How to know you're in an egocentric or propaganda-lead bubble/echo-chamber:
1. You are discouraged from considering statistics and external evidence over your personal experience(s) or your social groups (self-serving) conclusions.
2. You are encouraged to use biases and fallacies; especially fallacies such as the straw man, slippery slope, false equivalency, cherry picking and the ad hominem.
3. You are encouraged to be disruptive, dismissive and aggressive... and encourage others to do the same.
4. You are encouraged to slander and dehumanize people that ask questions about power imbalances and injustices.
5. You are encouraged to ignore mainstream academic studies and conclusions; often you are encouraged to equate them with conspiracies.
6. You are encouraged to attack intellectualism and treat speakers as egotistical combatants.
7. You are encouraged to refer to talking points that are based in fallacies, biases and conjecture instead of listing mainstream facts and figures.
8. You are discouraged from Critical Thinking and Socratic Dialogue.
9. You are encouraged to dismiss questions like "what would it take for you to change you mind?".
10. You are encouraged to think that changing your mind is proposing some form of great loss, a probable social threat to further trust, or as a form a "losing face".
A new study finds that believing in meritocracy can lead disadvantaged adolescents of color to act out and engage in risky behavior.
Recognizing the vast economic and racial inequalities his students faced, he chose what some might consider a radical approach for his writing and social-studies classes, weaving in concepts such as racism, classism, oppression, and prejudice. Barrett said it was vital to reject the oft-perpetuated narrative that society is fair and equal to address students’ questions and concerns about their current conditions. And Brighton Elementary’s seventh- and eighth-graders quickly put the lessons to work—confronting the school board over inequitable funding, fighting to install a playground, and creating a classroom library focused on black and Latino authors.
“Students who are told that things are fair implode pretty quickly in middle school as self-doubt hits them,” he said, “and they begin to blame themselves for problems they can’t control.”
Barrett’s personal observation is validated by a newly published study in the peer-reviewed journal Child Development that finds traditionally marginalized youth who grew up believing in the American ideal that hard work and perseverance naturally lead to success show a decline in self-esteem and an increase in risky behaviors during their middle-school years. The research is considered the first evidence linking preteens’ emotional and behavioral outcomes to their belief in meritocracy, the widely held assertion that individual merit is always rewarded.
“If you’re in an advantaged position in society, believing the system is fair and that everyone could just get ahead if they just tried hard enough doesn’t create any conflict for you … [you] can feel good about how [you] made it,” said Erin Godfrey, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of applied psychology at New York University’s Steinhardt School. But for those marginalized by the system—economically, racially, and ethnically—believing the system is fair puts them in conflict with themselves and can have negative consequences.
“If the system is fair, why am I seeing that everybody who has brown skin is in this kind of job? You’re having to think about that … like you’re not as good, or your social group isn’t as good,” Godfrey said. “That’s the piece … that I was trying to really get at [by studying] these kids.”
The findings build upon a body of literature on “system justification”—a social-psychology theory that believes humans tend to defend, bolster, or rationalize the status quo and see overarching social, economic, and political systems as good, fair, and legitimate. System justification is a distinctively American notion, Godfrey said, built on myths used to justify inequities, like “If you just work hard enough you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps … it’s just a matter of motivation and talent and grit.” Yet, as she and her colleagues discovered, these beliefs can be a liability for disadvantaged adolescents once their identity as a member of a marginalized group begins to gel—and once they become keenly aware of how institutional discrimination disadvantages them and their group.
How some people feel it necessary to tell me that one day they're going to haul me off to the mall and make me waste money I can't afford to waste on clothing and makeup I'll never wear and then make me sit through sensory hell while they teach me to do my hair in styles I'll never put in again with products I'll never use (that probably will aggravate my asthma) and put stuff on my face that makes it itch like mad and slap my hands when I try to scratch...
the link goes to [.../psp-ofp-shepherd.pdf], for which you'll need an Acrobat software product.
Steven Shepherd (University of Waterloo), Aaron C. Kay (Duke University)
Abstract: How do people cope when they feel uniformed or unable to understand important social issues, such as the environment, energy concerns, or the economy? Do they seek out information, or do they simply ignore the threatening issue at hand? One would intuitively expect that a lack of knowledge would motivate an increased, unbiased search for information, thereby facilitating participation and engagement in these issues—especially when they are consequential, pressing, and self-relevant. However, there appears to be a discrepancy between the importance/self-relevance of social issues and people’s willingness to engage with and learn about them. Leveraging the literature on system justification theory
(Jost & Banaji, 1994), the authors hypothesized that, rather than motivating an increased search for information, a lack of knowledge about a specific sociopolitical issue will (a) foster feelings of dependence on the government, which will (b) increase system justification and government trust, which will (c) increase desires to avoid learning about the relevant issue when information is negative or when information valence is unknown. In other words, the authors suggest that ignorance—as a function of the system justifying tendencies it may activate—may, ironically, breed more ignorance. In the contexts of energy, environmental, and economic issues, the authors present 5 studies that (a) provide evidence for this specific psychological chain (i.e., ignorance about an issue 3 dependence 3 government trust 3 avoidance of information about that issue); (b) shed light on the role of threat and motivation in driving the second and third links in this chain; and (c) illustrate the unfortunate consequences of this process for individual action in those contexts that may need it most.
