved without motivation. Some of us are strongly motivated while others are just drifting away in life. Again, there are people who have been motivated right from their childhood whereas others got motivated at a much later stage. So whatever category you may belong to, if you are not motivated as yet towards anything, you just happen to exist but unable to live. In order to live rather than just surviving you must have a quality of liveliness that comes from positive motivation.

Now the question arises: how to be a motivated person? How to possess motivation in the right direction? Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) has got the answer. The science or art of NLP centers on a pivotal truth that the solution to man ’s problems lies in a fundamental change in human mind and, ironically enough, it is the mind that is capable of effecting this change.

NLP aims at effecting behavioral change or increasing behavioral choice through the manipulation of personal state. This manipulation takes place either by carrying out a dialog with oneself or by allowing a professional NLP trainer to talk to us and work on us.

Everyone, whether normal or abnormal, young or old, a common man in the street or a great scientist, can be motivated with the help of NLP. In addition to being an instrument for motivating normal healthy people NLP can be used for individual psychotherapy. NLP teaches both individuals and groups how to fulfill their maximum potential and achieve great success. NLP involves a variety of communication and persuasion skills. Essentially, it uses self-hypnosis to motivate and change oneself. NLP motivates and enables you to transform all aspects of your life by bringing about a qualitative change in your relationships with both friends and foes. It adds to your sense of self-esteem that is indispensable for success in life.

Mechanism of NLP: The mechanism of NLP is self-talk. It is like having a dialog with oneself. This dialog is not some kind of soliloquy but a conscious monologue aimed at self-persuasion. This self-talk goes on when you are alone as much as when you are interacting with others. NLP helps you listen to others as well as listen to the stream of thoughts in your mind. It helps you consciously discard and filter out the negative strain in thought and suggest to yourself the positive antidote thought to counteract the effect of the negative thoughts. By carrying out a constant conscious talk with yourself you enlighten and illuminate the dark recesses of your mind. You are able to deal with and dispel the root cause of ignorance and move towards self-awareness and self-knowledge. This helps you have greater confidence in your actions, convictions and competencies.

Miracle of NLP: In order to derive full benefits of this phenomenon of self-talk it is important to carry out a set of positive thoughts in the right direction. A wrong set of thoughts can lead you in a totally different direction bringing disastrous consequences. Ask yourself consciously what is holding you back from accomplishing what you want to accomplish in life. What are your stumbling blocks? Through practicing self-talk over a period of time you would be able to analyze and diagnose your psychological malady. You would discover that the time has come to believe in yourself in spite of all your shortcomings. This realization would convert your weaknesses in to strengths by constantly repeating the positive thoughts affirming your positive qualities and competencies. In the end it will all leave you an enlightened being that is at perfect peace with himself as well as others and can live in this world sanely without any conflicts.

First of all, I’d like to thank everyone for handing in there while we worked out all the bugs on the site…I believe your patience will be rewarded. I know some of you have not received the free MP3s you are due, as we changed the handling of the emails, and had to rebuild the list.

Those will be out the first week of March. With February ’s holiday of St. Valentine, I thought I would write about the subject of Love from Lester ’s viewpoint.

He often said that Love was one of the most often used but misunderstood words in human experience. What Love brings to mind for most of us is that first kiss with our high school sweetheart, or meeting our spouse-to-be for the first time.

When we “fall in Love” there is a real chemical cocktail that is uncorked, poured into our blood, and we feel high, giddy , and for a time, the world is a blissful place. We see our beloved bathed in Love-colored hues, and he/she is perfect.

I’ve often thought if they could put this into a pill, we’d have a drug problem of horrendous proportions!
Lester said that human Love is totally different from the way a Master defines Love, which is the real Love of Beingness/God. He said that human Love is a very limited thing.

“You do this for me, and I will Love you.” I, in turn will do that for you, and you will Love me.” In Latin, we use the term :Quid Pro Quo, or “this for that”.

There is the law of mutuality always running, and this so called Love due is partly a type of human arrangement for some kind of desired result. It could be a planned family, a promising business future, or a myriad of other lustful fantasies.

