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Modern_Political_Philosophy_John_Rawls_PhD_1984
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John_RawlsModern_Political_PhilosophyLecture_18_audio_only.txt
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well good stole the ball episode 6f well I have very question I don't think I'll go over them now anything like that there were some be more that intention those were from the kind of thing to do and you dare popular names russ was about to poverty the other to do and the neighbors are having an airing up so you don't use a whole reading period on the paper all that's explained here in the length i would like to ask more weather well for it and you are or tape little are here when they see me act with the other to the other day type of gentleness let's see the other thing i should say that on Wednesday we will meet here sit down so that won't be questioned body we'll go back ok and then that means the second well the other day I talked about the basis of equality of the day delivery Vinci day by contrasting that with the basis of their he calls milk and today what I want to do although I don't give any means United of Count Anywhere I want to say something about the basis of the prior about their default English between those and the last time I made comments only on my break nine cracker jack and i pointed out something about this new follow about it I was vacuumed from the fact that his moral law clear moral view in a sense in which TJ is a clinical tomorrow it's the more narrowly drawn I was overlooking that aspect of it now we call back enjoying up the skin of a proclivity there isn't anything the last time in passing there's anything anything maxima except in the trivial sense of course of one's always the best vacuum on the balance of reasons but other than that there isn't any as it were being in the other notes is one time the idea to regatta schema basic liberties protect the citizens the adequate development and the full exercise of the tamal powers and what I did for the other day two fundamental cases and here the idea that collecting does not i think apply because we cannot maximize the adequate development and the pool exercise Zumwalt hour since we can i maximize with respective to differences work and maximize name would with respect to item all power or even indeed the maximizing with respect to both there would not be accessible objective because it i meant passing there are other things about women like fundamental and that I'm important decides exercising them all powers they may kind of the things that we do for fall under our conception of good and get to make my small towns the exercise of that would put a countenance upon the moral life that aspect of it this I think what we think about it really doesn't make sense and the point here on my ladder is that the mall power complimentary with other desires that we have so that the point of having evolved you the point of having a food the bottom of justice lies in part in the fact people have other desires other ancient the act is it are not more objective sense so that we might say the point is desired as well and if he did then no point if you imagine where we're fighting a magnet world with the only thing people interested in doing the right thing and nothing else but don't desire you know you think that food it has a kind of pottery about it and there's an aspect of constant if you press it hard I think we're it in danger of falling foul that difficult but I won't go into that access a big problem in interpretation my view now a practicable king of the bacon and every fifth night I think the best applied in sufficient detail by the point in the original position and I thought it would just mentioned it is sufficient at their role and structure and general content amazing Larry's candy outlines efficiently and the ground of their priority on this good in that position to us but we don't have to be able to work out the details so what's assume is that the further specification of the laughs to these other stages of the talk about in section 31 that is the convention the legislature stage and the judicial thing in the nagging king I've been there and no stated that there is more information available and I give her brief accountant 30 of how that's supposed to go now one comment on that sequence of my kind of force base sequence it is not intended as a description of any actual political process and much less is it an account of how any constitutional regime might actually be objected to operate so in that sense is not a critical theory at all it doesn't an account in work but instead it's a schemer for applying the prism of justice and for best buying a good content in a more definite way ETA the content of a celebrity when more information is available and the need for greater stratification arises for example the index primary good way doesn't have to be met by precisely position but the idea index the general form and structure ought to be and they're depending on the specific characteristics make them society and so on it can be made more definite it can't meet the beef well those are some pretty many comments things that I sit at the end the last night now I'll made a few observations about the priority of Liberty we call that no basic emeriti it's actually taken everything they may conflict with one another and take a hatred and therefore their clans have to be somehow adjusted the aim is to make me for judgment and such a way that at least the most significant everything wait to care the adequate development and the full exercise of the two more power in what I call the last time of two fundamental cases are normally compatible and I take it the historical experience James and Democratic constitutions indicates that at least under favorable circumstances is possible to do that that it doesn't mean that the complex have remained on the form of all the possible on the condition to arrange and the finest skiing up huh so the point then is that it's this scheme of memories with a bowl of had priority and any element and it can be adjusted and maybe quantities adjusted for the sake of other impurities in this game but that he has a hole in the thing that has a priority she never left nipple wouldn't have priority unless particular never gave himself where of fundamental importance so they are going to have to be fundamental Portland's some respect so let's consider as an example case of negative constants and indicate the kinda grounds that the parties have for a document and here I'm just going over some of the way the argument section 33 chapter 4 now I understand every conscience it covered religious philosophical and moral view the general discussion of them making updated view of the world generally and about relation to it in light of which we perforate and understand our own deception now the parties that cannot be sure that the person each represents the firmest such views they cannot assure that they won't but this person who's being represented maybe so and even if they don't know they may want to do so later so we called it and one white one is protecting is a person over a whole life that's why you're always it often add that create being a normally cooperating member Society of a whole life so if they don't now acronym stretch of you that they want in the future and then possibility has to be represented and allowed for parties assume that these views with a way to put the article already helped and wooly worm I'm fully form out and in this sense when they're given now one then on the other hand steering that is the course also responsible for the next generation on the ground is that people who've able fracking lift carry the next generation and so they're also concerned with the conditions of the adequate development of the mall powers and and their exercise now if but one of the alternatives principle that is available on the menu that story had to legacy if only one of those alternative of guarantees equal heavier conscious then the prince will guarantee that you must be adopted because this is what we are you think that some panda that is the formal structure the order of that so I'm and here I'm assuming that it now but me principles are practicable is there a workable pitch if they are not why then of course of arguments would fail now the day what they were saying will imply that Corey's i do not know and cannot estimate the probability of whether the beliefs that are bound by person to things that presents or a majority or a minority though and they can let chances by committing a master to minority is on the possibility that goes they can represent their in a majority or individual the dominant religion and will therefore have an even greater argument if it can't gamble on that where the parties at the gamble in this way they would show that they did not take seriously the when they just know topical moral convictions of the persons they event in effect they would show that they did not know what or philosophical or moral conviction what now what I just said is not an argument as I don't believe it don't in it aside what is being done is civic you call attention to the nature of these are convictions and the fact that they are regarded in a certain way they are regard is not a negotiable and this helps explain why the first principle priority over the second and their consideration and it also connects up with the practical nature of religious philosophical and moral conflict unless there is some constitutional arrangements agreed to that protects me the livers reaction it affects the only feasible arrangement once one takes account the nature of these things character now suppose someone were to deny that every content is entirety on the grounds at all human of any time are commensurable this would mean if there's always some radix Jane my set is always some trade in terms of which it's rational about the extent of the satisfaction of one interest against a satisfactory expand inside another that's always the case this idea that being a sharp dividing line however sometimes bicycle grad Claudia what everyone call it is not the case and it is irrational because there is always trade off of someone hold that then I think I have maintained well we haven't reached the kind of impact about this don't be that is so they might be rationalities be understood my day at Passover how certain interests are to be regarded it might be an impact have all kind of things behind it and it would be a matter of exploring pick the pace what the possibilities are that lie behind it these are some view of the nature of the self is some Cuba political rights and so on we just had to explore them but one way to continue the discussion will be to try to work out this game with a kind of does pad if I already in it and to show that this you can be done in a coherent way and relate to a workable conception of Justice that is positive the basic structure of a democratic regime and that it is ruined with various a convictions fundamental convictions that are embedded in its public culture and I think pretty quickly examine what's behind it and the head mentions we stay emotionally inalienable right one is not normally in for a contract in the part of someone whom they sell himself the slavery or something analogous to that if the beneficiary the contract tries to force it against will the person who agree to it then the court will not normally and I make what not to enforce it and it doesn't matter where the person has under say voluntary on course conditions agrees with or not that's what in irritability means and that i think the flexion of the factor that is reflected in this you in the fact that the Reitman of the parties and the original position is enforced to my safe against citizen in the fire so that this priority of they was going to prevent them from making certain sorts of agreement so this I think doesn't match and coincides with take towards the inevitability of Rights and again that voting is a right that we don't think someone could sell it is that people don't sell them it isn't this enough for but we wouldn't enforce in court contractor so and it indeed some of my new things they acquire obligation in the course of a political campaign towards people and they might feel found in one of the town's above a certain people but nevertheless even if it were wrong for them not to vote for them it would not get a something may be correct i need to enforce that so again that would be a reflection of what take the priority of the basic integrity and the millipede the kind of example i had in mind by quantum obligations that if you're working for marley back over the remaining wrong for you and other places practice involved but you don't see that but never lies it cannot be enforced well that's an example now i want to say few things about the fair value of it is not suppose on this view that the are equally important or that they are all bay for the singing the same reasons one strand of the neighborhood position a regard to equal political liberty and rope net intrinsic value than sacred example freedom of thought and liberty of conscience and what does mean is that what this is affirmative the fact that participation in public political life it which is guaranteed by equal with political liberties generally does had a rather feeling it is not had in present-day society and a large and a cafe a central dominant place in the life of the people and amazingly may have a nicer place than a lot of other activities anyway with public life the good of most people under public life is not now the focus of modern democratic society as it was in the ancient cities they had particular my and here however when was add among native born to a citizen immaculate always nice to have that because a certain want to go on about this but people often offer at an example it has to remember the actions of the city about 300,000 roughly and counting 34-35 felt they could at any assembling pet put it aliens and Lhasa slave and one has to add to what extent that made it possible to take the importances well if owning one in ten and exercise political car it obviously for those of Kennedy's play for the part in their life because they will then know that they have power over see that's not possible and make a major difference in how it can be you anyway I'm not going on about my subject have to remember that sociological now but the level everything that this is so can they'll be counted and they even if they are be sexual only as instant instrumental me other liberties it does seem plausible to suppose that they are essential in this respect minorities and other groups that are denied the franchise and excluded from political office and so on our life and a half their basic and there is a curtail these narrow but not you not this suffice is I think the parties to include the little liberties when eniac esteem of a rather extensive this is already done the movies but it'd be better to say it would not depart to prefer and this pencil that would of course when they do not prefer a final comment on it I have to assert that most people wit achill there were these are very instrumental pass that isn't the case for most people but what we want to do is to allow for that ability and the paint note that expand what the percentages because we know on the whole at a large modern genetics take it can't play let's get in public wit oh I can't play a role but that will not mean if these emitters are not important now I'm catch on to another comment about the fair value now the problem here is this that we saw on on him at seven part of it is that the principles for the basic liberties and their priority what the septa door catch that argument here provided that there are compliments making principles you're a headline particularly difference principle that provide the fair share of all-purpose material means for the good that's the role of the people is too is to do that now in the case of the political liberties is a special problem namely how we going to answer the long-standing objection that the political liberties are merely formal now I take that mean that while it may appear that citizens are equal under the two principles they were in effecting and there was satisfied that nevertheless it may be the case that social and economic inequality that exists in background of operating and an organizer shake everyday life so what are so great that those are with greater world's been effectively control responsibility for this on the direction of legislation and the content of social policy and so on and of course knitted them and if diffident objection it marks in general may so this is a farmer now to discuss this problem that's distinguish between the work of every in the following way we can say that the will basically these are the same for all citizens and the question how to compensate anybody for having a lesser never connected would not arise but the work or the usefulness of the fabric is different is not the same for all since the difference principle commits sub person who will have greater income and wealth rather than others and so they will have rear or purpose means for advancing are there hence will be true of course it when the difference is satisfied the basic structure maximizes the index of primary good for the racist and so that they commit use of the vehicle place enjoy by everything so in that sense you might say there is some compensation but I don't think it's adequate unless something else is sick I did step that continued making those are this distinction between each basic commodity and their work is merely a definition a quick doesn't solve any interesting or important the problem that the critical memory then a crew merely fundament formal still remained and what to say something about it and what I think we have to do because suggestion that we treat the equal political everything to actual way and this is not by moving in the first principles just as a provider these liberties and owning these in forever d I could be secured by what they called the fair value and the dissidents plane introduced in 224 to the center chapter four and it's a it is a vague notion and it's hard to be very fact that this but I think it just probably notice than one also there's a power connector with which I go on now the idea that they're evaluated me and it means that the worth of the political whatever their economic or social position must be sufficiently equal in a sense that everyone has a fair opportunity the whole political office and to influence the outcome of collections I was actually very idea is and then idea of their opportunity then will parallel this sense of fair opportunity in the second principle Justin now when principles aren't adopted in the original position is understood that the first principle includes the provider and that the parties would take it into account and they're the reason thus when we try to assess the way in which the Justice provide an understanding of the hectic claims of liberty and equality with whether or not that way and we say I def is appropriate we then have to be sure that taking your fair value with critical part of the idea nutshell not here now now that can be provided for by political arrangements or indeed whether they this some practicable way of doing this which is comparable with the essentials of the other liver never what oh I'm not going to say about it said one ought not to underestimate is important and very grave difficulties it is a problem I think ahead of it very very much for a very long time but that's another matter perhaps it will live on my receivable where but there is another question which is associated with this naming why not secure a fair value for all the basic liberties this suggestion that carry the idea of equality further that is done today for the two principles with this fair value equivalent every provider all right kind of a focal point natural focal point between the two principles without any proviso and two principles that includes a note for all the political liver and you will want to discuss the question why one doesn't do the lab now I think that I dare the more comprehensive and he is either irrational or worthless or socially to visit might be very interpreted if it means that income and wealth of be equally taken coming well for service Dandan for material means if they are to be driven equally then more expensive coryza will be irrational since it does not allow society to meet the requirements of social organization and economic efficiency and also I think oath if it means that as if it means that each person to be assured some fixed amount have been of incoming well as a wave breaking the idea was securing the equal work that it is the purpose because in effect the difference principle already does that so if that would the interpretation of it would be superfluous if it means that the dissolution of income is to take place according to the content of certain interests regarded as central for example take again that is a religious interest then I mean it's socially divisive some persons of make out for example among their religious you say going on pilgrimages the far-off places or building magnum the temple but you guarantee the equal worth of advantages American to them resuming devoting social resources of the situations rather than persons who interpret their religious duties as making one model plane social resources they don't but their proprietary way and we see things could be subsidized now the latter that if people who make new modern planes on social resources of presuming one my favorite there with that I just need are as it were less forgiving what I think plenty that the dis interpretation of fair value across the board of me would be socially position where you might say that's an unfair example or and you so we might take another example of someone who's very important of predominant in your life is to learn about the solar system in order to do that one has to build will say radio telescopes and a whole complicated for them to know that so we might hurt this principle fair value of all the liberties mean society should make attempt to make an equal proportion contribution to the fulfillment of anyone in section of the good now if I'm say mathematician all I need is paper and pencil proposed I'm a radio if I had this other idea which I did subscribe that's not enough her name doll and we then have a problem to fill this rather costly inception of the good now recall that the principle is to make it equal to fortune contributions of that conception regardless of the social effects for other people that it would have this is a first principle make a fortunate contribution everyone inception of the good oh it's now irrelevant that they building telescopes has consequences it may be socially viable but there again I think if we think through with this principle did take a rather extraordinary case but there are other can work out I think it anyway I think yes that the principal / forcement satisfaction as a way to read the fair values for all is socially divisive isn't the physical religious dress this is one other ground so the idea would be that if you have a construction of the good that is expensive and costly to satisfy and plenty of do moment that effect but you want this you you mustn't expect and how to resort sources with the be satisfied unless that make a contribution other people and in this particular difference for whatever principle is to be in any case and I think that there were consequences of will follow whenever the public inception justice adjusts citizens claims to social resources so that cell received more than others depending on the determinate final eggs and moral things that belong to their construction of the good in other words again will that take a petition reason and not indirectly to it social contributions of those people whenever they cannot be a public agreement on a conception of the good basis for political justice then I think the basis of social unity is death founded on some public inspection justice that judges plans to social resort in terms of kind of something like what I called primary good and what makes it possible I suppose for society like the Society of their ladies to put public resources into the doings of these a cathedral does depend on the factors social social unity based on tone has been section of a good one might be able to say that certainly it's based on their game is able to enforce that and while the needle art and the beautiful one have to begin to see the conditions at length possible without to criticize that woman present standpoint because in a way that's irrelevant what makes it possible the same things it would not be possible for us but it wouldn't have that kind of agreement and when one does not have that kind of agreement then one I think it is led to another kind of conception of Justice that begin the way in which TJ does add an example other way the van hit from the notion up to size us scheme of the cooperation and that imposes done well I'll make some concluding remarks very briefly about the content reputation this is a talked about it a sexual for don't plan to deleted that just to make a comment about it I think there are two sections in particular of TJ they can be very misleading as to the relation between the beautiful justices Berenson and these actions aren't expected 45 and guess why would Ryan road again having a little bit my hair listen but that's by the fire I think the main point is this that while I'm is a case that you called justices there's had many structural features in common with construction of the moral law priority right that the idea that the reasonable Savoy legs the rational and so on roll debts will make that distinction it has that feature also has the features of equal basic never do in the sense is also in constructing and with you read from the mediclinic and fright and there's also the idea the plurality of conceptions of the good which are comfortable reconcilable and so forth those structural features are common not to pay are identical but they are proud of that are important Harlow and I would want to emphasize this is a certain kind of conception and it he wishes it from few article views in general this dinguses it from utilitarianism Hitler and that really is a basic aspect of the do so nor the front foot property the back of the sections that are shared with constable and that is very important in order to understand it and see how it contrasts of another gears but the say that if you has that parallel or to say that not to say according to say this constitute you no respect you know I said analogies not identically what the differences are and the difference is i think is that the view that i called justice is barren as it may not depend and again is his way disney Anaka panel and constant at a physical views of reasons that any notion by which of crisis plaintiff amazing opinion i read an irrational its acronym not a motion that that's a pie or all of that connecticut of transcendental idea wasn't my in any type of way so far as i can see and is not a required and the same thing would be true about notice a person it went thought was a metaphysical now what I would want to say again is vague and one has four examples with that big inception in TJ and not a metaphysical perception at all but it's a conception of political justice that begins from fundamental intuitive ideas which are said to be in the public culture that have to be developed and the conception which is planning a work out which begins from exceptionally on the mountain to date idea to say sitteth fair cooperation all that beginning of that that that in the end has to be adjusted be able to work up to a walk up into what we say is higher like a livid with judgments that's crazy view now it's hard to give a definition nixle definition of what a metaphysical conception is and I will attempt to do that but one example is that one can say the idea of a choir independent moral order of values that can be grasped by a rational intuition is a metaphysical idea it's an idea that counts for the notions of how moral judgments can be true we say judgments are accurate over they are African searches about this fire and the planet order an old example of that would be terrific play this forms in some way representing value and that would be the example of a prior Independent Order the mets in morrison Ross and it provides the basis of saying that there must be an answer to any more questions the idea of an independent entire independent water suggests if moral questions in general had answered less you say that this order some course as holes in that moment they only provides a good things but in general one maybe I did most of not all more questions have answered and they knew the today's adjustments a little bit unnerving it most moral questions do not pay that rather few of them haven't you and what makes a wide or sensible political concession is that you find those that do have answers of a time and that are also important other words a good political theory on important question that has an answer and that in a way I think is enough if we can answer a few important question and the defense other answer that that would be a lot well i'm going over i could go on forever back as my head better stop but yes remember people hit the shot of the kind of life that we divide what you being relation between in a way you might say dona ana greenness so well
