Author: Alycia

When we think of the leading causes of death in the developed world, we tend to think of cancer and heart disease. What we do not hear about as a cause of death is misinformation. I believe that diseases such as cancer and heart disease would not kill nearly as many people if not for the help of misinformation. Not only does misinformation kill, it also messes up people’s lives. It can cause people to suffer for years in abusive relationships. It can prevent people from thriving and achieving their potential. It can cause the incarceration of innocent people. It can cause unwarranted damage to one’s reputation. Indeed, misinformation can cause a lot of needless suffering.

Note that this post is meant to raise awareness of the grave harm that misinformation can cause, how easily it can spread, and how rampant it is. This post is not meant to be an authority on which information is misinformation and which is factual.

To understand the plethora of harm that misinformation can cause, we need to understand two things:
1) Decisions we make can dramatically alter the course of our lives and sometimes be a matter of life and death
2) Misinformation interferes with these decisions

Decisions we make can be a matter of life and death

When someone receives a cancer diagnosis, the decisions he/she makes can be a matter of life and death. One bad medical decision and the person can be dead. I had a neighbor who received a bone marrow transplant after he was told that it would add seven years to his life. The procedure caused his health to make a turn for the worse instead, and he was dead in a few months. Had he known beforehand what was going to happen, he would presumably not have made that decision.

Even when our decisions are not a matter of life and death, they can still dramatically affect the course of our lives. Examples include:

• whether to marry
• whom to marry
• whether to have children
• whether to smoke
• how to eat every day

Sometimes bad decisions can cause life-altering events like car accidents.

Sometimes when someone is a powerful government official, his/her decisions can affect the rest of society. The leader of a country may have to decide whether or not to go to war. Such a decision dramatically affects not only the home country, but also the rival country. Government policies affect what happens to you when you find yourself without any income, or in large amounts of college debt. Policies affect what rights you have, and whether a criminal faces jail time for certain offenses.

Misinformation interferes with decision making

I am not going to say that misinformation is the biggest cause of bad decisions, but it is a major cause. Ruthless dictators in history have even used misinformation to justify the atrocities that they committed so that they could continue committing those atrocities with minimal public rebellion. Adolf Hitler used propaganda to justify the Holocaust. Word has it that President Putin of Russia is spreading misinformation to his people to minimize rebellion against the invasion of the Ukraine.

In my opinion, misinformation affects public health the most. Misinformation can pervert the nutrition information given to the public regarding what constitutes a healthy diet. Misinformation can alter government regulations that are supposed to protect the public from toxic environmental substances such as asbestos, second-hand smoke and other toxic chemicals from industrial production. Misinformation can reduce the quality of medical treatments for various diseases. Misinformation can cause people to get blamed for their suffering when their suffering is caused by certain factors out of their control.

The needless suffering that misinformation causes is profound. It can prevent people from choosing life-saving health interventions, thereby leading to more suffering and premature death. It can cause someone to marry the wrong person, leading to years of unhappiness, possible abuse and bitter divorce. It can cause people to consume substances every day that are harming them without their realizing it.

Misinformation regarding climate change can cause widespread harm throughout society. Let us say that there really is climate change, but misinformation is spreading that says that climate change is a hoax. Politicians who buy into this hoax theory would prevent the passage of government policies that are important for addressing climate change, thereby allowing climate change to grow worse over time, leading to coastal flooding, increases in severe hurricane activity, forest fires, reduced food production, reduced food quality, and more deaths and destruction of property from natural disasters.

On the other hand, let us say that climate change is a hoax, but misinformation says that it is real and we need to do something about it. Politicians who buy into this misinformation would promote the passage of unnecessary government policies that would increase the prices of gas, electricity and central heating. These measures would hurt the poor the hardest. Such measures also could hurt the economy and result in the loss of millions of jobs.

What causes the spread of misinformation?

Here are some of the reasons that people spread misinformation:

• pride and arrogance
• preconceived bias
• wishful thinking
• negligence
• honest mistakes

Pride and arrogance: The medical profession

Pride and arrogance are not necessarily the first things that come to mind when we think of what motivates people to spread misinformation, but I believe it is a significant factor. One group of people that spreads misinformation out of pride and arrogance is medical doctors and medical researchers. Some (but certainly not all) of these highly educated people are arrogant, and therefore like to think that they are superior to the patients. They like to see themselves as gods in white lab coats who have the right to tell patients what to do.

The truth is that the most effective (and safe) remedy for the major killer diseases of the developed world is lifestyle changes. However, the health care system is ridden with money-driven corruption where the objective is to make money and not to cure disease. You need to understand that there is strong incentive to treat a disease, but also a strong disincentive to cure it. When disease is treated, the symptoms reduce or go away, but the underlying disease is still there. When the disease is cured, on the other hand, the underlying disease is gone, which means no more going to the doctor’s office, no more pills, no more procedures. Such a scenario would be great for patients, but would be a tragic loss for the health care system because it would mean the loss of customers. For this reason, medical doctors are only taught how to treat these chronic diseases (heart disease, cancer diabetes, autoimmune disease), not cure them. Note that even when medical doctors recommend some dietary changes, they do not tend to be sufficient to prevent disease progression, let alone allow for disease reversal.

A medical doctor, when consumed in pride, would never want to admit that he/she paid a fortune to go to medical school only to find out that laypeople who never even received a bachelor’s degree know how to cure chronic diseases that he/she was only taught how to treat. Furthermore, these cures are not made in a laboratory, but rather come from one’s backyard and from the supermarket. Overly proud medical doctors would rather deny the scientific evidence behind the efficacy of such lifestyle changes.

A medical doctor may say that there is “no scientific evidence” to back up lifestyle changes as effective treatments/cures for these chronic diseases. Do not be fooled. People wearing white lab coats do not necessarily know what they are talking about. There is ample scientific evidence that lifestyle changes are more effective in the treatment and cure of the major killer diseases, which I list at the end of this blog post.

Also listed at the end of this blog post are peer-reviewed science articles and other articles discussing the close-knit financial relationship between medical doctors and pharmaceutical companies. Also listed are articles discussing food industry corruption, including the corruption of health and nutrition information being given to the public. In other words, if you visit a dietitian or nutritionist, you are not necessarily going to receive scientifically sound diet or nutrition advice. As a result, you may continue to consume unhealthy foods every day without realizing it, and potentially be setting yourself up for a life of chronic disease and a slow premature death.

Cancer and heart disease do kill a lot of people, but they would not have been able to kill nearly as many people if not for the rampant spread of misinformation, much of which comes from the very doctors that we rely on to restore us to good health!

Pride and arrogance: laypeople

Both experts and non-experts can spread misinformation about a given topic. Because of the advent of the internet, most people have access to large amounts of information that they did not have access to before. We used to have to go to a library and search through the library archives to get information about a topic. Now it is so much easier to acquire large amounts of information from a smart phone in the palm of our hand, but it comes with a price — the spread of misinformation.

The problem is that laypeople generally do not know misinformation when they see it. Even educated intellectuals do not always recognize misinformation when they see it due to preconceived bias, group think and other factors. Yet many laypeople read articles on the internet, watch youtube videos and listen to podcasts, and then fall into the illusion that they are experts on whatever topic they are reading about. Some laypeople are arrogant enough to assume that they know the topic better than the experts with PhDs.

For example, during the coronavirus pandemic, people were reading articles, watching youtube videos and listening to podcasts about the coronavirus, and then assumed that they understood the virus better than infectious disease experts with PhDs. While everyday common sense can get you a long way, it does not tell you everything. For example, even though the virus is smaller than the openings in the fabric of a mask, the virus may still not penetrate the mask because it travels in droplets, which are large enough to not pass through the fabric of the mask.

When laypeople are arrogant enough to see themselves as experts on a subject—just because they watched some youtube videos and listened to some podcasts—they become vessels through which misinformation is spread. Such misinformation can in certain contexts cause preventable sickness and even deaths among large numbers of people.

Preconceived bias and wishful thinking

Forming beliefs based on prior beliefs rather than sound logic and evidence is common. In a way, it takes humility to admit that one’s prior beliefs were wrong, but it is necessary in order to adopt new beliefs based on new information. Not everyone has this kind of humility.

Prior beliefs are not the only thing that can lead to preconceived bias. Preconceived bias can form against anything that goes against mainstream thinking. For example, the vegan diet is very different from the mainstream diet, and many people fear that it can cause protein deficiency and other deficiencies. If, for example, a person is vegan and happens to have osteopenia (low bone density), others may automatically jump to the conclusion that the osteopenia is linked to the person being vegan, and figure that maybe the person is not consuming enough dairy. Obviously, lots of people who eat a standard diet also have osteopenia and osteoporosis. Furthermore, countries consuming the most dairy also have the highest rates of osteoporosis and hip fractures. Nevertheless, the people who are biased against the vegan diet may start to spread word that the vegan diet causes osteopenia just because of the one vegan they met who had osteopenia.

Sometimes even when there are research studies that refute someone’s preconceived bias, the person will still find a reason to cling to his/her prior beliefs. The person may even claim that these research studies have been “discredited”. When someone tells you that someone’s research has been discredited, be skeptical. It may just be that the results of the study go against mainstream thinking, which is often wrong anyway. A study can be controversial, but that does not mean that it should be discredited. For something to be discredited, it needs to be proven to be untrustworthy. This can happen in cases of fraud and conflicts of interest.

Sometimes people come to certain beliefs because of wishful thinking. To strengthen their convictions for what they want to be true, they may try to get other people to believe the same thing. This previous blog post presents more discussion of preconceived bias and wishful thinking.

Many times people will claim that something is lacking in scientific evidence without having ever done a search through the science literature. Perhaps they are going by what someone else said or they just expect the evidence to fall into their lap without their having to look for it. Therefore, when someone tells you that there “is no evidence” for something, you should ask them if they did a thorough search through the science literature. What search words and search engines did they use? What studies did they find?

People are usually reluctant to put in the time to do a thorough search through the science literature, but they often have plenty of time to state their opinion on the subject. I guess it is more fun to express one’s opinion than it is to do the research.

Negligence and honest mistakes

Another reason that people spread misinformation is negligence. It is easy to hear about something or read something, and just believe it without checking the facts or considering the source. Checking the facts tends to require a significant amount of work, and not everyone is willing to put in the effort and/or the time. If you think that checking the facts would be too much work, the least you can do is not spread the information to others. Just as you would not feed someone without making sure that the food is free from poison, you should not spread information without first making sure that it is factually correct.

Sometimes, however, people spread misinformation because they honestly believe it to be true, and they had no way of knowing otherwise. Such people are not at fault. As I discussed earlier, both experts and non-experts can spread misinformation, which begs the question: whom can we trust? When navigating through a sea of information, it can be hard for people—including experts—to spot misinformation.

“There is no evidence that…”

The expression “there is no evidence that…” is can be misleading and is often laced with the burden of proof logical fallacy. For example, when someone says there is no evidence that GMOs are unsafe, even if this statement is factually correct, it says nothing about whether or not GMOs are safe. Why? Because while there may be no evidence that GMOs are unsafe, there may not be evidence that GMOs are safe either. The individual, by only stating that there is no evidence that GMOs are unsafe, is shifting the burden of proof towards proving that GMOs are safe. In other words, the individual is taking the stance that we should by default assume that GMOs are safe until we find evidence otherwise. Such a stance is irresponsible and destructive.

In some cases when there is lack of evidence for something, it is because not enough studies have been done on the topic or studies that were done on the topic were inconclusive. When a study on the safety of GMOs is inconclusive, it means that no conclusions could be drawn and so the study neither tells us that GMOs are safe nor that GMOs are unsafe.

So when someone says something to you that starts with “there’s no evidence that…”, I say you should challenge him/her by asking him/her what evidence there was to the contrary. Lack of evidence does not necessarily qualify as evidence to the contrary.

My personal experience

I know first hand what it is like to have a chronic disease and be at the mercy of misinformation. Based on my experience, when you have a chronic disease, your biggest enemies are misinformation and a lack of good information. I had found that natural health doctors were able to help me in ways that the medical doctors did not. From a natural health doctor, I found out about food intolerances that I had, which I never found out about from a medical doctor. The natural health doctor was also able to cure the food intolerances with food desensitization therapy. After that, foods that used to bother me did not anymore. From another natural health doctor, I found out that I had small-intestine bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), and he told me about a diet that fixes it. The diet worked. Again, the medical gastroenterologist did not know to test for SIBO.

Now suppose that someone were to tell me that these natural health doctors are not real medical doctors, and are just a bunch of quacks. If I were to listen to such a person and stay away from these natural health doctors, I would never have found out that I had SIBO and would never have found out about my food intolerances. Needless suffering would have ensued for years to come.

One time I went to the emergency room because I had really bad pains in my legs. The ER doctor said I had arthritis and told me that I am “not 15 anymore”. In other words, I was told that I am getting old. I was 25 years old at the time! What I found out later was that the arthritis was caused by a reaction to the large amounts of gluten I was eating in the form of seitan. After just a few days of minimizing gluten intake, the pain went away. So much for getting old.