There may or may not work out, and even if they do, there is no guarantee that Love, Inc. will survive. After all, the reminder of that drug is always on our minds, and that is why we hear about so much infidelity and affairs. The same person who incited that cocktail just can’t do it any more. Sound familiar?

On to what Lester had to say. At a New York City impromptu short lecture Lester gave, he made this powerful statement, “LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, and you’ll you be so happy….and healthy….and prosperous!” How could that be? The secret lies in Lester ’s definition of Love. “Love is total selflessness. Wanting for the other one what he/she wants for themselves (not what we want).

Love is someone knowing that “I AM YOU.” Those reading this who are Sedona Method grads will remember that on the feeling chart, Love is very high, in ACCEPTANCE, right below total PEACE. So, we need to query ourselves, “Am I really loving?” Probably not, most of the time. When we Love our pets or someone ’s newborn infant, we feel this Love. Lester said that Love is Giving, with no thought of Receiving, wanting nothing from the other one. Difficult? Not really, according to Lester. He said, “Loving people is the easiest thing to do.” Then why does it seem so hard to Love people? How many of you have heard others say, “If only people were as easy to Love as dogs.”

The reason for that is simple. We don’t want Love from them, just for them to be there when we get home, wag their tails or purr, take walks with us, etc., and Love us for what we are, not what we are not. They don’t remember our scolding yesterday, or that we forgot their favorite cookies. They exist in the NOW moment.
We humans have a hard time loving people because we fear rejection.

We put up walls around ourselves to protect us from any more hurt and to buffer the pain we are sure is to come. We want Love instead of feeling safe to give Love. Lester said “Wanting equates to not having.” So when we want Love, we create the opposite, or rejection. Lester was often heard to say, “Every feeling is a non-Love feeling.” Fear, Pride, Grief, Apathy, etc. are all expressions of non-Love. So when we release the Wanting Love program, it takes thousands of non-Love feelings with it!

There resides the incredible power of the Sedona Method (Release Technique). Lester told me if I became totally loving by using his technique, all my goals would just drop in by a mere effortless thought.

Why? Because it is such a high state, you are in tune with the Whole Universe, which is ALL LOVING. When the mind is quiet with no thoughts and feelings, all the power of one ’s Self is available, untethered by the baggage of the past (the programs). The Big 3 Master Programs are released with the Sedona Method Release Technique Course.

Getting back to Lester ’s statement at the lecture, if we would Love all the time, we would achieve a very successful and happy life. Loving totally would amazingly give us all the knowledge we seek as well. So what keeps us from doing this? Just holding on to non-Love feelings we think will protect us, but in fact cause us trouble.

The very fear of rejection causes us to be rejected. Anger at him/her for something said causes us to create the same thing over again with someone else! Also, because Love is such a high state, it automatically will bring up all the AGFLAP, or non-Love feelings, just as wording a goal in a high energy.

Once while in Sedona for an intensive, I made a goal, “I decide to Love people no matter what.” It stirred me up so badly I became violently ill and threw up for days.

Lester nearly yelled at me, “Why did you stop releasing? You could have gone free!” We don’t like the insecure or rejected feelings, so we slow our progress down. If you remember a time you were truly happy, you were most likely feeling very loving.

Is it true? Maybe you were helping in a selfless way, or maybe giving a gift to someone you really wanted to make happy.

You might have been teaching a child to ride a bike the first time or enjoying a video game with him.

A good exercise is to go back and find times when you were happy and investigate with the Method what got in the way. Or during the day, when someone does something to bother you, see if you can release and Love them anyway.

You will find yourself lighter and happier, freer and freer. Remember as Lester said, “LOVE LOVE LOVE, and you’ll be so happy….and healthy…and prosperous!!!”

And finally, there are biases and heuristics that affect trade-offs. Like many other heuristics we’ve discussed, they’re general, and not specific to security. But they’re still important.

First, some more framing effects.

Most of us have anecdotes about what psychologists call the “context effect”: preferences among a set of options depend on what other options are in the set. This has been confirmed in all sorts of experiments–remember the experiment about what people were willing to pay for a cold beer on a hot beach–and most of us have anecdotal confirmation of this heuristic.

