Study: Even the smallest external influences can control us

[JGeropoulas]

To me, this simple little study is an excellent demonstration of how vulnerable we “machines” are to external influences unless we work hard to become conscious beings.

April, 2012 Monitor On Psychology (Members magazine published by the American Psychological Association)

In one study, in press in Psychological Science, David Pizarro, Ph.D., a political psychology professor at Cornell, and his colleagues asked randomly selected students to fill out a survey of their political attitudes. They found that the students endorsed more conservative attitudes when they stood next to a bottle of hand sanitizer or near a sign reminding them to wash their hands. In another study, published last year in Emotion, students who filled out a survey in room with a noxious odor reported feeling less warmth toward gays than students in a normal-smelling room.

That may sound like an unlikely result, but past research suggests that subtle reminders of contamination can trigger a knee-jerk fear of outsiders - a xenophobic disgust reaction that may have once served to protect people from diseases carried by other tribes. Today, however, it has little use, Pizarro says. "Disgust should motivate you to not touch really dirty things, but I don't think it should motivate social, political or moral judgments.”

“All the people you see, all the people you know, all the people you may get to know, are machines working solely under the power of external influences…When a machine knows itself it is then no longer a machine, at least not such a machine as it was before.”

ISOTM (page 19)

 

[whitecoast]

Oh gosh that's so unnerving, how people can be so easily influenced :unsure:. I just hope doing the work helps to mitigate done if that, or at least keeps us vigilant against that type of suggestion.

 

[engagedinattempting]

Think how easily a small unsubstantiated slander can influence a person's standing in, for example, the workplace. Very few people will confront the source with a demand for the facts; instead, the poisonous lie will usually be embellished a bit and passed on to the next person. It doesn't take long before the victim is friendless and alienated.

It's been revealed to us by many knowledgeable people how easily manipulated we are as mere machines, our buttons clearly revealed to those ready to push them to further their own ends. Hard living, this place, when you're standing alone, naked and usable.