Today I reread the first chapter of "Beyond Sensation" and summarized the following content.
Imagine someone asking you who you are, what is your first reaction? Is it your name? But if people want to further ask about your entire situation, then your answer should include height, weight, age, all emotional information, secrets that you have never shared with others, etc., including your attitude. If the questioner continues to ask, "How did you become the way you are now?" then you might answer that it is my personality, I became this way because I wanted to, these are my style and attitude. This answer seems natural, but in a larger sense, it is incorrect. The influence of the world on us is much greater than most people.
In summary, there are at least the following influences:
- Influence of time and place
- Influence of popular ideas
- Influence of popular culture
- Manipulation of science
- Influence of psychology
Influence of time and place:
You are not only a human being, but also a human being in a specific time and place. This time and place are at least not determined by yourself, because you were born... So the cultural customs and beliefs of your birth environment limit your experiences and influence your thinking patterns. If you were born in the 19th century, you may not oppose young children working in factories, and you may not consider the special needs of teenagers (the concept of adolescence was not proposed until 1904).
If you grew up in the Middle East, then obviously you may be closer to the United States. If you were born in China in the 1980s, you may also be closer to the United States. But if you were born in China in the 2010s, then you may not have a good impression of the United States.
Daniel Kahneman said that people in different regions have different punctuality habits: in the United States, being 5 minutes late is allowed; but in Arab countries, being 30 minutes late is normal; in the UK, being 15 minutes late is correct; an Italian may be 2 hours late.
In short, living in different times and cultures will make you a completely different person. Even if you are a very rebellious person who does not conform to the local values of time and place, they still represent your life background-in other words, they will still affect your response patterns.
Influence of popular ideas:
If we can realize the close connection and meaning of the ideas we encounter, we can quickly distinguish what is right and what is foolish, but we rarely realize this, we accept ideas on the surface and accept them, rarely or not at all. Consider their relevant meanings. Over time, whether we realize it or not, our behavior is influenced by these meanings.
Consider a series of events caused by popular ideas that were popular in psychology more than a century ago and continue to this day. This idea is: "Intelligence is determined by genes and cannot be increased."
This view prompted researchers to design intelligence tests, the most famous of which is the test that determined that the average mental age of white Americans is 13 years old, while the average mental age of immigrants from Russia is 11.34 years old, Italians are 11.01 years old, Poles are 10.74 years old, and blacks are 10.41 years old.
After reading the test results, educators believed that it was meaningless to try to improve students' intelligence, so they replaced academic courses with vocational courses and adopted an approach to teach academic facts rather than judgment processes; legislators decided to take some measures to prevent intellectually disabled people from entering the country after understanding the test results, so they modified immigration laws to discriminate against Southern Europeans and Central Europeans.
These are the most obvious influences of genetic determinism, but they are certainly not the only influences.
The countless ideas you encounter will affect your beliefs and behaviors in a similar way-sometimes the influence is small, sometimes it is far-reaching. Even if you accept these ideas unconsciously, this situation will occur.
Influence of popular culture:
In the past few centuries, family and teachers were the most important factors influencing children, sometimes the only factors. However, today the influence of popular culture is greater. What impact does popular culture have on us? We only need to consider the influence of celebrity endorsements frequently used in modern advertisements on the public. This method has led many people to develop emotional and impulsive habits. They also tend to have different values from those taught by family and school. Advertisements often depict play as more fulfilling than work, self-satisfaction as more desirable than self-control, and materialism as more meaningful than idealism.
Popular culture prevents many people from developing mature attention spans. Do you remember my definition of attention-time plus intentionality, both are indispensable. They expect classrooms and workplaces to provide the same stimulation as short videos, which is of course impossible, so they say that work is boring and lacks a sense of accomplishment. They also don't read books that require them to think because they have been trained to be impatient, just like Pavlov's dogs... (no derogatory meaning, just arguing the influence of popular culture on people)
Manipulation of science:
Pavlov's dogs are the most famous, and experiments on conditioned reflexes have made the manipulation of human thoughts and behaviors a science...
Solomon Asch's experiments showed that simply placing some positive adjectives in front, participants gave positive evaluations. But when jealousy was placed in front and intelligence was placed behind, the participants gave negative evaluations.
The same experiment also shows that human memory can be manipulated, and the way questions are asked can change the details in a person's memory, and even make a person remember things that never happened.
Influence of psychology:
In the past, our grandmothers taught us that people should be self-disciplined, self-critical, and humble, and that being self-centered is a bad habit. Hard work can bring a sense of accomplishment, and a sense of accomplishment can bring satisfaction and self-confidence. Our grandmothers' generation has internalized these cultural values. But today, it has completely turned around, being self-centered has turned from a bad habit to a virtue, and people who are dedicated to helping others are considered to have a pleasing personality. Whether we agree or not, the attitudes, values, and beliefs of all of us are more or less influenced by psychology.
So how can we become independent individuals?
Based on the previous discussion, it seems that we should not consider personality as something innate, but as something acquired after birth. Personality comes from realizing that it is impossible to escape the influence of others and the environment. The essence of personality is vigilance, and we need to do the following to help us:
- Treat your first reaction to anyone, anything, or any situation as tentative. Do not accept it before studying it, no matter how attractive it may be.
- Determine why you have such a reaction. Consider whether your reaction is influenced by others' opinions, and if possible, determine what experiences have caused you to have such a reaction.
- Think about other possible reactions you may have to this person or thing.
- Ask yourself if there are more appropriate alternative reactions. Remember to resist the influence of conditioned reflexes.
Make sure you are truly an independent person, not just claiming to be one. These guidelines need to be carefully examined.