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Modern_Political_Philosophy_John_Rawls_PhD_1984
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John_RawlsModern_Political_PhilosophyLecture_16_audio_only.txt
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just certain activities involve the exercise of higher faculties which those have the dominant place and then in chapter 4 of utilitarianism he makes the argument you can Michael over that argument that the only thing desirable and that is happening and that all things are desirable either as means to or as a part of happiness again we're having to get thought of in this rather large broad comprehensive way now Mills first principle might say practical reasoning is this but we ought always to arrange social institutions and to act so as to produce the most good that's a principle he argues for in the logic the last chapter the last book of his logic totally 43 and that is reflected a bit in chapter one okay so that Mills principle of utility now to use his name for us you notice chapter four is called the proof of principle of utility and what he actually does that prove that happens that's good the only thing desirable so he might say his in his language and post how I've been using the term his principle of me tilt is happiness alone it's good and then if we put those two principles together we get his principal right Justice which might be that we are all ways to arrange social institutions and to act so as to produce the most happiness so that's a kind of summary of what's mill does with the motion of utility then we come to his account in Chapter by Devon you Philip end it was account of right and justice so there's a very important chapter again this is an amendment that Bentham ice appointed that animoto over there now and the act is done in paragraphs it counted right thought focus on perfectly in paragraph 16 to 25 and in the asic connection I notice a problem with Mills account the problem is this and his official view now when I first summer someone's official you I mean that's what they explicitly say pose pressed to what they do how they are Mills official view is that moral rights are the legal right that we ought to have that that is that they are the legal rights that we would have if law in institutions satisfy the principle of utility and were a range to realize the most happiness so they have this connection with people right find that you might enforce sometimes he goes on to add a qualification if it would be very much practical to actually enforce these rights and the ball would not do so but that would be the kind of grounded with block it so that's his official view that the ultimate arm is always heal soon the case of rights of moral rights to this application of principle of utility in my sense that is his principles right to maximize patterns now he also has another view that seems me implicit in the in the text is that moral rights are 0 to each person so that all have equal rights which secure and protect the essential elements of our well-being the very ground work of our existence those are phrases which he uses goes on to say that the center of justice developed in part I say in part not was toto because of another element to it in part from the natural impulse one place natural instinct of self-defense so present preservation or the defense of those that prepare for so we had a problem about hills of you namely why should Mills official view late to and coincide with what I called his other view about that being equal more rice why should that happen and that was the problem that I suggested and also suggested an in utilitarianism he'll never clearly faces this particular problem so after that we then go on to own everything and see well maybe he faces it on Liberty let's see what we can do to get an answer the satisfaction in fantasy so question also I think isn't clearly space haider in on everything that isn't explicitly said the other essay I have this sort of problem see now I'm going to explain to you how to coincide it doesn't do that so the answer one wants to suggest is an ends that he could give to us if we saw him and harass him on some occasions said well why didn't you say this the something like that in any case we want to do the best we can for him otherwise we don't bother to read Franklin now I stake it Mills essay in the form of three clauses and I'll go over those because I think I did that the other day not everyone was here and I will do that this fairly briefly who protects this whole thing will help the first Clause is that society by the use of law as legal enforcement of right or do use a moral pressure pressure public opinion is of pressure to certain moral judgment that baseball and that those form society can never interfere with individuals police or their choice of way of life for their associations of with one another except to protect the legitimate interest of what I think no means by that the rights of others and in particular then only reasons of right and wrong can be peeled to and discussing this question of appearance now when i substitute the praise their gentleman interest or rights may as where I get that from the answer is you must look which is practically it isn't the only place in the essay but by far the clearest most explicit fight in it you must look in chapter 4 paragraphs 1 to 12 you don't study this carefully you'll have no idea what is going on you have to do that example of a writer who doesn't enforce me we're all the same way I actually put everything where it's easiest to notice that's my job it's in chapter four paragraphs once as well and I take you will see at least I suggested the gentleman interest or harm and injuries all these sort of vague notions of the pier or in the essay there get explained and gentlemen interest for rights so what the principal dozen in this first Clause as explained in this paragraph its exclude three kinds of reasons for how the battery might be drawn one way rather than another that is the band in between the claims of the individual of society those three kinds of reasons aren't paternalistic reasons that are called them that is mazing that are based on society's promoting the individuals good in ways such an individual would resist or object to in concern for them because they are unable for some way or other in societies and judgment to take care of themselves women's glue paternalistic reasons one also cludes reasons of excellence or human ideals for certain forms of non moral perfection that is one cannot make these interferences on the grounds that people that would be more excellent and say something aesthetic wet some non more away but nevertheless reasons of excellence and the very kind of reason which i think is excluded is reasons of mere dislike or preference even if Utley the preference on the part of the majority vast majority of society as a whole so I take it what principle does in Mills understanding of it it's impose certain limits on the reason they can be introduced into public discussion another public discussion I mean discussions is to where law and model opinion as a form of public pressure applied to draw the boundary between playing the individual and the claims of society then the second Clause of the principle then as it as it goes fairly easy to get certain forms of conduct do seem to interfere with a legitimate interest that is the rights of others would be another turn that is a scenery interfere with what we might want to say when is rice then the question of legal and social interference with the conduct and beliefs and so on of individuals may be discussed this is owed for discussion and it made the disgustingness be discussed on its on its merits but always again with the restriction that when can introduce these other three kinds of reasons so then it's easy enough we're just tied together by any third clause which says that because the injury to the German interests of others alone can jump by legal and social interference with the kind of individuals it does not follow that it always does suck so the question then remains to be settled on the merits taking you the totality of permitted reasons and excluded those and instituting those that are not permitted okay now that's what I take the principle could be now this principle recall holes only honored certain social conditions and it only applies to certain sorts of people does not apply to children it does not apply those mentally disturbed and so on excluding those kinds of exceptions and mill also believes it it only applies to add certain stage of us society doesn't fly backward ages he says in a variety of other circumstances but he's concerned of course as I mentioned the first day with the Democratic Society that he precedes becoming in the jittery that's where he's concerned that it does by all means apply and because that his vocation is to try to appeal to advance opinion of one might say an educated Vance opinion and those principles which he thinks are necessary and ought to obtain in this society to come now keep in mind that this principle of Liberty guaranteed to all citizens please the way I read it and the best democratic society to come and he'll things in the society his day it's not foreign teachers that were here now he canna takes all citizens an equal right to create a fun so these rights are equal and you also regards them far as I see for practical purposes absolute that is this principles that govern absolutely the way in which society throws the boundaries in law and the moral opinion as public pressure the words between the claims of society on the one hand claims of individual on the others regulate those absolutely without exception and the rights it gives are equal now for an example of this you might look at the first paragraph chapter 2 where mill talks about society would not have the right to silence a lone dissenter would not have that right even if they found this person very gentle well it did not like him and so forth and so on all these excluded regions absolutely could not have that right paragraph 1 chapter 2 I think implies that now because the principle of Liberty establishes equal rights which are for practical purposes asking me and not be overridden by seemingly plausible consideration it seems to rest on a doctrine of rice end of the notion of utility that's how it strikes a lot of people and perhaps some stuff that's at home but mill denies this he denies it fairly in fact that's not the case I take no advantage of a doctor at that time now what might take the view that mill is simply a confusing and compared and so forth I don't take that here is something like that's not the explanation of what's going on so what we want to do is to see is there anything at least plausible answer not saying a correct answer but was a plausible ran to the very bright man like you know Mike Appel that explains how he thinks things are supposed to go to connect these here now what I'm going to suggest in something like this but I've already been sort of uncertain if this is a fully active thanks to me to be too trivets mill and answer this Volvo and I think quite interesting that's the best way then he is saying to advance into realize what he calls the permanent interest of management depressing thing that's obviously very key phrase we have to try to understand permanent us a man is a progressive being that the best way to do that is to follow the principle of liberty as a principle of political right injustice and the democratic society to come he's proposing this principle that was called previously in other connections as a political principle and here's a proposing then it should be followed and consensus principle secures these equal rights etc it is to be followed without exception and so now it needs emphasis that this principle is of in the base in the suggestion that make it's a principle of political justice and it is to be publicly recognize that it's in the public forum where questions of law and how to draw the boundaries between the claims individuals and acclaimed excited I discussed that that's why I mean the public forum here it is to be recognized as governing that discretion and that's importance of it a part of the importance of it now why don't you also note that Gil has in mind they're not worth neighbor I'm interpreting him as having a mind here this conception of utility that underlies it namely he thinks of institutions as I mentioned a moment ago as educating national character they're going to have an influence on national car now I'm supposing him to think that the public principles of political justice Thank government discussion of where to draw the bad news between the claims of individual claims of societies is one of those institutions it's an institution that makes it takes a form of discussion but nevertheless it's a very important kind of institutionalized principle a sense it's regularly followed by people and recognized to be mutually accepted and so on so i take nobody saying is that what we have to take into account and seeing the importance of the principles understand it in that way so that he is concerned then when with the effect of the principle of everybody as a public principal political justice its effect on national character heart will make people think and behave and understand themselves and so on not only in the facts in a more civic sense and potential sense that it might have had so familiar information how much ago he worth of institutions it very importantly to be taken as the signs of people that they encourage the kinds character qualities of mind and all those other things that they bring the path and therefore I take him to say something like this that he insists on taking the long term effect quite long term effects of institutions on national character and the publicity effects of political discussion as I'm sorry the public density effect of the principal memory yourself as it governs public discussion but I don't take this gives us yet although it helps us at the sea now what nail was getting it see he's saying something like it's only if we follow it absolutely in public discussion do we get the benefits of it and since the principle itself requires equal rights and so on if that's where these equal rights are coming from Oh begin to get a whole on what his argument is at least I hope at any rate some beginning to get a hold of it but I don't think we have all of the elements of it i'm going to introduce another then i will come back to trying to include the general picture at the element i had at mine is Nils discussion of individuality in chapter 3 Obama everything again this is a very important part of the book particularly first nine tigress over there other important paragraph sentence in the paragraph for sustained account of his idea of individuality now that that's a term i will use individuality and mill thinks it's somehow i have to work that out Idzik this idea was it connected with the permanent as a progressive change and i think is actual to the interest is the free development of individual this is a wood mill says in the paragraph i think it back these essentials would combine two main components there's one I would describe he using his own language as the Greek ideal self development of all our various natural powers including of course importantly the exercise of power of our higher faculties into some kind of harmonious whole that's emotional take from fun humble who was a German philosopher that I think what was published it was your folks from in 1795 then the second part of the ponent of this ideas health development it's a Christian idea of self-government and that this idea includes is on treadmill recognizing the limits imposed by the basic rights equal basic rights that are secured by justice and so the right security the children interests of others he's very insistent paragraph nine of this essay wanted short note that that recognizing the equal rights of others and they made to comply with us is not incompatible with this ideal and in the back individuality that he's presenting but essential to the notion of this aspect of it of self of self-government some individuality is he on his fans that includes this recognition and acting in accordance with some basic price these two elements are they define mill rocking performance I've had mention them paragraph nine and here Mills says that if it is any part of religion to believe that we were created by a good thing it is consistent with written confession to believe that we have the higher faculties in order that these faculties can be cultivated and unfold it and not rude it up and consume is also consistent with relation to believe the things that God delights in our approach in this full utilization of our powers and the idea of conception of myself embodied in it and it's here it's in this paragraph that he'll reject with what he called the Calvinistic a conception of humanity and poses to that his own conception now as milk presents these notions here in chapter 3 they don't see any purely psychological doctors they strike one of ten an account of human excellence is his preferred jus or philosophical doc of what human beings ought to be and if they are that way then they realized a higher degree of human excellence and on the Hazzard County might say that part of the purpose of males do with political social institutions is to make people of this sort possible and to do what one can do and he cares now that poses a problem and i'll come back to whether that's the case or not now mills conception of individuality actually i think i'm going to have to skip over this i think to give the general picture that is hip over his account of individuality I just urge you to read that to work out the various elements in it some of them will fall under the idea of self-government recognizing the rights of others the others are fallen under the idea of self development this is the other aspect of it making our police our own making our desires our own making a character want to think about what's all that means that just a phrase I can desires police inspector chyron and how do we do that what's involved of doing that and i think you mean sort of appropriating a runway various resources of our culture and adding to the way and that we can only do that under what he takes the the institutions are guaranteed by the liver and that is something that would have that tired than I didn't look at their various aspects of it that is different from previous accounts toleration for the Sun one of those main aspects is that there is no longer the case that one is so anxious about falling into error is in a religious age but it's a belief that you must leave truth your face damnation then it's far harder to experiment with new ideas and it's far harder to urge the kind of view that hell hole because it puts I'd say roughly not equal in a system those and what the incest is that is a risk it's important to believe what's true in Mills view what's also important that it's something that you believe that you have worked out and you committed to appropriate and understand it what's involved in taking to leash your own so the only important thing isn't that you believe what's true you also must believe in a certain way and that's not an element that's new with milk but it is an element that distinguishes his age from an earlier one well let me go on that I would just mention those points hastily and presuming that we have an understanding of the various aspects of individuality and let's return to our problem myself our problem is how do we get from middles understand the principle of utility wearing which that have explained it to the principle of liberty how does the first justify the sex planograms now I take nails argument of course it's going to be in some sense from the permanent interest of manners of progressing team and the way to answer this in part is to refer back to Mills account of utility and the distinction between the higher end and over language and recall that this distinction is one between activity so we're talking about higher and lower inhibitors it worse as taxes gained through these and recall also that the source of the pleasures is the higher and lower faculties faculties event like imagine feeling and so on as opposed to so-called lower faculties and knees and song now also recall middles a decided preference criteria that is the higher pleasures are specified by this a criteria so let's say that Mel assume that it's a deep psychological fact about human beings the follow namely that in the absence of some special explanation that people will put at the center of their life and organize their light round the activities are connected with the higher faculties that's it the fact about what they will do and that this psychological fact will then connect up with what milk I describes as the sense of a dignity so on and it's also a possible way which I'll come to in a moment of turkey news ideal in the big route but we don't have to say it introduces a perfectionist note is a mighty way of aborting that and we call finally that no uses the decided preference criterion also to determine quantity that is its introduced to determine quantity of the lower pleasures and it also means where I took him to understand it that the higher pleasures are indefinitely higher and badder than fulfillment of the lower plate well that isn't very active the stated but trying to sort it exactly now I believe that then of Mel is making also certain further assumption name he's assuming that all normal persons and supposedly they within this similar patients for the moment are equally capable of enjoying the higher pleasures and as everyone has a higher fact all normal person has a higher faculties and given suitable opportunities say under equal education and support the song they will be able to educate these factors and they will then be able to effectively to exercise so as to obtain various forms of hermit enjoyment from and that that sends make them central both sigh of their mind now it's important here what no is assuming that the things between the higher and the lower pleasures is really a dualism that is we just knife is seeking the higher on the lower and the higher or very much in value graduate so that we're not going to have to rank or to compare the value of the higher pleasures of an Einstein for example over someone else just like and getting some higher pleasure at home practicing driving perhaps they're designing a bookshelf and so on I mean it has fun playing do the houses southport and son as promised today and endeavors sometimes there are lots of ways of engaging the higher pleasures in Mills view at least so I'm interpreting and we don't compare these with some level I'm a deeply frightening prospect so you compare the interest that someone had an immature music and mathematics try to compare it in any value in some sense minds on Mozart I mean that we wouldn't come out very well the Bible and I taken the nil would be saying we're not supposed to do that we don't establish any kind of fine grain interpersonal comparisons of qualities of the higher pleasure you just don't do that fact he never makes anything that what's important is the door and it's the way people organized their lives so we might say he is making the following kind of assumption he called a cat's example he's assuming that they hate within the plan being at the higher pleasure that human beings are capable of are effectively equal and as if we have a motorbike that we adopt and follow under this decided pressure to criteria and we succeed at it then the higher pleasures that anyone gets with anyone else are the same we're not going to have interpersonal fire when the Americal time with in that division that's why I'm in Turkey so we happen to take a passage in we could put more formally that the capacity for the higher places all people is potentially equal we don't distinguish certain grades another assumption he's making is that the particular form for motive systems that is best for any one individual in particular and only be ascertained by that paperwork individual under conditions where the decided preference criteria is operative and that means for it to be operative the institutions of everything must be established other words and what I want to say is it the principle of Liberty establishes the conditions under which the decided preference criterion can operate and then it will be left in asking what the motive lie should be the test that's their particular character that is nothing like mill is saying each individual has a peculiar bent and not the same and there's no general psychological theory of human nature that tells us how to identify what sorts of people are going to prefer what modes of life and that sends fun I should like that's adapted for them and therefore a cheap the best modes suited to their nature would have to be that but to them i believe these is swimming back okay so it's only if yes it's only in principle of liberty is in fourth which sets up the competition's of the decided preference criterion to operate rich in turn is the only way to allow individuals to ascertain the best form of life of them don't all those things are done that society can proceed in any rational way to maximize utility but otherwise we would lack information see no way to ascertain what is going to be the motive life people will prefer without those efficient so this you see the importance in other words there not being any general psychological theories I'm reading it that would enable some all observing all-knowing scientists to say well we do it by ascertaining certain features of people that i can tell you ahead of time what's the best mode of life way that's not that i am assuming that milk is saying can't be case there isn't a face well this amazing woman with the question of where the idea of excellence is going to fit in and i hope i have given some kind of arguments milk kicks it out how we get from his notion of utility to this principle and liberty understood it simple equal right and the whole absolutely hope I've done now the question is well maybe I'll begin with this the next time but I want you to think about it is there a way and I need to visit way saying that did this ideal of individuality is not a perfectionist ideal it's often so described and one might hear that interpretation moments tonight all implausible but I think given what he wants to say and the drift of his view it would be better to say that it's Davis is the following it does not define an ideal that belongs to the notion of the good for the maximum it is rather eight again is part of the deep psychological fact that when the principal memory is established and the pronunciations for the decided preference of criterion obtained then many people although not everyone but many people will prefer motive existence that realizes or they strive to realize that various element of individuality that mill described so that'll did the effect about human nature and therefore one wants to make that ideal possible for them along with other ideals of front of you and then that would be supplemented by Mills believe that those people who do that that is the fur mode of life of the individual are on the whole the very creative and productive so in the long run society the whole were bathroom and he s sighs it to this point in three and paragraphs 10 to 18 you've already done your part time chapter is to present the ideal itself or what if be an ideal itself and then the emphasizes is great value in long run for society as a whole I'm individuals of allowing individuals to may have an act in this way well that's an attempt to tie together in those views so it's a plausible view how is inception utility needs to write and next up with thank you what's the next economy fnu awesome
