Social Norms and Sanctions

Vampire bats...share blood...don't share then get punished by others.

reciprocal altruism... positive sum game...

sanctioning eliminates free riders...


accept drinks but don't pay. cheaters in the short run outperform non-cheaters

cheat detectors...  watch for cheaters
A vampire bat strikes it big but doesn't share. Later other vampire bats who strike it big starve the selfish bats...



Social emotions and the prisoners dilemma
•We feel GRATITUDE and LIKING for people who cooperate with us. This motivates us to be nice to them in the future
•We feel ANGER and DISTRUST toward those who betray us. This motivates us to betray or avoid them in the future
•We feel GUILT when we betray someone who cooperates with us. This motivates us to behave better in the future


irrationality in relationship makes it last longer. Rational:"You are the best person I've met so far. I will stay with you as long as that is true."

Levels of rationality differs from culture to culture.
Culture of honor

Genetic doesn't mean inevitable, and cultural doesn't mean easy to fix.

More testosterone, less social.

Problems of empathy and problems of social cognition are more prevalent among male than female.

The pain of others is even aversive to babies.

Chimpanzees are empathetic to other chimpanzees, but not other animals, like rabbits.

The Robbers Cave study: common goal, common fate to rebuild a larger group from separated groups.

minimal groups: Henri Tajfel

Moral Judgments: evaluation; obligation; sanctions
Three frameworks of moral thought: ethics of autonomy (rights, equality, freedom), ethics of community (duty, status, hierarchy, interdependence), ethics of divinity (purity, sanctity, pollution, sin)

acquaintances matter.



You THINK everyone notices you.
1. Spotlight effect.
2. Transparency effect: people systematically overestimate the extent to which other people notice their secrets. We constantly overestimate how much other people know.

Positive enhancement effect...we feel good about ourselves.

Festinger cognitive dissonance... we act to reduce dissonance...
can also be explained by status quo bias? Not in this case.
people who get paid $1 reported to enjoy the task more than those who get paid $20.
People who are in a bad relationship for quite a long time tend to convince themselves that they are in love with their partners, even their partners are jerks.
"haze" in fraternity, get people to like the group.
"If you don't pay people, they are more committed to the cause."
Therapy for free are more likely to be ineffective.
Cognitive Dissonance... vs. intrinsic motivation...
We adjust our beliefs to make ourselves look more moral and rational than we are.

Three findings about yourself:
You THINK everyone notices you.
You believe that you are terrific
What you do makes sense. If it doesn't make sense, or if something you do is foolish or make you look manipulative or cheap, you will distort it in your head so that it does make sense.


"mere exposure effect"
People tend to like something they see often or they see before. People like their mirror image more, while their friends will like their image more.
familiarity is itself a force for liking.

couples become more and more similar during the course of the relationship.

"Matthew effect" developmental psychology term. the rich get richer...

stereotype...

Other people's expectations are important for people's behavior.
People are full of potentials. But people's stereotyping makes them ignorant of the evidence that is against their stereotyping. We other people believe that you cannot do well, they tend to ignore the evidence that you are doing well. So if most people believe that you cannot do well, it doesn't help that much if you do well, because they are unlikely to notice anyway. You then may get discouraged and don't try at all to do well. People's low expectation is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's not that high expectations increase people's performance, but rather that low expectations extremely limit people's potentials.

Why people tend to ignore evidence that is against their theories and beliefs? To reduce cognitive dissonance.

being chased is the most common dream.
memory consolidates during a dream


Laughter is social and communicative. involuntary noise-making.

Most laughter is inspired by some degree of aggression, but it's attenuated and not real. A laughter is a signal that it's not real. Mock aggression; collective aggression.
"Laughter is a form of bonding against a common enemy. a sound of group cohesion against common enemy."



Schemas are frameworks that develop to help organize knowledge.

•Assimilation -process of taking new information or a new experience and fitting it into an already existing schema
•Accommodation -process by which existing schemas are changed or new schemas are created in order to fit new information

Happiness

H.L. Mencken - A wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband.

Ending matters a lot for memory. 90% bad stuff + 10% good stuff in the end is much better than 90% good stuff + 10% bad stuff in the end.

1. The brain is the source of mental life, but we don't know how this happens.

2. About a half of the variants in personalities of different people are due to genetic factors, but we don't know how the other half happens.

3. The social influences are important to induce and drive people to do certain things. But some people are immune to these social influences.

Man does not live on bread alone.

Matthew 4:4 says, man does not live on bread alone. We certainly need material substance to survive and function, but money and material cannot bring happiness.

