people who are easily embarrassed are also more trustworthy, and more generous.The reason, the research seems to indicate is simply, and probably unsurprisingly, that
embarrassment signals people's tendency to be pro-social,I will console myself with that thought the next time I feel myself reddening for some minor error of judgement or whatever.
From a crowd made up of individuals, each possessing the ability to make a free choice, something more powerful had been unleashed in which normal rules of conduct seemed not to apply.
“For some reason some kind of force filled me,” testified one of the rioters during his trial. “Until this day, I do not understand how I got into this. What kind of devil was it that asked me to go and forced me to enter into the police department?”
Collective violence, extending from riots to warfare, presents a challenge to our ordinary understanding of free will. Actions that would rarely be taken by an individual on their own seem to be embraced when supported by a larger group.
“You didn’t lose your identity,” says Bell, “you gained a new one in reaction to a threat.” As Bell points out in the case of riots, that threat is often excessive force from the police that turns a disgruntled crowd into an angry mob.
A French court on Thursday imposed fines on two women for wearing the full Islamic face-covering veil, for the first time since a law was passed making it illegal to wear it in public.You may remember that the enforcement of the law mostly depends on other citizens making a complaint given that often police would not be around to observe it. I wonder whether, as well, some of the other people who said they would try to get arrested for fulfilling the law's strictures without a niqab. When will those cases come to court.
We have evolved not to be representers-of-the-world, but to lock-in and keep track of where we find ourselves. We use landmarks and street signs to find our way around;I'm not sure the two things are so far apart or even fundamentally different. Representation surely involves picking out particular features out of a large potential field of percepts and using those features in communication based on, among other things, a sense of what other people may pick out (and this is heavily influenced by culturally-driven convergences). These features are probably landmarks in the relevant communicative transactions and, by analogy, landmark-like things in other kinds of discourse. I'm hypothesising, I guess, that the psychological mechanism for using landmarks, therefore, is recycled into perception-for-communication: ie representation ....
Pay levels in the private sector have impacts which go beyond the company itself. Excessive incentives at the top can produce perverse behaviours. Excessively low pay externalises costs to the taxpayer (e.g. through the benefits system) estimated in the billions of pounds and is likely to reduce the ability of the economy to recover. Excessive gaps between incomes are associated with costly health and social problems as well as with higher levels of debt and economic volatility.
"Although these babies were between just 7 and 9 months of age, they were already dividing the world into events" using the "tool" of statistical learning. "It is these events that will be named with words," she continues. "A few months later, when they can hook up words to the events they see, they will begin to use language."
I came away with the feeling that it was very harmless. And maybe that's the key difference from Christian worship. In Christian worship there's a certain sense of risk: we risk affirming an idea of truth that is somewhat at odds with natural wisdom, inner peace. And we risk affirming a tradition that has an aura of violence – the violent rhetoric about the Lord of hosts and so forth – and the references to death and blood in the sombre ritual. There's a sense of potential danger in Christianity – this religion has been used for violent ends, and people have suffered martyrdom for it too. There's a disturbing absoluteness. Unitarianism carries about as much sense of dangerous otherness as a tots' singalong at the local library.However, the sense of worship being dangerous, in some way, is intriguing, don't you think? I certainly relate to the sense at some occasions of corporate worship that we were not dealing with a tame God, and the awe of that was not necessarily the anxiety-funk sort of thing that would be dehumanising but somehow is about awakening us to Otherness which lies, I would argue, at the heart of learning love. An ennobling awe; an inside-outing awe; an awe that calls us beyond who we were before...
under certain circumstances higher status consumers are more likely to emulate the choices of lower status people, a phenomenon called the "low status user effect." For example, observing a janitor using the latest tech gadget may lead a person of higher status to question his own technological innovativeness. "This scenario might lead the observer to think: if a lower socioeconomic status person owns the latest tech gadget and I don't, what does this mean about my relative technological innovativeness?" The authors found that the low status user effect only occurs when the product symbolizes a clear and desirable trait and when the observer is unconfident about her relative standing on that trait.Actually this isn't surprising if we consider the matter of emulation more widely. For example in language we know that for some speakers forms of speech that may be considered 'lower status' may actually be what they wish to emulate because of the symbolic value of those 'lower status' speakers as fashionable or 'cool' or 'hard' or some other desirable trace which may not be conventionally linked to their socio-economic status. This is further linkable to the way that fashion is often led by trends in black and working class youth culture. It's actually about what is considered desirable and that may not actually be linked to 'fame and fortune' or wealth but rather to other traits such as 'hipness' or cultural creativity or lifestyle or ... well, you get the picture.
.. his contention that power is unavoidable; we must exercise it. Indeed, Christians are to transform it. But power relations are also complex, coming to play in all our roles. Just as no one exercises it absolutely, so no one is totally without power. This account of power allows Hunter to accept its reality in human life and name its temptations. There is no question that gross disparities can quickly arise as power is allocated. The Christian is to name such disparities and ameliorate them...This I like because, while I have many sympathies with the anabaptists, I have tended to feel that the mys-engagement with issues of power in, for example, the Post Christendom series of books is a shame and disallows cultural and political engagement in such a way as to make it unlikely that people outside of the churches might take them seriously as agents of change. I look forward to engaging with this book in due course, hopefully before I next teach Engaging Culture.
This vision of transformed power provides a support for Hunter’s call to Christians to be faithfully involved in their culture and its institutions. While the Christian Right and Left have mistakenly adopted worldly power as an end in itself, the Neo-Anabaptists have mistakenly attempted to have nothing to do with power.
Revealing the existence and nature of a bias against creativity can help explain why people might reject creative ideas and stifle scientific advancements, even in the face of strong intentions to the contrary. ... The field of creativity may need to shift its current focus from identifying how to generate more creative ideas to identify how to help innovative institutions recognize and accept creativity.
So here has come the question: how do we do appropriate liturgy for a situation which can encompass as cradle sharing of drink and some food and ‘godly conversation’. And the other factors we think are to do with building community rather than simply letting individualism and simple prima facie affinity rule. The difference between going into a cafe and a corporate liturgy resides hereabouts, I thinkI'd be interested to hear any further intellingence either here on this blog or here:
I got a response from my MP which got me kind of mad. You'll see why as I reproduce it here. Apologies for the strange changes in types...
