Easily embarrassed? - people will trust you more

Since my youth I've been embarrassed by being embarrassed. Partly it's being a redhead; blushing comes easily. And in the last few years it seems to have got worse. However, there seems to be a silver lining in that cloud.

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.
Easily embarrassed? Study finds people will trust you more:

Evolution of Collective Violence

I've been aware, as I've been collecting and reflecting on the corporisation of human agglomerates that the phenomenon of mobs may be a significant dimension of the matter. So it was interesting to find an article specifically referring to this.

Freedom to Riot: On the Evolution of Collective Violence | The Primate Diaries, Scientific American Blog Network:

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.

I'm interesting in two dimensions of this: one is the way that the individual feels their personal subjectivity is subsumed by a 'bigger' entity and the other is the issue of responsibility. The latter, certainly, is a dimension that others such as McFadyen have explored. Now I wrote 'subsumed' above as if there were a kind of loss of identity; on the other hand it could be interpreted in another way:

“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.

The new identity is a solidary one. And much of what follows in the article is an examination of how social stresses seem to be flashpoints for the emergence of a (violent) social solidarity. The point for me is that there is a function in human make-up which is clearly 'meshable'. The interesting thing (which lies beyond the scope of this article) is the possibility that this meshable-ness can be evoked and harnessed in other ways -including the emergence of corporisations with less violent modi operandi or raisons d'etre.

First women fined under France's Burka ban

Well, I've been wondering when it would happen, and here it is:
First women fined under France's Burka ban | RFI:

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.

One of the things I pointed out in earlier comments is that this arguably flouts the EDHR, and so it is no surprise to read that this will be tested:
"Yann Gré, who is the lawyer for the two women, declared that they will appeal against the ruling and are ready to take the case before the European Court of Human Rights."
Of course, this is a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut situation. It is estimated that about 2000 women in France wore niqab before the law. This may now have halved. I'm no fan of niqab, but I don't think that bearing down on people's beliefs like this is a terrible afront to freedom of conscience. Which is the point of the EDHR's protecting of life-stance beliefs. Far from creating a neutrality, the French form of secularism creates a public sphere in the image of humanistic rationalism. It is itself a belief-system and it, ironically, persecutes other belief systems whose actors cannot enter the public realm shorn of their life-shaping commitments.

Memory and representation

Broadly speaking this is a good corrective to the moral panic sort of stuff we've been seeing lately that this title refers to Google Is Not Making You Stupid : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR. I found myself, musing over a side-bar this time though.

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 differentials and the adverse impacts on UK plc

Worth checking out, this report.
One Society � The gulf between employees’ pay and chief executives’ pay, and the adverse impacts on UK plc:
One of the findings caught my attentions:

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.

And it caught my attention because this issue of externalising costs means that the issue really is of interest and concern to the tax payer, aka the voter aka government. It is in our interest to be wary of private enterprise which talks the talk of the market but is surreptitiously sponging off the public purse (and it happens far more than the rhetoric would have you believe, the free market is rarely what it is cracked up to be).

The recommendations of the report seem, in this light, eminently sensible.

chotomising in your head: starting to nam

Yeah, I just made up the word 'chotomising' (from 'dichotomy' -I didn't want to retain the idea of simply cutting into two; perhaps 'polychotomy' and a cognate verb might do the trick in some cases...). Any how, the main point is to highlight this research which shows that the already-established 'statistical learning' tool that we humans seem to have, is what enables the mental boundary-making which enables 'naming' to take place. See here:
Watching the world in motion, babies take a first step toward language:

"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."

This is something I'm now pondering in relation to my theology of culture work relating to the naming of the animals... obviously!

Better to light a candle ...

When I started my new job as co-ordinating chaplain at Northumbria University, I inherited a strapline for the chaplaincy; an old favourite Jewish saying: "It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness." There was a simple drawing of a lighted candle that tended to do duty as a kind of logo. While trawling through the university's archive of approved images for publicity I came across the one that this one is based on. It has now been made into a large screen-poster for standing behind tables when we do fairs, induction events and the like. I really like it because it focuses visually on the lighting rather than the candle, which feels more at the heart of the saying. And also, the image is lush.