@Randem

I’d like to take a moment to talk about mind control. Mind control is the ultimate power; you can use it to influence others, to alter your own reality, and to make personal gains or profit. The possibilities are endless.

Now let’s be clear, I’m not talking about some ESP or other hocus pocus that you might see in a movie. This isn’t some Jedi mind trick, and it’s not hypnosis. It’s much simpler, much more down-to-earth, and yet much more powerful if you learn to use it.

In other words, I’m not talking about controlling other people’s minds, I’m talking about controlling your own. Frankly, yours is the only mind that you have the power to control anyway.

Why So Negative?
Considering all the facts and evidence may be the most logical course of action, and may lead to the most accurate and reasonable decisions, but it takes time. When a prehistoric human was faced with a new threat — for instance, a hungry lion — considering all the facts and evidence would have taken too long and he would have been eaten. Thus, our brains are equipped to take shortcuts. We have the power to assume. We developed the ability to make quick, loose judgment calls without considering all the evidence, because the ability to assume proved to be beneficial to survival.

We humans are biologically evolved to favor negativity. As a simple survival trait, natural selection favors pessimism because those who are too trusting or too nonchalant would not have survived, while those who were cautious or skeptical were likely to live to tell about it… and to reproduce.

So, to greatly oversimplify the complicated topic of evolutionary psychology, that explains why it is so easy to see the bad in a situation, or to assume the worst about something someone says. It’s built in to our DNA! We humans are natural skeptics. We are natural pessimists. Murphy’s Law is a product of evolution, and so is the “why me?” attitude.

Unlike our ancestors, however, we don’t face daily challenges to our survival. We’ve learned about man-eating tigers in school so we don’t have to guess at their motives… but moreover, the odds of encountering one in daily life are inordinately low!

There aren’t many threats to our survival lurking around the corner. Civilization has provided us with governments and laws and hospitals and health care. We’ve learned about germs and disease and all-in-all, modern civilization has made it pretty easy to survive. Yet we still have that evolved propensity for negativity, and now it’s working against us!

The Power of Positivity
Caution and skepticism work because our brains have evolved to use shortcuts, but those same shortcuts can be exploited to favor positivity and optimism. Instead of assuming the worst in a situation, you can make the conscious choice to assume the best. And doing so repeatedly will make it a habit.

I hear people all the time talking about fear of failure. They’re afraid to try something because they might not succeed. But failure when trying something new, like investing in stocks or starting your own business is a far different thing than the failure our ancestors would experience if they weren’t able to escape that hungry predator.

All the most successful people in history have understood this same concept: failure is not a bad thing. Instead of fearing failure, successful people welcome it. They see the positive, rather than the negative: they learn from failure, rather than sulking in it.

Perception is Reality
The power of our evolved ability to assume is that we are not consciously aware of the difference between an assumption and a fact. It truly is a shortcut, leading to the same place: belief. What you perceive becomes your reality.

If you believe that you are cursed, you will find the evidence of it everywhere you look. If you believe that people are out to get you, you will see yourself as the victim in every interaction you have. If you believe in Murphy’s Law, things really will go wrong at every turn.

But the opposite can be true, too. You can choose to believe that people are inherently good, and you will find that they will prove you right. You can choose to believe that there is no such thing as a lose-lose — that every choice has a positive outcome — and you will benefit from that attitude as you go through life.

Success is a choice. Popularity is a choice. Happiness is a choice. It’s all in your mind. No one else can make you unhappy if you choose to be happy. No one else can take away your joy. Only you make the choice.

The power of mind control is choosing how you will perceive the world, rather than defaulting to those negative assumptions.

Today is “no” day. This is my experiment: no matter what I am asked today, my answer will be “no”. I want to see just how much the words matter, and how much of the true meaning is conveyed through tone and body language. It’s already proving to be quite fun!

You’re riding down in the elevator, and you reach the lobby. The doors open, and before you get a chance to move, there are a dozen people already pushing into the elevator before it’s even empty. It happens every day.