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well I don't know the explanation why it won't turn [Applause] on so I just have to can you hear me at all I I just might make one comment about the last time you recall I gave the example of trying to explain the notion of adjusted procedural Justice gave the example of the PO game right where we took something out of each pot so that everyone could uh continue play and I think that has the sense that well that's a a gambling game and uh I tried to say that isn't so bad we're trying to illustrate something but I think one still thinks it's external somehow to what's going on CU they having most of of a poker game already so it be nice to get a better example so I talked about that with some people then it occurred to us well a better example it to related to games but there's the example where say in professional baseball or football or something the teams that end up in the bottom of the league have the the first draft of the players who come up and the idea of that is to even out the team so they don't get too much discrepancy and so on so we have a good game so to speak so that's a an adjusting process it does seem internal and connected with the point of of having this whole activity um so you might think of it that way everybody knows that if they win they're going to end up in the bottom of the as it were and if they lose they'll get a chance to uh to draw first and things of that sort I think that's a better okay well I don't want to persist on that they have to go on uh to C and it's with some trepidation actually that to talk about can't at all because it is so difficult but I thought I would try perhaps un wiser to make the attempt so I know you'll find find it difficult and don't worry about it you try to get what you can and I hope eventually be able to see some of the main points and today I do want to go over some main points about the tech the ground work I also should say that there is now in the coup some copies about 30 copies I think of the political writing and I do want to talk about the social contract on Friday as an idea of Reason along with cont notion of autonomy and freedom now other people who we've read I always like to say something at the beginning of B them so you have an idea of how I think they approach the subject is that he's a poor boy the others uh were sons of professional people lawyers and so on or of wellknown figures say like John Stewart Mill being the son of James Mill the concept poor boy is uh father was a saddle maker they lived in the in the Aon section of kingburg rather horse section might said he was born on the wrong side of the canal had off across into town and that's where the poor people live the arti class and he was parents were Lutheran and he was saved as it were because someone noticed him as a kid and made sure he got education into what was actually kind of theological school where 11 years the 10 or8 hours a day all they did was to study Greek and Latin from mathematics the idea being they would go on for the um preachers or if they was among the smart of those they would become theologians or something and eventually he went to the university in the early age of 16 and he hated school and it's a good case of an example but some people if you're smart enough you can't be destroyed if anything would have destroyed anybody probably be the kind of schooling you had for 8 or 10 hours a day he hated it just a prison and he always spoke of it with great resentment as it was older well anyway it's all the books that we read were all written in the 1780s once for which he was renowned were almost all there few in the '90s like the religion 93 and the doctr of justice for right the doctrine of virtue they're two parts of the same book morals was 17797 and there's this extraordinary period of time 10 years more 1780 to 90 when all this was done and um in 81 he was 57 years old so he began writing quite late and it was enormous effort the short period of time but then in the 70s he didn't write he wrote very few things and he was changing his mind beginning around 1765 I doesn't know exactly what happened before that that time he was something of a litan and then this dramatic change occurs in philosophical view uh and he presents in these writings a document called transcendental idealism which I should not try to explain it's extremely hard to AR to understand and there a lot of argument today about its value and how to understand it on my own part I think it's a great thing and cont along with other people common natural wonder and I would like to have more time to give some account of that but all we're able to do is to focus on a few Notions but as I would understand the motivation of it I think one can say something about this that is the motivation transcendental idealism I see it uh I don't think it's a Ecentric view as has what one might call a philosophical Doctrine in defense of reasonable Faith it's the kind of an apologetics and the sense one might think of in seminary or Christian doctr of the defense of Faith now it's not a defense of Christian faith um although there are aspects of that that are defended but it's a defense of reasonable Faith it's a defense first of all of our knowledge of the world of physical world in both mathematics and in science and it sends D against the eism and also against materialism of a kind of I'm sorry against a doctrine of idealism of the kind of bar which sometime refers to as material idealism as opposed to his transcendental idealism and in the ethical writings it's a defense of the moral law and of other ethical values that are based upon it and a defense of our Free Will and the problem is of course that in the 18th century other times have always has been in philosophy a sense that there's a conflict between the determinism that appears to obtain think to obtain in the case of the natural world as develop say byon physics or other physical views and freedom of the will and part of transcendental idealism is A New Perspective philosophical view that presents a framework within which then might be reconciled I think that's a major motivation of cons is much motivated by m philosophy kind of values that with in his sense of offended by anything else and also there is I just view the god reasonable faith and if you read reason in particular where the religion uh which is in 1793 it's pla that uh not only does he believe in some sense in those values but he knows a great deal about Christian Theology and has thought a lot about it and has tried to give an interpretation of it within this Sy of critical reading so that's his motivation again I I indicate to distinguish him from these other people each of whom have their own approach to things and I don't think it can't view so much as a philosophical system but a framework within which one is able to give an interpretation of and a defense of these different kinds of values and show how they hold together and as a defense it I think puts the view in somewhat stronger position because you what you're able to do is to argue against certain views that they have not been shown and with in the context of reable faith I think he holds that uh these values that can be maintain but all that I realized is tends to be misleading perhaps but I think that indicates the motivation of the critical philosoph as a whole as any de to think of it now note for example at the end of chapter one of the groundwork 22 paragraphs in that last three paragraphs um you think of his motivation there as explained the idea exist Kant does not suppose that what I'm going on to talk about the the moral law and the categorical imperative procedure he doesn't suppose that that's going to inform anybody of any procedure or law or ways of reing that they don't already know what he thinks he's there doing is giving kind of formula kind of articulating in a more exact way forms of deliberation that we actually follow in everyday life and he thinks that the ordinary person who U natural reason is uncorrupted and is sound in some way is able to reason about morals as well as the most educated person indeed he says the most educated person precisely because such persons know more and they may be aware of lots of fancier Doctrine with all kinds of distinctions that they are more likely to go wrong than the ordinary person who follow of their natural reason because he says they get confused and so on by all these arguments of one kind or another and they might be tempted into error as a result or they may fall into error as a result so he then asked the question well what's the point of studying moral philosophy and setting out account of moral law if we already know it and the the kind of answer he gives there which isn't the kind of answer he always gives but the kind of answer he gives there is well innocence is easily deceit and if we don't think about the basis of the moral law and how it's rooted in our reason and how our reason is part of an essential part of our moral personality if we don't understand that then we may be persuaded by sophy and other kinds of arguments not to follow the moral laws so the point then I stated there a moral philosophy isn't to explain to what's the content of it be able to do it but to strengthen our hold on it and to strengthen our hold on it by understanding what it is and how is it connected with our person and how it's rooted in our nature with certain kinds of persons and so forth in particular how it's connected with our freedom and how acting from the moral law displays and shows that we are free and those kinds of things if we understand that then we will understand the basis of the moral law and we'll hold on to it we don't understand it why then we're an easy target you might say prise and various arguments of persons of the world uh so in that's s he sees it you might say as defense uh moral philosopy as defense of the moral law and I hold upon it from say what he there calls the natural dialectic but from certain variety of Temptations of culture and civilization and so on kind of able so was Street in that that was so made a tremendous impressional particularly with and so the moral law isn't a doctrine of man uh it isn't not to be seen as an ethic of par is from some outside agent or Source it's a law we give to ourselves as beings of a certain sort and that's what we have to understand and in that sense the view is a defensive face so rather say moral say to hold on to the moral law against s from us and it does that by tracing it to its source and our person well when one judges the c one up if you read his writings and take the political writing you must be aware of course where he comes from um he was born in turberg fion of Fredick de great and he's not going to hold in his opinions the kind of views that you hold uh he's going to be from another world and often you find his opinions particularly how we ought to regard The Sovereign and so forth and the political writings as extreme right him so and I don't quite understand uh some things he said but question always is when I say I don't understand it I mean I'm not quite sure how men I think he must have been comp these view it's not I don't understand the process uh of reasoning I think there must be something I don't understand but is somewh from another world so the question question that we have to ask is was as we ask of all of us is one a significantly ahead rather than behind our our world and if one thinks of it that way then I think the answer in his case perhaps obvious not and going to judge him appropriately in like that well I ought to go on maybe perhaps a bit too much about this kind of background can't tell um so first thing I want to do is to give a very brief sketch of what I take the Marvel Mo to be or at least a way to take it and this will be a highly schematic presentation of it but I hope it will U enable us to have some idea of it and that then if I have time go on to talk about his conceptions of the good that can be related to different parts of how this law is set out now there are three things that I think have to be distinguished one is the moral law itself the other is categorical imperative and the third is to categorical imperative procedure and I'll sometimes we use the term C procedure for sure now those are three different things the moral law I think of is an idea of reason that specifies a principle which applies to all reasonable and rational beings I use the phrase reasonable and rational to indicate two kinds of reason I'll distinguish in in a moment but then the moral law is an idea of reason that specifies a principle that applies to all reasonal andal beings and in that sense it applies to God and the angels or any such beings perhaps in other planets and so but we can leave that aside the categorical imperative itself is of course an imperative and as an imperative it is directed only to those reasonable and rational beings who experience the moral law and the constraint that is they desire to do things that are contrary to it now the categorical imperative does not apply to God because God does not have any inclinations or desires that tempt God to act contrary to it therefore since God does not experience moral laws a constraint the categorical imp it does not apply this C procedure is a procedure that applies the categorical imperative to our circumstances that is to our human circumstances as has finite beings with needs and it takes into account the normal circumstances of human life so the C procedure is a procedure for applying the the categorical imperative to us in our normal human circumstances as things that have needs and desires and so on now ke keep in mind throughout when when K was talking about the C procedure and the categor care that he is concerned solely with the reasoning the moral Liberation and so forth of fully reasonable and rational human beings and he's concerned only with a sincere agency taking that I think for granted everyone with this I think he's assuming that so that the idea of the procedure is a scheme uh to characterize the framework of deliberation that such agents implicitly use in their Mall reason course agents is those that are fully reasonable and rational and can't takes it for granted I think that in order to apply the C procedure to apply categorical ter normal conditions of human life that we must presuppose some moral sensibility on our part and a sensibility that we share with other people I think it's a misconception of the categorical comparative procedure to think of it as a any kind of algorithm of any kind set of explicit rules that by themselves say as debating rules will trap Liars ands uh cnics and scoundrel into uh make false inferences or exposing of their hand something like that it presupposes some moral Sensibility on that part I think he beli in order to be able to apply now I think and I'm following others in this characterization of it that it has four steps as follows and I'll set it out kind of a schema at the first step we have the agent Max which by assumption is rational from the agent point of view that is to say the the maxim is rational given the agent's situation actual situation and given the Alternatives that are actually available to the agent and the agent's actual desires what the agent wants also we have to take into account the agent abilities opportunities and so on also K assumes of this maximum that it is sincere that we're dealing in with sincere agents and what this means is that it reflects or is the maxim that the agent that actually describes the agent's action and the principle of it as the agent would so describe them truthfully as without could see the agent actually believes that this is the principle on which the action is being under undertaken so that the maximum applies to sincere agent in that sense so one can then put a Maxim in the following form as sort of a general policy I am to do X say in circumstan C in order to bring about why and we might put it in a more complicated form but that's all all right for purposes is I am to do act in certain stances of time C in order to bring about water as I am to take uh certain kinds of food uh at the dinner table and for your phone in order to keep myself healthy and strong or something like that a variety of other things but it's a sort of a general policy about what I am to do to achieve certain ends that's the first step then at the Second Step One generalizes the maxim so one says that everyone is to do X in circumstances C in order to bring about why then everyone need to do it in circumstances C in order to bring about why so that whereas the maxim is directed to me and adopt on the basis of my desires and so forth and so on at Second Step it'll be a general precept directed to everybody on this interation then at the third step and this seeds in accordance with the idea of what calls in the groundwork the law of nature formula in Chapter 2 what one is to do is to turn the general precept as step two into a law of nature so we get at the third step every everyone always does act in circumstances see in order to bring about why as if by a law of nature so everyone always does ask circumstances so it's always be converted from a general precept which is in the same comparative mood into statement of the law of nature then we get the fourth step and this is the way the most complicated and raises a lot of questions but roughly the idea is this we are to adjoin uh the law of nature at step three the one we just arrived at to the existing laws of nature as these are understood by us and then we are to calculate as best we can what the order of nature would be if that law were adjoined to these other laws so it is assumed that this new order of nature that that a result from adding a this law has a kind of equilibrium state that is if we allow all these consequences of adding a this law to work out then we end up with a different kind of social world than the kind that we actually have now and we try to work out what it would be by the consequences of adding this other law to it and we might call this new kind of social World u a social work it's arrived at by adjusting laws of nature in our world in certain way now and after I go through this I'll give an example to help clarify what all this was supped to me um I can now then State the categorical imperative in the following way that we are permitted to act from a rational and sincere maximum at step one only if two conditions are satisfied the first condition is that we must be able to intend as reasonable and rational agents to act from that Maxim when we regard ourselves as a member of the perur social world and not our world it is rational in our world by assumption but it might not be rational in the perur social world and we might not even be able to intend to act from that in the case of the lying example the deceitful lying example can't Le we can't even intend to act from it because if you generalize the maximum of the seit for lie practice promising will no longer exist it'll be undermined it uh will it will no longer be possible and uh National Agents cannot quir rational and tend to do what that agent knows cannot be done so that agent will not be able even to intend to act on the Maxum in the perur social World although it can be done in our world or at least s assumes in that particular case so the first condition then is it I I'll do the other condition I come back um the first condition is that we must be able to intend to act from the in the pered social world the second condition is that we must be able to will this perturbed social world and we must be able to affirm it should we belong to it so the two conditions we must be able to intend to act from from the maximum in the turb world and we must be able to will that world and we don't know what this thing means but perhaps I should stop in moment question no I'll leave um I realized this may be quite mysterious is it good yeah um well uh maybe I should keep going anyway till I get through an example that I would disc some more details um then maybe you will see the point of it uh but it's perfectly clear I assure you it's perfectly Lucid if you just I mean I I don't mean that you all ought to see that it is such I'm just saying um just matter of uh underneath all the uh you know K's philosophy is something like U an ie Symphony where you have five bands playing once you have to be able to hear identify the band you want to listen to and then it all makes all right I'll proceed through with um an example eventually and then perhaps it be all right or then it' be a little better and of course I don't know at this point perhaps you haven't read the groundwork yet and of course then it's going even more mysterious I'm talking of course about chapter two the central part about the paragraph 31 to 79 which is up paragraph where the categorical iner is discussed and 80 is the beginning of where he talks about and that's a part I'm not talking about and I talking about the first formulation of that which is 31 paragraph through 45 4 46 the beginning of the second um only talk about those paragraphs now the view is if we cannot will if we cannot meet both of these conditions then uh we cannot act on this on this match that's the roughly the point now a given illustration is kind stinks it and perhaps the clearest one is the fourth one which is about uh the duty of mutual Aid now consider fourth example that this is in page 423 the academy Edition and that's in all of your text any text we have have and the Maxima to be tested and rejected is one that expresses indifference to the well-being of others who who who need our help and assistance so what we have to decide is whether a maximum of indifference to others that is we ignore them we don't help them when they need our assistance uh rather or not that maximum will pass the test of the categorical imper and all such a maxim might be rational in the case of a person who knew that they just need the help of others perhaps they were very wealthy and they can pay for it so for them it might be rational to be to have a policy a maxim that is indiffer uh or one might imagine a society divided into two parts uh and one part holds considerable power and is able to take care of himself where the other does not if you knew that you belonged in the part that that held and exercise the greater share of wealth then again why you are not being different to everybody you would would might say have a maxim that made that you different for those um in the other part or something of that sort so such a maximum might be rational and question is could we sit so the maxim is I am I am not to do anything to help others or to support them in distress unless at the time it is rational to do so in terms of my own interest otherwise I will not help them now the perturbed World which is associated with this Maxim is then a world in which no one ever does anything