emotions and pro-social and religious sentiments during the September 11 disaster

Abstract:

Analysing emotional states under duress or during heightened, life-and-death situations is extremely difficult, especially given the inability of laboratory experiments to adequately replicate the environment and the inherent biases of post event surveys.  It is in this  area that  natural experiments  come to the fore by combining the randomization that comes from natural data with an experimentally realistic event. The pager communications from September 11th, made publicly 

available by Wiki Leaks (Wiki Leaks, 2009), provide exactly the kind of natural experiment emotion researchers have been seeking.  We have  analysed the pager messages by applying an absolute count methodology and by presenting both positive and negative emotive categories as well as the development of  pro-social and religious sentiment. Providing  behavioural evidence on how people communicate under  extreme circumstances and offers valuable insights into human nature. We demonstrate that positive and pro-social communications are the first to emerge followed by the slower and lower negative  communications. Religious sentiment is the last to emerge, as individual attempt to make sense of event. 

Following the Crowd: Changing Your Mind to Fit In May Not Be a Conscious Choice And this is why I will always be promoting the motto ‘Think for yourself’. Oh science, you always know what to say to reinstate my faith in you (Not that it ever left). Beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder—it is also in the eyes of the beholder’s friends. A study published in April in Psychological Science found that men judge a woman as more attractive when they believe their peers find that woman attractive—supporting a budding theory that groupthink is not as simple as once thought. Researchers at Harvard University asked 14 college-age men to rate the attractiveness of 180 female faces on a scale of 1 to 10. Thirty minutes later the psychologists asked the men to rate the faces again, but this time the faces were paired with a random rating that the scien­tists told the men were averages of their peers’ scores. The men were strongly influenced by their peers’ supposed judgments—they rated the women with higher scores as more attractive than they did the first time. Functional MRI scans showed that the men were not simply lying to fit in. Activity in their brain’s pleasure centers indicated that their opinions of the women’s beauty really did change. The results fit in with a new theory of con­formity, says the study’s lead author Jamil Zaki. When people conform to group expect­ations, Zaki says, they are not concealing their own preferences; they actually have aligned their minds. In addition, the likelihood of someone conforming depends on his or her place within the group, according to a study in the December 2010 issue of the British Journal of Sociology. Members who are central are more likely to dissent because their identities are more secure. Those at the edges, who feel only partially in­volved or are new to the group, may have more malleable opinions.
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Following the Crowd: Changing Your Mind to Fit In May Not Be a Conscious Choice

And this is why I will always be promoting the motto ‘Think for yourself’. Oh science, you always know what to say to reinstate my faith in you (Not that it ever left).

Beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder—it is also in the eyes of the beholder’s friends. A study published in April in Psychological Science found that men judge a woman as more attractive when they believe their peers find that woman attractive—supporting a budding theory that groupthink is not as simple as once thought.

Researchers at Harvard University asked 14 college-age men to rate the attractiveness of 180 female faces on a scale of 1 to 10. Thirty minutes later the psychologists asked the men to rate the faces again, but this time the faces were paired with a random rating that the scien­tists told the men were averages of their peers’ scores. The men were strongly influenced by their peers’ supposed judgments—they rated the women with higher scores as more attractive than they did the first time. Functional MRI scans showed that the men were not simply lying to fit in. Activity in their brain’s pleasure centers indicated that their opinions of the women’s beauty really did change.

The results fit in with a new theory of con­formity, says the study’s lead author Jamil Zaki. When people conform to group expect­ations, Zaki says, they are not concealing their own preferences; they actually have aligned their minds. In addition, the likelihood of someone conforming depends on his or her place within the group, according to a study in the December 2010 issue of the British Journal of Sociology. Members who are central are more likely to dissent because their identities are more secure. Those at the edges, who feel only partially in­volved or are new to the group, may have more malleable opinions.

(via scinerds)