Word: writes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...smarter; he will probably just disbelieve your contradictory theory, hew more closely to his own self-assessment and, in the end, feel even dumber. In one fascinating 1990s experiment demonstrating this effect - called cognitive dissonance in official terms - a team including psychologist Joel Cooper of Princeton asked participants to write hard-hearted essays opposing funding for the disabled. When these participants were later told they were compassionate, they felt even worse about what they had written. (See how to prevent illness...
...paper, Wood, Lee and Perunovic measured 68 students on their self-esteem. The students were then asked to write down their thoughts and feelings for four minutes. Every 15 seconds during those four minutes, one randomly assigned group of the students heard a bell. When they heard it, they were supposed to tell themselves, "I am a lovable person...
This effect can also occur when experiments are more open-ended. The authors cite a 1991 study in which participants were asked to recall either six or 12 examples of instances when they behaved assertively. "Paradoxically," the authors write, "those in the 12-example condition rated themselves as less assertive than did those in the six-example condition. Participants apparently inferred from their difficulty retrieving 12 examples that they must not be very assertive after...
...lives. Unfortunately, middle-class conservatives assume that if you’re a member of the “elite,” you’re liberal. When I revealed that I wrote for The Harvard Crimson, one man asked me, “Are you going to write about how dumb we are?” A second warned that the crowd might run me out of town...
...from Hamden, Conn. But who will that counterweight be? “I’m excited about Palin, Romney…” Melissa Welsh, an onlooker, told me, her voice trailing off as she hit the bottom of a short list. Conservatives shouldn’t write off their elite; they need them. After all, the Founding Fathers weren’t populists...