For example, people have a tendency to choose options that dominate other options, or compromise options that lie between other options. If you want your boss to approve your $1M security budget, you’ll have a much better chance of getting that approval if you give him a choice among three security plans–with budgets of $500K, $1M, and $2M, respectively–than you will if you give him a choice among three plans with budgets of $250K, $500K, and $1M.

The rule of thumb makes sense: avoid extremes. It fails, however, when there’s an intelligence on the other end, manipulating the set of choices so that a particular one doesn’t seem extreme.

“Choice bracketing” is another common heuristic. In other words: choose a variety. Basically, people tend to choose a more diverse set of goods when the decision is bracketed more broadly than they do when it is bracketed more narrowly. For example, 55 in one experiment students were asked to choose among one of six different snacks that they would receive at the beginning of the next three weekly classes. One group had to choose the three weekly snacks in advance, while the other group chose at the beginning of each class session. Of the group that chose in advance, 64% chose a different snack each week, but only 9% of the group that chose each week did the same.

The narrow interpretation of this experiment is that we overestimate the value of variety. Looking ahead three weeks, a variety of snacks seems like a good idea, but when we get to the actual time to enjoy those snacks, we choose the snack we like. But there’s a broader interpretation as well, one borne out by similar experiments and directly applicable to risk taking: when faced with repeated risk decisions, evaluating them as a group makes them feel less risky than evaluating them one at a time. Back to finance, someone who rejects a particular gamble as being too risky might accept multiple identical gambles.

Again, the results of a trade-off depend on the context of the trade-off.

It gets even weirder. Psychologists have identified an “anchoring effect,” whereby decisions are affected by random information cognitively nearby. In one experiment56, subjects were shown the spin of a wheel whose numbers ranged from 0 and 100, and asked to guess whether the number of African nations in the UN was greater or less than that randomly generated number. Then, they were asked to guess the exact number of African nations in the UN.

Even though the spin of the wheel was random, and the subjects knew it, their final guess was strongly influenced by it. That is, subjects who happened to spin a higher random number guessed higher than subjects with a lower random number.

Psychologists have theorized that the subjects anchored on the number in front of them, mentally adjusting it for what they thought was true. Of course, because this was just a guess, many people didn’t adjust sufficiently. As strange as it might seem, other experiments have confirmed this effect.

And if you’re not completely despairing yet, here’s another experiment that will push you over the edge.57 In it, subjects were asked one of these two questions:
Question 1: Should divorce in this country be easier to obtain, more difficult to obtain, or stay as it is now?
Question 2: Should divorce in this country be easier to obtain, stay as it is now, or be more difficult to obtain?

In response to the first question, 23% of the subjects chose easier divorce laws, 36% chose more difficult divorce laws, and 41% said that the status quo was fine. In response to the second question, 26% chose easier divorce laws, 46% chose more difficult divorce laws, and 29% chose the status quo. Yes, the order in which the alternatives are listed affects the results.

There are lots of results along these lines, including the order of candidates on a ballot.

Another heuristic that affects security trade-offs is the “confirmation bias.” People are more likely to notice evidence that supports a previously held position than evidence that discredits it. Even worse, people who support position A sometimes mistakenly believe that anti-A evidence actually supports that position. There are a lot of experiments that confirm this basic bias and explore its complexities.

If there’s one moral here, it’s that individual preferences are not based on predefined models that can be cleanly represented in the sort of indifference curves you read about in microeconomics textbooks; but instead, are poorly defined, highly malleable, and strongly dependent on the context in which they are elicited. Heuristics and biases matter. A lot.

This all relates to security because it demonstrates that we are not adept at making rational security trade-offs, especially in the context of a lot of ancillary information designed to persuade us one way or another.

Making Sense of the Perception of Security

We started out by teasing apart the security trade-off, and listing five areas where perception can diverge from reality:
The severity of the risk.
The probability of the risk.
The magnitude of the costs.
How effective the countermeasure is at mitigating the risk.
The trade-off itself.