People with various problems are often told that they are “getting old” when really they are often just doing things to their bodies on a regular basis that their bodies do not like. I find it to be harmful and destructive to tell people to attribute their problems to factors outside of their control when in reality the problems are within their control. It is bad to tell people that they are getting old and cannot do anything about it when perhaps some simple lifestyle and medicinal interventions would have fixed the problem.

Summary

Critical thinking, rationality and diligent collection of good information are not the only things that shape someone’s beliefs. Someone’s beliefs also can be shaped by wishful thinking, pride, arrogance, preconceived biases, prejudice, etc. When people’s beliefs are shaped by these things, they are more likely to spread misinformation.

I advise you, the reader, to be careful of what information you divulge. If it is indeed misinformation, it is potentially a poisonous venom, particularly when it comes to people’s health. If someone is suffering from a serious health condition and is considering a somewhat unorthodox treatment approach, and you tell him/her that this approach is not backed by science without checking your facts, then for all you know you may be wrong, in which case you are potentially preventing the other person from undergoing an unorthodox treatment that would save his/her life. The misinformation that you divulge to this person may result in this person’s slow and painful premature death. A funeral could be taking place because of you.

Even if an unorthodox treatment does not work, is it high risk? Conventional health interventions tend to be the highest risk because they often involve invasive surgeries and toxic drugs. Some of the articles I list below discuss the dangers of conventional medical care. I am aware that extreme dietary changes come with risks as well, but how would that compare to bypass surgery or cancer chemotherapy?

What is worse than not knowing? In my opinion it is believing something that is not true.

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Ever witness a person say “you gotta earn my respect”? Sometimes in friendships and romantic relationships, one treats the other badly until the other one decides to stand up for him/herself. One man told me that his girlfriend was taking advantage of him. She had taken advantage of many other people as well. He said that when he stood up for himself and stopped accepting her bad treatment, he gained more of her respect. If you ask me, he would not have had to stand up to her if she were a good person.

Imagine a situation in the workplace where a pretty young lady in the work group is not being treated with much respect or being taken seriously. She decides to stand up for herself and talk back to them. She also proves that she is smart and knows what she is talking about. Now imagine the group proclaiming that she has officially “earned their respect”, and so they accept her as an equal. I imagine some members of the audience thinking “Good for her! That young lady showed that she is tough, and now the rest of the group respects her. What a happy ending…” What such members of the audience do not understand is that this young lady should not have had to earn their respect. One should consider that if she really did have to earn the group’s respect, then why is it that no other members of the group had to earn her respect?

People who make you have to earn their respect are placing themselves onto a pedestal above others. In their mind, they are on this grand high pedestal while the other people are down below looking up at them. They act as if their respect is a trophy carved out of gold, and that anybody who earns this trophy must feel good about him/herself for such a great accomplishment, as if it were equal to winning the Nobel Prize. One can only imagine that magnitude of arrogance and perhaps even narcissism behind this ridiculous behavior.

When a friend treats you badly, and you stand up for yourself, the friend may have more respect for you afterwards. Your friend may also start to treat you better and be nicer to you. Does this mean that the friendship is good now, and we can all live happily ever after? I say no. The friendship is meant to be terminated. The friend has shown his/her true colors. Even if your friend is nice to you now, it is not because he/she cares about you, but rather because he/she knows that he/she cannot get away with treating you badly. He/she knows now that if he/she treats you badly, there will be consequences. Evildoers often will only do evil to others when they think that they can get away with it. The niceness that your friend shows to you after you stand up for yourself is no manifestation of goodness. Your friend is still the same bad person that he/she was before.

Disrespectful people are generally less worthy of respect

Below is a hypothetical conversation between person A and person B.

A: Now that you have stood up to me and proven that you are tough, you have my respect
B: That’s funny, because as of now you have earned my lack of respect. Only second-rate human beings make others have to earn their respect.
A: Well, I guess I will have to earn your respect back. What do I have to do to earn your respect back?
B: Never make anybody have to earn your respect ever again. But I know you would never do that. You would only respect everybody when you are in my presence, and then revert back to your old self when I am not looking.
A: I guess you will have to trust me then.
B: Why would I trust you when I do not even respect you? It is too late. You have already shown your true colors…

In this scenario, person A has initially placed himself on a pedestal above person B and many other people for that matter. Person B is proclaiming his loss of respect for person A, thereby bringing person A off of the pedestal and into some ditch below person B. Person A, in response, tries to bargain. Person A figures that if he cannot be on his pedestal as he originally planned, he will try to at least be level with person B. Person B is not falling for it, though. Person B knows that person A is most likely doing whatever evil he can get away with, and is not buying person A’s claim that he is somehow going to become anything remotely resemblant of a decent person overnight.

When people make you have to earn their respect, they just are not worth your time of day. They are not good people and you are better off not having any relationship with them at all.

Sometimes when a person criticizes a person or thing, the person has the illusion of superiority over whatever it is that he/she is criticizing. In reality, we do not become superior to an entity by simply criticizing it. People criticize things they do not understand all the time. Furthermore, criticism usually occurs because of a disagreement, and certainly disagreeing with someone or something does not make you superior to it. The same goes with disrespect. When a person disrespects another, it does not make that person superior to the other person. Disrespect usually says more about the one doing the disrespecting that it does about the one being disrespected. Indeed, the disrespect is usually unwarranted.

The definition of respect varies

In the dictionary, respect is defined as a feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements. Based on this definition, it would make sense that respect has to be earned.

Let us say that you are on a team of software engineers, and a new guy has just joined the team. Are the other team members supposed to assume by default that this new guy can’t write code to save his life until he proves himself? I think not. To make such an assumption is an insult to the higher-ranking people who decided to hire him. The team members should welcome him and presume that he would not have been hired if he were not good at what he does to some extent. A more appropriate attitude would be one of excitement and anticipation as to what this new guy will be able to bring to the team.

In some contexts, respect simply means seeing someone else as an equal and recognizing the other person’s intrinsic worth. This kind of respect, in my opinion, should not have to be earned. One thing about evildoers is that they often fail to recognize the worth of fellow human beings.

Taking advantage of someone’s niceness

Sometimes when someone is really nice, others mistake it for weakness. They figure they can take advantage of the nice person. If the nice person gets harmed as a result, then, well, it was his/her fault for being “too nice”.

When you take advantage of people who are nice to you, you are essentially creating an environment where niceness is punished and meanness is rewarded with respect. In such an environment, people will not be as nice.

People who take advantage of nice people may say that niceness is rare. In reality, it is not that niceness is rare, but rather that nice people would never in their right mind associate with jerks who take advantage of niceness…or at least if nice people are in the presence of these jerks, they will not behave as nicely as they usually do, because they know that their niceness would be returned with exploitation. These jerks who take advantage of niceness do not realize that there are plenty of nice people, they are just somewhere else far away from the vicinity of the jerk.

Summary

When a person makes you have to prove that you are an equal or prove your worth as a human being, that person is living in a dream world. There is no reason to view another person as inferior by default. If anything, it is often recommended that people view everyone else as a superior.

I am no psychologist, but I would imagine that people who make you have to earn their respect are insecure. They are trying to reduce their feelings of insecurity by placing themselves on a pedestal above others. This article discusses some other factors that can make people be disrespectful.

We tend to think of stupidity as being something opposing to high intelligence, but highly intelligent people can still be pretty stupid. There is even a book called Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid published by Yale University Press. The idea of smart people doing stupid things is certainly not new. When we think of smart people doing stupid things, we may think of the brilliant university student who gets really drunk at a party, dances around naked, yells out profanities, then goes to class the next day and gets an ‘A’ on his physics exam. In this scenario, the actions of this person do not necessarily lead to any long-lasting consequences. Sometimes, however, highly intelligent people do stupid things that do have long-lasting and devastating consequences. Highly intelligent people can mess up their own lives with their bad decisions, and they can mess up the lives of those who are unfortunate enough to be affected by their bad decisions. All this can happen while people who are much less intelligent make much better life decisions, become much more productive members of society, and have much better lives and better relationships.

Here, when I say “stupidity”, I refer to a tendency to make bad decisions or adopt false beliefs despite the availability of sufficient information and resources. Many people are inclined to believe that highly intelligent people are less prone to stupidity, but the judgment of highly intelligent people is not always trustworthy. First, highly intelligent people can still be bad people who do not have the best interests of others in mind. Second, highly intelligent people can still be prone to irrational behaviors that can cause potential harm to themselves and/or those around them.

High intelligence offers no protection from irrationality

In an article from Psychology Today, Arthur Dobrin D.S.W. explains how intelligence is not a predictor of good judgment like we may think. Rather, intelligence and rationality are distinctly different mental processes. Nonetheless, our brains are bombarded with large amounts of information every day, and we often have to make decisions without the availability of sufficient information. Our tendencies to jump to conclusions and act irrationally, in other words, may be a coping mechanism that our brains use to allow us to function in everyday life in a sea of unnecessary information where the necessary information may not be available.

Keith Stanovich, who has authored about 300 publications and been cited 43,212 times, is one of the key researchers who coined the term dysrationalia, defined as the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence. Stanovich and others argue that IQ tests do not measure one’s level of rationality. In this article, Stanovich defines rational thinking as adopting appropriate goals, taking appropriate actions given the goals and beliefs, and holding beliefs that correspond with evidence.

A prime real-life example of dysrationalia that Stanovich discusses in this article is the case where parents, who were former schoolteachers, pulled their children out of school because the children were being taught about the Holocaust in their history class, and the parents thought that the Holocaust was a myth. The parents even wrote about 6000 letters to local parents and local teachers, and they wrote one letter to each member of Congress, stating that Western civilization should not be continuing to live in such myths. These parents, being former schoolteachers, were presumably college educated. Despite their level of education and intelligence, they had erroneous beliefs and they acted on those beliefs.

A study by (Wagner, 1928) found that superstitious thinking among college freshman had no signficiant correlation with intelligence. In the study, the students were asked whether they had certain superstitious beliefs. Superstitious beliefs and behaviors that students were asked about included tapping wood after boasting; following signs like a falling star; the belief that dropping a food utensil or dish rag brings company; picking up pins for luck; horoscopes; four-leaf clover brings good luck; black cat brings bad luck; psalmists can foretell the future. Men had 6-7 superstitious beliefs on average while women had 11-12 superstitious beliefs on average. The correlation between intelligence (as measured by IQ tests) and the number of superstitious beliefs was -0.12, too small in magnitude to be significant. Instead, the researchers found significant correlations with younger age, being female and being more open to suggestion. Although intelligent people can learn faster, what they learn may not be aligned with reality.

Highly intelligent people are just as prone to preconceived biases as everyone else

We do not hear very often about Democrats becoming Republicans or Republicans become Democrats. We also seldom hear about people who are against abortion changing to being in favor of abortion, or vice versa. The reason is that once people adopt a certain set of beliefs or opinions, it is hard for them to change their minds even when they are presented with new information/evidence that contradicts their prior beliefs.

This article by (Stanovich et al., 2013) reviews the research literature on what is called “my-side bias” defined as evaluating evidence, generating evidence, and testing hypotheses in a manner biased toward our own prior beliefs, opinions and attitudes. (Stanovich et al., 2013) cites prior studies showing that bias in favor of one’s current opinion was the same in high and low intelligence subjects. If, however, study subjects were explicitly told at the beginning of the experiment to decouple their preconceived biases from their conclusions, then subjects with higher IQ scores were able to show less bias than subjects with lower IQ scores. What this means is that highly intelligent people may possess the cognitive capacity to think independently of their preconceived biases, but usually choose not to.

Group think

Group think is a phenomenon where individuals of a group can be reasonably smart, but still adopt beliefs characteristic of their group that defy common sense. The reason is that individuals in a group do not adopt these beliefs by their own independent reasoning, but rather because everyone else in the group has these beliefs. Individuals within a group trust that whatever their group believes, it must be right.

Group think can be dangerous because in some contexts, it can cause people to act upon certain erroneous beliefs despite the moral or ethical implications. Members of a group are sometimes afraid to express doubt of the validity of the group’s beliefs, for fear of being excluded, ridiculed or maybe even persecuted. This article gives 25 historical examples of catastrophes thought to occur because of groupthink. They include the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, the Salem Witch Trials, and the United States ignoring warnings regarding an imminent attack on Pearl Harbor.

Sometimes the solution to a problem is really simple

People each have their own areas of specialty, and often a person likes to think that his/her area of specialty is more central to everything than it actually is. For example, if we were to ask three different types of engineers what the core functioning of a robot system is based on, we may get three different answers. The electrical engineer may say that the core functioning of a robot system is in the electronics. The mechanical engineer may say that the core functioning of a robot system is in the mechanics. The software engineer may say that the core functioning is in the software algorithms.