The crowd in the lobby doesn’t even wait to see if there are actually people on the elevator… they just see the doors open and start climbing in… only acknowledging your presence if they happen to bump into you on their self-concerned journey to the upper floors.

It’s rude. And I don’t stand for it. When I’m riding in an elevator, I stand directly in front of the door once I get near my destination floor. When the doors open I stand firm, blocking entrance for anyone who doesn’t give me space to exit.

We’ve all been that hurried passenger, anxious to get into the elevator. But why do some people eventually slow down and look while others never learn?

How might the various schools of thought answer this question? Let’s see…

Social determinism
The passengers who wait calmly must come from better homes and have higher education, whereas those who push their way into the elevator without concern for people trying to exit must come from broken homes with divorced parents, and have attended bad schools.

Environmental determinism
The patient people who wait for the elevator to empty must come from warmer climates, which formed lazy, relaxed attitudes, while the impatient people are from colder climates and have a more driven work ethic.

Evolutionary psychology
There were no elevators in the Savannah, so our minds are not evolved to deal with the conditions of vertical transportation.

Chaos theory
A pigeon flapping its wings in the promenade outside caused a chain reaction of events eventually leading to the urgency, or lack thereof, of passengers to enter the elevator car.

Freudian psychology
The lobby is a cold, scary place, and passengers long to enter the warm, womb-like safety of the elevator… no doubt due to some repressed sexual desire for their parents. The patient ones are simply repressing their oedipal sexual urges to penetrate the elevator.

Jungian psychology
Those who push their way into the elevator without empathy for the passengers trying to exit have very repressed shadow selves due to failure to admit their own failures, shortcomings, and weaknesses.

Pavlovian psychology
After being hit by the closing doors, or being left behind for not boarding the elevator fast enough, people eventually learn to enter the elevator as forcefully as necessary in order to get aboard and avoid negative stimuli.

Then there’s Randem Psychology. My theory is simple: those who push their way into the elevator, ignoring the passengers who try to exit, are inconsiderate, self-absorbed, rude. They’re assholes, and they need to be knocked down a peg. And that’s why I block the door and prevent their entry until they make room for the current passengers to exit.

When I was young, the older people around me talked about how tough experiences “build character”. For most of my life I’ve had the impression that character defined what type of person you are.

Parents and churches and other sources of moral influence teach us to be loyal, responsible, courageous, clean, decisive, flexible, generous, and kind. Likewise, we’re taught that these things are “good”, and that disloyalty, irresponsibility, cowardice, untidiness, indecisiveness, inflexibility, miserliness, and unkindness are “bad”.

These are very black-and-white, very absolute terms that portray character as a duality, forcing us into roles of either good or bad. You’re kind? Oh then you’re a good character. You’re indecisive? Hmmm, you must have lousy character.

But a different view of the subject of character occurred to me as I was reading The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. While discussing a psychological phenomenon called Fundamental Attribution Error, Gladwell quotes the psychologist Walter Mischel, who refers to it as a sort of “releasing valve”:

When we observe a woman who seems hostile and fiercely independent some of the time but passive, dependent and feminine on other occasions, our reducing valve usually usually makes us choose between the two syndromes. We decide that one pattern is in the service of the other, or that both are in the service of a third motive. She must be a really castrating lady with a facade of passivity — or perhaps she is a warm, passive-dependent woman with a surface defense of aggressiveness. But perhaps nature is bigger than our concepts and it is possible for the lady to be a hostile, fiercely independent, passive, dependent, feminine, aggressive, warm, castrating person all-in-one. Of course which of these she is at any particular moment would depend on who she is with, when, how, and much, much more. But each of these aspects of her self may be a quite genuine and real aspect of her total being.

Based on this type of thinking, a person is not a “good” character or a “bad” character. No one is purely honest or dishonest, decisive or indecisive, responsible or irresponsible, but rather they are sometimes honest, neat, reliable, or generous and other times dishonest, or messy, or unreliable, or miserly depending on situations or circumstances.