Sometimes in all the areas, and all the time in area 4, we can explain this divergence as a consequence of not having enough information. But sometimes we have all the information and still make bad security trade-offs. My aim was to give you a glimpse of the complicated brain systems that make these trade-offs, and how they can go wrong.

Of course, we can make bad trade-offs in anything: predicting what snack we’d prefer next week or not being willing to pay enough for a beer on a hot day. But security trade-offs are particularly vulnerable to these biases because they are so critical to our survival. Long before our evolutionary ancestors had the brain capacity to consider future snack preferences or a fair price for a cold beer, they were dodging predators and forging social ties with others of their species. Our brain heuristics for dealing with security are old and well-worn, and our amygdalas are even older.

What’s new from an evolutionary perspective is large-scale human society, and the new security trade-offs that come with it. In the past I have singled out technology and the media as two aspects of modern society that make it particularly difficult to make good security trade-offs–technology by hiding detailed complexity so that we don’t have the right information about risks, and the media by producing such available, vivid, and salient sensory input–but the issue is really broader than that. The neocortex, the part of our brain that has to make security trade-offs, is, in the words of Daniel Gilbert, “still in beta testing.”

I have just started exploring the relevant literature in behavioral economics, the psychology of decision making, the psychology of risk, and neuroscience. Undoubtedly there is a lot of research out there for me still to discover, and more fascinatingly counterintuitive experiments that illuminate our brain heuristics and biases. But already I understand much more clearly why we get security trade-offs so wrong so often.

When I started reading about the psychology of security, I quickly realized that this research can be used both for good and for evil. The good way to use this research is to figure out how humans’ feelings of security can better match the reality of security. In other words, how do we get people to recognize that they need to question their default behavior? Giving them more information seems not to be the answer; we’re already drowning in information, and these heuristics are not based on a lack of information. Perhaps by understanding how our brains processes risk, and the heuristics and biases we use to think about security, we can learn how to override our natural tendencies and make better security trade-offs. Perhaps we can learn how not to be taken in by security theater, and how to convince others not to be taken in by the same.

The evil way is to focus on the feeling of security at the expense of the reality. In his book Influence,58 Robert Cialdini makes the point that people can’t analyze every decision fully; it’s just not possible: people need heuristics to get through life. Cialdini discusses how to take advantage of that; an unscrupulous person, corporation, or government can similarly take advantage of the heuristics and biases we have about risk and security. Concepts of prospect theory, framing, availability, representativeness, affect, and others are key issues in marketing and politics. They’re applied generally, but in today’s world they’re more and more applied to security. Someone could use this research to simply make people feel more secure, rather than to actually make them more secure.

After all my reading and writing, I believe my good way of using the research is unrealistic, and the evil way is unacceptable. But I also see a third way: integrating the feeling and reality of security.

The feeling and reality of security are different, but they’re closely related. We make the best security trade-offs–and by that I mean trade-offs that give us genuine security for a reasonable cost–when our feeling of security matches the reality of security. It’s when the two are out of alignment that we get security wrong.

In the past, I’ve criticized palliative security measures that only make people feel more secure as “security theater.” But used correctly, they can be a way of raising our feeling of security to more closely match the reality of security. One example is the tamper-proof packaging that started to appear on over-the-counter drugs in the 1980s, after a few highly publicized random poisonings. As a countermeasure, it didn’t make much sense. It’s easy to poison many foods and over-the-counter medicines right through the seal–with a syringe, for example–or to open and reseal the package well enough that an unwary consumer won’t detect it. But the tamper-resistant packaging brought people’s perceptions of the risk more in line with the actual risk: minimal. And for that reason the change was worth it.

Of course, security theater has a cost, just like real security. It can cost money, time, capabilities, freedoms, and so on, and most of the time the costs far outweigh the benefits. And security theater is no substitute for real security. Furthermore, too much security theater will raise people’s feeling of security to a level greater than the reality, which is also bad. But used in conjunction with real security, a bit of well-placed security theater might be exactly what we need to both be and feel more secure.