The “specialty” of highly intelligent people is in the complicated. Highly intelligent people can understand very complicated concepts that the majority of other people cannot understand. Because of this, a highly intelligent person may assume that the solution to a problem is more complicated than it actually is. When the solution to a problem is simple, the less intelligent people may be more effective at solving the problem than the more intelligent people. The more intelligent people are more likely to over-complicate things and over-analyze.

Wishful thinking

Highly intelligent people can still be prone to wishful thinking where beliefs are formed based on what one wants to be true rather than based on evidence or logic. For example, maybe a smart person will believe in God, not because there is evidence that God exists, but rather because the person feels better knowing that there is an all-knowing and loving intelligent creator watching over everything.

Conversely, someone may choose to believe that God does not exist because he/she does not like the idea of a place of eternal torment awaiting anyone who does not follow this God. Such people may rather live their lives whatever way they want than to live life in obedience to some God. Indeed, people sometimes adopt beliefs to meet some psychological need, and not for the purpose of finding any objective truth.

Arrogance multiplies the stupidity that intellectuals are prone to

As stated in (Stanovich et al., 2013), when highly intelligent study subjects were told to decouple their preconceived biases from their conclusions, they were able to come to conclusions that were less biased. These results indicate that while intelligent people are just as prone to preconceived biases as less intelligent people, they can overcome these tendencies by making a conscious effort to make judgments that are more based on sound reasoning and evidence even if these judgments go against their prior beliefs.

If the highly intelligent person is arrogant, however, such a person will be less likely to be aware of his/her limitations. He/she will be less likely to admit to him/herself that he/she has tendencies to be irrational in some circumstances. When we are in denial of our limitations, our denial certainly does not make those limitations go away! Rather, the impact of our limitations can increase because we are not making the effort to mitigate those limitations. Such is more likely to happen with arrogant people.

When people are of a gifted level of intelligence, they usually know it. Just knowing that they are of gifted intelligence can enhance any already-existing tendencies towards arrogance. In other words, their gifted intelligence gives them an additional “reason” to be arrogant. Their arrogance can then give them a false sense of immunity to irrationality, preconceived biases and other limitations.

In addition to being in denial of their limitations, arrogant intellectuals also have a stunted ability to learn from others. They are generally too busy judging others as being more inferior than they actually are. They do not understand that people less intelligent than they are can still have certain kinds of skills, knowledge and wisdom that they do not possess.

An arrogant intellectual is easy to spot. Arrogant intellectuals, in general, assume that they are smarter than anybody who crosses their path. When working in groups, arrogant intellectuals will often try to take over the project. They believe that their way is the best way and that their ideas are the best ideas. They will often go around telling everybody how to do things even when they do not know what they are talking about. They do not understand that although they are highly intelligent, they do not know everything. People around them, even if they are less intelligent, will still know more about certain things than they do.

This article from BBC discusses some of the problems that can arise when the smartest people are selected for top management positions. Enron is an example of a company that made the mistake of hiring the smartest guys for the management positions, and letting them run the highest-profit divisions in the company. As the article states, “The managers, despite their smarts, were an arrogant, insecure bunch who took wild chances and lost billions of dollars. The company dissolved in 2001.” Safer positions for intellectuals are researchers, analysts and coders who stay in a room working by themselves without the need for emotional intelligence or people skills.

High intelligence can exist in the absence of character

In my opinion, to have character means to be one’s own person rather than modeling oneself after everybody else. People with character are not afraid to be different, and they tend to stand up for their moral principles, even in the face of adversity.

Malcolm from the TV series Malcolm in the Middle is an example of what genius intelligence looks like with little to no character. While it is understandable for a young boy to want to fit in with his peers, Malcolm continues to be obsessed with being like everyone else as he gets older. His obsession with being “normal” is so great that he makes himself easily manipulated by people who are far less intelligent. At one point Malcolm is so obsessed with being accepted by the in-crowd that he almost decides to have sexual intercourse with a girl after she goes unconscious. He was afraid that the other kids may think that he is a wuss.

Malcolm’s mother, on the other hand, has possibly the greatest strength of character that I have seen of any character on television. Yet in Malcolm’s world, she is the crazy lady. To people like Malcolm, being strong-minded and not being afraid to stand up for one’s moral principles against the crowd comes across as lunacy. Malcolm would rather participate in a variety of wrongful behaviors just to fit in.

High intelligence cannot be of much benefit if one just wants to “be like everybody else”. Once we decide to be like everybody else, we place onto ourselves the obligation of conforming to the ways of others, no matter how wrong and stupid those ways are.

The movie Forrest Gump, in contrast, shows how great someone’s life can be even when someone is mentally retarded. Forrest Gump had an IQ not only below average, but below normal range. Despite this, he had a great life. He played college varsity football. He served in the army and received a medal for saving the lives of a number of his comrads. He got to appear on television with President Kennedy. He found his true love, Jenny. He took up running, and he got so good at running long distances that people would gather in groups and run with him. In my opinion, Malcolm engaged in more destructive and “stupid” behaviors than Forrest Gump ever did.

Summary

There are a variety of reasons for why highly intelligent people can still fail at life while much less intelligent people succeed and thrive. High intelligence does not offer protection from irrationality, immorality, group think or preconceived biases. Being highly intelligent also does not mean that one is going to have any more life wisdom than the next person. One can be highly intelligent and still not know what is most important in life or what priorities to set. Forrest Gump, in contrast, may have been mentally retarded, but he had great life wisdom that he learned from his mother. Meanwhile, highly intelligent people may still chase after things that will never make them happy, and may even wind up as losers, as is described in the Planet Loser blog post.

Being highly intelligent does not mean that one will succeed at one’s job. In fact, highly intelligent people can still be horrible people to have on a team in the workplace, especially when they are arrogant. Arrogant intellectuals can dismiss great ideas coming from their teammates and insist on their own ideas even if their own ideas are not the greatest. They can diminish workplace morale and in the long run can ruin productivity.

When I was in driver’s ed class as a teenager, the girls were told that when they have a new boyfriend, and they want to know what he is really like, they should go into the car with him and see how he drives. The idea was that how someone drives says something about his/her true nature. We can learn about someone’s true nature by seeing how he/she interacts with other drivers on the road, how he/she reacts when he/she is cut off by another driver, how aggressively he/she drives, etc. I postulate that the same concept applies to someone’s sense of humor.

Below are aspects of someone’s sense of humor that can offer a glimpse into his/her true character:

• What kinds of things does he/she laugh at or find to be funny?
• What kinds of jokes does he/she make?
• How does he/she react when the other person does not like the joke?

What does the person find to be funny?

I cannot think of that many things that a good person would find to be funny and that a bad person would not find to be funny; but I can think of lots of things that bad people may find to be funny and that good people would not find to be funny. A bad person may laugh at someone getting hurt. A bad person may laugh at someone as a form of ridicule. Sometimes a bad person likes to laugh when two people are fighting. A man may chuckle when he sees two women fighting, muttering to himself about how vicious those women be can to each other. Sometimes bad people are laughing not because they find anything to be funny, but rather because they are insecure, and they want to deflect the attention of other people off of themselves and onto someone else.

Sometimes bad people take such great pleasure in someone being in a state of distress that they may intentionally drive the other person into a state of distress just to entertain themselves. While we should acknowledge that this is wrong, bad people like to fool us into thinking that they are just “teasing” or committing an innocent prank. For example, a person may make a certain noise that he/she knows makes another person upset, just so that he/she can get a laugh out of seeing the other person in a state of distress. A person may also make an insulting comment, and present it as a joke, just so he/she can press the other person’s buttons and watch the other person give off an angry look. That angry look is amusing to a bad person, but not amusing to a good person who does not take pleasure in making others angry or distressed.

Laughing can be a form of mockery and it can convey disrespect in certain contexts. For example, a person may laugh when someone is presenting his/her opinion about something, even though it is obvious that the other person is not joking and wants to be taken seriously. Such behavior is disrespectful, and gives across the message that the other person’s opinion is laughable. Would you like it if you were speaking your mind about something that is important to you, and then suddenly hear the other person just laugh as if you were telling a joke? This has happened to me a few times. It is, in my opinion, mean and thoughtless.

We also can learn about somebody from what he/she does not find to be funny. Let us say that somebody is the only one in the room not laughing at a scene where a person or animal is getting hurt. This scenario would indicate that the person likely possesses moral integrity, and does not go along with the crowd when the crowd is doing something that is wrong.

What kinds of jokes does the person make?

When bad people make jokes, they often place another person as the target of the joke. In other words, the entertainment is at someone’s expense. At the same time, the one who is the target of the joke is expected to just shrug his shoulders and go along with it for the sake of being a good sport. If he retaliates, then he may be called a spoil-sport.

Sometimes evildoers try to justify their mean jokes by claiming that everyone jokes like this, so we should all just get used to it. They want us to accept their mean jokes as the norm even though there are plenty of people who do not place another human being as the target of their jokes.

Many of you have probably watched The Office TV series, and remember the many episodes where Jim and Pam played pranks on Dwight. I admit, I did find many of these pranks amusing to watch, but the truth is that what Jim and Pam were doing to Dwight qualifies as harassment. When a person continues to behave in a certain way towards another person even though he/she knows that the behavior is unwelcome, the behavior becomes harassment. Jim and Pam know that Dwight does not like their pranks, but they continue playing pranks on Dwight anyway. They are using Dwight as their personal source of office entertainment, at Dwight’s expense, and without any compensation to Dwight for the trouble they cause him. Now I admit that Dwight is not exactly the nicest person either, and he did get vicious when he sought revenge against Jim and Pam later in the TV series, but Jim and Pam’s pranks are still wrong.

So does this mean that Jim and Pam are bad people? While the TV series presents Jim and Pam as being nice and likeable people who have a blossoming romance, upon closer inspection we see that they are not always nice. Numerous articles describe Jim as a bully, analogous to the good-looking jock who picks on the nerdy outcast, which is analogous to Dwight. Other viewers have noted Jim’s bad treatment of women, and his superiority complex. Pam, on the other hand, is described by some as being passive aggressive.

When good people tell jokes, their aim is most often to bring laughter and joy to others. In the 1998 film Patch Adams, Dr. Hunter “Patch” Adams specializes in making patients laugh. Keep in mind that many of these patients have quite serious diseases such as cancer. When patients in the hospital are prone to feeling glum with their serious diseases, Dr. Adams cheers them up and makes them laugh.

A bad person would not want to do what Dr. “Patch” Adams does. A bad person may say he does not want to use his sense of humor to cheer up seriously ill people because he finds being around seriously ill people to be depressing. He would rather be around people who are already happy and/or content so that he can suck the happiness out of them by “pushing their buttons”, and have that be the joke.

While good people often use humor to bring joy to others, bad people, in contrast, often use humor to entertain themselves, and maybe also to impress their friends. Unfortunately, the jokes of a bad person are often at the expense of someone else.

How does the person react when the other person does not like his/her joke?

In general, bad people do not react graciously when the other person does not like the joke. To the bad person, the other person who does not like the joke is always the problem. Nothing is ever wrong with the joke.

Bad people often like to judge other people who do not like their jokes. If you express disapproval of a joke that a bad person makes, the bad person may judge you as being excessively serious, no fun or perhaps one of those “practical” people, while the bad person considers him/herself to be the fun and goofy one. To justify him/herself, the bad person may try to place you into a special category of people who are serious and who don’t know how to have fun. He/she may tell him/herself and others that you are a grouch and never seem to laugh or smile. Meanwhile, the bad person most likely does not want to face the reality that nobody in his/her right mind would be happy in his/her presence.

Sometimes if you try to explain to the bad person how inappropriate the joke is, the bad person may say “ouch!” as if you said something really hurtful — and certainly we don’t want to be hurtful! Here, the bad person is trying to put you on a guilt trip in order to manipulate you into tolerating his bad behavior. The bad person may even tell you that his jokes are a big part of his personality, and that by not being allowed to tell jokes, he cannot be himself.

So how would a good person react if the other person does not like his/her joke? The good person may get a little embarrassed, or may apologize. It can be awkward when the other person does not like the joke, but it is no excuse to act as if the other person is the problem. The other person has the right to decide for him/herself what he/she finds to be funny and what he/she finds to not be funny. We have no right to tell someone what is funny and what is not, and good people know that.

Laughter as a form of ridicule

When we think of laughter as a form of ridicule, we may think of the kid that gets made fun of at school. We may think of a group of bullies laughing at the kid that they are terrorizing. What we may not think of is laughter as a subtle form of ridicule from one adult to another in a seemingly friendly conversation.

A wicked person’s laughter can occur in regular everyday conversation as a way of conveying disrespect. For example, you may be speaking your mind on something that is important to you. Just when you thought you made a great point on something, the other person just laughs. It is obvious that you were not making a joke. Instead, you feel disrespected and mocked. Yet the other person tells you to just chill out, and that laughing is just a part of every day casual conversation.

