I am quite interested in what I call “postmodern identity theory”. I’ve tried to define it a few times in blog posts (most recently) but I’m mostly just waving my hands around. Here’s another try:

Modernist identity theory says that people have fundamental attributes that they carry around with them throughout life. In early-modern theory these attributes were shared by a group, so Brits would act British rather than go native in the colonies. Late-modern theory says that fundamental attributes differ from person to person – they’re what make people unique.

Exactly how we characterize fundamental attributes has gone through a few changes over the years. From mission and principles to values in the most recent shift.

When you see someone do something, you can either say they’re reacting to their situation or acting according to their fundamental attributes. Your theory of mind says that sometimes people do stuff because they have consistent, internal attributes; and sometimes their behavior is dictated by a context-dependent, external situation. Psychologists have noted that, when in doubt, you’ll err on the side of fundamental attributes. You think Alice does X because Alice is the kind of person who does X not because X seemed like the best thing to do from Alice’s point of view.

Postmodernism says that modernist identity theory is just one big fundamental attribution error. People don’t have fundamental attributes. Alice does X because she’s socially constructed that way.

I’m checking out MoodGym, an online CBT programme. Peep this test:

—

In the last two weeks, I have felt:

Things always go wrong for me
I’ll never be able to do anything right
If only I could be a better person
I’m worthless, useless and inadequate
I’m unlovable
I always mess things up
I’m exceptionally stupid
I’m a fraud
Things should always go right for me
I’m a failure
Life has turned me into an angry person
Nobody likes me
I should be good at everything all the time

—

Apparently:

67% of people around my age score 0 or 1 on this test. More than one, other things being equal, means you need an attitude adjustment.

I scored 11, so there you have it. And I think I just got a bonus point:

“If I had my act together, I’d be getting free medicine for this shit.”

Which I’ve learned to re-frame: “I would like to get organized on the mental health front.”

I suppose if I was really on top of things, I’d now add that to my GTD system.

Re-framed: “Which I’ve now added to my GTD system.”

Fuck, do I have to do this for every thought?

Re-framed: “I look forward to doing this for every thought!”

Most people have a typical way of being in relationships, particularly of the romantic variety (e.g., your friend who always gets dumped, your friend who fears commitment, your stalker friend). In psychobabble, this is your attachment style, and it originated in your parents’ treatment of you beginning when you were just an adorable bouncing baby.

There are 3 types of insecure (read: bad) attachment:

Preoccupied: these are your clingers. They fall in love with you almost instantly and you can never love them back hard enough.

Fearful-avoidant: these folks kinda long to be loved, but are terrified of being hurt, so they run run run.

Dismissing-avoidant: much like the fearful folks, but here the terror is so strong that the need for love is completely denied.

Then there is secure (read: good) attachment, which comes from having parents who were warm, caring, and consistently responsive to your needs. (“Just like my parents,” you’re surely thinking). “It is easy for me to become emotionally close to others. I am comfortable depending on others and having others depend on me. I don’t worry about being alone or having others not accept me.” This is how a secure person might describe herself (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991). Sounds fake right? It seems to me that the only people who fit this description are those I don’t know very well.

Both beautifully and tragically, the attachment system has adapted evolutionarily to be highly flexible. This means that parents who are simply “good enough,” despite some lapses in unconditional positive regard, should be sufficient to produce securely attached offspring. Sadly, it also means that there is plenty o’ room for parents (mom usually gets most of the blame) to screw up your chances of ever truly loving or being loved. It’s tricky because to be a “good enough” parent, secure attachment is a prerequisite. Our grandparents likely didn’t have warm, caring, consistently responsive parents, so neither did our parents, so neither did we… And so the intergenerational transmission of insecure attachment continues ad infinitum. (How to break the cycle? Therapy! But I may be slightly biased).

Perhaps this is due to my line of work (nearly-psychologist) or my reasons for becoming such (edited for length), but  I am highly skeptical of the following statistic: approximately 50% of people are securely attached. Come on. Did the “secure” description sound like you or any of your exes? I didn’t think so. So, if 50% are secure, the question is where are they hiding? I don’t know, but if you see one of these mythical beauties, rising like a phoenix from the ashes of his/her childhood, skin glinting like diamonds in the sun, grab this person tightly and hold on for dear life.

Having won the War on Mental Illness, psychologists decided that virtue ethics would benefit from some modernism and invented “positive psychology”. Their primary result so far has been to determine that Hope is not one of the Seven Cardinal Virtues. They then went and analyzed the Six Cardinal Virtues into sub-virtues.