1 Bruce Schneier, Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World, Springer-Verlag, 2003.

2 David Ropeik and George Gray, Risk: A Practical Guide for Deciding What’s Really Safe and What’s Really Dangerous in the World Around You, Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

3 Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things, Basic Books, 1999.

4 Paul Slovic, The Perception of Risk, Earthscan Publications Ltd, 2000.

5 Daniel Gilbert, “If only gay sex caused global warming,” Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2006.

6 Jeffrey Kluger, “How Americans Are Living Dangerously,” Time, 26 Nov 2006.

7 Steven Johnson, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life, Scribner, 2004.

8 Daniel Gilbert, “If only gay sex caused global warming,” Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2006.

9 Donald A. Norman, “Being Analog,” http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/being_analog.html. Originally published as Chapter 7 of The Invisible Computer, MIT Press, 1998.

10 Daniel Kahneman, “A Perspective on Judgment and Choice,” American Psychologist, 2003, 58:9, 697–720.

11 Gerg Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd, et al., Simple Heuristics that Make us Smart, Oxford University Press, 1999.

12 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk,” Econometrica, 1979, 47:263–291.

13 Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice,” Science, 1981, 211: 453–458.

14 Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Evidential Impact of Base Rates,” in Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky (eds.), Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. 153–160.

15 Daniel J. Kahneman, Jack L. Knetsch, and R.H. Thaler, “Experimental Tests of the Endowment Effect and the Coase Theorem,” Journal of Political Economy, 1990, 98: 1325–1348.

16 Jack L. Knetsch, “Preferences and Nonreversibility of Indifference Curves,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 1992, 17: 131–139.

17 Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Advances in Prospect Theory: Cumulative Representation of Subjective Uncertainty,” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 1992, 5:xx, 297–323.

18 John Adams, “Cars, Cholera, and Cows: The Management of Risk and Uncertainty,” CATO Institute Policy Analysis #335, 1999.

19 David L. Rosenhan and Samuel Messick, “Affect and Expectation,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1966, 3: 38–44.

20 Neil D. Weinstein, “Unrealistic Optimism about Future Life Events,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1980, 39: 806–820.

21 D. Kahneman, I. Ritov, and D. Schkade, “Economic preferences or attitude expressions? An analysis of dollar responses to public issues,” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 1999, 19:220–242.

22 P. Winkielman, R.B. Zajonc, and N. Schwarz, “Subliminal affective priming attributional interventions,” Cognition and Emotion, 1977, 11:4, 433–465.

23 Daniel Gilbert, “If only gay sex caused global warming,” Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2006.

24 Robyn S. Wilson and Joseph L. Arvai, “When Less is More: How Affect Influences Preferences When Comparing Low-risk and High-risk Options,” Journal of Risk Research, 2006, 9:2, 165–178.

25 J. Cohen, The Privileged Ape: Cultural Capital in the Making of Man, Parthenon Publishing Group, 1989.

26 Paul Slovic, The Perception of Risk, Earthscan Publications Ltd, 2000.

27 John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988.

28 Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” Science, 1974, 185:1124–1130.

29 Bruce Schneier, Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World, Springer-Verlag, 2003.

30 Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things, Basic Books, 1999.

31 Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency,” Cognitive Psychology, 1973, 5:207–232.

32 John S. Carroll, “The Effect of Imagining an Event on Expectations for the Event: An Interpretation in Terms of the Availability Heuristic,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1978, 14:88–96.

33 Robert M. Reyes, William C. Thompson, and Gordon H. Bower, “Judgmental Biases Resulting from Differing Availabilities of Arguments,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1980, 39:2–12.

34 S. Jim Sherman, Robert B. Cialdini, Donna F. Schwartzman, and Kim D. Reynolds, “Imagining Can Heighten or Lower the Perceived Likelihood of Contracting a Disease: The Mediating Effect of Ease of Imagery,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 1985, 11:118–127.

35 C. K. Morewedge, D.T. Gilbert, and T.D. Wilson, “The Least Likely of Times: How Memory for Past Events Biases the Prediction of Future Events,” Psychological Science, 2005, 16:626–630.

36 Cass R. Sunstein, “Terrorism and Probability Neglect,” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 2003, 26:121-136.