While laughter is a normal component of everyday conversation, what is not a normal component of conversation is putting people down and making fun of people for the sake of entertaining oneself and for the sake of feeling better about oneself. Yet, as if often the case, the evildoer just wants the other person to believe that he/she is just being too sensitive and needs to lighten up.

Joking too excessively can make someone unpleasant to be around

I have met a few people whose sense of humor is so annoying that they actually are more pleasant to be around when they are in a bad mood! It is sad, but true. The reason I did not like their sense of humor was that they would smother me with one joke after the other, and I did not find the jokes to be that funny. Yet they seem to be oblivious to the fact that nobody laughs when they tell this stream of jokes. They are obviously entertaining themselves, but their captive audience gets a obnoxious stream of silliness. The few people I knew who behaved this way were not very good people.

I think it is easy to say that a bad sense of humor is worse than no sense of humor at all. In my opinion, the most pleasant and enjoyable people to be around are not the ones who crack the most jokes. They are kind, considerate, empathetic and they take an interest in other people besides themselves.

Nonetheless, having some sense of humor is a good thing. They say that laughter is the best medicine.

Does having a dark sense of humor make you bad?

One time when I was a kid, I was thinking about how funny it would be if someone driving a car saw a Christmas lights display so beautiful and mesmerizing that she gets distracted and crashes her car. This is an example of a fictional scenario that may be funny to someone with a dark sense of humor.

So what is the difference between a dark sense of humor and a sense of humor characteristic of bad people? I believe the difference is that for the bad person to laugh, something bad has to actually happen to the person who is the target of the joke, whether it be physical or psychological harm. The person with a dark sense of humor, on the other hand, just needs to hear a story of the bad thing happening. The story certainly does not have to come true for people to laugh. Furthermore, when we laugh at a story that ends in a person crashing a car, we can always imagine that the person is perfectly okay afterwards and that the car can be repaired. In other words, we are not necessarily laughing at the thought of someone being harmed.

Recall a previous blog post on Treatment of Women on Television and Popular Culture where I discuss attempted rape scenes that are presented as funny. Does this qualify as just a dark sense of humor, or something more? Where we draw the dividing line, in my opinion, is in whether the unfortunate event includes substantial harm to a person and whether the wrongful act is portrayed as normal and okay. Note from the previous blog post that in two of the four attempted rape scenes I described, the woman was in a state of mental distress while the man was trying to rape her. In one of the other two attempted rape scenes, the attempted rape was successful. Though the woman was not in any mental distress, she did react to the rape in a way that no woman in her right mind would. She looked upon her rapist with admiration because he was so good at having sex for a nerd.

The 1993 film The Adams Family Values shows another round of dark humor where Fester’s wife is repeatedly trying to murder him so that she can take his money. Her repeated attempts to murder him are unsuccessful, though, and the whole thing is presented as being funny. Are we being bad when we laugh at this? I doubt it because at least Fester suffers no harm, physical or psychological, and Debby ends up getting what she deserves in the end.

While the person with the dark sense of humor laughs at stories of events that often result in harm, such a person would not necessarily laugh at the harm itself. The bad person, however, may laugh at the harm itself, and may even intentionally inflict harm—often psychological—for his/her own entertainment. The person who is the target of the joke may not have to sustain serious physical harm, but he/she still would need to be in some state of distress, anger, annoyance or confusion for the bad person to receive satisfactory entertainment.

Comedies on television

As discussed in the Television blog post, television is ridden with scenes that entice viewers to laugh at things that people should not be laughing at. In many movies and sitcoms, we are enticed to laugh at people getting harmed and at people intentionally hurting each other. In a culture where laughing at such things is the norm, it can be hard to know when we are laughing at something that bad people would typically laugh at.

So if you laugh at an anvil falling on a cartoon character’s head, does that mean that you are being a bad person? Not necessarily. Cartoon characters do not get hurt the way that real people get hurt. After a boulder rock falls on their head, they often see birds or stars, then a moment later they are good as new. However, watching comedic scenes of cartoon characters falling off a cliff or having pianos falling on their heads is a stepping stone closer to watching and laughing at real people getting hurt. I can testify that television successfully taught me to laugh at people getting hurt when I was a child. At first it was cartoon characters, then I laughed at live-action characters smashing dishes onto each other’s heads, then eventually I laughed at real people getting hurt. Beware of the desensitization that television can cause.

Summary

To summarize, we can learn a lot about someone’s true nature by what he/she laughs at and the kinds of jokes that he/she makes. Does he/she laugh a someone being in a state of distress (such as anger, annoyance or confusion)? Does he/she laugh when someone is struggling to complete a task and is expressing frustration? Does he/she laugh when the other person is obviously being serious? When he/she tells a joke, is his/her goal to bring laughter and joy to other people? Or is he/she just entertaining him/herself without regard to how others present are responding to the joke? Does he/she accuse others of not being able to take a joke? Or does he/she apologize when the joke offends someone?

Imagine you are a child, 12 years old or so, with the maturity level of an adult. You are pretty good at making decisions, but your parents are not. Your parents are prone to making bad decisions that hurt the family, including you. When you try to explain to your parents that they are about to make a bad decision, they do not listen to you or believe you. To them, you are just a kid. So you watch as they make one bad decision after the other. You may be smarter than they are, but you are still under their power and authority. This situation is resemblant of many of the families we see on television.

When family movies and sitcoms first came out, back in the day, they were happy and well-functioning families. The father was the leader of the household. The mother was kind and a good provider for her children. The children benefitted from their parents’ wisdom. Some viewers even got jealous that the TV family looked so happy and perfect. Then came the dysfunctional families in the 1990s and 2000s, like Titus, Everybody Loves Raymond, Malcolm in the Middle, Married With Children, etc. These dysfunctional families were not only funny, but also did not make viewers jealous by being so happy and perfect.

In the 1980s and 1990s, there emerged movies and sitcoms where the children were smart and the adults were stupid. Who defeated the bad guys? The children did, because the adults did not know what was going on during the whole movie. Sometimes the bad guys were mythical-looking creatures that were not thought to exist, which was why only the children knew of their existence. For example, in the 1989 movie The Little Monsters, the bad guys were monsters that lived in a world that could only be accessed by crawling under someone’s bed. Adults would not believe that such creatures existed. Only children would believe that. So the children were the only ones who could defeat the bad guys because they were the only ones who were willing to believe that these creatures existed. The movie Hocus Pocus is another example. Three witches, who were executed 300 years ago, were brought back to life by the lighting of the black-flamed candle. Such an event would supposedly be hard for adults to believe actually happened, so the children had to save the day.

Sometimes, however, it was up to the children to conquer the bad guys because the adults really were just idiots, or at the very least their judgment could not be trusted. Take the Stranger Things TV series. Three boys find a girl named Eleven who escaped from a research laboratory where she was held prisoner. The boys did not tell their parents about Eleven because they figured that if they did, their parents would call the police and then the police would bring Eleven right back to the bad men that she was running from. The boys could not let that happen, so they hid Eleven in their basement. This scenario is an example of a situation where the children could not trust their parents to do the right thing. The children were convinced that only they knew what was right. If they got their parents involved, then the bad guys would get what they want.

The 2018 movie Mary Poppins Returns is another example of a movie where the children are smarter than the parent. The synopsis features some bad men at the bank pulling off a wicked scheme to deceive Mr. Banks and many other people into thinking that the payments on their houses were overdue, and that they had no choice but to turn over their houses to the bank. Who were the ones who found out what those bad men at the bank were really up to? The Banks children. Those bad men at the bank may be able to outsmart Mr. Banks, but they could not outsmart his children. Of course the children tried to explain to their easily deceived father that these men at the bank were up to no good, but he would not believe them. As in many other movies, it was up to the children to defeat the bad guys. At least this time the children had the help of Mary Poppins.

Still another example of a family with children smarter than the parents is the long-time The Simpsons TV series. Of course it is not too hard to be smarter than Homer Simpson, and let’s face it, the little girl, Lisa Simpson, is arguably genius intelligence. Not only is Lisa highly intelligent, she also is morally superior to her parents. She is the kind of girl that we would see participating in activism and always trying to make the world a better place. Though Bart Simpson is not known for being smart, he does seem to be cunning and crafty when he wants to be. While Bart and Lisa being smarter than their parents may be a part of what makes The Simpsons show so amusing, one could imagine how frustrating it would be for children to be under the authority and custody of parents who are less intelligent than you are.

Why are children so often smarter than adults on TV?

Note that the movies where children are smarter than the adults are most likely to be children’s movies where children are the main characters and where children are also the target audience. It is reasonable to figure that children can relate more to movies where children are the main characters. However, if the adults are smarter than the children like they are supposed to be in real life, then the adults would naturally play a bigger role in defeating the bad guys, in which case the children would not be the main characters anymore. Therefore, there are logistical reasons to make the adult characters into idiots. Alternatively, the bad guys could be mythical-looking creatures that only the children are willing to believe actually exist. Either way, the adults have to remain in la-la land the whole movie so that the children can be the main characters who defeat the bad guys.

While there are some explanations as to why children are smarter than adults in a number of movies and sitcoms, there can also be some bad unintended effects on viewers. Keep in mind that many of these movies are children’s movies with mainly children as the target audience, and when these children view one story after another where the children have to save the day because the adults are idiots, or at least cannot be trusted, there is a potential for our young viewers to mistakingly believe that this is representative of real life. Imagine that you are a parent and you have to keep proving to your children that they are not as mature as the TV children and you are smarter than the TV parents.

Some older people complain that children are more disrespectful today than they used to be. I wonder if one of the factors making children increasingly disrespectful is the TV family. As I discussed in the television blog post, people are greatly affected by what they see on television. In a way, people view TV characters as a model of how they should be. Children are even more impressionable, and when these movies targeted to children audiences show the child characters having to take matters into their own hands while the adults are either in la-la land or cannot be trusted, the young viewers are receiving the message that adults are incompetent and are hence not necessarily worthy of respect.

The rebellious teenager stereotype

Television promotes a lot of stereotypes, one of which is the rebellious teenager stereotype. Teenage television characters frequently have a big unfriendly KEEP OUT sign on their bedroom doors. They roll their eyes. They complain frequently. They get overly dramatic. However, when we look at how irresponsible the parents are and the bad decisions the parents make that hurt the family while the children know what is right, we see that the world of TV is a world where teenagers actually have a good reason to be rebellious.

It is one thing for parents to make bad decisions sometimes. It happens. It is another thing if the parents are prone to doing the wrong thing while the children know what the right thing to do is all along. Recall the television blog post that discusses how in a number of movies (e.g. Problem Child 2, It Takes Two), a single parent is about to marry the wrong person while the children know whom their parent should marry the entire time. Not only that, the single parent will not even believe the children when they try to explain to him that this woman he is about to marry is not a good person.

In a number of movies, the parent is too incompetent to protect the children from bad people. Not only this, but also the parent sometimes forcibly exposes the children to bad people by marrying them and making them into the children’s step parents. Though the children are smarter than the parents in these TV families, they are still under the authority of these idiots, and they suffer from it. Furthermore, the idiot adults do not take these intellectually superior and mature children seriously when these children try to explain to the adults that they are about to make the wrong decision. To the adult, the children are “just kids” and do not know any better. While it is true that children often do not know what is good for them in real life, in the land of TV that is not so. In the land of TV, it is often (though not always) the parent that does not know what is good for him/her and it is the children who know what is best.

Take the TV series Haters Back Off, featuring a teenage girl who is trying to build a famous online presence with her singing ability, which is practically non-existent. Her uncle and mother are preoccupied with trying to help her to fulfill her dreams while her younger sister, Emily, has to pay the electric bill. One day at breakfast, Emily says to the family “you notice that the lights actually turned on today? That is because I paid the electric bill”. Obviously she is the most mature and most reasonable person in the household, and she is the younger of the two children. My impression is that we viewers are supposed to laugh as this silly dysfunctional family makes the younger child have to take on some adult responsibilities because the adults are too absentminded. If you empathize with Emily, however, you may not find it to be funny.

If I were a child with the maturity level of an adult, and I had parents who were too mentally incompetent to take on adult responsibilities, and if I had to take on some of those responsibilities while an audience in the background is laughing at the whole thing, I would be angry. Yet when a teenager in the TV family gets angry, we are supposed to believe he/she is angry because he/she is a teenager and teenagers are supposed to be rebellious and “hard to deal with”. Like the female stereotypes I discussed in this blog post, the rebellious teenager stereotype also can be harmful. It produces a justification for invalidating the negative emotions of teenagers, and neglects the fact that negative emotions are often warranted and should be respected and taken seriously.

While movies and sitcoms often show children being smarter than the adults, what they do not show is the detrimental effects on the children. In real life, if a child were smarter than his/her parents, and had to watch his/her parents make one bad decision after the other, that child would have a good reason to get angry and frustrated. When bad guys come along, and the parents are too incompetent to protect the child from the bad guys, and make the child have to take matters into his/her own hands when it comes to defeating the bad guys, that child would have good reason to get angry and maybe even rebellious. When these idiot parents don’t even listen to the child when the child has something intelligent to say, and continue making bad decisions that hurt the family, including the child, then the child especially has good reason to be angry.

