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from the sad-crying-clown-in-an-iron-lung dept.
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Cognitive curiosity, cognitive ability, melancholy, and introversion predict social psychological skill, a new Yale study shows.
[...] The authors asked more than 1.000 subjects about how people think, act, and feel in social contexts. The two psychologists began the survey [...] by asking: “Can you accurately infer how most people feel, think, and behave in social context?” Gollwitzer and Bargh did a series of experiments to try and identify traits of those who accurately answered the questions.
[...] The key predictors of social psychological skill were the willingness to tackle a complex problem and cognitive ability, the authors claim.
Interestingly, the authors also found that lonely individuals, as well as individuals with lower self-esteem, tended to answer questions more accurately. Likewise, introverts answered more accurately than extroverts.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by idiot_king on Wednesday March 21 2018, @12:40AM
Lonely people constantly ask questions internally as to why they don't fit in, which leads them to study others, and in bad cases, leads them to develop theories to, as it were, put a pin through their pet butterflies with a theory of some sort, a theory of for example alienation or some such which explains rather why the observer himself had brought about his entire life. Such individuals litter history books all over, and often times develop methods which often times turn out more to punish than to help (see: Discipline and Punish by Foucault). Those who are on the outside often despise those on the inside for having "more" or "belonging," etc. This is, for example, one of the motivations of Marx (and others who took cues from him) to help alleviate this tension in human behavior. Plenty of other thinkers have been a necessary counterweight, but it's not without irony that the alienated intellectuals would be socially sacrificed (by being alienated) as to make progress in the understanding of society. Queer Theory, Feminist Theory, et al. are manifestations of this outgrowth from being neglected by society.
Perhaps oppression is the necessary evil to reveal more about ourselves, so that we can fix ourselves...