37 Scott Plous, The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making, McGraw-Hill, 1993.

38 S.E. Taylor and S.T. Fiske, “Point of View and Perceptions of Causality,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1975, 32: 439–445.

39 Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff, and Sarah Lichtenstein, “Rating the Risks,” Environment, 1979, 2: 14–20, 36–39.

40 Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Extensional vs Intuitive Reasoning: The Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment,” Psychological Review, 1983, 90:??, 293–315.

41 Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Judgments of and by Representativeness,” in Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky (eds.), Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, Cambridge University Press, 1982.

42 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “On the Psychology of Prediction,” Psychological Review, 1973, 80: 237–251.

43 Daniel Kahneman and S. Frederick, “Representativeness Revisited: Attribute Substitution in Intuitive Judgement,” in T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, and D. Kahneman (eds.), Heuristics and Biases, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 49–81.

44 Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky, “The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences,” Cognitive Psychology, 1985, 17: 295–314.

45 Richard H. Thaler, “Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 1980, 1:39–60.

46 Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice,” Science, 1981, 211:253:258.

47 Richard Thayer, “Mental Accounting Matters,” in Colin F. Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Matthew Rabin, eds., Advances in Behavioral Economics, Princeton University Press, 2004.

48 Richard Thayer, “Mental Accounting and Consumer Choice,” Marketing Science, 1985, 4:199–214.

49 Chip Heath and Jack B. Soll, “Mental Accounting and Consumer Decisions,” Journal of Consumer Research, 1996, 23:40–52.

50 Muhtar Ali, “Probability and Utility Estimates for Racetrack Bettors,” Journal of Political Economy, 1977, 85:803–815.

51 Richard Thayer, “Some Empirical Evidence on Dynamic Inconsistency,” Economics Letters, 1981, 8: 201–207.

52 George Loewenstein and Drazen Prelec, “Anomalies in Intertemporal Choice: Evidence and Interpretation,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1992, 573–597.

53 George Loewenstein, “Anticipation and the Valuation of Delayed Consumption,” Economy Journal, 1987, 97: 666–684.

54 Uri Benzion, Amnon Rapoport, and Joseph Yagel, “Discount Rates Inferred from Decisions: An Experimental Study,” Management Science, 1989, 35:270–284.

55 Itamer Simonson, “The Effect of Purchase Quantity and Timing on Variety-Seeking Behavior,” Journal of Marketing Research, 1990, 17:150–162.

56 Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” Science, 1974, 185: 1124–1131.

57 Howard Schurman and Stanley Presser, Questions and Answers in Attitude Surveys: Experiments on Wording Form, Wording, and Context, Academic Press, 1981.

58 Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, HarperCollins, 1998.

Time Discounting

“Time discounting” is the term used to describe the human tendency to discount future costs and benefits. It makes economic sense; a cost paid in a year is not the same as a cost paid today, because that money could be invested and earn interest during the year. Similarly, a benefit accrued in a year is worth less than a benefit accrued today.

Way back in 1937, economist Paul Samuelson proposed a discounted-utility model to explain this all. Basically, something is worth more today than it is in the future. It’s worth more to you to have a house today than it is to get it in ten years, because you’ll have ten more years’ enjoyment of the house. Money is worth more today than it is years from now; that’s why a bank is willing to pay you to store it with them.

The discounted utility model assumes that things are discounted according to some rate. There’s a mathematical formula for calculating which is worth more–$100 today or $120 in twelve months–based on interest rates. Today, for example, the discount rate is 6.25%, meaning that $100 today is worth the same as $106.25 in twelve months. But of course, people are much more complicated than that.

There is, for example, a magnitude effect: smaller amounts are discounted more than larger ones. In one experiment, 51 subjects were asked to choose between an amount of money today or a greater amount in a year. The results would make any banker shake his head in wonder. People didn’t care whether they received $15 today or $60 in twelve months. At the same time, they were indifferent to receiving $250 today or $350 in twelve months, and $3,000 today or $4,000 in twelve months. If you do the math, that implies a discount rate of 139%, 34%, and 29%–all held simultaneously by subjects, depending on the initial dollar amount.