Summary

Television shows toxic behaviors a lot of the time without showing the harmful effects of those toxic behaviors. For example, television will frequently show characters engaging in sexual promiscuity and having sexual relations within hours of meeting each other. What television will not show are the diseases that are spread, and the emotional harm that occurs. Similarly, television will frequently show child characters being smarter, wiser and more mature than they are in real life, while the adults are not always so smart. It may seem amusing, but in real life it is a destructive family dynamic.

People generally view help as a good thing that one does for another, especially when the other person is in a state of need. When people reject an offer of help or do not show appreciation, they are sometimes judged as being ungrateful. However, help can be harmful in some contexts. Furthermore, help sometimes comes with motives that are selfish and maybe even outright evil.

Sometimes when people try to help others, their help is ineffective. In other words, their actions don’t “help” the other person. However, sometimes even when the help is effective, it does harm. Below are some examples of harm that can come upon the person being helped:

• prevents the person from developing the ability to complete a task independently
• deprives a person of a feeling of accomplishment from having done something on his/her own
• spoils the fun of figuring something out by oneself
• causes harm to come upon the person due to incompetence of the helper
• enables bad behavior, like cheating on a test

One time I was at an event that took place on a college campus, and I was looking for a building by using a map. An older guy I passed by had noticed me looking at a map and earnestly offered to show me where the building was. I rejected his offer of help because it would have spoiled the fun of looking for the building by using the map. It was like a game to me. I ended up finding the building, and it was more fun than if someone had just shown to me where the building was. This is an example of situation where help can spoil the fun.

Another time I was building a snowman. My goal was to build a snowman that was taller than me. I made two really big snowballs, but I was not strong enough to put one snowball on top of the other. So I ended up taking one chunk of one snowball at a time and putting it on top of the other snow ball. I could have asked for help, but if I got help, I would have been deprived of that feeling of accomplishment from having done something by myself. This is an example of a situation where help can deprive someone of that feeling of accomplishment from having done something by him/herself.

While people sometimes need help, other times people need to not be helped. The reason is that help can deprive a person of the ability to learn how to perform a task independently. Parents often help their children with their homework, but they usually won’t do the homework for their children. They try to teach the children enough so that they can figure out the right answers for themselves. Unless the children do some figuring out for themselves, they do not learn. When the teacher has the students take a test, there is a reason that the teacher does not help the students take the test. The test is meant to assess how well the students know the material, and the test is also meant to push the students to learn the material enough so that they can answer the test questions without being helped.

Sometimes help is morally wrong, like when a student lets another student copy his/her answers during a test. Help sometimes enables bad habits and wrongful behaviors. Helping someone cheat on a test may seem convenient to the person in the short term, but in the long term diminishes the person’s motivation to learn the material. The person being helped may get a good grade, but will be deprived of the fruits of knowledge and understanding that come with knowing the material.

Sometimes the helper is not qualified to give certain kinds of help. For example, let us say that you are cooking a meal and someone insists on helping you, but does not know much about food preparation. The person may put together ingredients that do not taste good together, or the person may burn something. In the end, the meal could be lower quality than if you had not received any help.

Unwanted help

Unwanted help can qualify as a form of harassment. Harassment is defined as any unwanted behavior, physical or verbal (or even suggested), that makes a reasonable person feel uncomfortable, humiliated, or mentally distressed. Many people would agree that when a person makes it clear that a form of treatment is unwelcome, that continuing to treat the person that way is harassment. Correspondingly, when we continue to give someone help after he/she has made it clear that the help is unwanted, the unwanted help becomes harassment.

In my opinion, unwanted help is only warranted when there is reason to believe that if the person does not receive help, death or serious injury will result, and even then there are some exceptions. A person has a right to refuse to undergo a medical procedure even when there is reason to believe that without the medical procedure, death is likely. People have certain rights, and one of those rights is the right to refuse help.

As described above, help can do harm, even when the help is effective. In some contexts, the more effective the help is, the more harm it does. By giving someone unwanted help, we are assuming the right to decide what is best for him/her. Unless you are officially a caretaker of the other person, you have no right to decide what is in the better interests of the other person. You need to respect the other person’s space and autonomy.

A part of being a good helper is not just being ready to help, but also backing off when it is made clear that the help is not wanted.

The helper can have evil motives

When help does harm to another person, we may like to think that at least the intentions are good, but this is not always the case. Motives to help someone can be not only selfish, but also outright evil. Below are examples of the motivations to help others that are actually evil:

• power and control
• humiliation
• self-exaltation
• manipulation

Evildoers have many tactics that they utilize to make themselves look like good people that they are not. One such tactic is helping someone in plain sight of others. By helping others, evildoers can even fool themselves into thinking that they are good people. In my opinion, there are ways one can tell whether help is fueled by a genuine concern for the better interests of the other person. For example, is this help actually in the better interests of the other person? Also, what is the reaction when the other person rejects the help? Does the person respect boundaries and back off, saying “I’m there if you need me” or does the person accuse the other person of being ungrateful or too proud?

Imagine a culture where girls and women in engineering is almost unheard of. Now imagine a high school girl is the only girl in an electronics laboratory class. The students partner up to do a laboratory exercise where the goal is to build a circuit and test it. The girl decides to not have a partner because she is pretty smart and believes she can do the laboratory exercise by herself. She also knows that the boys in the class have no faith in her ability to do anything, and would probably take over all of the laboratory tasks if she had one of them as a partner.

When the laboratory session starts, and the girl is about to gather the supplies to make her circuit, a couple of boys come over to her lab station and start to build her circuit for her because they refuse to believe that she can do it herself. She tells them to go away, and that she does not want any help, but they could not care less. They proceed to build the entire circuit for her. So she decides to go over to another lab station that is unoccupied and start over. As she again tries to gather the supplies, the two boys come over to that lab station and continue to build the circuit for her again. She obviously does not like this, and when she tries to tell them to go away, they just accuse her of being too proud to accept their help.

I can imagine outside observers of this incident thinking “Oh that poor girl in a predominantly male setting. She is just not tough enough to survive in this environment, and those boys are trying to help her…” Such members of the audience do not understand the reality of the situation. The boys’ motives to help the girl are not good but evil. Their forcing their help upon her against her will is evidence that they are not helping her because of any genuine concern for her well-being but rather for the purpose of establishing power, control and superiority over her. They are sexist and they do not believe that she belongs there. They are sending her the message that she cannot build a circuit on her own without their help.

By forcibly building the circuit for her, they are preventing her from developing the ability to build a circuit on her own. Note that the purpose of the laboratory exercise is not to build a circuit, but rather to learn how to build a circuit and test it. The girl will not learn how to build a circuit if someone else builds it for her. By “helping her” to build the circuit, the boys are defeating the purpose of her being there. Even worse, when she attempts to reject their help, they say she is too proud. When she tells them that they are jerks, they figure she is being ungrateful and they keep saying “We’re just trying to help…We’re just trying to help…”

Evil people often like to have power and control over others. Some men use rape to establish power and control over a women. According to this academic article, there are four major motivations to rape: assert power over the victim; suppress their own feelings of inadequacy; vent their anger; and sadism. According to this article, Sherry Hamby, a research professor of psychology at the University of the South in the US state of Tennessee, says “sexual assault is not about sexual gratification or sexual interest, but more about dominating people.”

The first motivation to rape—asserting power over the victim—is the same as the motivation behind the actions of these boys who were forcing their help on this girl. Their forced help says something about their character, which is that they are evil and like to control others, particularly females. They may also be angry that she is there because of their firm belief that she does not belong there. Just as rapists sometimes say to themselves “she wanted it”, these boys may be saying to themselves “she knows she wanted our help deep down. She can’t build a circuit”.

Evildoers will find various ways to establish power and control over others. Men who want to establish power, control and superiority over women will not always choose to rape because rape is technically against the law, and a man who commits rape could face prosecution. He may be labeled as a sex offender, which comes with damage to his reputation, and possibly some time in jail. Therefore, men have incentive to choose other methods to establish power, control and superiority over women, one of which is unsolicited help.

Let us say that someone is insistent on helping another person manage his/her finances. The real motivation may be, once again, power and control. The “helper” just wants control over another person’s money. If someone shows signs of vulnerability, the “helper” may try to take advantage of him/her by helping him/her with his/her finances, and then eventually taking over his/her finances altogether.

Another example: someone is writing a book about a topic that is politics-related, and another person persistently offers to help write the book. When the writer finally lets him/her help out, he/she eventually starts dictating what is to be written and what is not to be written. The helper’s intentions here are not good, but rather are about power and control over what goes into the book. The helper only wants his/her political opinions to be endorsed in the book rather than that of the writer.

Help can also be a form of manipulation. The evildoer may be giving the other person help in order to make the other person feel indebted to him/her. By placing the other person into this state of indebtedness, the evildoer can feel entitled to special favors from the other person in the future.

Help can sometimes be humiliating to the one receiving help. For example, when someone receives unwanted help for a very simple task that he/she could have done him/herself, he/she may look stupid and feel humiliated in front of the other people who are present. In such a situation, the evildoer is deliberately humiliating the other person, while putting on the façade of being a nice person who is just trying to help. Naïve bystanders will not notice the helper’s evil intentions, and may instead feel pity for the person receiving the help for such a simple task.

Summary

To summarize, help is not always a good deed. Not only can help be harmful, but it can also come with evil intentions. Unwanted help is one of many tactics that evildoers can utilize to harm their victims without looking like a bad person to casual bystanders. In the end, we need to respect people’s rights to reject help, and not judge them as being ungrateful or too proud.

Women have been a marginalized group throughout history. Though in historical society women were subservient to men, women are much more equal to men in today’s Western society. Nonetheless, there is still some degree of sex discrimination that comes with certain destructive female stereotypes. Below I will discuss some of the more common female stereotypes

1. The woman thinks that she is always right

This stereotype is promoted throughout television and popular culture. Often this stereotype is presented in a humorous light. Some scenes on television show a married couple agreeing to a certain rule, which is that the wife is always right, and the husband is walking into the snake pit if he even tries to disagree. Though these scenes entice the audience to laugh, the implications of this stereotype are serious and very derogatory.

When the husband and wife live by the rule that the wife is always right, note that the husband does not really think that the wife is always right. He is only pretending that she is always right to her face, and still probably believes that she is wrong and misguided. Also note that the wife is being placed into a light that paints her as a second rate human being who is so horrible and foolish that she cannot even respect the opinions of others, and turns into the angry hulk if anybody even tries to disagree with her. Making such harsh assumptions about someone’s character on the basis of a stereotype is outright mean. To conclude, when the husband and wife live by the rule that the wife is always right, the last thing that the wife gets is actual respect.

Sometimes people have a good reason to present their side of the argument with conviction. They have taken the time to confirm the facts and have thought through everything carefully. The person on the opposing side, however, may not have checked the facts, and may only be going by what he/she heard somewhere without considering the source. In such a case, the one who checked the facts and thought through everything carefully is more likely to be right; but what if the one who checked the facts is a woman, and the one who is just going by what he heard happens to be a man? If the woman asserts her argument with conviction, does she deserve to be judged as “just another woman who thinks she is always right”? Or maybe she does have a good reason to believe that she is right and the other person is wrong.

The stereotype, which says that the woman thinks she is always right, places the woman into a position where her opinion can never be taken seriously no matter how much she has carefully checked the facts, and no matter how logically sound her argument is. The audience will question the validity of her conviction in what she is saying in ways that they would not do for a man. No matter how logically sound and factually correct of an argument the woman presents, the audience will continue to believe that the woman only has conviction because she is a woman and women think that they are always right.

So is this stereotype aligned with reality? In other words, are women really more likely to believe that they are always right than are men? The scientific literature indicates that, if anything, the opposite is true. (Lenney, 1977) did a review of the science literature and found that women show lower confidence in their abilities in achievement settings while men tend to show inflated confidence, though these results can vary based on ability area. (Roberts, 1991) found that when it comes to self-assessments, men tend to have a more competitive mindset and are more likely to rate themselves highly while women are more likely to rate themselves based on how others have rated their performance.

Other evidence against this stereotype is that men are more likely to have narcissistic personality disorder, which is defined as a mental condition in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for excessive attention and admiration, troubled relationships, and a lack of empathy for others. (Grijalva et al., 2015) reviewed the science literature on gender differences in narcissism and found that narcissists generally think that they are always right and that they do not make mistakes. The first study they discuss confirms that narcissists are more commonly men. Though there is another kind of narcissism equally prevalent in both men and women, called vulnerable narcissism, this kind of narcissism is marked by low self-esteem, neuroticism and introversion.