uh to help others in distress for the sake of their world being and the same it thought the whole of everyone and this just happens like a law of nature they act on this Maxim as if it were a law of nature as it were and that's the relevant equilibrium state that can't takes for granted that everyone in this social world knows what the laws of nature are and it's important to be aware of this assumption that that is that when a maxim is to be generalized and converted into law of nature then it's clear from how he discussed matters particularly case of the promis example that this law is known by people and they're able to work out what what the consequences are now if we make that assumption they think does then kind goes on to say that we cannot will these things the turb social world which is associated with the maximum of indifference because many situations may arise in that world in which we ourselves need love and sympathy and the help of others so that in those situations by a law originating from our own will we would have robbed ourselves of what we require it would be irrational for us to will such a work in which everyone as if by a law of nature is death to appeals for assistance it's irrational to do that he said now C doesn't say here very much about how the notion of rational to be understood uh or why it's irrational it says about this uh and indeed the test as he actually describes it I think is a too strong because he makes it seem as if if in the perturbed world we want to do something or we want something very much and now having it is as as a result of some Maxim that we hold and when generalized becomes a law of nature if that law blocks something that we now want right then he says that precept is rejected and the reason I think this is is a too strong is that all moral precepts are going to cross our interests and desires on at least some occasions in most any social world that's in rambl nature at all ours so there's always going to be some conflict between the maxims that we act from and generalize and our particular interests as they might arise in the social World in which everyone is acting on those maxims so I think that the test is actually proposed in example four is a bit too strong well it is too strong I think at least I don't know how to uh uh to avoid saying that now I think there are several ways out of this that one might try to amend you he doesn't himself explore these but the notion I'm want to emphasize it's important is the notion of willing a social world of a certain kind and of being able to will a world that's in which everyone acts from precepts or principles of suitable generality that you yourself are prepared to affirm now one one way which I think won't discuss in a great detail here but I'll I'll indicate parallel at some point later is it Khan often talks about the adoption of or he sometimes sorry oppos to often sometimes uses a phrase to human needs and there are passages in the doctrine of virtue as if it appears he's reasoning in accordance with the idea of whether in this detered social World our true human needs are adequately taken care of by the precepts that we generalized so rather than say that we reject the max if it might Coss our desires and interests of some sort perhaps we ought to read the fourth example of saying that need in time of distress and in help in times of distress sorry and certain people in some Cas is true human need and that the reason why the maximum is to be rejected is because if from a suitably general point of view it doesn't take care of that need as opposed to fulfilling or satisfying some desire that isn't a need that we don't count as then it is to be rejected so one might then get a test of the following sort can I will the perturbed social World associated with the pre of indifference that is what I don't help anybody rather than a turb world associated with the precept of mutual a that is a maxim joining me to help others in need and in answering that question I am Tak into account not only mat true human needs where you buy assumption take myself to have and everyone else to have or rather I'm sorry in judging of those worlds and to take into account only my true human needs and presumably we have some account of that so um if we read I think the the fourth and also the third example in this life in an analogous life then um I could begin perhaps to make uh a more plausible case for the kind of view um he is is a presenting which seems to be open to this difficulty now the idea is this that in applying the SBI procedure now as now revised we understand that any general precept which is all like a moral precept will constrain of course some of our actions on some occasions as action prompted by some of our desires as a feature of the moral precept which can't be avoided what we must do though is to compare alternative social worlds and evaluate all the consequences so far as we can of really one of these worlds rather than another so in order to do this we're going to have to have some account of true human need and that will then enable us to make an es of some rough way what these consequences might be that is a general picture of what I take the uh cedure to be in a very schematic form of course now I also believe perhaps this is something that I project into it that at this fourth stage of testing a a maxim where we are comparing these alternative social social worlds K supposes that are two limits on information the first limit is that we are to ignore the particular features of persons um including ourselves in the making of that judgment and we also ignore and I think there's evidence for this in the text and for the CRI practical reason there isn't a lot of evidence but some the how stated for ignoring the content of our particular desire and I think the other constraint on information is that in the the critique where talks about we have to be able to will in order agent in general um I think from the way the text made there it's at the end of chapter two of the antic and something called the typical judgment it up um it sounds as if presupposing that we don't know the place that we will have in that order nature now that's something perhaps I project into it because it's somewhat analogous to the constraints on information that parties are subject to inal position but I think one who reads these parts of the of the text is this idea uh if not being actually asserted or presupposed is either implicit or very close to the surface that depends on on on one's judgment there he doesn't actually assert it in a mistakable fashion well now that half from B three anyway um is there anything you wish to ask yes yeah um about the last com about ignoring particular features of persons um does that do that me that K has to again have to have some sort of idea about a general human being or real General rational wants because you're going generalize for everyone and you're not taking your own personal interest as typical the ones who follow the ones would you follow the ones would a person follow deciding whether it's rational to world or not well what I think you need is it un unless you I mean I mean if you go the way I would suggest that it has you would have to develop some kind of account of what they true human need are okay that goes for the now now I haven't said anything about what those are but we get a hint from say fourth example that we need uh when way he puts it there some occasion sympathy but one might say that we need to live in a social World in which others are going to come to our assistance when we need it in this way we might be drowning or we might be starving uh and want characterize what these are now there isn't very much to go on there in that example there's a little bit to go on uh a little bit more to go on in the third example where he seems to suggest that it's important for us to to develop our talent um and that would be a kind of need for certain purposes although possible to imagine a society where that isn't done but now I haven't attempted to give any account of it for him that in his own terms of of would work um so what would have to do would be to develop one on on one's own and uh or VI that would go along with him and slice it in now I might mention of course the thing that's in the of my mind is that the account of primary Goods is intended to do something quite like that I mean it is intended to be things that people need in a certain kind of Sor that one is trying to develop a contion of political Justice for well per I better stop here I have the feeling that I haven't been able to all unforunately I think it may become more [Music] to [Music]
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Modern_Political_Philosophy_John_Rawls_PhD_1984
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John_RawlsModern_Political_PhilosophyLecture_21_audio_only.txt
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I should say forward again we have some macabre teacher not sure how to set it should be good it's got into English oh I mean it'll be good well actually that's anyway there's a package of it up here those do we didn't get it sexy well this is a third last class or Marco capatch alphabet mark and I always feel as I do tax even more so to taste the mill that three times it's quite I apologize for that I think it marks the middle of this is great bigger than 19 centuries we think of philosophy and social theory together they combine both of those in a way I think there's no one else in the century does attack level so that all those are dictated by later for example cocktail they don't have the philosophy side my sake me so I always feel I don't do it very powerful people anyway well what I want to say something about today that full kind of society and hope to get that today bit I might make some introductory comments in capital x + 3 there's the following off quoted remark that all science like quote know exactly how it is translate somewhat of an easy to translate it follows that all science would be superfluous if the appearance of things and the essence of things were to directly to coincide so it's a kind of split between essence of parents that have afraid we'll make social science possible and with I take to be a statement about full time in a society namely that in that form of society the essence of things I need or shine ins form of things appears things coincide now what's that mean what there's some adventure elucidation mean this sort of one of them walks into getting like expressions that appeared at excellent how food tastes bland well first I begin with her cuts background and comments over things that we found a full-function don't know it before in the first class here a marching fall that I discussed the controversial questions of what disappointment aim the martha's labor theory of value and I main claim that others have been came to make some others have anything that it's point a name is essentially follows first the show that despite the fact that capitalism is a system of personal independence which is quacks all citizens certain equal rights and regime of free contract and all market transactions are made by formally speaking volunteered that is nevertheless capitalism is a system just as much as dualism is in which surplus value is extracted and therefore capitalism is a system of exploitation by definition of exportation of traction surplus value given certain institutions the second point of it was to show how by various institutions practices under cat boarding the extraction of surplus-value was hidden from view in and so that they can visible nature of exploitation is a teacher of the social system as a whole and it's not a trick of certain clever people who designed it this way it isn't some personal wrong or improper action on the part of people it's partnered way the system works even when they're doing acting in ways if that system allowed so on this interpretation mark thinks of the labor theory of value as a method of economic analysis that is designed to establish precisely these two points it is in that method frame for a particular purpose of answering those particular questions about this particular social forum and and so it is not I suggested a theory of price the usual sense although I has some relation that is not a theory of just right and it isn't theory about the source of the origin of all values being labor I do think that marks regards social labor as a kind of a social asset at five it hasn't someone at the whole and he's in stood and how that is allocated and how that works but that's what I'm economic theory that's sort of the background is something explains I think Y position during the things that he does so in reference to the quotation then we could say in a full time in this society the labor theory of value would be unnecessary or a theory of that time would be unnecessary only in a society like that a capital in which the appearance of things where the essence of things does not coincide is there any need to penetrate beneath the surface appearances of social institutions to the essence of things and to see how surplus value and exploitation are made possible by the system of property that is factorable factor-kappa skiing equipment possible now we can also say that a very life the labor theory of value is necessary only in a society where consciousness plays with the phasic road either as an ill aroond that is with people are to see and taken in by appearances and that says quite reason to pool or as a diligent that means some psychological element some needs that can lead them to affirm these you so we can say it opaque full kindness society that it is a society whose members or without ideological consciousness in there's a side to the appearance of jeans and the essence of things directly coincide and they own and they aren't therefore without illusions and they have no need for a theory like the labor theory of value in the second class we discussed marks is apparent view about the historical significance of conceptions of political justice I say his opponent deal on this because my labor theory of value this is the controversial topic of course it'd be very tentative so it was suggested that for Mark's connections of political and social justice are part of the ideology of the political systems of domination of society divided into classes one class as owning the means of production and therefore dominating other class or or the other classes at their number of different conceptions of political justice will characterize different historical modes of production and marks of remarks that they are adequate to we might say appropriate to these modes of production when they are properly adjusted to them that that is when the equal political system the notions justice orbit are adjusted to the mode of production and therefore enable them to serve their historical role in capitalism this role is rapidly to build up the means of production by having institutions that compares the introduction of innovations and so on again in reference to the corporation then conceptions of political justice as Marc thinks of them will not exist in a full common in society that that was a suggestion of the quotation I have in mind is about there would be no science when the appearance in the essence essence disappeared or no need that they belong that is to say concessions of justice to the various systems of domination they are conceptions of prehistory that is crazy more oxygen needs to refer to the time before socialist society or any rate the last date of it the American sections of prehistory different sections of justice because they involve a kind of false consciousness the list notes strebel point here about the markless view it can it's easy to understand there a number possibility and not all them in mind curabitur first of all he does not deny that people in a concave kappa society who accept or who affirm the capitalist conception of political justice can often do make numerous criticisms of the institutions or of what happens actually when i say under capitalism in the life of that conception of justice for example they can criticize and they do force and fraud monopolistic combinations of all kinds to fix prices and the rest and that more axes view allows for this and other kinds might say internal criticism o have capitalism operators found the operator to depart in his own emotions in certain ways and he certainly means to allow for that and this account of it another quest more important point is it one more sense of that constructions of justice are adequate to their associated mode of production doing the higher period when these modes of production are serving their historical role did this on the interpretation either suggestion this would be taken is a statement within his political sociology he is not himself endorsing these conceptions from a moral point of view let's say it holds some kind of set point you he is saying what role they have historically and how they operate and in particular I don't take him to say that the legal system and constructions of justice and so forth ought to be adapted an adequate to the mode of production he isn't saying that he is saying on interpretation I'm suggesting something within his political sociology and saying come these of conception actually operating within the capitalist societies assuming that there would be no conception of Justice outside of all of them from which a dating of that time could be made but finally when when when I say that mark thinks that constructions of dresses are elements of the ideological consciousness of a catalyst society I mean that he thinks that those who affirm these conceptions are in various ways deluded they need to believe since both caplets who own the means of production and workers who don't on the hole in the hybrid need to believe that the scheme is is just some moral point of view that they accept otherwise the social system will not work smoothly won't operate to serve that purpose so there is eight they need one might say that the system has is to work amazing inception of this sort and it is a firm in its miss hybrid and and that's it they are deluded as opposed to be here taping again now you're also in various ways mistaken that is to say because they think there are from right of which are in some sense of banded on the term principles or with any raids are absolute principle might be better prayed principles of reasons principles of natural law natural right they are mistaken to think that that's the case and that is another element of highly illogical consciousness they fail to see the purely historical role of the session so it's marks when Mike saison isn't as an observer or political sociologist who's making these remarks about the system and how it works and all of this evening correct still leave a possibility that in a full kinda society there are moral conceptions and values a perm and while none of these are presumably reputation on suggestion is correct our conceptions of political justice as we know them historically there may be a construction somewhat similar to it inception justice and I shall not try to heard this question any definite way someone just suggest that you think about but we might consider Wilmot a full-time a society might be bike and more why one might think of it and why one might think it is a society beyond justice in the sense that it has no need for political justice now I think here it's important to keep in mind that the question that concerns the public culture with what I was a crazy used before it concerns the public culture of it full coming in society we're asking whether people in a full communist society half conceptions similar to our conceptions of political justice the kind that you know are distorted and this means what what whether they're public night and thought of contains notions of this sort but that is the people in this aside to use these notions added a rest themselves and they had social so it's discussions by teaming to principles of the sort or they clean it with these gluten make decisions and in the light of them and so on it may be as observers that we would say of the society the day thank you justly at any rate I think unjustly in any obvious way so it would appear to us but that's not the question the point is from their standpoint their consciousness do they have conceptions of the sort and do they enter in to their public discussions and their program why so the suggestion isn't that we're trying to work out what a full counter cited is why if it society of my sake to do this net negatively so we say first it is a society in which ideological consciousness has completely disappeared no one has any need for these delusions for false consciousness as a psychological support for the system itself does not require that kind of support and also the social institutions the surface appearances that they present a do not conceal of their essence rather appearance in essence of directly to coincide or whatever that means I'll try to get some contents of every moment the second point is it it is it is a society in which the mode of production completely eliminates the extraction of surplus value and so exportation in the Ewing longer exists a note here the term extraction of surplus-value which I generally used I think what the term extraction me first who is how surface value as a cheap how it produce in the first age of socialism is marked I didn't pretty go to program there is certainly unpaid labor and therefore the circles bed EG this sorta fire in the form of in the gas McMahon laid aside certain amount of social product voted it to overhead social overhead and so on but it's not extracted since it is the outcome I take it of a free voluntary decision that's also a Democratic decision by free to associate producers my comment on this last point marks I believe does not mean by exportation normally than rates may be the existence of 28 labor or surplus value more money has in mind is the nature of the background system of property which clinic Catholic society has in roughly the speaker but these are here teachers but this from his text i just mentioned kind of thing i think the headline person did the aggregate social surplus that is the total of things that are produced by a surplus of Labor falls into the hands of other people than the workers so it falls into the hands of those who own the means of production and it thus it is the owners of that control over the output of production a second feature is it the owners of the means of production also exercised and thinks autocratic control over the over the labor process within both firm industry it is the owners who decide from the introduction of new machinery and it extent and the details of the division of labor and so on a third point is that the owners of the means of production also determine the extent in the direction of the flow of new investment they decide each firm individually on the assumption competition where their surplus funds are the best use in order to maximize pronto that's the owners of the whole that last and they don't decide this joint since I decided as a group secondly make use of the social surplus and determine the break-ins growth of bleep we come of course they don't control it depends on how the market process goes but in supporters of our part human a decisions i've made about that it would be made about that it today with the decisions on the part of those in that class thus if we say that exploitation is attraction of sniffles value within a system of ownership of the means of production is risible and if we say that alienation arises large part as a result of the backgrounds social conditions in such a system of ownership then it follows that the social form of free associated producers is more holes it does overcome this sense both exploitation and alienation this social forum is that presumably fully achieved in april communist society it is the social world of really associated producers in which i did ideological consciousness and a need for as completely disappear now in this social world in which I he thinks of it people have true beliefs and their activities and realize truly human values and take her to some examples of what I think he has mine the days of self-development in the work autonomy priyam coerced Association etc the members of a full kindness society understand how their social world works and its essence and it's appearing then coincide again referring back to location again we might say in philosophical terms we have the unity of Syrian practice in the sense that the true description of the social world is a description of a social world that is good so we have community r-truth in goodness where I'm thinking of good goodness be different than motion of the right and adjust it's also the case that the members of this soak the world know that is good so we have this self conscious awareness of this truth and this goodness on the part of all of the members of it or make three comments on this first woman it is suggested that the public culture of a full continent society has unknown e4 and hence lactating section of footage justice it is not of course intended full common society likes Omar conception anti-roma conception of political justice is but one kind of more inception and it's a rather special kind that nor is it deny that a full climb in a society may have various conceptions of right and wrong that quite different from any debt we would say or political normal sense or even so forth and certainly mark thinks of a full communist society isn't realizing the values of self-development meaningful work and the other ones which I just mentioned it these fall under the notion of the good rather than right and just and I'm assuming it's a pleasure to the court tegel comprehend and understand these babies secondly wouldn't want marks and suffix Reza's hostility as he does grapple and elsewhere to capitalism as such reform he does so perhaps because he thinks it has outlived its historical role its timing path is not doing what it is supposed to be now that is done and therefore it is now an irrational system headed to break down and one makes a denied the eyes those eyes intention to vote but without to get some reason so that it degrades human beings done sir self-development denies their classes for free its association so on oh it's now that's nasty rational and that's this rational and degrading answer and that's a different kind of criticism meant to say is unjust third point might make is that the reason that four times its size it has no need for a in section of political justice would seem to rest in part of these on the thesis of Marx's historical materialism and its explanation a class of concerts in full