This holds true for losses as well,52 although gains are discounted more than losses. In other words, someone might be indifferent to $250 today or $350 in twelve months, but would much prefer a $250 penalty today to a $350 penalty in twelve months. Notice how time discounting interacts with prospect theory here.

Also, preferences between different delayed rewards can flip, depending on the time between the decision and the two rewards. Someone might prefer $100 today to $110 tomorrow, but also prefer $110 in 31 days to $100 in thirty days.

Framing effects show up in time discounting, too. You can frame something either as an acceleration or a delay from a base reference point, and that makes a big difference. In one experiment,53 subjects who expected to receive a VCR in twelve months would pay an average of $54 to receive it immediately, but subjects who expected to receive the VCR immediately demanded an average $126 discount to delay receipt for a year. This holds true for losses as well: people demand more to expedite payments than they would pay to delay them.54

Reading through the literature, it sometimes seems that discounted utility theory is full of nuances, complications, and contradictions. Time discounting is more pronounced in young people, people who are in emotional states–fear is certainly an example of this–and people who are distracted. But clearly there is some mental discounting going on; it’s just not anywhere near linear, and not easily formularized.

Getting Psychological Help: Five Mental Health Professionals

Counseling psychologists focus on problems in daily life. They often work in the community to offer psychological help: hospitals, schools, businesses, clinics, and private settings. They help with relationships, work, grief, and major life stresses. They specialize in a number of disciplines, such as cognitive-behavioral, Freudian, Jungian, existential-humanistic – or a combination of two or three.

Clinical psychologists specialize in more severe psychological disorders such as depression, learning disabilities, eating disorders, and anxiety. They often work as part of a team to offer psychological help — such as social workers, doctors, and other health professionals. Group, marital, or individual therapies are both offered by most psychologists (in fact, most mental health professionals will work with groups or individuals).

Psychiatrists are medical doctors. Typically, they treat mental and emotional disorders with a combination of prescription medication and counseling therapy. They deal with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder. Getting psychological help from a psychiatrist can involve prescriptions such as antidepressants or anti-anxiety medications.

Clinical social workers often work in hospice, hospital, or out-patient care facilities and focus on the social context of their client’s problems. They work with families in most situations to provide psychological help; often the entire family is involved in therapy. Elder abuse, child abuse, family violence, adjustment to illness, substance abuse, cultural concerns, and guardianship issues are all common ground to clinical social workers.

Pastoral counselors are trained in both psychology and theology to help people with mental health struggles or psychological disorders. Often they combine spiritual insights or guidance with problem-solving tactics to provide psychological help. Their fees can be lower than other professionals’ as they often work in non-profit settings.

Getting Psychological Help: No Absolute Descriptions

Getting psychological help includes being aware that these descriptions aren’t absolute: the roles of various mental health professionals can shift and change. For instance, pastoral counselors may not include theological matters or prayer in their counseling; a counseling psychologist may introduce spirituality if appropriate. Psychiatrists don’t always prescribe medication when they offer psychological help, and clinical psychologists often work with schizophrenics or severely depressed clients.

Getting Psychological Help: “Shopping Around”

Getting psychological help also means you may need to talk to a few therapists before you find the right fit. Ask about their style of therapy and theoretical orientation. If you as a client aren’t comfortable with, say, a psychiatrist as your therapist, then it’s your right and responsibility to seek another source of help – whether it’s a pastoral counselor or social worker.

Researchers help define what makes a political conservative

By Kathleen Maclay, Media Relations | 22 July 2003 (revised 7/25/03)

BERKELEY – Politically conservative agendas may range from supporting the Vietnam War to upholding traditional moral and religious values to opposing welfare. But are there consistent underlying motivations?

Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:

• Fear and aggression
• Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
• Uncertainty avoidance
• Need for cognitive closure
• Terror management

“From our perspective, these psychological factors are capable of contributing to the adoption of conservative ideological contents, either independently or in combination,” the researchers wrote in an article, “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” recently published in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin.