Many more recent articles are now saying that the confidence gap between men and women in the workplace is a myth. (Lenney, 1977) and (Roberts, 1991) both conducted their meta-analysis in the 20th century. Times are changing, but even though this gap in confidence between men and women has narrowed, women are still no more confident in themselves than men are, and when they do express self-confidence, they more easily become less likeable. With women, there are more strict behavioral standards to be nice. Women come across as too harsh when they express a certain level of assertiveness unless they also embellish their assertiveness with niceness and empathy.

2. Women fight with each other more than men do

For awhile I was sharing an apartment with three other women. One of my flatmates was talking with this guy. She told him that four of us women were living together, to which he replied that we must fight a lot. I found this remark to be offensive.

In this video from That 70s Show, Erik Forman and Steven Hyde are play-fighting while Jackie and Donna are making fun of them. Erik and Steven make the claim that girls can’t play-fight because when they do, it turns into a real fight. So Jackie and Donna decide to show them that they, too, can play-fight without their play-fight turning into a real fight. They start playfully hitting each other on the shoulder when suddenly Donna complains that Jackie scratched her, and then the two of them get into a real fight after all.

This scene from That 70s Show is made out to be funny, of course, but the scene is still promoting a derogatory female stereotype, which states that somehow women have a diminished ability to get along with each other compared to men. The thing is that when people fight, it is generally because somebody did something wrong or there was a misunderstanding or someone does not feel that he/she is being treated well. Therefore, by saying that females are more prone to fighting with each other, we are implying that females have a diminished ability to know how to treat each other and/or behave like decent human beings towards each other. We also are implying that they have a diminished ability to be forgiving of each other’s mistakes. Essentially the stereotype implies that women, compared to men, are second-rate human beings, or what Steven Hyde calls “bitches”.

One time I decided to let a woman live with me who had no place to live of her own. While she was living with me, she took advantage of me. She took some food out of the food pantry without asking me, wore some of my clothes without asking me, used up some of my bathroom products and was emotionally abusive towards me whenever I didn’t do what she wanted. We had a fight where I ended up eventually kicking her out of the apartment. The thing is that I remembered the stereotype that females fight with each other more. I imagined some guy believing that the two of us were fighting simply because we are both women, and women just happen to fight more. It was obvious to me that we were fighting, not because we were both women, but because she was a horrible and exploitative person. In fact, she lived with a number of men before she lived with me, and the men fought with her too. So if someone were to assume that this other women and I were fighting just because we are both women, you can see how ignorant and offensive that judgmental assumption would be.

According to this stereotype, women are the more aggressive sex (keeping in mind that aggression can be verbal and not just physical). Of course in the field of psychology, there are often no gender differences in aggression. When there are gender differences found, males tend to be the more aggressive sex. A review by (Hyde, 1984) looked at 143 studies on gender differences in aggression, and found that gender differences were modest, only accounting for about 5% of aggression. Gender differences in aggression were highest in the 6 and younger age group (with males being more aggressive than females) and they decreased with older age. A more recent literature review by (Clauss et al., 2017) found that men are more likely to be physically aggressive while women are more likely to exhibit relational aggression characterized by isolation and ostracism through gossip rumors and lies. No evidence of gender differences in anger were found. Still another literature review by (Bjorkqvist, 2018) found that boys and girls had equal tendencies to be verbally abusive.

3. With women and girls there is more drama

I once overheard a man saying that he is glad he has sons instead of daughters because he would not have liked all the drama that comes with having daughters. Mothers sometimes comment that while boys are more likely to participate in risky activities that can cause physical injury, girls are more likely to cause drama. Indeed, we have all heard the phrase “drama queen”.

When people refer to drama, they tend to mean made-up conflict where the person invents something to fight about and fights for the sake of fighting. Sometimes drama refers to a behavior where one or both people in a relationship create an uncomfortable feeling through manipulation and/or control. It is hard to find anything in the science literature on this topic, but based on my personal experience, males and females are equally prone to creating drama.

One group that I believe is more prone to creating drama is small children. We have all seen small children throw a fuss, like it is the end of the world, over something that an adult would not think twice about. We have seen small children fight over things where mature adults would have been able to reach a compromise.

What is particularly destructive about this female stereotype is that when a woman does get upset over something, the others present may just assume she is upset because she is a woman and women are more prone to drama. They will not consider that maybe she has a legitimate reason to be upset. In other words, stereotypes such as this cause a woman’s negative emotions to not be taken as seriously. Whenever she expresses a negative emotion, even if it is justified, she is always at risk of being called a “drama queen”.

4. Women are more emotional than men

In culture, women can appear to be more emotional. They express their emotions more, they talk about their emotions with each other more, they take more of an interest in emotion and they may also have higher emotional intelligence. Men, on the contrary, are taught when they are boys that emotion is a weakness and they are discouraged from showing emotion. Therefore, it is not surprising that women appear to be the more emotional sex.

So are women more emotional than men are? According to the science literature, the “emotional” label placed on women is only a cultural stereotype, and is not rooted in reality. According to this study, women do not experience any more emotional fluctuations than men do…not even the women that menstruate. Though women were found in another study to experience more negative emotions than men, some studies show that if anything, men are more emotional than women. There is even an article entitled “Why Are Men More Emotional Than Women?“

In one study, men showed more of a physiological emotional response to emotion-provoking stimuli. The content of the videos was categorized into four areas: blissful, exciting, heartwarming and funny. The article explains: the results showed that men had stronger emotional reactions to each of these areas. When it came to the heartwarming content, men responded twice as much as did women. When asked to rate their emotional response to the content, women stated that they were much more emotional than the test results showed, while men said they were much less emotional than they actually were. In a separate survey conducted by the same company, 67 percent of these men later went on to admit they actually felt more emotional than they let on.

Men are taught when they are young boys that emotion is a weakness, and so they are told to hide their emotions. However, as it explained in this article, hiding and/or suppressing one’s emotions only causes the emotions to go unresolved. When emotions remain unresolved, they dominate us more, causing us to lash out in certain contexts without knowing why. When men do show emotion, it is often viewed as “passion”. When men get so emotional that they throw things in a fit of rage, they are viewed as “having a bad day” or “having a temper”, anything but emotional. This label seems to be reserved for women. In other words, people in culture overlook evidence that contradicts their beliefs about gender differences.

While women are not any more emotional than men are, men are not any more logical than women are. Brain studies such as this one generally show that men have better motor skills and spatial thinking skills while women have better analytical skills and think more intuitively. This study assessed men’s and women’s logical thinking skills via written exams. The results showed that women scored at least as high as men did, and sometimes higher.

When women are falsely labeled as being more emotional and less logical, disrespectful behaviors towards women sometimes come about. One behavior that I find to be particularly destructive is accusing a woman of getting angry because she is on her menstrual period. In this video from The Big Bang Theory TV series, Sheldon Cooper did just that with the human resources lady. In the video, we see that the human resources lady has reason to believe that Sheldon and his friends are behaving in a manner that is disparaging towards women. Rather than seeing her exasperation as being justified, Sheldon assumes she must be on her menstrual period.

The question is: how can the human resources lady prove to Sheldon that her agitation is not because of her menstrual period? Should she furnish proof that she is not menstruating at the time? Should they all wait a week and see if her reaction to their terrible behavior changes? Will everyone have to wait a week every time she becomes outraged by something just to make sure she is not just grumpy because she is on her period? Then what if she reaches menopause? Do we just brush off her anger as hormonally driven until she is finished with menopause?

I had read about a real-life incident where a man saw that a woman was angry with him and said “well, someone is on her period…” The woman replied “If I were on my period every time I got angry with you, I would be anemic!” Now, in my opinion, telling a witty joke in response to a disparaging comment may make the situation worse. A witty joke may only give the perpetrator free comedy entertainment and lighten the mood. This remark is to be dealt with seriously. It is a form of sexual harassment.

When people get angry, they deserve respect and they deserve to be listened to. Their complaints should be taken into consideration. Their anger should not be invalidated based on some assumption that their hormones are driving their negative emotions rather than stimuli that warrant those negative emotions.

5. Gossip is a woman thing

The science literature shows mixed results regarding whether women gossip more than men do. Nonetheless, men do gossip. One place of gossip is the mens locker room as discussed in this article. Sometimes men talk trash about other men in the locker room at sports team practices. This trash talk does meet the definition of gossip.

Prejudice against one’s own group

Sometimes the people who are the most prejudiced against a group are people who are members of the group. For example, the people who complain the most about women being too much drama are often women. When women stereotype their own group, they often think of themselves as the exception. In The Crown TV series, when Margaret Thatcher became the first female Prime Minister of Britain, she said in one episode that women are too emotional to take on government offices. She made this statement while she, a woman, was assuming the most prominent public office in Britain. She obviously thought that she was an exception to this “rule”.

When women complain about other women starting too much drama, they often give themselves a pat on the back for not being that way. They think they are better than the other women. They really have just fallen into what is called internalized misogyny.

Confirmation bias in prejudice

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values. When it comes to prejudice against a group of people, confirmation bias will cause one’s observations of the group to be biased in favor of negative attributes and against positive attributes.

When a member of a group exhibits an unfavorable behavior, to the prejudiced person, that member of the group is representative of the entire group. For example, say a woman is making a scene at a restaurant because she is not happy with the service she is getting. The prejudiced person will say to him/herself “see, just what I thought, women are just too much drama!” Meanwhile, when a man yells out loud at the airport terminal because he is not getting his way, the same prejudiced person will just think “well, I hope he manages to calm down and that his problem gets fixed.”

Now when a member of the group exhibits a favorable attribute, the prejudiced person will think that this individual is an exception, expecially when the behavior is one that goes against the group stereotype. For example, let us say that a woman has a calm, rational and humble demeanor that goes against some of the negative female stereotypes. The prejudiced person will still think that the negative female stereotypes are aligned with reality, but that this one woman happens to be an exception. He may even say to the woman “you are not like other girls”. In this particular context, the statement “you are not like other girls” is an insult to the female sex. By telling a young woman that she is not like other girls, and framing it as a compliment, one is implying that it is better to not be like other members of the female sex, as if something is wrong with being feminine. Granted the expression “you are not like other girls” does not always have sexist underpinnings. In other contexts, it may just mean that the woman has a unique personality and that few other people are like her.

Summary

When we put all of these female stereotypes together, we can see that they place women into a bad position. Whenever a woman expresses her opinion about something with conviction, nobody will care because she is just another woman who thinks that she is always right. Whenever the woman gets upset about something, others will just think she is another woman full of drama, and will not consider that maybe her getting upset is warranted. If she gets into a dispute with another woman, others may think that the dispute is only happening because they are women, and not for some other reason.

Such bad treatment stemming from these stereotypes can lead to more negative emotions, which can then lead to more judgment and bad treatment. It is time we stop thinking based on stereotypes and see people as individuals.

References

Bjorkqvist K (2018) “Gender differences in aggression” Current Opinion in Psychology 18:39-42.

Clauss N, Rankin A, Byrd-Craven J (2017) Meta-analysis of Sex Differences in Aggression. In: Shackelford T., Weekes-Shackelford V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_846-1

Funk C and Parker K (2018) “Women and Men in STEM Often at Odds Over Workplace Equity” Pew Research Center

Grijalva, E., Newman, D. A., Tay, L., Donnellan, M. B., Harms, P. D., Robins, R. W., & Yan, T. (2015) “Gender differences in narcissism: A meta-analytic review” Psychological Bulletin 141(2):261–310. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038231

Hyde JS (1984) “How large are gender differences in aggression? A developmental meta-analysis” Developmental Psychology 20(4):722–736. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.20.4.722

Johnson S (1994) “A game of two halves? On men, football and gossip” Journal of Gender Studies 3(2):145-154. doi: 10.1080/09589236.1994.9960562

Lenney E (1977) “Women’s self-confidence in achievement settings” Psychological Bulletin 84(1):1–13. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.84.1.1

Roberts TA (1991) “Gender and the influence of evaluations on self-assessments in achievement settings” Psychological Bulletin 109(2):297–308. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.109.2.297

When you are in a debate or an argument with another person, there are two potential goals you can have. One potential goal is to win the argument. The other potential goal is to find out what is objectively true or objectively right. Though there can be shades of gray, I think that people tend to be shifted more towards one side. In other words, some people are not thinking as much about what is objectively right/true. They just want to win the argument. Other people care more about what is objectively true/right. They are concerned that their thinking may be misguided, and they want to be put right in the case that they are wrong.

People who just want to win the argument are going to exhibit certain behaviors. I figure that such people are going to talk more and listen less. When they do listen to the other person’s side of the debate, they are doing so not to genuinely understand the other person’s perspective, but rather to find fault. As the other person is talking to them, they will be constantly looking for fault so that they can secure their win. When they do this, they will often find fault before they even completely understand the other person’s argument in its entirety. In other words, they will jump to conclusions about why the other person thinks the way that he/she does before completely hearing the other person out.

