Psychology articles feature analysis about public health, policy, ethics, and society.
All psychology articles at Brownstone Institute are translated automatically into multiple languages.
Perpetual decline and fall is not inevitable. It is fixable but every powerful force out there, especially mainstream media, seems to stand against that. It is all designed to demoralize us and cause us to give up. We cannot accept this fate. There is still time, providing that we understand what is happening and the grave consequences of letting it all take place without a fight.
Lockdowns, Closures, and the Loss of Moral Clarity Read More »
We need pandemic policies rooted in human nature—policies that meet people where they are, not where some sanctimonious Twitter warriors decide they should be. Throwing the S-word around doesn’t earn respect or cooperation from the accused. Au contraire: when pelted with character-assassinating epithets, people double down.
Selfish: The King of Covid Epithets Read More »
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 More »
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 More »
Now that the population has gotten used to one form of mobilization and a sizable fraction has found it enjoys the opportunities that mobilization opens up for bullying, new mobilizations for new excuses will be harder to resist.
Crowd Creation: A New Political Tool Read More »
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 More »
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.
The Moral Cruelty of the Pandemic Response Read More »
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 More »
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 More »
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 More »
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 More »
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 More »