Assistant Professor Jack Glaser of the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and Visiting Professor Frank Sulloway of UC Berkeley joined lead author, Associate Professor John Jost of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and Professor Arie Kruglanski of the University of Maryland at College Park, to analyze the literature on conservatism.

The psychologists sought patterns among 88 samples, involving 22,818 participants, taken from journal articles, books and conference papers. The material originating from 12 countries included speeches and interviews given by politicians, opinions and verdicts rendered by judges, as well as experimental, field and survey studies.

Ten meta-analytic calculations performed on the material - which included various types of literature and approaches from different countries and groups - yielded consistent, common threads, Glaser said.

The avoidance of uncertainty, for example, as well as the striving for certainty, are particularly tied to one key dimension of conservative thought - the resistance to change or hanging onto the status quo, they said.

The terror management feature of conservatism can be seen in post-Sept. 11 America, where many people appear to shun and even punish outsiders and those who threaten the status of cherished world views, they wrote.

Concerns with fear and threat, likewise, can be linked to a second key dimension of conservatism - an endorsement of inequality, a view reflected in the Indian caste system, South African apartheid and the conservative, segregationist politics of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-South S.C.).

Disparate conservatives share a resistance to change and acceptance of inequality, the authors said. Hitler, Mussolini, and former President Ronald Reagan were individuals, but all were right-wing conservatives because they preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality in some form. Talk host Rush Limbaugh can be described the same way, the authors commented in a published reply to the article.

This research marks the first synthesis of a vast amount of information about conservatism, and the result is an “elegant and unifying explanation” for political conservatism under the rubric of motivated social cognition, said Sulloway. That entails the tendency of people’s attitudinal preferences on policy matters to be explained by individual needs based on personality, social interests or existential needs.

The researchers’ analytical methods allowed them to determine the effects for each class of factors and revealed “more pluralistic and nuanced understanding of the source of conservatism,” Sulloway said.

While most people resist change, Glaser said, liberals appear to have a higher tolerance for change than conservatives do.

As for conservatives’ penchant for accepting inequality, he said, one contemporary example is liberals’ general endorsement of extending rights and liberties to disadvantaged minorities such as gays and lesbians, compared to conservatives’ opposing position.

The researchers said that conservative ideologies, like virtually all belief systems, develop in part because they satisfy some psychological needs, but that “does not mean that conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false, irrational, or unprincipled.”

They also stressed that their findings are not judgmental.

“In many cases, including mass politics, ‘liberal’ traits may be liabilities, and being intolerant of ambiguity, high on the need for closure, or low in cognitive complexity might be associated with such generally valued characteristics as personal commitment and unwavering loyalty,” the researchers wrote.

This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic cliches and stereotypes, the researchers advised.

The latest debate about the possibility that the Bush administration ignored intelligence information that discounted reports of Iraq buying nuclear material from Africa may be linked to the conservative intolerance for ambiguity and or need for closure, said Glaser.

“For a variety of psychological reasons, then, right-wing populism may have more consistent appeal than left-wing populism, especially in times of potential crisis and instability,” he said.

Glaser acknowledged that the team’s exclusive assessment of the psychological motivations of political conservatism might be viewed as a partisan exercise. However, he said, there is a host of information available about conservatism, but not about liberalism.

The researchers conceded cases of left-wing ideologues, such as Stalin, Khrushchev or Castro, who, once in power, steadfastly resisted change, allegedly in the name of egalitarianism.

Yet, they noted that some of these figures might be considered politically conservative in the context of the systems that they defended. The researchers noted that Stalin, for example, was concerned about defending and preserving the existing Soviet system.

Although they concluded that conservatives are less “integratively complex” than others are, Glaser said, “it doesn’t mean that they’re simple-minded.”

Conservatives don’t feel the need to jump through complex, intellectual hoops in order to understand or justify some of their positions, he said. “They are more comfortable seeing and stating things in black and white in ways that would make liberals squirm,” Glaser said.

He pointed as an example to a 2001 trip to Italy, where President George W. Bush was asked to explain himself. The Republican president told assembled world leaders, “I know what I believe and I believe what I believe is right.” And in 2002, Bush told a British reporter, “Look, my job isn’t to nuance.”