Sometimes when people just want to win an argument, they pervert the other person’s assertions into something that they are not so that the other person’s perspective is made easier to criticize. For example, let us say that some women are complaining about “mansplaining” in the workplace, and a man invalidates their complaints by saying that mansplaining is defined as “whenever a man speaks”. In this case, the man is saying that these women do not want men to speak or express themselves at all. That is not necessarily true, however. In reality, mansplaining is defined as commenting on or explaining something to a woman in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner. In other words, these women are complaining that they are being talked down to by men who think that they are superior. As you can see, there is a discrepancy between what the man thinks that the women are complaining about and what the women are actually complaining about. By altering the definition of mansplaining to “whenever a man speaks”, the man is making it much easier to find fault with the complaints of these women.

If the man cared about what was objectively right, then he would have collected information from the women and the other men that they encountered. He would have tried to develop an understanding of why these women felt that they were being talked down to, and how they would like to be treated. He would have then considered whether men would still be able to express themselves while still treating the women the way that they want to be treated.

The straw man logical fallacy is the act of setting up a phony, weak, extreme or ridiculous parody of an opponent’s argument and then proceeding to knock it down or reduce it to absurdity with a rhetorical wave of the hand. For example, if the opponent is a vegetarian who claims that animals have feelings, the person may ask if anyone has ever heard a cow laugh at a joke. If the opponent is pro-life and against abortion, the person may judgmentally assume that the pro-lifers want women to be oppressed, pregnant and chained to the stove. In these scenarios, the person who wants to win the argument is trying to frame the opposing view into something that it is not so that it is easier to win.

When people just want to win an argument, the reasons, I figure, are ego and wishful thinking. In other words, sometimes people just want to feed their sense of pride. Other times people believe what they want to be true/right, but not what is evidently true/right.

Scenarios where the truth is more popular

While droves of people are more interested in winning an argument than in finding out what is objectively true/right, there are some situations where most people do care what is objectively true/right. For example, let us say that you decide to take a train from New York City to Boston. You are sitting on the train waiting for it to start moving when someone near you explains that you are wrong, the train is actually going to Philadelphia. Here, someone has expressed disagreement with you as to where the train is going. What do you care about more?—winning the argument or finding out where the train is actually going?

If you decide that winning the argument is more important, then your goal is to convince the other person that the train is actually going to Boston. If you succeed, then the other person will leave the train and go find another train. However, what if it turns out that the train you are on is really going to Philadelphia? You would end up in the wrong city, and you would be late for an important business meeting, BUT at least you won the argument with that other guy who thought the train was going to Philadelphia.

Another example: Let us say that you and another person are having a debate about whether the Atkins diet is a healthy diet. You argue that the Atkins diet is good for weight loss, vibrant health and longevity while the other person disagrees. Eventually, you win the argument and convince the other person that the Atkins diet is a good healthy diet. Now imagine that years later, you die a slow and painful death from heart disease because of the high fat content of the Atkins diet. Though you die a slow and painful death, at least you won the argument.

In these examples described above, a reasonable person would care more about the objective truth than about winning the argument. A reasonable person would be willing to find out that he/she is wrong if that is the case so that he/she could be put right.

A lesson we can learn from the examples above is that even when you win the argument, you may still be objectively wrong, and the truth will often be made known eventually. At that point you may look more foolish than if you just admitted that you were wrong in the beginning, and allowed yourself to lose the argument.

Another lesson we can learn from the examples above is that when you win an argument, and you turn out to be wrong later, you not only screw yourself over, but also other people. Think of the person who thought that the train was going to Philadelphia, and then left to go look for another train, not knowing that he was on the correct train at the start.

Goodness cares about what is right while evil just wants to win

Sometimes people are praised for having good debating skills. With good debating skills, we are good at being persuasive—not only towards the person with whom we are debating, but also towards others observing the debate. The problem comes when techniques emerge that involve deception and manufactured misunderstanding of the opposing side.

Let us say that you are a prosecutor and you are praised for having an 85% success rate. This may seem impressive, but what if only 60% of the defendants were actually guilty? That would mean that because you are “so good at your job”, innocent people have been prosecuted and sent to prison. Is this acceptable? According to the world, it is. When a destructive behavior is common, culture becomes desensitized to it, and eventually people just shrug their shoulders and mutter “that’s just how things are…”

While the law profession has sometimes been condemned for being corrupt, a lawyer can still carry out his/her work in a morally right manner by, for example, refusing to take a case if he/she has reason to believe that it does not represent what is true/right. In the long term, this can result in a higher success rate even though at times it can involve rejecting high-paying clients.

How do we define “winning an argument”?

When there are formal debates, the winner is generally chosen by a panel of judges who are supposed to be impartial. In informal debates, however, there are usually no 3rd party judges present, and so it is more difficult to define the winner and loser. Is the loser the one who stops arguing first? Is the loser the one who changes his/her mind to that of the opposing side? If we define the loser as the one who is persuaded of the opposing view, then we make it difficult to impossible to win an argument against an idiot. In order for a person to be persuaded to change sides, the person needs to first understand the other side, and this is more difficult for an idiot to do. Idiots find more difficulty in learning new concepts and taking in new information.

To persuade the opposing side of our view, we need to do some amount of talking. To be persuaded of the opposing view and thus change sides, we need to listen and understand. The thing is that listening, and especially understanding, requires much more cognitive capacity than talking and lecturing. The reason is that when we are talking, all we are doing is taking information that is already in our heads and spitting it out. Talking is so easy that even parrots can do it, and they do not even possess human intelligence! To listen and understand, however, we need to take in new information and make sense of it. This is more difficult.

So if we were to see an idiot having a debate with a smarter person, we may see the idiot doing more of the talking while the smarter person listens. The listener may look like he/she is just sitting there doing nothing, but in reality, he/she is doing more than the one who is doing all of the talking. Recall the scene from the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie where Dorothy asks the scarecrow “How can you talk if you do not have a brain”. The scarecrow comments that “some people without brains do an awful lot of talking”. We should try not to be one of those people.

Do you want to look smarter or get smarter?

I have a saying: if you want to look smarter, then use your mouth. If you want to get smarter, then use your ears.

I would imagine plenty of people saying that they would like to both look smarter and get smarter, but there is some degree of tradeoff. When we are too obsessed with looking smarter, we become unable to admit when we are wrong. Correspondingly, when our view is objectively wrong, we will be less likely to be corrected in a debate. Indeed, a debate is an opportunity to be put right in the case that we are objectively wrong; but it is harder to be corrected when we are too busy talking over the other person and finding fault in the opposing view that may not be there.

Additional behaviors exhibited by people who want to win

People who just want to win are more likely to be condescending and disrespectful towards the opposing view. Such people also are more likely to be aggressive and hostile. They may even take pride in making the other person cry. At this point, the debate is more like a verbal boxing match than it is a civilized discussion.

People in search of truth, on the other hand, are more likely to take the time to listen and understand. They are open to the possibility that they are wrong and the opposing side is right. Such open-mindedness is not always easy.

Sometimes when people just want to win an argument, they will falsely accuse the other person of falling into logical fallacies. For example, they may accuse the other person of the post hoc logical fallacy even when there is reason to believe that a cause-effect relationship does exist. They may accuse the other person of the slippery slope logical fallacy even when there is evidence of a chain reaction taking place. They may accuse the other person of the style-over-substance logical fallacy simply because the other person does not feel comfortable around someone who is dressed in shabby attire. The shabby attire is not necessarily what is causing the discomfort for all they know.

Most people hate hearing the other person say “you are wrong. This is what I think…”, but at least the person is addressing you as an equal and is taking the time to disagree with you. What I find to be more noxious and offensive is being told “well, if that’s how you feel…”. This expression also is an expression of disagreement, but with an additional condescending twist. Unlike the expressions “that’s what you think…” or “you are wrong”, the phrase “how you feel” to me implies that your view does not come from any reasoning, is not rooted in reality, and is rather just a feeling. While people sometimes say “I feel that…” as a way of admitting that they may be wrong, the act of telling someone “that’s how you feel” serves as a put-down in ways that saying “you are wrong” does not.

Summary

Let us say that you are having a disagreement with someone, and you really care about what is objectively true/right. If you see that the other person just wants to win the argument, then the two of you are not on the same page. You both have different agendas. What will probably happen is that you will do more of the listening, the other person will do more of the talking, and the other person may have the illusion of getting the upper hand simply because he/she is talking more. He/she may think that your talking less means that you are less knowledgable. This can be frustrating, but sometimes the right way is harder.

A debate can be one of two things: a search for truth or an ego fest.

Most, if not all, of us remember the heroes of classic fairy tales. They tended to be rich, handsome and skilled in combat. They were virtuous. They were brave. They were kind. In these stories, they would rescue the young beautiful woman from the villain and marry her. Then the two would live happily ever after. The villain, on the other hand, was often ugly in appearance. Even in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, the good witch of the north assured Dorothy that only bad witches are ugly.

Some more recent fairy tale movies, such as Shrek, have shown much less physically attractive heroes while the villain may be the more physically attractive one. Indeed, most people are probably aware that when a man is rich and handsome, he is not necessarily a good person. Conversely, when a person is ugly, he/she is not necessarily a bad person. This concept should be easy enough for the average person to understand. Yet most people have some famous celebrity that they idolize, such as a pop artist, Hollywood actor or sports athlete. Many people see these celebrities as being like royalty.

So suppose you are a big fan of a famous person throughout much of your life. This person’s work inspires you, and uplifts you. Now suppose that one day you find evidence that this person—whom you have been a fan of for so long—is not a good person. Word has it that this person has done some bad things that have caused people to suffer, and he/she is not showing signs of penitence. Would you still be a fan?

Unfortunately, a lot of celebrities have been guilty of causing suffering to others, particularly women. This Wikipedia article presents a long list of male celebrities who have sexually harassed and sexually abused women. Some of these male celebrities were accused of sexual abuse by up to 60 or more women.

The world’s fetish for rich, handsome men

One day when I was in high school, my sports team was having a car wash. The next customer comes up to have his car washed, and I hear one of the other girls say “He is really hot, you guys, so do a good job”. I did not like this comment. Being more physically attractive should not mean that one is more deserving of better service. Nonetheless, this incident shows how physically attractive people are more likely to get better service.

Rich people also have a higher status in mainstream culture than poor or middle income people. While many rich people have worked their way into becoming rich, there are also many people who were born rich, and thus have been rich their entire lives. They did not have to earn their high status in society. They always had it.

The average person usually has to put effort into earning the favor of others. They may earn the favor of others by demonstrating certain virtues, talents, passions or charisma. The rich and handsome man, on the other hand, does not have to do as much to win the favor of others. What does this mean? He can be a mediocre person and plenty of people will still like him.

How this fetish can affect the rich, handsome men

In general, rich handsome men receive messages from the world around them that they will be well-liked even if they are not good people. They often receive these messages from a very young age. Such messages convey to them that there are little to no behavioral standards and no boundaries. They can do with people whatever they want, and it is okay.

Gaston from the classic story Beauty and the Beast is an example of a handsome alpha male who believes that it is every woman’s fondest dream to be with him. In reality, he is conceited, self-centered and outright evil. Even though he is far removed from being a decent human being, he has a posse of people in town who adore him for his good looks and his talents. As illustrated in this video, he has both men and women swooning over him. As long as people continue to shower him with adoration, he will continue to see himself as the handsome and virtuous hero who is entitled to get whatever he wants.

When these rich handsome men are favored by our culture, almost unconditionally, they are, I figure, predisposed to developing narcissistic behavioral tendencies. In other words, they become predisposed to growing up believing that they are entitled to special treatment and are entitled to get whatever they want, regardless of how badly the fulfillment of their desires affects others.

I do not mean to say that all rich and handsome men are bad. What I am saying is that they, as a group, have an increased temptation to do evil simply because their actions are less likely to backfire on them. Even when they commit a heinous crime, they can afford to pay lawyers large amounts of money and evade prosecution.

Young women and girls often become infatuated with these rich and handsome men, and they display this infatuation freely for others to see. This behavior can fuel the flames of the superiority complex of these rich and handsome men. Eventually, these men start to believe that all women love them. The word “no” from a woman ceases to have any meaning in their world. Because they think that all women are supposed to like them, they can become prone to sexual misconduct. They can fall into the delusion that all of their sexual advances are welcome.

Sometimes the rich, handsome men see themselves as being like the heroes from fairy tales. Like the heroes from fairy tales, they are rich, handsome and perhaps have some notable talent. They see themselves as the one who fights evil, or at least as the one who is on the good side. They do not understand that they are the villain, and not the hero.

The Bryce Walker character from the Thirtheen Reasons Why TV series is an example of a rich and fairly good-looking guy who abused his high social status and became a serial rapist. He was not only rich, but also a star athlete. This video clip from the series shows Bryce’s rationalization for his actions — the all too common “she wanted it!” At the end of the video clip, Bryce says that “she was practically begging me to fuck her. If that’s rape then every girl at this school wants to be raped”. Of course Bryce’s recollection of the event is inaccurate. Anybody who saw the scene would see that the girl was obviously trying to get away when he forcibly grabbed her and had sex with her from behind.