common society there are no classes presumably in his sense of play with hands upon and the ownership means of production control over those to go back and so class conflict disappears what if this would also disappear the need for institutions of domination of which intersection of justice and legal order are a cloth so in that sense of the need for construction of political justice over this appeared the plan of comment I'll make is it as a critic of heroism marks practicing something like falling is wrong to spoke that justice and rights and those distractions that find them are a permanent feature human society rather they are nearly a text feature of historical societies and in particularly next feature of their whole society but that society is underlying divisions and class conflicts will pass away and when it that's it wake there will be no need for concessions of justice well what I might now do at the time that remains is to go over try to illustrate what I think the idea involved is in fighting for continent societies as one in which everything is open to view and there is no discrepancy between appearances we'll have to go to very quickly press it'll be a bit curative anyway so I'll try one might note from the early Paris of manuscripts the on emmitt alienation this section talks about that is it the notion has four aspects as presented their purses it under the campus mode of production that neighbors are aiming it first from the product of their labor from what they produce and mark says it becomes an alien being that that is it is flaunting owned by troll by capitalists who owns the output and who has the right to dispose now we've gone over that and that's fairly obvious but thats dose of what that means but more important i think more revealing of what he's getting it is it he thinks that the surplus labor of the workers over time when accumulate find economic system increases the massive real capital and so increases the output and size of the forces of production at the disposal of the capitalist class also it's the case that the products of labor appear on the market and they movement of prices that have been black they're being sold on the market are not understood by the workers that whole process of how crisis moved and how they are determined by flows about put not understood by anybody it's just in that sense we know market is a foreign phenomenon per ticket the movements of prices on it the reason it's a foreign phenomena or phenomena that it don't understand is that there isn't any public social planet production that people understand in the light of which products are produced so the adjustment of prices to market forces appears to them as they throw by some power or forces if they don't understand that the powers are independent of any that they do a second feature a bit of alienation is it workers are alienated from a production and from the productive activity of migrant itself so it mark says they're the work is external to the workers it isn't a part or the realization of nature will mark isn't fulfilling in any way doesn't develop an exercise of their natural powers so if the workers feel at home at all is doing there neither time work then this isn't any longer volunteer it isn't gaining full force it isn't dissatisfaction in hearing me but it is a means for satisfying other means so I believe this scheme of alienation is self-sacrifice self-employed ification and while working the labor power belongs to someone else or perhaps I should say it fits and hired after someone else the use in the direction of it a third thing that mark says about elimination here's it America's are alienated from their species from there's decent life and so is everyone else incidentally I think everyone in society in some sense is there a fun hishis activity from t25 the notion of species life I'm not sure how to interpret that I think it's a rather complex and interesting notion and characteristic I believe German idealism to lose the notion of this sort of a racer i am going to interpret it i think the important thing is not to trivialize it in some way that that is to say that this is a typical dishes lice simply means that human beings are DC thing that is to say they are by nature on this hard rotation social beings diced or trivial things will say or to say that human beings have reason and self-consciousness and that they are aware of themselves as belonging to when they see the each of which can likewise use meeting and has so consciousness again I think that is somewhat trivial thing to say not that that isn't also meant that I don't think probably best thing Marx has in mind I think it's something like this or past like this that human beings are addictive natural time or meetings and then they collectively produced and reproduced they can technicians of the common social life over time and yet at the same time their social forms evolved historically and in a certain sequence until eventually a certain social forum develops that is more or less maniacally to their nature as national social and active and creatively productive beings so that when assessed and human beings create through time through their own history the conditions of their more complete social self-realization the collective activity by which this school's collective self expression is accomplished in cooperation of course with natural forces is species activity so it has this historical dimension over time it means producing reproducing over time till eventually there is adequate form come sabbatical full society now in this next part of this social self creation of human beings over time in March review and the emphasis is productive economic activity cluding put processes of change the to be alienated from PCs activity is first of all not to comprehend and not to understand this historical process that would be alienated from PCs activity and since second theory made from it would be not to participate in that activity in any self realizing meaningful way the activity would be directed entirely by others in no say things I dissipate with them working class under capitalism and therefore they are aiming it from that aspect of this species activity so if we ask what does it mean for all to participate in this disease activity in a self-realized way then the answer is provided by the kind of economic scheme that obtains of whatever is in full Cummings society will makes me get some idea that from what mark says about the early stages of it would first data's other than critical the goethe program and in the various of remarks at amazing capital about the economic forum of trees associated produces my mighty i can turn to that can be get some accounts as bad as to how that is how i think that fulfills that these are conditions although actually scratch that obvious at this point um what one should look at its section 4th kappa chapter one and the various economic forms that are there discussed i'll just mention some of them one of them the simplest is that Robinson Crusoe this is a one person economy and assuming that in Robinson Crusoe it rational the usual sense then the plan and economic operations of the one person economy is presumably clear that cleared the Robinson Crusoe and so it is Chris ozone activities and the plan that he draws up team earns Bryce there's one thing costs and terms of his own diaper time he keep track of these in his spot book and so he knows their labor values and so forth and Mark said all the relations of between Crusoe and the objects that form his wealth are his own creation and are here so simple and clear to be intelligible or without exertion these relations contain all that is essential to determine values but of course this is an economy has no social relations at all but it's an example of what Mark has in mind by and everything being open took you they know continue to bruns cruiser second there's a fuel economy which he discusses and I've already made some observations about that so I'll get over that Sarah nomination the another one which he dick talks about which is a patriarchal peasant family here we have directly associated labor that is there is no system of market transactions and there were different social functions on a part of a number people that were bidding agent of labor between people but it's natural and spontaneous division that it existed to turn by age sex and the seasons and so on and not provide the most effective proper terms organization of the factory division of labor I'm friends was back in this case the products in the labor are not commodities even though agri here is social as opposed to Crusoe economy and remember that the family have common purpose and once again one can say that the members of the family understand what's going on they know that then we plan for operating say the farm and also hear that everything is clear and open to you marcos have talks about sample commodity production kappas production miles if over this the important thing i will turn to is what dimensions here is the production of previous associated producers Rome means of production in common and the angry Powerball is consciously I take that between publicly and successfully applied as the elected mayor of the community and and here mark says all the characteristics of chrousos labor are here repeated but with this difference that they are social instead of individual assuming that the share of each of producer well that's the end of the quote assuming that the share of each of producer is determined by their neighbor time then the neighbor time plays a dual role in this first stage its apportionment two different activities in accordance with a definite public and social plan establishes the correct balance between different kinds of work to be done and the various uh needs and wants of their community as a whole that neighbor time also measures the part of common labor that is borne by an individual and determines the share of each and the total product which is destined for consumption after the various a deduction Heather made for in decima and these and these other things so that social relations of individual producers but their varies that neighbor times the corresponding shares are perfectly open to view again they are visible in public and they are the outcome of social decisions in which all and taking part now in this last form of society with that call that create associated one has laid the basis I think how marks understands or how he thinks he can understand make sense of idea this idea which I had called unity theory in practice and Apple cotton in society the idea would be that the come is regulated by publix settle plan which is drawn up by some democratic process in which all three associates have taken part where they can't take part that they want to do with the can if they want to and the presumption is they all took part in it marks and is it discourse presupposes certain material conditions which happened brought about as a result a long painful historical process of development so to get the full idea of beauty of to practice of traitors and views we have to add I think following naming that the police upon which the social plan is drawn up and the other relevant beliefs are true for David accurate enough for a break or not that delusions are really so that they taken the relevant Belleza true and that the human values that are achieved by the plan and which are dressed in social institutions are appropriate values of the kind but earlier itself second now one might need some economics science its meat calculation in order to avoid Africa I think that that we ought not to question that or I think that in itself as any injection the point is one does not require a certain kind of economic science or economic theory that I say the kind that that is presented in Chapel a for coming in society does not always the heat or even perhaps often achieve this full unity but point is its institutional forms satisfy some of the essential preconditions of this the namely Republic visible and social aspects of institutions which are illustrated by this idea so what I have attempted to do I will stop here is to use of the idea of pretty associated producers and the discussion which marks gives and section for chapter 1 a Kappa volume in order to try to make sense of these ideas to present the notion of trying it to where gasoline is time that make it good wait what full comment society would be like on his view or making a suggestion of it and I say we do it negatively because we say what would it be like if it did without ideological concept is completely without delusion without illusions without the need for that and what would it be like different labs Daily Nation completely and exploitation quickly and it does appear rocklea but this sort of sketched that if we think of the society clearly associated producers and make it was involved in that one can see the kind of picture from my form and if if we ask count is possible that that form of society does not need a conception of political justice then the answer is extremely that class the business had disappeared and if we naked the view historical materialism and the and the count of ideology chip is a connected with that one one can see how he would suppose that political perceptions of justice would then become unnecessary was it not to say that are no more values of the kind of society I asked them all to get a different question I haven't all certified Oh Oh you make those noises been going out
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Modern_Political_Philosophy_John_Rawls_PhD_1984
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John_RawlsModern_Political_PhilosophyLecture_19_audio_only.txt
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well today we remember the law taking a change in trade makin up near contemporary Pacioretty know who was 12 years old and I'm I went in the remarks that we read we could provide a knuckle cloud the birth by the early essays and philosophical writings in 1840 example on the good question 143 from economic and philosophic and is good year later on dead no then you're 44 speeches on for about Jeremiah finality 18.5 six then you read part of the economic road began white women a las first volume capital second was publishing 85 the flirtin women may roam add to that and don't have a date hmm I to that exact day but then we be non momenta habit to hand out today copy the entire critic of the good and I think the whole thing really now I could say it's beginning at the veins of our capital market i'll be able to limit it was that even more milk with ultra limited marks of talk is enormous and scoping really good then very large difficulties I think to understand liftmaster the idea capital me volumes isn't itself of the bid intact but I think they have to do what we can say I ran a model and I plan to give a central place new and hit the social system another they awaken early heck no me neither than a very elegant Madrid and simplified where could we keep the avenging in my tracks now thank you Frank location as monsters economics is justified point of view but also because I think he assigned it a very important place mental players and correct sent to take him seriously we have to make no never been the basic point of what he would act right and half on practically spent back then fallen to play he's my hopes up and I think that one of the really remarkable changes is that starting with the measurement background and juris prudence and philosophy turned out to be late life is about your age is over all of that and thinking himself what hood of a drama he was a lonely I place caller didn't have any colleagues of this year's return ative for important health within go to graduate school important things and his library book through a little greedy and yet nevertheless we became a very important time Barbara Marshall Ricardo know the matter that quite good because these other people had contacts with other Congress to what their own angela was it on my major tom 50 Mill Creek sample had a father of the tooth so although at age 21 and to keep spinning put papers and economic on a discoverable generation later he anyway go mark can't do it all by himself now the focus that are going to take one in order to have some kind of angle with the unit is critical and ableism and although that did a courtroom one perspectives are marked and obviously not but important one or not the many important one I think it will tell us the heck we'll deal with it in the trash so that today unwanted to consider Tom marks understood katalavaíneis photos with room and I go over all too briefly what I take it to the point of the legislative battery and won't get into any detail exactly what I take to be the quantity what we're trying to accomplish and with that background that they will understand some other things i should add that there isn't i dream of that he's mad at all these things controversial but i presented interpretation that I'm not alone of not altogether to find Sam next time I can hit it one way a wonderful inning market at it to work in second divided up this and what role he thought these the ocean had ideas I got this in catalytic system how'd it work Martin roll a play and whether or not Martha Nell thought capitalism was unjust sore but we thought that that was an important critical of those other things and filing the third class I devote some attention to his notion of poo economy body as a society really associate producers in which either logical consciousness and alienation and exploitation have been overcome but one way of understanding at that emotion full kind of society I could work buying the game by what the decided free associated with life when we're done your logic consciousness and there is no exploitation or over make them but on fam emotions take last 20 livin happen what other beta marking the right on the tackle that's what I think that local my mother was important so I'm i sent by outline about how we will see it is evidence I size of similar to take know that back priming I his work and i'll try to give it some kind of a purpose so that they're frightened to some use to us know Oh goober briefly so call your attention to remind you of certain features of what I think it being Markham account of papal is officially the first cat ilysm of the social system which is divided it to you to exclusive and exhaustive classes say to capture some workers this is a court simplified view the prison he's aware that of other classes and augments political writing talks about any of the groups of the economic love helpful to take ages to fold evented not a capitalist known and had control of the meat that the ducts remember the back class um happen trololo the names of the ducting and now add a natural resources war crime except the later part of what they owe me all the names of production the latest are and then the contents of a fact active is no flavor happen they a deal and deal south of labour-power nobody the other quest in order to exercise and to apply their labor power with the only thing that hard to go the workers ignore that access to the area to use the means of production and without access to the names of the document not productive introducing so those are matrix campus and to describe you a second feature of it it happens a month since my creative editing market not perfect markets that there is competition and we can have and with their only with the output of production is sold the household and on which the factors of production are acquired from other capital firms for hire workers who um Baku on their labor enter into slavery and back to the production capital funds will move freely from one industry to another artist to another and in particular capital funds well as in states that had the highest rate of return or pocket and back hence no sabes a one Megaton and burn now here the look River which mark route the way toward himself very generous paid about he was buried capitalism as a system of personal independence as opposed to heroism which is a symptom of personal defended so the contrast between personal independence and personal defense now an idea is that the institution fakes of serfdom be able to bridge what is meant a personal dependence that is a search are in various ways property of the Lord they go to that a certain customary rights which are part of their Vegas ministry to move from the board Elaine some other demands demands an area and so forth and they have to work so many days in here with the status if I trust them on the board lands opposed to their comment oh this is institutionally has gone on for a long time and people living room far and Marcus rice bag is saying is that everything is open to do and perfectly visible Louis a sense in which assertive attendance on the Lord Hispanic custom Harbach invisible if the search has to work say upon the vague a venir access a lot size 50 days at 200 where you here then 11 note how much later the search has to get to the war we're roughly warm one day out of four and in it attention to kinda see where capitalism mark graduated first a system of her to be independent because the book is a print move between industry two things burn some other employment they've been a long run contract terms and me when wage agreements are drug on the market of marketer engraved market and the agents that enter into these are presumably had lower than in between equal and that tension has formal equality and all that's involved in the notion of saying capitalist system of personal independence contract of destruction you know the mark the striking feature of capitalism would this despite the fact that it is a system approach assistance with personal independence and freedom demarcus biggest deal with systems and we can hit you others paid labor or surface values exist very still reckless later and unpaid labor even though you have free market and personal independence now he wanted to act how it is possible warm one question how's it possible that there could be a pig later and effectively how does it hidden from view that he thinks that most 8 in the system are not aware or they're not aware how it works or how it takes place and so it isn't open to you to visit you it's something you have to be able to stand me this very hard thing to understand so I think I offer get this involve me dead one of the aims of Martin language a bag is it michael explained birth how it possible to the estate later kind of system and nekkid lee and i make equally important how it is that it didn't all idea to it there and it is on to us ok circle services so that that just poses a problem i think that negative values to address on the other aspects of this michael detention of warmth are the different age and rolls of the social platinum the economic reason a Martha Jews and Heyman role of the catalyst in the system is represented by the cycle and Dan see em hostages where that means were eminence plastic greatest n-word fourth inning money and see me for that gypsum representation of the fact that these tackles in that manage money and real packet of some form machinery wages they work it and then at the end of the period they only output and the net Sylvia put that impossible and it could be going as expect then that they will be profit at the end of that series of transactions but Darien event to take apple father's to amuse of us to do a quick measurement process me n roll of the flirting resistive begin to sink that and that see if possibly where normally as presumption is better seen at three o'clock please and be equal in matters sometimes it's very but on the whole to complete one day and this represents the fact that they were workers agree to work and to produce in order to get wait for the day dude so what they want to do is to maintain their labor power to reproduce themselves in the mall i'm going to take to sustain their crimes and the children of the song all that labor power now deck and mikasa p is greater than m in the sea cycle represent the fact that catholics are in a position to accumulate real capital and to add up to do kapil over time and the campus of the class and tended you at making various a decision about how much capital feeling effective oh and the class of a whole play that role in the FNP economic system voiced by contrast the work in fact is not normally say or was amplified knew the saving of the word implanted very consumption we might say as worker for old age of something that sort but over the period of lifetime if we take all of the paint avenged accountant we deduct from those expenses with the support of planet why then angry say zero that the negative again within this entire scheme say so then we want to say that's the best Appetit by implant size because social role of the catalysis is to say that was cumulate and two mil castle by leavening the cheese factory the technology various sources c-segment and thereby to duel up society in the long run and the subjective a at the end that habit had in mind in doing this is maximize profit of the firm and one of the matter what consultants kappa is higher that is a gorgeous class nevertheless the aim catalyst isn't to pursue but they will be driven by the nature of the photo system and the position in market replicate I will be driven to accumulate of real cactus although they only average and live better and the Heian period capitalism said that cannot be dis book role and Catholic Canada for Monroe what enabled them to do so is it they own the means of production and natural resources and that puts meant to make Oh position social position to make decisions regarding the amount of direction the direction of investment and the life and also put them into of the dishes to be in charge of the order work and making that kind to me if the prerogatives that belong to the castle class that enables them to fulfill the social role as fine a point of this is that if we take the preceding teachers together then we get two classes going to have very close social roles that had very potent social interest last interest and the syphilis capitalism Paris trophy on the time period five historical chair on my playing this role and it into another phase where it happens and this was done it's packed away historically and then sees it has become more and more opposed to one another and then more Hortense paganistic so potentially we get I kind of break them very of what what happened in Bishop now thank you what with me I will make a comment in the background is facing things about what I believe to be of value I always say that I'm rich in love with the destructive economic to go I'm not an economist tend to be and I take the economics because you know it's very controversial I think general agreement found