This book Positive Psychology at the Movies lists movies that illustrate each sub-virtue:

8 Mile

if you mock people’s mothers with enough Wisdom-Creativity, you can escape from post-apocalyptic Detroit

Sideways

if you have enough Wisdom-Curiosity to drink merlot, you can pick up chicks

25th Hour

if you don’t have Wisdom-Open-mindedness, you won’t imagine how everyone is out to get you

The Karate Kid

with the right Wisdom-Perspective, waxing Mr Miyagi’s truck is not child-abuse

Silence of the Lambs

nothing says Courage-Bravery like giving them the hose again

Kissing Jessica Stein

it takes great Courage-Integrity to admit you were lying about being a lesbian

The Sound of Music

the hills have Courage-Vitality/with the songs they have sung for over 9000 years

A Space Odyssey

Courage-Persistence, or drugs, is what it takes to get to the end of this movie

The New World

there is no Humanity-Love so pure as between a grown man and a thirteen-year-old girl

Equilibrium

gun-kata actually requires a surprising amount of Humanity-Social Intelligence

V for Vendetta

blowing stuff up is a good way to show Justice-Fairness

Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, The Matrix and Spartacus

are all great examples of Justice-Leadership in the fight for sexual-orientation equality

Super Size Me

because nothing says Temperance-Self-Regulation like eating junk food

Grizzly Man

Transcendence-Beauty is om nom nom

The New World

“oh Father, allow me to express my Transcendence-Gratitude for giving this continent to the Europeans”

Hustle and Flow

“[I Transcendence-Hope] to get rich ‘fore I leave up out this bitch”

Half Nelson

you know what’s full of Transcendence-Humor? crack addiction

The Tao of Steve

the right Transcendence-Spirituality will get you laid

The autism spectrum goes from neurotypical to nerdy to Asperger’s to autistic disorder. Some psychologists say that schizophrenia has a similar spectrum from neurotypical to gregarious to schizotypical to schizophrenia. These spectra fit together to form a full spectrum.

There’s a popular theory in philosophy of mind that autism is caused by a deficiency in the “theory of mind module”: the part of your brain that allows you to figure out what other people are thinking and see things from their point of view. It’s suggested that schizophrenia could be an overactive theory of mind: hallucinations are leaks from simulation of other minds, paranoid delusions arise from assuming that other people are thinking about you, etc.

It strikes me as rather stereotypical, but autism has also been framed as an overly “masculine” brain: a focus on things and logical thinking over people and play. Schizophrenia could be correspondingly “feminine”: high empathy and poor logic skills.

There’s some correlation between autism and high physical growth, and between schizophrenia and low physical growth (all covered in this paper so thorough, it must have been written by an autistic). So guess what the proposed cause of this spectrum of disorders is? Genome imprinting: your mom’s genes are trying to make you schizophrenic and your dad’s genes are trying to make you autistic; if they’re balanced, you end up neurotypical.

Evolutionary psychologists believe that differences in optimal mating strategies between men and women lead to widespread differences in behavior. These theories have been widely popularized and have a huge impact on folk psychology.

The most cited difference is the energy investment in growing an immature ovum to a baby. This is said to explain, for example, why women are choosier with their sexual partners.

Another difference that might be far more deeply ingrained in our culture, is the reproductive window: babies are optimally produced by young women. This is said to explain, for example, why almost all heterosexual men are ephebophiles.

My entire life plan relies on the fact that I can continue to date women I find attractive: greater than 50% of such women are younger than me at any future point in time. But the NY Times has reviewed a number of studies that find a correlation between father age and child malfunction. The article briefly considers the question: what if these science facts become integrated into our culture and the reproductive window is applied to men?

Neo-classical economics assumes that people are rational agents: given a choice, they will always choose the option that maximizes utility (wealth, happiness, etc). And yet, as with most things in economics, actual observation shows this to be a poor model for reality. Instead of rationality, it turns out that “satisficing” is an excellent model: given a choice, people will choose an option that does a “good enough” job of maximizing utility.

I like to think of satisficing in terms of computational theory: people make choices using an algorithm that yields increasingly accurate answers the more computational resources are devoted to it; but the optimal answer would require huge resources, so a “good enough” answer must suffice.

I believe we not only satisfice when we’re making decisions but also when we implement them. The concept is closely related to “settling”. We constantly decide that what we have readily available is good enough, whether it’s paint colour or a mate.

Life has sparse survival decisions and many inconsequential decisions between essentially interchangable choices. Most of the interesting decisions in life are aesthetic choices and for these we consistently satisfice.

I’ve been wondering lately if satisficing increases stress? Is it frustrating to know that greater effort could achieve a more optimal answer? Do our brains’ decision processes dislike being halted before they complete? Life is a series of aesthetic choices and it pains us to make each one = life is suffering, the First Noble Truth.