We need personal interaction with others to feel fulfilled, to feel motivated and to feel the meaning of life. Hence social affluence is much more important than material affluence to bring happiness into life.


spill-over effect, spread effect in psychology
Neurological research suggests that the modular construction of our brains limits the power to differentiate between varying circumstances (Frank 1988: passions within reason. The strategic role of emotions).  neurological compactness, which has an evolutionary advantage..
Technical separability does not imply attitudinal separability.

Double Spacing in LaTex

source: http://albertskblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/to-doublespace-latex-document-you.html

To doublespace a LaTeX document, you should include the line

\usepackage{setspace}

after your \documentclass line.

Before your \begin{document} command,

\doublespacing

will make the text of the whole document doublespaced.  Footnotes,
figures, and tables will still be singlespaced, however. For one-and-a-half
spacing, instead use the command

\onehalfspacing

In order to make a part of the text of your document singlespaced, you can
put:

\begin{singlespace}

at the beginning of the text you want singlespaced, and

\end{singlespace}

at the end.

You can also set the spacing to be something other than doublespaced; for
example, if you wanted to have one-and-a-quarter spacing between lines,
use the line

\setstretch{1.25}

before your \begin{document} command, and after the
\usepackage{setspace} line.

Search in Vim

On a single line you can use fo and then ; to go forward (or , backward).

On multiple line, you must use /o and then n to go forward (or N backward).

Alternatively, your problem might be solved by using regexp and substitute, ie :%s/[your odd character]//g

To manage to copy and paste your "odd character", you should go in visual using v to select the character, then y<ESC>.

Then type : :%s/<CTRL+r>"//g

<CTRL+r>" will copy the content of the copy register in the command line.

Latex-Suite and Vim

\cite{}  F9 to select references from .bib file

David Brooks: Social Animal

Three insights:
1. While the conscious mind writes the autobiography of our species, the unconscious mind does most of the  work.

2. Emotions are at the center of our thinking. Emotions are not separate from reason, but they are the foundation of reason because they tell us what to value. Learning and educating your emotions is one of the central activities of wisdom. It is the central organizing process of the way we think. It tells us what to imprint. The brain is the record of the feelings of a life.

情感与理智并不是相悖的。情感是理智的基础，因为情感让我们知道什么值得我们去珍视。

3. We're not primarily self-contained individuals. We're social animals, not rational animals. We emerge out of relationships, and we are deeply interpenetrated, one with another. And so when we see another person, we reenact in our own minds what we see in their minds.


We are now children of the French Enlightenment. We believe that reason is the highest of the faculties. But I think this research shows that the British Enlightenment, or the Scottish Enlightenment, with David Hume, Adam Smith, actually had a better handle on who we are -- that reason is often weak, our sentiments are strong, and our sentiments are often trustworthy. And this work corrects that bias in our culture, that dehumanizing bias. It gives us a deeper sense of what it actually takes for us to thrive in this life. When we think about human capital we think about the things we can measure easily. What it really takes to do well, to lead a meaningful life, are things that are deeper, things we don't really even have words for.


The first gift, or talent, is mind-sight -- the ability to enter into other people's minds and learn what they have to offer. This is one skill of how to hoover up knowledge, one from another.

A second skill is equal poise, the ability to have the serenity to read the biases and failures in your own mind. Some people have the ability and awareness of their own biases, their own overconfidence. They have epistemological modesty. They are open-minded in the face of ambiguity. They are able to adjust strength of the conclusions to the strength of their evidence. They are curious. And these traits are often unrelated and uncorrelated with IQ.

The third trait is metis, what we might call street smarts -- it's a Greek word. It's a sensitivity to the physical environment, the ability to pick out patterns in an environment -- derive a gist. The third is what you might call sympathy, the ability to work within groups. And that comes in tremendously handy, because groups are smarter than individuals. And face-to-face groups are much smarter than groups that communicate electronically, because 90 percent of our communication is non-verbal. And the effectiveness of a group is not determined by the IQ of the group; it's determined by how well they communicate, how often they take turns in conversation. Then you could talk about a trait like blending.

And then the final thing I'll mention is something you might call limerence. And this is not an ability; it's a drive and a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for success and prestige.The unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence, when the skull line disappears and we are lost in a challenge or a task -- when a craftsman feels lost in his craft, when a naturalist feels at one with nature, when a believer feels at one with God's love.That is what the unconscious mind hungers for. And many of us feel it in love when lovers feel fused.