at the base and make me come down fine point sounded good and I'm going I hope this will help now I take it in Waiting describes his economic theory of laws that sweetheart the first part takes up in what we might call the static theory of the extraction of surplus-value under the simplified assumption that the organic compositions capital is the same in all industries organic composition name roughly the degree of capital intensity of this behemoth capital had her workers and here is LaMarcus concern mrs. Kryder now none wage income but if a profit ingestion brent he's concerned with describing how they come about again going back to how many nuns wage income possible in its different personal in Henderson yes and way I think is the basic and central part of you and it is presented tackle vol.1 that that is very to be brought in one and the you are in effect of here roughly the first 10 chapters other things at home later but we get the main structure there the second main part of the view that one view is given by three of cattle and here is concerned away on the aggregate surfaces it may distribute from one energy to another how it made its pivot in society and how it is converted into profit interest in rent once the simplifying assumptions of buying one heart drop that it is not any longer coming back the organic composition catalan all in the state trooper thanks some may have greater adage capital for workers and others and now for mark to the said the basic question on the interpretation of suggesting is that was no cavities none wait incomes are produced and this it explains in this temp I sumption by one where none weight income is explained is arriving from surplus value unpaid labor and buyeth radius concern with the redistribution of this surplus value between industries and mr. Fussell version to profit interest and rent and a mobile fascism moment but important thing to realize is the back of the Marxist redistribution of surplus-value if intimidate one when i call it surface of kelowna it takes place by the system of competitive market which is familiar to anyone who's nervous system and was very into the study 30 today by platform heel platform crimes and i take this from ours although these complexities enjoying three or important that name def occurred in 21 and 1 what to realize because it would tell my dad about this historical facts and not all people we go that mark had the ideas of flying free in mind when we wrote a volume 1 and as if any doubt about that at all there worries get it before apparently by one the so-called transformation problems problem reduce dimension and all and also when it was published eventually 1933 find that the blunt ERISA which is from the mid 50 has the whole problem there with a sketch of a smooch so in hidden ok he instantly thought by some of Marx's critic that with only act is published by one that this so-called Prince to be hatin occurred to him yet to make all these observations of there isn't anything at the same time together as to set a blade of a single argument whatever you think we are you doesn't matter where I was prom and then fitted or slightly after that well in May alibi nice and three interpretation of the month negative value which I make are incorrect get you that way I think first of all summer sausage the migratory diet is reviewed at the ultimate source of all wealth of all hues value is human labor and this new master saying that labor and say the only factor of production for the main one for all practical purposes and a general theory about the source of Labor mark takes this estate was currently in correct sentence land and far and natural resources of all time are also sort of abuse battery and a not product of human labor that mark does not understand the legacy right in this fashion is I think clear from his attack on this view at beginning of the good program which I available Monday in the opening paragraph first section of that he makes eight points I said neighbors not affordable world that nature is as much a sort of in space labor is in fact labor is only one manifestation among others of the forces of nature and second markets mark goes on to say that did you that labor is the full force of youth values reflect the point of view of those who own the main production not my labor those who own means of production had reasons to think for acquiring certain supernatural creative powers of two ladies and he takes it very good comments hurting Zeebo practices that by ascribing fifth Street powerful labour those who made the production obscure the fact that those who don't own anything but their labor power must as a result of be dominated by their enemies of production and natural meaningful but was this view about labour anything to skewer it for those who only their way to power I do not possess the necessary cooperative means to make their labors of productive and hence they must in a system of personal independence and perfect human they must sell their labor to those who do didn't only of seduction but mark made to do that has been negative source or use value that hope is a tiny logical view to conceal that fruit like this maybe that is the neighbor is not responsible but it always in practice hinges on the means of production even a system of personal independent factor change so we come to another powerful rotation of the language theory okay maybe some medicated affiliate jump price as an account of what prices ought to be for how prices should be related to labor values if prices are to be just perfect for example it was detected by the Galactic according the champagne and the late Middle Ages at the normal long run free market competitive price is a commodity in the death drop this excludes monopoly smooth various forms of the pollutant ranking prices to get what one can at times of hardship and their harvests and so forth is all the prices in mark this day is so covert I socially and the kind of negative value let's make an argument that justice requires that at the labor of he paid the full value of what the labor produced but and we shall fail how about this on Monday I don't believe in it cleared animated blocks criticizes tablet and unjust and I don't need that granted thinking back being labor 30 bags is intended to be at signature prior now then we had a third possible interpretation of what it might be mainly the last one paisa seen those August on assortment that is very market prices at the very height which is the thing is comical only instant doing and refinement all different kind of market I don't think it's a very trust contingent is that I don't we might argue that in general prices are equal to were proportional to socially necessary labour time required to predict the items in question in volume 13 good naked function that ensures the support nality prices to labor right but these assumptions as I drop in volume 11 of them something disease to be equal organic composition of Paul of all images now it had been supposed that the neighborhood guy who dis partly exterior prices because of Ricardo who did great influence mark mark did understand his fearful adversaries of prices for Brandon Smith's recorder held across the production phase prices his labor theory of value and the kind of good approximation prices it is intended at the acrid take a call I think 93% maybe 30 prices of good approximation and then she would be the natural to suppose that mark intended vision later transpired in the same way with the improved a move over a Martha's not make clear de straightforward Xbox going way what his intentions are not have suggested that his aim is worth looks like the fork to describe now surplus value for unpaid labor or non wage income is produced as a possible what makes surplus value possible conti question and a system I capitalism we always happen added with a personal independence competitive markets three contracts and had bought a race some kind of formal equality and the second thing concern winters describe how I am surface is tribute my friend immensely and why that's not this fact of circles I isn't August why is love is the view now mark held there is a systemic relation is soon later divided but the two are not the same we knew I knew perfectly well that prices can be explained in terms of the competitive process and some theories supply and demand classes held but we were ditched it and explain what enough was not interested start explaining frightened and only understand in terms of supply man he wanted a Buick and an hour that would enable him to understand how surface value could take place or a touristy called how exploitation if you take place in this kind of scheme what a personal in independent that I take to be his questions that the aggregated value is to explain now so that's it problem now well I might put it this way that he thought it necessary to develop an economic view or an economic theory that went underneath the crisis in the sense it was not going to claim prices in terms of supply and demand isn't that he would eject it that he wanted to look into the background against which all of this took place and so wanted to go the knee this is a language which he uses are meant to go beneath the surface appearances of Catholic economy he wanted to get act a reality of exploitation for the practice of surplus-value which he takes it hidden by the appearances of tablet institutions as a personal independence now taking wood years afraid hidden by the appearances of that sort of planting contract edges and appearance deeper philosophical notion and the idea in this case is on it appearances they what you see additional surface and the episode what would make these phenomena that resist it possible that you have to have his kind of an hour in order to write at there so that from this standpoint i can- think about the institutional appearances and the essence of things you might know that had a crisis are readily observable here and those are things all be no prices are quoted on market they are public information and economic agent says household earns the neighbors can so on they use this information deciding what to do in determining their plans of production and cope with the contract an internship so the users intimated and that they like on the employer to estimate what's going to happen nature and I think it's a evidence in volume three two mark take the branded these instant institutions and superficial level the edited determination of crisis this way now maybe 30 riders in that factory neighbor values are not institutional to them like prices but they are technological data that is the value of the commodity is socially and necessary that they return that it required to produce one unit of that commodity and required to produce it by most efficient means of production so that as technique improve and get better the matter is that every time it required full so later babes are also going to pull now the point is that neighbor value of a double commodity can be computed if we have an update of a process is a production and so on and what I meant to calling it a technological data and we have to know with helmet or the amount of I agree that this year's up the record in seduction plus the bathroom David it's used in making old manger production that is amazing machines and so on which marks sometimes called NGO waiver and the two points to notice here one is that in principle then labour bags can be computed orator known in theory independence prices I technological failure and now generally recognized if we make certain many artists Thompson the did in principle possible to work those out the second point is that prices are observable as I'm information to before but labor value are not observable in the same way they are not in the form of humanity computed bike isn't supported institutional phenomena that help them like the technological data are and it would follow that unpaid labor surplus labor surplus value and well as the rate of exploitation is not observable now the point here is under feudalism if we took the days the number they year that could work over the total day a year that they work then I'm rated unpaid labor and surplus value is observable it's right there custom anyone sees it they spoke to you in another scheme it's not going to do although they do exist pick a lock with a day they're not observable so in a intimate personal independent megabyte I'm not observable well enough I think my wife negative three pocket a bottle five minutes okay I have moved I think uh trying to get over this a bit but the one not trying to is this that what what Mark does it to treat labor as the only socially relevant means of production he tried to be track of what happens to Hydra time the way it is in the system not because in the the gonna make sense class well because Smith or no classical common sense it's the only Asian of production the other thing are also factors of production but it makes my social point of view he was regarded in labor climate reflected in that nagra time is the social active account he wants to keep track of how that is used in the in the economy that is the point of that background assumption it's one of the underlying ideas and the magnitude of bed and that's why people want to keep track of these flows of Labor hunt now what happens in the Tecla scheme is it the fact that there's a class of people who own all the names of production living natural own resources that enable them in effect to charge a fee to might take a neighboring class as a whole charge a fee if they are to have access to these means of production and that will mean that those who don't exercise put forth any not every time but act as pure owners are going to be able to extract good unpaid labor and that's the rule a location is it if you want to put your niagara power to work you must find some member of caprica class who will let you work with them sheets in order to do that although we will not appear to you and how the price system works what is in effect happen is you're being charged a fee for this I think that's a ways see how Martin much better and it is because he has another account of the price system he keeping count of nitric flows in a different way so what he will do and towards the end applying 3r sacramental backers of London and he will attack the marginal productivity theory of a battery whenever that is used as a council just price that theory can be presented in a way that makes it a parative that each factor production has been paid what it contributes they think that that's enough ataxic illusion that that is not having that ability rather than others and staggered every part of his pretty of liberalism if this would be important if if you think of egg Elizabeth defending the place it's just some markets on the ground that if the item that I didn't slip of the song then the marginal productivity returns is a is a fair return he would be questioning that because something else is happening on his view that what Nelly understand talent happens he think I could any kind of analysis of that he presents well i don't think i'm unable to obviously have an able to present but i think it's i hope i may get something off of that what i thinkI think that point is negative don't forget there is not last year of time ya arranged it up
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Modern_Political_Philosophy_John_Rawls_PhD_1984
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John_RawlsModern_Political_PhilosophyLecture_10_audio_only.txt
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last time to see how thankful I can make it all actually there's something in that because I think if it's not hurting stuff but I think before I get onto that I probably should say some things about Y which we call the procedure for flying tomorrow and since of we feel tomorrow loads it is spring there is a categorical imperative it says to follow them all so principals would but how do we tell if it's rational well we might tell and things like given a desire and given what the agent is hoping to accomplish we live like that it's this irrational accent of the ages but have many doesn't characterize policy that is calculating circumstances now we might have liked to take effective means to your end also like other things the more likely or more probable to be successful and things of that kind others it reminds list but American going in the detail would just oppose a number of principles of that sort in which in in terms of which we would judge the rationality so that one hypothetical a maximum force generated by them so the precip will help others in need and to give them assistance when they need it would be a like you say it is a particular again this isn't strictly at least I hope it doesn't alter it so the thing that I think is important to see it on and continue we cannot act which appears it hurt well that's the maxim passes geography so plan to do an action now in some cases that might require me to press all together the kind of desire that prompted me to formally Christmas but in other occasions it might not be as drastic is that it might require me to alter my action in some way to adjust the tailor my so rather than requesting it to revive my want and require me to do something else I might be emphasized it can never in any point in the process say well I want to do or I want to achieve this particular in very much and therefore that's enough to title me to override the requirements of the categorical anyway the agent cannot balance in terms of the can I use that way the requirements of the moral law that's one way in which one can be subordinate if we think the language is any reason I think that's understandable Oh although if we didn't want to use a full terminology what we could say that big categorically and subordinates it requires absolutely is is absolute they can that's been restricted in constitute cause tomorrow he thinks of that as an idea of reasons idea the contrast that you would like to bear in mind is to characterize the you so tearing you with the planning some hope it was good independently to the distinction purposes so what the clients are good in the planning from the right and then gives a particular characterization of the good is the satisfaction of desires or tax rises later or maybe has the satisfaction those are where again without any moral element and then the right is an to man that could put it in terms of institutions institutions that you if you can and so on you do so because if you don't retract them there so the Bentham will say that it's just people to have desires of that we want to discuss as far as we can because they have unfortunate consequences so although the plate so trinsic value as pleasure so what one will get on constitute I suggested is if there are certain enemies that are permissible and that sort why dinner there is no claim on the court to be satisfied well but all those Center stunts are underpinning it applies to reason is the under it is unable to say its own in and it doesn't have any sense of direction of any time and those who provided by ideas of reason and direct the understanding - and it provides it with certain fundamental idea of how to classify them those kinds of systematic unit so it's the guide for the understanding and therefore without reason that would be science but it's in order to develop an exception to that for we have to have certain general principles and ideas the issue well there's a parallel with that insofar as we are so including the idea of the original contract an idea of reason you should be aware of the very special content sensibly humans or live in saline what it is oh I'm trying to hit some and also own interest in science justice in this is the right which now the universal enables within the masa as a whole special in the application of the we can distinguish between two different kinds of but the important thing is that he does think in some way or other that the various duties adjusters can be collected under this principle right that then it prints deals with people itself and since the moral laws and I did read them all of these ideas it is an injustice which is a no distinction between the doctrine of justice and the back of the virtue tempered by them to me that the former deals of with what he calls external action that is with what we do and to do and not with our in Formosa in doing those that only deal makes you can make that abstraction but it's supposed to do with what we do and this is why he said that the universal principle of right there's none not require us to make that principle itself then is we are not required to adopt but to have any desire the universal principle of right did the doctrine of right does not require that what does require that the doctrine of virtue that is it is a very it is due to death we have and part the documentation desire to act with right this goes right itself is the characterized the content law attending corporate institutions and enforce five so that the document justice that is concerned though we regard and so long in comply with the system of just law there is not unjust the conduct is not wrong they may of course lack virtue now we have some green spirit but I'm not wrong and what they do what they do a just system of public law on hit you with one thing guys they're talking right a virtuous danishes public private private right is ignored in the Texas public right and turn falls into two parts that it between the the form of regime of a nation-state and international law and I now the connection a with public right that is with the Constitution and form of the nation's law contract the idea now first with the way we saw that much case that the document social contract and the first party before we form of political authority change so for the Sun beginning to arrive and that part of the state and also the second part of it is requires some kind of or for you joining a consent now class doctrine to be original contract I think well it's altogether and how the TV box thing but constituent even the note that might have taken place in some way is not what's important I think Justin so he had no place of a rightly conducted historical change that is it is a way of leaving path that is actually constituted into a unity a criterium roman half of the state to the social unit in exercise so it isn't I think enough to Dingley you from LA this baby was hypothetical what we have to do with some notice of difference in the role that the idea had means for something to be an idea of reason and keep this in mind no it's dead suddenly things again I know the explanation I guess I'll try to talk a little louder I guess well this is mine because it's the marimba then okay we talked about in the in the community in which everyone acts from the moral law applies from it as if by a law of nature but of course the regularity a brief event and it's the object of that is this the kind of society that if we think through and confidence what the moral law requires to me that this kind of body is not already give somehow a we see to be valuable or to example five I'm punched you that would make it prior to the other way around imaginary by acting on those that sense the language are use and you might know this is very interesting beginning of the introduction huh makes this analogy of how we can subtract the idea for distance of freedom he compares that to the construction of concepts I'm sorry geometric concepts and thank you one of the places in the critique where I'm where the notion of construction is used in connection with moral ideas that's why actually right well anything we begin with this state of nature and hunt thinks that in that state we all have a duty because just within has as a necessary precondition the message of some form of political organization mistake therefore everyone in the state of nature has unconstitu of duty nature again he describes it as an idea of reasons we didn't have anybody to leave it wide to close within which is the topic of the moral law exists unless there's a background the state then the question is how what in what way are we if you can see how the state is to be right into a unity now can we conceive that my walking it to louder now we called it in the groundwork chapter two there's three formulations in categorical repair versus the form of the universe of all which I called the strict met near the end I think a summary of the formula then there's a formula of humanity and humanity for country must not always always means it works you of our moral powers our powers of pure classical reason and moral sensibility know our humanity to act come to moral law and moral feelings of next with me that's what makes us human being confident if we lack that would just be purely rational while you might be very clever and we could do and understand all kinds of things but that when raising the formulation called humanity because it protects and when we we are - okay our selves at Legends ladies who are we the moral principles we can do that we are able to do that and the garden eyes without the back enacting those principles precepts are we then we are fulfilling the freeway get three ways of looking at procedure from different angles what precepts have actually passed so background then understood them we can say there's no contract is the idea of all citizens as members of banking is full legislative members and really the fundamental constitutional principle which establish the power of the political machine and those same principles will so in short I think the idea original contractors can't wait a regard mistaken founded upon the autonomy of its citizens as three equal persons with the powers of reason and moral sensibility different than in front of you I want to emphasize isn't really being I did to contracted down on his dorsal and hypothetical we just put it that way although not inaccurate we would miss the weirdest flavor what's going on with the real sense of what's going on the sense of what's going on is the original contract is his way of conceiving now the autonomy of the body is reflected and made to the basic principles of the state when she thinks in a pure form it's going to be pure Republic and to the regime the international society will be all of which would neither tyranny or divided Civil War I think the yelling hope for the future is constitutional regime a society of such and thinks that if that word those things are discussed in the