When Bryce Walker was put on trial for rape, he managed to evade prosecution because of the large number of lawyers receiving plenty of money from his wealthy family. Nonetheless, once word got out that he was a serial rapist, he became known as the town monster. Even the other boys at his new school were mean to him because of what he had done. This chain of events, however, is not always representative of what happens in real life. In real life, rich handsome men sometimes maintain an okay reputation even after word gets out that they have sexually abused large numbers of women.

Take Bill Cosby, for example. About 60 women had made allegations against him for sexual abuse, and those allegations were found later to be true. Despite this, Bill Cosby is still best known as a stand-up comedian and actor who presented a more positive image of African Americans on television. Because he had such a high level of social importance at the time of these rape allegations, it was hard for the public to recognize him for the bad man that he was.

Sowing one’s wild oats

Sowing one’s wild oats refers to the practice of having many sexual relationships particularly when one is young. Young men in old fashioned upper class society were sometimes encouraged (though maybe behind closed doors) to sow their wild oats before they marry and commit to one woman for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately, sowing their wild oats often involved taking advantage of lower class women. In the southern United States during the time of slavery, the sons of plantation owners were sometimes told to have sex with the slave women rather than spoiling a “pure white virgin girl”. It was common for slave women to be raped by their masters and their masters’ sons.

When upper class men sow their wild oats, their sexual indulgences often involve abuses of their power. When they are rich and handsome, they are sometimes not able to see why a lower class woman would say “no”. They believe that with their smooth talk and charm, all women adore them, and all women should welcome their sexual advances. When the lower class woman pushes the man away, he does not go away so easily. He is not able to comprehend the fact that he is not as desirable as he thinks he is. His attempt to take advantage of a lower class woman alone is proof of the terrible person he is. No woman, in her right mind, of any class would marry him or have anything to do with him. His stubborn delusion that all women love him is what makes him so dangerous for women to be around.

What makes matters worse is that these rich handsome villains are not the only ones who think all women are supposed to adore them. Much of the rest of society also expects all women to adore these men, placing the women into a bad position where it is difficult to impossible to seek justice should they be victimized. Society already treats rape victims badly enough when the rapists are not rich and handsome.

It is thought that these rich, handsome men do not need to rape women because they already have a bunch of women willingly throwing themselves at them. Real-world observations, however, show that wealthy male celebrities do sexually abuse women, sometimes on a routine basis. This article discusses the dark side of Hollywood and how many men in Hollywood have abused their power and used their high social status to silence their victims. Below is an excerpt from the article, translated from Spanish:

As Andrés Quinteros, a Cepsim psychologist specializing in sexual abuse, assures, although there is no specific profile of a harasser, it is always his power that leads him to these situations. “They are men or women with a lot of power and they use it with vulnerable people to get what they want. Normally they lack empathy, which is what places us in the pain of others and makes us do no harm or be selfish », he assures.

The concept of people as private property is offensive to mainstream culture. Our culture especially condemns slavery. While owning people as private property is technically illegal, evildoers will still find ways to claim another human being as their personal property.

What does it mean for a person to be the private property of another?

Imagine a scenario where there is a chair in the room, and you would like to sit down. You do not have to ask the chair if it is okay for you to sit on it. The chair has no will of its own. It is an inanimate object. However, if someone else owns the chair, and the owner of the chair says that you are not supposed to sit in the chair, then that is a different story. The chair does not have a will of its own, but the owner of the chair does.

So when one person claims another person as his/her personal property, the will of the other person does not matter anymore. All that matters is the will of the “owner”. Everything that the other person says or does is to be dictated by the one who owns him/her.

Note that romantic relationships are not the only kind of relationship where one person claims another as his private property. People may claim friends, family members or maybe even coworkers as their private property.

So let us say that Jen decides to claim Jill as her personal property. What does that mean? Well, first Jen forces Jill to be in some kind of relationship with her. For example, Jen may coerce Jill into being her friend. In the relationship, Jen will stifle Jill’s ability to express herself freely. Jen could not care less that Jill has a will of her own. If Jill is writing up an email where she is speaking her mind about something, Jen may constantly look over her shoulder to see what she is writing. If Jen finds that she does not agree with the content of Jill’s email message, then she will, by force, stop Jill from sending out the email. All the while, Jen may be too delusional to believe that she is doing anything wrong. Jen may rationalize and tell herself that she is only protecting Jill because if silly Jill does whatever she wants, she may hurt herself, and we don’t want that!

In addition to stifling Jill’s ability to express herself, Jen may also force Jill to live her life the way that Jen wants her to. Jen may tell Jill how to eat, what to wear and even what kind of career path to take. Jen also does not like it when Jill makes friends with people who are not friends with her. What if Jill’s other friends are people that Jen does not like? They may pollute Jill’s head with ideas that Jen does not agree with. Jen also will not want Jill to accomplish great things that Jen never accomplished herself. Indeed, private property cannot be superior to its owner!

One would think that Jill would want to leave such a terrible relationship, but as far as Jen is concerned, Jill has no right to leave the relationship any more than a chair has a right to decide not to be owned by its owner. If Jill tries to get away from Jen, then Jen may stalk her. For example, Jen may walk up to the door of Jill’s apartment and keep knocking until Jill answers. Jen may even try to break into Jill’s home, saying she “just wants to talk to her”. Jen may convince herself that Jill only wants to get away because she is suffering from anxiety issues and is behaving irrationally. Eventually, Jill may need to resort to an act of violence just to keep Jen from invading her space.

Fortunately, friendships like the one between Jen and Jill do not happen often, but there are shades of gray. Often people will try to exercise some degree of control over another, though not necessarily to the extent that Jen exerts control of Jill.

Why would people try to control other people?

Many articles discuss how people try to control other people. Usually, articles site anxiety as being the most common motivation for controlling other people. When people are anxious, they are more likely to want their way all the time. They are nervous about what may happen if they do not get their way. The only way that such people can get their way all the time is by controlling people around them.

I think that there are other motivations besides anxiety for controlling others. Sometimes people want to control others just because they are evil. This article discusses the characteristics of evil people, one of which is the need to control everything. The evildoer’s objective is to get whatever he/she wants regardless of the path of destruction and suffering that he/she leaves behind.

Unsolicited physical contact and invasion of space

Some say that more communication takes place in nonverbal body language than in verbal communication. Physical contact, for example, usually conveys affection, which may be sexual or nonsexual.

Unsolicited physical contact, however, is contact that is inappropriate or unwanted. When we think of unsolicited physical contact, we most often think of physical contact of a sexual nature. However, unsolicited physical contact can also be nonsexual. When the evildoer makes unsolicited physical contact with the victim, the evildoer is, in a nonverbal manner, claiming ownership over the victim in that moment. The message is not one of companionship, but rather one of control. Just as an animal marks a plot of land as its territory by urinating on it, the evildoer can mark a victim as his/her territory by means of physical contact and invasion of the victim’s space. Meanwhile, to the casual bystander, the unsolicited physical contact just looks like a friend patting the other friend on the shoulder.

So let’s go back to the story of Jen and Jill. When Jill is sitting at her computer writing an email and Jen places her hand on Jill’s shoulder, what Jen is nonverbally conveying to Jill is “You are under my control right now. Your will does not matter, only mine does”. Jen may even start typing on Jill’s keyboard and clicking on Jill’s mouse. She does not care that the computer belongs to Jill and not her. Because Jen is underhandedly claiming Jill as her personal property, any of Jill’s property automatically becomes Jen’s property as far as Jen is concerned. After all, private property cannot own other private property. An entity can either be an owner or be a piece of property, but not both.

If Jill complains that Jen is invading her space and touching her too much, Jen may just brush off Jen’s complaints. Jen describes herself as a touchy-feely, affectionate person, and tells Jill that she is being unappreciative of her friend’s “love and affection”.

In my opinion, one can tell whether physical contact by another person is malicious or friendly based on the context. If someone has been a good friend of yours for many years and pats you on the shoulder, then the physical contact is friendly. If the person makes physical contact with you continually even though you have told him that you do not like it, then what he is doing becomes harassment. If the person making physical contact with you has been trying to control you in ways that are oppressive and inappropriate, then you can figure that the physical contact is not conveying true companionship.

Making the victim feel guilty for having any will at all

In the times of slavery, a master wanted a slave to be docile, submissive and apathetic. Correspondingly, when evildoers claim another human being as their personal property, they too prefer their “property” to have these same characteristics.

To get the victim to be more submissive and apathetic, the evildoer may try to make the victim feel guilty for expressing a strong opinion about something. When the victim speaks his/her mind, the evildoer may act like the victim is being too overbearing. Also, if the victim so much as expresses a preference for things to be a certain way, the evildoer may say things like “you just like to always be in control”.

In other words, whenever the victim expresses an opinion or a preference, the evildoer may intentionally blow the victim’s behavior out of proportion, and act like the victim is being overbearing, bossy and always wanting to be in control. If these manipulative tactics are successful, then the victim will over time become less and less assertive and more and more submissive to the will of everyone else. The victim may even cease to express him/herself altogether.

Do parents own their children?

Most people believe that children are not the property of their parents. For example, children have rights, and they can be taken away from their parents if the state finds that the parents are harming the children. Conversely, when someone owns a piece of property, he/she can do with it whatever he/she wants, and it will not be taken away. Back in the days of slavery, slaves did not have rights, and no amount of harm that the master did to the slave would warrant the removal of the slave from the master.

The good parent sees the child as a separate, though underdeveloped, human being. The good parent tries to raise the child in the best way he/she can so that the child becomes the best version of him/herself. The parent who sees the child as property, on the other hand, views the child more as an extension of him/her. When this parent speaks highly of the child to others, he/she is actually flattering him/herself. For example, the parent may comment on how beautiful the child is. Now when we comment on how beautiful a house is, we are not complimenting the house because the house is an inanimate object. Obviously, we are complimenting the owner of the house. Similarly, when this parent comments on how beautiful the child is, the compliment is not directed at the child any more than it would be towards a house. The parent is complimenting him/herself, the “owner” of the child.

Parents often view their children as an extension of them. To me, this does not necessarily mean that they view their children as chattel. Perhaps these parents just feel a connection to their child because their child has inherited their genes and because they raised the child. Therefore, the child’s accomplishments are seen as a reflection of them, the parents.

The parents who view their children as their personal property, on the other hand, have a mentality that the children exist for their own sake. Their children live for them rather than them living for their children. Because they do not see the children as separate human beings, they think their children’s cares and concerns are not warranted and that any negative emotions that their children express are inconsequential. To them, the things that their children worry about are all in their head. Rather than a negative emotion being validated, the negative emotion is viewed as this thing that comes out of nowhere, and just needs to be subdued, either by hugs and kisses or by punishment.

I personally find Leonard Hofstadter’s mother (from The Big Bang Theory show) to be refreshing. Her children have accomplished some great things. When others say that she must be so proud of her children, she simply says that she is not proud because, after all, they are not her accomplishments.

People who use other people

Even when people are not claiming you as their own personal property, they may still “rent” you. In other words, they may temporarily use you for their own personal gains. Their use of you may involve invasion of your personal space. Once they have gotten what they wanted, they stop using you. Their rent period is over.

Let us say that some lady has a bad reputation and she knows that you have a pretty good reputation. The lady may stand close to you, talk to you, and maybe even make physical contact with you, just to make it look to others like she has a relationship with you of some kind. She figures that by associating with you, she can improve her image in the eyes of others. She may even give you a hug. You awkwardly let her hug you. What else are you going to do? Push her away? Meanwhile, your hug is signifying to others that the two of you are buddies, even though you are not.

Let us say that you are a woman, and a man is standing close to you and talking to you. His X-girlfriend is within sight, and he is trying to make her jealous by making it look like he has something going with you. You see that he is just using you, and you don’t like it. You try to push him away, but he is not going away so easily. He thinks that if he can just kiss you, he can make his X burn with jealousy. “I know what you are doing, and I don’t like it!” you say. He doesn’t care. Instead, he stubbornly believes that you should be flattered by his attention. In that moment, you exist for his own sake as far as he is concerned. It will not be for long though. Once he has accomplished his little scheme, his rent period is over, and you belong to yourself again.

Summary

Many will say that unsolicited physical contact implies that one’s body is not one’s own. The victim’s living body does not belong to him/her anymore, but rather to someone else. For those of you who follow the Bible, the Bible states in 1 Corinthians 6:19 Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own. In other words, the Bible states that the person’s body belongs to God. By claiming another person’s body as theirs, evildoers are claiming ownership of something that actually belongs to God, and are using it to fulfill their own desires.

Nonetheless, I believe that unsolicited physical contact has additional implications. For example, many would agree that it is wrong to pet a cat or a dog that does not want to be petted. Hence, unsolicited physical contact implies that the victim has even less autonomy than what a cat or a dog should have, and therefore ranks the victim at the same level as an inanimate object. Just as an inanimate object has no will of its own, the victim is treated as if his/her own will either does not exist or is inconsequential.