Word: psychologist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...indeed, even to "love thy neighbor as thyself"; yet by our nature, we are tempted to exploit our neighbor, "to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [Man is a wolf to man]." The Unabomber, too, in his mode aas armchair psychologist, celebrates our "WILD nature" and complains that in modern society "we are not supposed to hate anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other." This sort of cramping of our natural selves, he opines, creates "oversocialized" people He seems to agree with Freud's claim that "primitive...
...richer-and if the people on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous don't get richer--then we shouldn't, in theory, get less happy than we already are. Between 1957 and 1990, per capita income in America more than doubled in real terms. Yet, as the psychologist David Myers notes in The Pursuit of Happiness, the number of Americans who reported being "very happy" remained constant, at one- third. Plainly, more gross domestic product isn't the answer to our deepest needs. (And that's especially true when growth only widens the gap between richest and poorest...
There is a lesson here not just for policymakers but also for the rest of us. "It is human nature always to want a little more," writes the psychologist Timothy Miller in the recent book How to Want What You Have, perhaps the first self-help book based explicitly on evolutionary psychology. "People spend their lives honestly believing that they have almost enough of whatever they want. Just a little more will put them over the top; then they will be contented forever." This is a built-in illusion, Miller notes, engrained in our minds by natural selection...
...Military psychologist Dan Landis says, "There are all kinds of macho traditions that have grown up at the Citadel whose rationales have long been forgotten. They're useless." Indeed, the Citadel's ego-stripping program can be worse than useless. One Citadel graduate was among the four Rangers who froze to death in a training exercise in Florida this year. His instructors told him to continue to string a rope in 52-degree water, and he did so until he died. Pentagon statistics show that since 1989 seven soldiers have died in training for every one killed in combat...
...Hollywood wanted to make him a star, so he tries that in Nine Months, a big burly romp from director Chris Columbus (the Home Alone hits, Mrs. Doubtfire). Yet another high-concept comedy based on a French film, Nine Months tracks a child psychologist (Grant) and his dance-teacher lover (Julianne Moore, acute as always) from pregnancy through delivery of a baby the man isn't at all ready...