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sighs I'm this is a good beginning once again in the vacation so I will see actually I ought to say in advance believing actually away April's 12 and 14 so have a lecture but here that wednesday because somebody shuffling I'll talk to y'all about how to work that way I thought what I would do is it over yet what I went over very passive in the last 12 how to make its chicken in the portal and to getting preparations to what I hope to do is definitely no so I will keep that a bit too much I was just guessing the last time five ways in which it seems me know was attempting to go to our veterans and to formulate when he took to be a more satisfactory version of the document utilitarianism and I may seem far away isn't more one was the Benton did not given he sought the satisfactory justification principle of utility so no wanted to give some account of the philosophical foundation he also wanted to go beyond principle of utility as conceived as a five anthem nanny were no calls in the remarks the principle of us Pacific consequences which took into account the consequences of that kind of action moment evaluated when in general performed by all of the people all other our people kind of principle of the universe by the way as its subsequent we can call milto is also important taking account the consequences of actions only pediatr performance of actions on character resisted that because the token institutions were important means of educating to and flashing people have certain forms of character and he was interested in how the basic form of institutions shaped and formed a kind of national character he wanted Flint characterize the principle of utility that would be suitable for how institutions should be characterizing things set up there we're going to have those another for the third way in which he wanted to go beyond Benton was a matter of a psychology want to go being fencing's eagle was a psychology so mill thought again I'm not supposing that this is a fair event and we're talking about half mil think which is all isn't is important and then the fourth thing that I mentioned although indirectly is to develop a principle of utility and its various a companion principles the one I will talk about today principle of liberty to develop those as basic political principles now that are to the influence and and the shape of the gaya public discussion and it's in the essay on liberty in particular one little does this he doesn't review this I think in the obvious way in the essay on utilitarianism as part of problem Turkish his utilitarianism at the see the connection between the two essays they were both written roughly 18 yet the quarter 59 the record dates are not important anything he'd been thinking about well over 20 years and fluoride a little rhythm so why not to think of them as expressing different aspects of the same bathroom and then the final thing I was discussing it the NE last time we've got onto was Neil the Kanth of Justice which is in chapter 5 and that chapter played a very important part in understanding those principle of you toooo never kids I hope to make clear so a lot of the criticisms of Mills essay on mera pyaar I think result of a failure to see the connections between the two essays and also the essay on subjects and women which is not actually published until 1869 but no from a very early age had been an ardent that feminist if one would say today it goes back at the 19 I'm sorry 1830 even before he met Harriet Taylor so he had had had this idea for long time but he finally doesn't pose anything about 1869 esas nearly four years later so none of these ideas and we have to see them along connected with the same year so I have to read the essays together have to notice how it might fit if there's a like ooh nice i'm sorting some at Lee's sí then you have to see what it is a match and the other now at the end last time i was mentioning a problem of which with mill and i wanted to go over that see if i can find more once again yes I am I the first part of chapter five I want the lower back again now the question I want to raise and then we want to see if the essay on liberty has any kind of a civil wars and the template and support is good today namely whether or not a utilitarianism in forum in which mill develops it specifies an adequate foundation for what I've been calling basic rights and liberties and what he calls in the in the charcoal fire yes I want you to moral right he's very kind of rights are protected essentials of human well-being doesn't give it a good foundation for those now the problem arises if I both hand is a case of the conflict of sorts over the mills you and i hope to explain this a bit more clearly than I did last time food so i'll begin by international that there are three features of the concept the basic rights or rights and moralizing in Mel's view and which I think our recent reasonably standard the first is is that the basic rights provide reasons with this special weight and urgency for is establishing naval right words if we had moral right of this sort the kind of nail discusses faces right it provides a reason of special urgency or decided to protect it but this has special way and as no explains intact ified these reasons that is for having these rights are concern the essentials of human well-being reverse groundwork of our existence and these equations are connect up with what he says near the end after I think preggers 34 with utilities that are extraordinarily important and effective the second feature is it the heavy right means them that we had it has a kind of a parental character so the tabby right is to have a moral versus of legal justification for demanded for demanding that some narrative or some service be provided Bible from others of the many to be supported in somewhere by the coercion of protection of the state against interference and by others or if not that then to be protected by social pressure or public opinion in the sensitive cheering that is formed a moral pressure so it should be protected in either of those ways and that protection is appropriate and if you have a right you have a right to demand yet there is a justification to demand that where this again has this professional urgency and then third nuances to have these rights they are apart from and can go contrary to existing legal institutions as opposed to what I so as I said they are independent in this sense of law as it now exists or has existed and I take in progress 16 to 25 chapter private utilitarianism all these features have mentioned and I think what things now the problem arises as well there are two ways off in which legal rights can be justified and it seems that they'll feel so cold to both of these and problem is the connection between the first way is by and appeal to a general TV illogical conception in particular in the mills case by an appeal to the principle of utility that is what we can say we could justify people having these legal rights on the grounds that it's the best way most effective way to promote the general patterns of members of society and the other way is the second way is buying an appeal to what appears being independently existing basic right some kind of individuals have and which rights exist independent of the legal order of course and these rights what they are we ascertain on Mills view is announced ebony by looking to the essentials of human before Elvis looking to attain what are the very elements of the groundwork of existence and so on and those things that is what are these essentials what are these various elements of ground where cards listen it not decided by some appealed we round about appeal to emotion of utility and how it would be satisfied and I could have missed it by examining the nature of days individually and seeing what this is prizes he these centers of their well-being very able to graduate assistants and so on now in the first case we might describe the navel right as required by some say some overall principle social social policy which a justified by reference to the principle of utility understood in this aggregated way in the second case the basic rights are justified that is legal rights would be justified by some antecedent they have a small rise now these two kinds of justification off man seemed quite different as they have been described consider following case of Congress might set up twice afore system for agricultural produce notice it existed long time since the grand time so the idea this would be to encourage of production to smooth out the fluctuation prices and full variety for the reasons that will might happen it perhaps has a bad reason perhaps of the bed positive if I didn't point the point is that it would be introduced for to achieve very economic objectives and the justification might be in some sense the I results social vantage we might say that's a question policy a policy Congress wife dog and no one would suppose that say farmers or other people benefited from policy cuts that consumers from regular non fluctuating smooth of prices have a basic right to pry sports team if the scheme exist and so forth and so on and if they under taking care of the thing and expectation t to exist then of course they have a right in the sense of a legitimate expectation that we talked about before but in the absence of the institution we would say I think in the same way as we say that they have a place it right to try supports in the way in which we would say people have a right to vote equal political rights or Never your conscience is something of that sort or whatever we take the basic price to be the two reasons or 10k to be different so the point then is this a policy like a price course would be to ask why buy and appeal to some for my tea by some area total well-being if it was within some framework basic rice so social ends as a vote for as justification of laws by an impression sue an estate tomorrow rice it kind of my talks about it chapter 5 it is not does the matter kind as i said here's to refer to separate define a quantified infinite of principle of utility as far as so no then it seems to be committed to a criterion for identifying basic rights that actually seem to have two components to it one component is his official view that when you asked and he will always say well the ends of the basic rights is by appeal to the general principle of utility that's an official view the non-official view that is that I think he finally the text chat by there's another way to identify the basic rights and that's duty he sent to almond well being that grounded and what human beings are required in substance now if it's there is to avoid contradiction and this is a familiar one standing question about review it would seem to require the following has to hold landed it there two components leaning side sectional cases cannot diverge and what this would mean is in general utility would always require general public they ruled which would then establish legal rights and social protection of these essential elements of human well-being or the elements of the ground mode of existence and support the one in today's rights would include where these general rules would include the protection of certain equal basic right so the view is it would have to be it would seem if we apply the general principle of utility in the correct way way which milk understands it we would be later institutions that require set up certain general rules that dennis is equal rights and the problems how can we show that institutions and rules which deny some minority same is equal rights could never result in the etiquette on the whole to a greater balance of utilities how can it the show that the way in which you know understand utility it wouldn't have made to removals at this kind that treat a person the right all persons a life perspective these equal basic right now big one can say that if it's not enough that yes that we have some non dent my notion of utilities those that mill certainly does defines special notion chapter 20 of utilitarianism suppose we use it as a name for that simply individuality or something that sort I've indicated with that battery is not that that's a fair description still why would it be the case that if we wish to maximize with that sort of value for out the side in the aggregate it would be the case that we would be soaked through the assignment of people rides why should a Percheron planning a photo case of society's did append high cultures it one of the justification for repressing certain to minorities is that that made possible these there's higher forms now and one might say that well the Philippines will require that each is count for one and no more than one and it might be thought that that is some places are for equal rights but this melam self nyse's and the footnote the paragraph 2 36 in which he replies to Herbert Spencer the idea of easy count for one and for the more than one is just a thing about measurement what what it says it's actually is it equal units of pleasure what happiness I'd say happiness would be fairer things totally had some idea of the unit of it they were units of happiness are to be counted the same who's ever happiness it is it doesn't matter in other words as a principal in mind second quarter outfit is it fly T was a happiness in order to give some bite to this man Henry main the vertical dimension logging on foot and he is a case of a Brahma I don't let such a stair example but Brahman was being explained by her to me a chair the Brahmin said is being explained from more what Bentham's principle is and the Brahman said well that's all right at the point where the Brahmins highbridge account for 25 everybody else up to one per unit and dance the way of saying that you're going to all each account for one means is if fear that the weights on all the measures are the same for everybody and you don't wait them differently so that doesn't same thing yet about equal rights and nil is aware that so we had a problem it does no offer any kind of to show that if we apply the principle eat it correctly where then we ought to end up with the general public legal rules that will assign equal basic rights to everyone and this so rights of what sort is there any order well there is not an origin utilitarianism there's the certain one I suppose of it that is the case but I don't believe the details of it and not too late after Andy if we keep building you might be but I do think there is selection argument attempted it leaves in the essay on ography and in subjection and that's why I think they're important and why you have to take these essays together I have been gone into the background to a conveyor to you that you have to take the essays together if you are get back you know and of course there isn't any point and talking about anybody here anywhere else if you don't make them in the best form there's no interest in doing otherwise so we want to read bill and turf it the view and I hope we get done this with also with locking human khan song reading in the best way to do it what can two nite their knees to my right are as well as over you sure do for then I have to assume that they are amazed as smart as we are and we could take up injection they could if we could think of an answer to it so then could they and so forth so we see how far is it would take it push it okay well that's just on the world friday at Mercer monologist on Liberty say some things about it well I think writers hip over a bit the beginning part that I was going to say the important thing to see is it no well you ought to think about how he used the problem he views it as that one might say social Liberty in the broad sense in in a way in which he thinks that problem arises within what who thinks is the democratic state to come was no Liz at a time where he thinks is going to be made a change to come in that sense police he was as almost all of us I suppose do the people in Egypt transition but the kind of society he is thinking about that doesn't think it's Harriet at the time he is writing and he's concerned where delivery look Michael social livery and the Democratic days to come so it isn't a concern we say the tyranny of kings he thinks that that had been more or less resolved by various constitutional devices what he's concerned with is the tyranny if that's the right word to use of public opinion within a democratic society that is a graphic on and he's concerned tyranny of it in the form it might take and the exercise of pages I just a shoe that is through saying after Congress on leaving following it would be be aggressive through the new majority doesn't appreciate the values of it when he's also concerned with tyranny of the public opinion in society insofar as it exercises a certain kind of moral pressure on people not like to do birds things not to entertain certain ways of life things so forth so he is concerned not with problem that ticket at that time existed so much as he thought was soon going now no surveys a chat to one of G of you tilt up on remedies are a number of defects of prevailing moral opinion I won't I think mentioned those but I think a portlet to see he thinks it free daily my opinion is kind of a mixture of prejudice unnamed sentiment combined with class interests in the sense of the dominant classes instance in society always had a larger way the influence public opinion and then combine all these things together it is known this isn't given to considerations of utility in no sense the general interest in Broadway of a society without attempting to specified that more exactly so what no thinks it there is this kind of mixture of opinion partly reason and part nah and what he thinks it's unprepared this poet thing is unprepared to discuss the question of how the family ought to be drawn in this future society future democratic society between the rights of the majority of political majority and the rights of the individual is unprepared to think intelligently about that question in a manner that is suited to her the nature of the society of what you think is going to come about be democratically and dust will be the whole sector and so forth at at the end of the chapter more or less chapter one he shows some optimism but not over optimism about being able to introduce a principle that will be of some actual help and guidance and this public discussion he thinks it isn't too late to propose some principle and have adopted on the other hand he isn't overly optimistic idea about the chances of success but his own views on zone roll the cast for himself his vocation is to be an educator of advanced opinion to this essay the perfect example that he is trying to educate in my safe advanced opinion in this principle of Liberty thinks that's important in guiding public discussion public legislation and truly the present features public opinion suppose it serves a kind of more pressure so that's what I think as you see he's attempting to do now um make a comment about the parts of the estate to read it took just a long essay and I think some parts we want important than others and i'll just mention the part that I think you're sure to read a number of times I think about understand what's going on i wreck us might be the matter well i can do here is the guys with the things that i think you should look at and poke of my guidance isn't wrong tour too far oh well i would read all a chat to one I think that's important ki ashay bells aim and begins on a thing of principle I think chapter 22 read the first 11 paragraph and to read the last five paragraphs the first of 11 paragraph I think are important which is all it's all interesting and important but the technique first 11 grass which is on Mills stoeckel infallibility argument which people have thought was not a very good argument but I think if you if you read carefully you can certainly construct the valid argument there whether it's sound and that's another question but there is a valid argument there I thinking some matter China to dig it out and the premises are that are there asserted the neighbor gave one a clue to what Mills a background these are so Cirie and the nature of the society that he's addressing whether he thinks aggression chapter three the first nine pirate fundamental in giving account of his conception individuality that's a term I used perhaps what you say Autonomy's that is another term that home to use so what new will call the essential elements of human well-being I think turn out to be one element we could characterize unjust under security that is a textin of rice that security person and those who Gus is in chapter 5 of futility and it's a minute they're Telamon here we could call individuality or autonomy those Brides that protect those essentials of well-being and that teacher of Mills view is mrs. godson progress 19 1129 sorry of chapter 3 I also look at chapters 14 and 19 there are some important packages and 13 but everything I'm sure to look at I think to continue chapter for the first 12 paragraph is very important and if one doesn't see it next between what mill is saying there are other things I just think one is hopelessly balsa selector who is I explain why in a moment and they said hope you get to it today if you have to read chapters 12 12 because what you're there realize is that little means by harm to prevent harm to others actually turns out to me to prevent the interfering with the legitimate interest of others and these different interests turned out to be moral right so the term harm gets specified a very important way I think in these first whole paragraphs of chapter four then on quiet eyes and lots of examples but I think say the first port is important I'm going out some detailed physical therapy and then 16 to 23 / interesting comments government and the relation between government bureaucracy creative element character and snow fort okay now at some parts of that sa fie now I will attempt to run over the principle of Liberty what it says I'll give you an interpretation of it like I hope this is helpful milf take the principal paragraph 9 chapter 1 and elsewhere the first Dayton is following the sole end for which mankind are monitored individually and collectively in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection the self protection nil ads that are the only purpose for which tower can be rightly exercised over any member of eights civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others his own good either physical or moral is not a sufficient one someone else is good and then I quote for someone else's good is a good reason for remonstrated waiting for for reasoning with it or persuading him for trying to but not freaking pellet or missing him with evil in case he does harm others in other words if we can try to persuade someone to do we can advise them and do it right at other things but the thing you can do to exercise an illegal of coercion and ? insofar as it becomes of course so he joined it takes between advice persuasion and chapter four and her aggressive 12 12 certain natural scents also as if people do things that we think to be under worded human beings then we will associate with them and that he might say as a penalty as from Connor you think that that as a natural penalty and various attitudes that when we had toward people of that sort is inevitable he's not a condemning it is so long as it does not become a forum also may be a party line to draw but he's attempting to draw vitamin A to justify that what we have to do but to justify of coercion and either face form and I go tomorrow is we have to argue isn't likely to produce harm in the censorship earlier described to someone else and building is going to say that regarding that this part of our content who has concerns ourselves he says her quote our independence is of right absolute he also says for over himself over his own body and mine individual consult remember lot something like that a state of nature now this principle is a course extended by me to apply through its tomato charity which are the result of the same one of my key calls the model of coercion of public opinion as well as to legal institutions and so totally try to sum up what he said i will give and dedication of what I think this principle means what comes to and I'll put it in three three parts which I hope will make it easier to understand the first part is it society by means of law a coercive institutions sensation from over law or by normal a coercion the sense of pressure of public opinion is immoral and this place without ever else it might be can never interfere with individual beliefs and with individual conduct and associations at work unless that kind of injures the legitimate interest of others where it's yet an interest of others not going to be terminated according to chapter 4 paragraph 3 the quote Zach in other ways we Dennis sing harm you're making a substitution experiment brother and we like chapter 4 paragraph 3 to 12 in particular to make this more a specific raises the only reasons of right and wrong somewhat can be killed too and therefore this excludes first of all paternalistic reasons it is reasons which it peeled say only to the other person is good you cannot appeal two reasons of that sort to just fine maple of course enormous portion of public opinion as Marlon so there's some notion of the wives of the prove that we kind of feel to in advising people but that would not be a kind of reason that we can give just by Mabel tomorrow proportion another kind of reason that we cannot appeal to is reasons of excellence or ideals of human character or perfection specify state by reference to our our societies or someone else's ideals of accidents so we cannot tell them to turn mystic regions as defined or two reasons of excellence has to find and the third kind of you can't appeal to either is to our dislike or to our preferences we might just not like there to be certain the kind of people around is a message certain kinds of things we don't attempt to justify it by all kind of mysterious just say I don't like it I have a preference if that should not exist so one represses it or whatever makes it a mood if occult to do so we had three kinds of reasons that it will be excluded as the kinds of grounds that we can appeal to and just by niggle of courses by law or the pressure of moral opinion so what is essential then a2 milk principle of them never in this first formulation this first part of the formulation is it excludes certain kinds of reasons and it isn't that they only have a small way they count 20 the Crisco will count them 20 that's why I'm certain they just don't count at all if you if you offer them you don't understand what principal said yes that's where am i certain this may be wrong is something you can check out with this nation's total the negative thing is it if certain point of conduct do injure the interest of others who know Jimin interests of others because it does interfere with that injure them then society may consider may consider whether these forms of conduct should be restricted