This makes much more sense. We all carry the genetic potential for loyalty and disloyalty, honesty and dishonesty, generosity and selfishness. And moreover, we have circumstantial motive for exhibiting both sides of the duality, depending on a given context. So what is character?

My new thinking is that character describes a tendency for either sticking to, or straying from, the path of least resistance. It’s wrong to say that someone does or does not have character. A person is not honest or dishonest, responsible or irresponsible, neat or messy, but rather a combination of all of them.

For instance, if you got caught with your hand in the cookie jar, and mom has a soft spot for honesty, then honesty is the path of least resistance. But if dad doesn’t care about reasons, honesty isn’t going to get you anywhere and you might have a better motivation for a lie. Telling mom the truth means nothing, but telling dad the truth shows strong character. Likewise, depending on further context, taking the risk of lying to mom might show strong character too.

Trying to be any one side of the duality, and completely eschew the other, seems to yield disastrous results. For instance, people who become the definition of neatness, banishing any trace of mess, are not thought of as having strong character; they’re called obsessive-compulsive. Those who are always completely honest, are considered naive, and usually tactless. And those who are overly generous are (ironically) called needy.

So what is character? I think it describes a propensity to make choices that are in opposition to the natural path of least resistance. In essence, it is having power over your very nature.

Kinda like James Bond. Now there’s a guy with strong character.

When in doubt, people look to the collective opinion for how to proceed. If a lot of people are wearing flip-flops and polo shirts, they’re in style and we feel more comfortable wearing them ourselves. If a beggar is asking for food on a busy downtown street, it’s likely we’ll ignore him if that’s what everyone else is doing. It’s called social proof.

There was a UFO cult here in Chicago in the ’60s. They believed the world would be destroyed in another great flood, but that 8 hours before it happened, a UFO would come by and pick up the cult members, taking them to safety. When they believed they were right, they did not accept new members. But after the big day came and went, with no flood and no UFO, they started actively recruiting new members. Why? Because they were looking for social proof.

And that’s kinda like what happens in relationships. You know… when you’re dating someone, and you have a fight, you turn to your friends and tell them your side — not because you want advice, but because you want their agreement, their social proof. (Social proof is even stronger when it comes from people we know.)

It’s even worse when people break up. It’s so easy to seek out all your friends and tell them horrible stories about the new ex-, not because it’s information they need… but because you want them to support the breakup. You want their social proof.

It’s perfectly natural, and largely unavoidable. Evolutionary psychologists will say it’s built into our genes. I think they’re right. It helps reduce the complexity of the number of decisions we have to make every day.

But in the end, we don’t respect groupthink. After all, trends are easy to folllow, but think about the people who start them. Don’t the majority of trends get started by the same minority of people? …a few independent people, who are strong-willed enough to do what they like, or what they want, or what they think is right, regardless of the logic of the crowd?

You can’t really blame people for following the groupthink. But you can’t exactly respect them, either.

If the whole crowd is walking past a homeless man, deliberately ignoring him, you will think nothing of walking past and ignoring him too. But if the street were completely empty, just you and him, and you had to walk past him, would you still be able to pretend you didn’t notice him asking for money? Or would you fish out some coins and try to help?

The problem with social proof is when it prevents us from doing the right thing, simply because nobody else is doing the right thing. And the evidence shows when we’re alone and our actions don’t match those from when we were in the group.

If you bad talk your ex- all day to your friends, and spend all day insisting you hate him, but then once you’re alone and away from your friends you call him and try to apologize, that makes you a hypocrite. It makes you inauthentic.

Don’t worry. It’s not so bad. You’re just like everyone else. Unfortunately, I’m looking for someone who stands out — who’s not just like everyone else. I don’t want just another hypocritical face in the crowd.

Yesterday’s 60-Second Science podcast at Scientific American discussed the “six basic rules of persuasion” that Joe Torre used to his advantage. The reason I find this particularly interesting is because this comes from the book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, which I am currently in the middle of reading.

In fact, it’s all the more fascinating, given that last night I read about marketing research companies sending money with their surveys, and then this morning my coworker mentioned that he just received money in an envelope that he was about to feed to the shredder.