Psychology

Psychology articles feature analysis about public health, policy, ethics, and society.

All psychology articles at Brownstone Institute are translated automatically into multiple languages.

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Mimetic Contagion

The Psychology of Mimetic Contagion

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Participation in the ritual, which lacks pragmatic advantages and requires sacrifice, demonstrates that the collective is higher than the individual. For this portion of the population, it doesn’t matter whether the measures are absurd. Think of walking into a restaurant with a mask on, and removing it as soon as one sits down, for example.

The Psychology of Mimetic Contagion Read Journal Article

The Urge to Shame, Purge, and Exclude Diminishes Ourselves

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In these times of summarily rejecting people we disagree with or treating those with differing opinions as dangerous or diseased, I have felt led to remember what I would have missed if I had rejected certain people with whom I disagreed on significant issues but from whom I had also received wonderful gifts.

The Urge to Shame, Purge, and Exclude Diminishes Ourselves Read Journal Article

What Can the Stanford Prison Experiment Tell Us

What Can the Stanford Prison Experiment Tell Us about Life in the Pandemic Era?

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Given the world in which we have been living for the past two years, despite the numerous flaws critics have found in both Zimbardo’s work, it would seem that both he and other members of social psychology’s golden age can still tell us a lot about how social roles, oppressive environments and powerful authorities can alter the psyches and actions of normal people in pathological ways.

What Can the Stanford Prison Experiment Tell Us about Life in the Pandemic Era? Read Journal Article

The Moral Cruelty of the Pandemic Response

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Beyond empathy, to combat a psychic epidemic we need meaning in our lives. Not an ersatz top-down solidarity, dreamt up by technocratic communications experts, but genuine, socially meaningful relationships, purpose and values. Lockdowns and restrictions squashed exactly what we need to flourish as human beings in order to counteract a psychic epidemic. For the good of the collective, we must recapture meaning and values as individuals. 

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The Nudge: Ethically Dubious and Ineffective

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By going with the grain of how we think and act, the state-employed ‘nudgers’ can covertly shape our behaviour in a direction deemed desirable by the regime of the day – an appealing prospect for any government. The ubiquitous deployment of these behavioural strategies – which frequently rely on inflating emotional distress to change behaviour – raises profound moral questions.

The Nudge: Ethically Dubious and Ineffective Read Journal Article

Some People Will Follow Authority – “The Science” – to Their Doom 

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And, even after the most cataclysmic events predicted by “The Science” have not come to pass, there remains a core group of true believers who are convinced “The Science” had simply gotten the date or the variant wrong and that the End of Days are still to come unless we all remain vigilant by forever being ready to mask up and lock down when “The Science” says it’s time.

Some People Will Follow Authority – “The Science” – to Their Doom  Read Journal Article

the-joker

The Joker – A Premonition

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The Joker is not just one man, not just a crazy person, but the instantiation of the insane and morbid dangers associated with persistent personal failure backed by a conviction that when there is a fundamental conflict between a vision and reality, it can only be solved by the creation of chaos and suffering. As unpleasant as it is, The Joker is the movie we needed to see to understand and then prepare for the horrors that this unchecked mentality can and did unleash on the world. 

The Joker – A Premonition Read Journal Article

A Partial List of the Myriad Abuses That Facemasks Inflict on Our Children

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Facemasks are a radical and unnatural impingement on normal physical, mental and emotional functioning. Over time, this can change your personality – such as making you less social, less outgoing, more suspicious, decreased tendency or desire to be kind and so on.

A Partial List of the Myriad Abuses That Facemasks Inflict on Our Children Read Journal Article

Five Ways That People Refused to be Fooled by Lockdown Madness

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Various kinds of people stood apart from the herd at the outset, while some escaped it after it formed. Here we try to describe the main pathways to escape from the madness. We do this only partly out of intellectual curiosity: such an exercise also provides clues as to which of those still in thrall to lockdown orthodoxy might be close to liberating themselves, and what is needed to complete their unshackling.

Five Ways That People Refused to be Fooled by Lockdown Madness Read Journal Article

The Antisocialization of Our Nation

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We antisocialized ourselves, fully withdrew from random commingling, and in a way filtered ourselves from society. Life lost its luster when expected to test or inoculate oneself with something with no longitudinal safety assessments in order to live a life anything close to what we once took for granted.

The Antisocialization of Our Nation Read Journal Article

The Psychological Cruelty of Denying Natural immunity

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Take away the knowledge of natural immunity, and thus the realization that there can be a better life on the other side of sickness, and you leave people with existential emptiness and a lasting sense of despair. No one can live that way. No one should have to. 

The Psychological Cruelty of Denying Natural immunity Read Journal Article