the question is the biggest gusset on the mayor now but when it is this Gus on the merits we have to exclude the three kinds of reasons so again when we asked on balance weather should be strict it we can't take into account and reasons that are excluded but we may discuss equation because it may be that certain things do it it fear with the tournament interests of others so we had to constrain but would be down enter into these other matters in sesang whether it should be restricted so that what we have to do then is to look to these reasons only ones are loud and it may be or may not be that we limited it all depends on how that a balanced task while I'm gonna get some things here hoping not to much but to hang together to surface this ok sure there are these three rights that know things will be protected by the principle of my routine to numerate see and this cus isn't chapter 2 the first Liberty say which is that covering the inverted diminutive consciousness deliberate conscience freedom of thought feeling absolute freedom of opinion as sentiment on all subjects practical record it son tific moral and theological and so forth oh it i think i saw what we called freedom of thought and narrative content she's taken sign with their also free in the speech and group presents as far as a certain involved with the political matters the second would be every taste and pursuits of framing and remote Eliza's should I character where that was great so long again as a children interests of others would turn out to be them their moral rights it defined by chapter 5 totalitarianism and three the preferred libraries would take a concern with his freedom of association and in chapter 2 he talks about the creative thought maybe conscious chapter 3 about this nexus Michael won our freedom to develop a character arts and when the mother life etc and then for takes up among other things freedom of association and five of our these examples and then 13 money says it no society in which these memories are not on horseback with is free or whatever maybe it's a form of government and none is completely free in which they do not exist absolute then unquote now we're might with it where did these rights come from and how H get this principle be and interpret it I know how is I'm going to be able to get over this but so maybe i will try to get the counter I mean I with Kim of just active education the final point but that may indicate of what i think is going on we asked where these rights are protected by the principle of here we come from and how is that principle justified then I think we have to look to nils account of money calls the permanent interest and man is a progressive thing appraised which he uses in chapter one of our neighbor cake we had trying to see what these interests are permit interest and rural things it down a bit it has a phrase that you can refer to I think the phrases i use earlier will do one set of the term an interest we can collect under the phrase of security of our person and the kind of things he's referring to in chapter 5 of butyl apparently protection of the asa crisis certain times freedom from arrest and all those things but fundamentalism then there will be the other one which we can call out an individuality or autonomy one way in which he reflection so he thinks of those interests our current interest and the mighty others and some of the fine and out of their group could will want to include monkeys now you have to remember part I get over that in chapter one of all no supposes that this principle applies only under certain historical conditions keep thinking of the England at that time and the doctor exercise you become so he makes it various restrictions it does not apply to children does not apply in earlier society if that is applied in societies where a level culture has been reached and the basis for institutions is come into existence such that society can be improved by freedom of discussion and song Jesus good humming a certain background in history and a certain level of a culture we call so he thinks that again going back now check to Philip any of them maybe this distinction between the higher and the lower pleasures and I emphasize it that's mainly a duel between pleasures it arrived on basis of what we might say I Wallace urgent biological physical needs and so forth and we pass trek amount are satisfied adequately and then the excess and then depart plated a result from the exercise of the higher faculties and the point here is it then he believes it's a basic psychological fact about me that if they have freedom of choice about how to arrange their life they will show a decided preference the higher pleasures and what that means is it they will actually arrange their life in a way and with the ex try to hire faculty have a central place in their life so I think a better stop here but what I'm trying to do is to indicate he won't explain how is yet from the principle of utility to an argument that's any rate flowable because is whoa but is closed want to do best which meant for it to saying assignment be the conditions here without except 25 is equal rights and then you have to tie together this way so i'll stop here
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John_RawlsModern_Political_PhilosophyLecture_17_audio_only.txt
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take up the patient everything's that I discussed in chapter 4 and make today just a very general point about those actually because I want to lead into that by talking some more about a mill the kind of audience rice gets up at the last time and I want to draw some contracts and someone have suggestions of pathetic addict how TJ does it fit differently may recall that mill wishes it to maintain that the Equal liberties that are protected by the principal every day of course they're equal and they also priority that this place if I refuse it that is that the art that they may be late absolutely and without exception where the line has to be drawn between the plains of society and playing for the individuals it's the idea that having priority mean that they regulate absolutely without exception now I interpret mill to say that those equal liberties the ones that are protected by the principal and whatever they and others also i think which expresses in the essay on the subject women with I think for our purpose of being flirted with that does equal never attempt priority on the subject I was suggesting because it is by affirming the principle of Liberty the whole absolutely am in that exception given the course of normal conditions of a democratic state assuming the present time that Mills talking about this day is by confirming that principle which protects the equilibria and exception that the permanent interesting man progressive being or most effectively promoted now mill doesn't I think have to argue that any kind of maximum tax rate achieved the point is this there is no more effective way to do it to do this however far short one might fall did this prince will I take the people post by Mills of an over last time as a political principle by that I mean that proposes a principle to govern the public discussion and the reasoning that is to take place that concerns legislation but governs in the actual Magnus of laws and the regulation of institutions on so forth and it also regulates what Neal called moral opinion and I take that to be a form of moral pressure you might say it's also kind of a coercive sanction that deciding photos on on on individuals the dansant distinguished various kinds of sanctions and motorcycles was the moral sanction and religious sanction in addition to the legal section and when no false about tomorrow opinion I think it thinking of it as among other things kind of sanction that does exert a certain time precious so the principle apply to that now I take my nails view a half and always feel a little uncertain about that but Brett this one going on a Sega taxes grass regarded as a form of indirectly till as I'm not really until tourism if anything I know that distinction opposed to action they kind of indirectly to attorneys and that is a view of kind of spouse apply here now I don't directly write know that we have rid of any case that's fairly standard term indirection till ten eleven but it's different than the view in moral philosophy because it's applied to the principal agility now viewers of political principles so Nellis thinking of it in that context so the idea that is that the principle of utility is not to be used as a faceful of memory is used in public discussion of legislation and social policy principle never dating these other pots and pan and principles Gus and subjection women hard together that principle of utility the middle sense should not apply there I think is you is something like this in political life we cannot be relied upon to apply this principle correctly when we intervene in the lives of industry it will say contrary to the idea discarded paternalistic reasons we always intervene in the wrong place that is society wrong place he's talking about a clipper pencil now I'm not that helped that friends and members of the family that's another consideration that's a clue so that we can't apply this principle correctly and without serious distortions also he thinks that the principle of every public principle when adhere to that exception has certain desirable consequences on natural character it inculcates a notion of the person that mill thinks is desirable from the standpoint of he had to be promoting the entrance of Medicine aggressive been accepted and if we don't adhere to the principle that were you with an exception and allow these other considerations with the intervening or a rider where then they don't get the benefits of this public principle tannerite and its effects on the control keishon of a certain kind of national character so a milf view the place of the principle of utility is in our reflected philosophical thought and if they're that we use it to understand and comprehend the moral basis of the institutions of the Democratic Society in the modern a so partly understood it is a cent document loxley to understand the comprehend those institutions but it's another thing to use it as a public kritika principle that's what I mean as the notion of interactive tool and applied not within more pasta to a political principle now I think that mill what I'm doing is a it's a comment on the summary idea come before about I would tend to do that and we'll need up brief break the Saints and things about the basic liberties if this and the mill introduces I think several crucial ideas in the course of setting out his view that block the normal force of utilitarianism as an aggregated maximizing principle which is the way in which we know they can save of it that is within the profitable position speech and I will remind you of some of these he says for example if that happiness is not be understood he mystically but adds a successful mating of a way of life the heading of which is suited to our nature it would have to be successful in some way of life remote existence that suits our particular nature's he says also that pleasures or what they've been herded them to do so that pleasures are activities which involve the enjoyable exercise of our faculties of higher of our faculties as the next that the distinction between a higher and lower pleasures which is drawn by the decided preference right turn so using those afraid there corresponds to a distinction between the exercise of the higher faculties and the exercise of the lower factor feasible views and the current progress of tool turns in chapter 2 i'm also assuming that milk goals that citizens are equally capable of a higher pleasures in the form of some procrit for them that is actually we just have tools there and applying the decided preference or criterion of higher and lower pleasures presupposes that society has provided the opportunity and the means of education and the encouragement of the higher faculties so that people can note both kinds of pledges so forth and and decide between muslim most life and also it presupposes that society has instituted certain social conditions which permit persons who have reason and reflect the decided preferences and to make a free choice of the application of the criteria and use of it presupposes that what we're going to do those things and he also believes as i mentioned that it is a deep psychological fact about human beings that given the social conditions presuppose and applying the decided preference of criteria most persons will decidedly prefer a way of life it gives a preeminent life to activities which call upon the exercise of the higher faculties within the range of download now taken together I think all these ideas of building which we went over have grown over at some time or other but taken together that these ideas support them a natural way to principal liberty for example it is this principle waits to cure some of the essential social conditions required for the operation put into effect of the decided preference of criteria unless those conditions are instituted there is no way to know which way of life the tick of individuals would decide excitedly prefer and no way to know which ways of life he's successful having of which would can maximize well-being of this or that particular individual even individuals of themselves that would not know that's part of the point and also there is no way for society to know so it then here's to follow or this was Davis just making that with that free institutions as guaranteed by the principal owed everything 90 society nor individuals can have any information required to maximize utility and moreover only individuals with suitably developed faculties and living under conditions of freedom king can gain and apply and follow are just information as an economist might say don't say that would very brief statement but as they might say that jess is only the decisions and of economic agents in a perfect market here involved individual sumption there a lot of them can in practice achieve an efficient allocation of resources of economic resources only agents that can do it in Sector market unexpected conditions and not some central agency operating with a pure or something that's impossible so milk thinks that there is no better way for society to advance the permanent interests of men is a progressive being then to secure the rights of justice the other merchants never date and the social conditions of their for under which the decided preference criterion can operate society it does best although the courts of Natesville court to adhere to this course without exception so what the philosophical document utilitarianism enables us to see but have a role something like in aiding us understand how these free institutions for to promote the permanent us of manners of aggressive a somewhat like one might say consists of the Commerce use of the theory general equilibrium understand how the market right so forth so forth the musicians use a vision dollar resources we don't have to go believing I think you just say that we understand the analogy which is being used so you don't suppose that you can use the general theory equilibrium acting you make particular decisions the patcher point yes and Thomas who notice about the general Perry people living with black mark is going to do it this year don't understand doesn't anything to do with that it did dad to give an idea of how it goes i'm not thinking that suggesting that there's similar indirect relationship in the case of milk always feel a little uncertain about is some year i say one thing to another well now there's a sort of transition from this to talking about basic liberties there's a certain similarity as some similarity doesn't think about how much between Mills principle of liberty and the first principle justice with secure certain victory of the pricing abilities so is let's extracting these differences between these principles and as is there any reason for preferring one account over the other as opposed to the moment that there had the same content would there be any reason for preferring one over the other leaving aside for the moment was just one too many other reasons that would be too easy is there a other other things about it well move over various points as I have aside from time to time autonomic today say political conceptions develop I think from some fundamental and two idea about how practical reason is they understood and have the social world and our places it in it mr. beacon see have some I think there's some very fundamental intuitive idea about all this and we develop that and then do some sort of political conception now he'll starts on the fundamental idea that practical reason has always guided by some indoor and eventually has to be subsumed under a final man and his first principle is that we ought to act so as to arrange institutions to produce the most good and six he believed that happiness alone is good this comes out in utilitarianism the chapters before it relieves that it would put these together that we ought to arrange institutions to produce most happiness now my contrast and TJ won't begins with the fundamental to ative idea that society is that they can see as a system of their cooperation of between citizens as create equal person but that's we talk about that the very beginning now given that idea we can ask how the fair terms of cooperation on TBS cocaine yes I question how our way to ascertain to fair careful and the variety of ways of doing back to the stable from has been look at natural law and so forth other possibilities but what one does in the case of justice or fairness and say well we actually attainable by an agreement reached by citizens himself you trying to do it in that light so it will be greement greased by them when they are fairly represented so a is really from all persons and since we want to find principles of political justice for the basic structure itself we think of that as a system of cooperation in which we are born in which we must lead a complete life in order to get a position where we represented very good as opposed to and represented in some pics of way qualified by our particular position in it in order to do that we have to introduce an idea like Leo P and we use that to explain the idea of fair representation to explain how that notion she understood and we try to use it in notice today how the principles of determine the ferry terms of the cooperation is to be determined so we use in the idea of society of the system fair cooperation and we use the idea of GOP and that seems to be ideas of a Morton growing with the fundamental intuitive ideas of democratic culture then the military idea of maximizing aggregated principle words that that would be one basis of preference that we might have two going in one way rather than the other and that does not mean that a crystal a nice mining aggregate principal is always incorrect and for example I've just will refer to the argument that I suggest what I could criticism assessment of Edwards argument that occurs in to Jay TJ take on the seventies that'd be one where it in an appropriate to describe way one can in supportive cases employed and Aniyah gave transport price of utilitarian time but has to be suitably restricted and I'm warning honker with the nation's hip wife indicated spare filled up on I'm 771 here in stood in bed another point is this is it nil secured the Equal Rights and the priority as covered by the principle of liberty by blocking this is what I think has he blocks the normal force of the principle of utilities and maximizing aggregated principal and he does this by reformulating the idea of utility so that it is no longer a homogeneous quantity and it is no longer as the people feeling all things that we've gone over rather is identifiable only through the three choices of individuals that express he decided preferences of those individuals whose faculties have been developed and educated and who also live under institution to freedom that you redefine the notion in a way or you characterize emotion in a way so it's only honor those social conditions that you have any joke book as we're finding out what the greater utility is for particular individuals and for society of a whole now under Herman interested man etc so that behind my saying that I think he blocks the normal force of utilitarianism I conceived as a Maximizer navigated principle next done by the narrow part course until attendant chapter 2 now by contrasting in to go if you like that one security equal rights and their priority but using the notion likely okies a device of fair representation given the importance of the basic rights and liberties and given the symmetry of the parties situation and so on the parties agreed to the two princes of justice rather than to the principle of average utility active case that we their distress was wearing totally misunderstood and say Benton source citrix sense and we went over that and hand at seven in Part C and D that that was the first of attraction that we their distress so the point is that that and this again is the kind of a reason for preferring doing it this way that in justice of fairness there would be no need to block or the circumvent the normal force of a maximizing aggregated principle or indeed I don't think they would be the need to block or to circumvent any of the normal course of the ideas and principles that are you in setting of the European that appear and the fundamental intuitive ideas or in their collaborators now I say that I confess I haven't checked it out but I'm I make that someone has an assertion that there's no you don't have to block their normal force in the same way to reinterpret them and you're actually and we use them or PESA fire them in what one with regard is a normal way to it the natural way so we can interpret the okie of the original position as a way of embedding reasonable de strength on arguments for principle to justice with basic structure and and I think hand at six why we did the first one we talked about the fourth reason and that's 681 I thought the port reason printed we think of it as representing reasonable constraints and that I did in it represents pranks on arguments for principles of justice for the basic structure now these constraints are once if we regard as reasonable in the light of our everyday conviction so as we say regards certain ocean and partiality is important saying the case of justice well we see that that constraint or Rickon strengthened supposed to express that emotion isn't threaded in vot so that is included there and so we're it's cific tying together and drawing out the normal course of these everyday convictions consuming how we would reason about principle for the basic church so that's the idea so that again the kind of reason for preferring going milk in Nell's utilitarianism as a maximizing principle that it does not have this expected role of invention of before and also I think related if it is that there is no attempt by mill seriously to estimate the sums of utilities it knows real attempt to visit or to work out what max utility would would really mean any sense it was maximizing aggregated motion it really doesn't attempt to do that and I think one can see why he doesn't because his other device really makes it unnecessary so beyond the station that is its other device thing to decided preference of criterion always a distinction session on network means it doesn't really have to do that the understatement between higher and lower pleasures no distinction of levels of pleasure on a lease on the interpretation on giving interpersonal comparisons of utility plane apart and so on the ideas and distinctions that gets substance to a nice mining aggregate transport have been removed so mill plain that adhering to the principle of ingenuity the most effective way to adventure totally understood and his sense saves not had much content section understood moreover we know that this claim rest actually not on any calculations that he's made or attempt to estimate the Sun but it rests on the decided preference of criteria and the need to set up three institutions if that criterion mysticus to the aquifer so by contrast of we could say that justice defense is set up in a way that avoids the use of maximum aggregate principal at the basic level and it does not have to block her to reinterpret the normal force of emotions of his users that is to say sort of has illustration that parties try to do the best they can for the person that each of them represents but this is and that's a kind of maximizing idea in a case of an individual cool but it is not me to the way it can set up to a maximizing aggregate principal sport the basic structure and the difference principle would not be an exception of to this I don't think we might more thing well why not like it that good but I don't leave step out of the two principles of justice included next bliss statement analog the middle east's nancial elements of human well-being where we all being it now understood as the well-being of citizens as free and equal purchase developing of this idea as sex elements and as L of people's well-being these principles include the basic rights libraries and opportunities if these are what we could call her I called earlier primary goods and they're as specially important giving the way in which each citizen is it to see the idea that all citizens need these basic rights and never easy to maintain and to exercise their Davis as rien created Edison's if we ought to regard them as unknowingly cooperating none members of the sodding support over a complete move over complete life so today's basic rights on our equal guarantee and free free person they're guaranteed for the same reason and that and having them these rights could follow from the nature of each taken as an individual so there no maximizing aggregated notions involved at this point and one could say that securing the basic liberties does not maximize anything and he's working on say except in the trivial sense of acting if you live in accordance with the best reasons but I don't take that to the maximum now they ain't here and what I have been doing going OT point isn't to criticize drills boxing then one inside what we're trying to do is to under this to understand it if it is correct what had been suggestion that he seems to arrive at conclusions of my blocking and reinterpreting the normal force of the principle of utility that's how we would normally understand and understood wife says that's it if that's right then what is it simply comparison between the two what just Express does is to attempt to reach conclusions similar to Mills more directly worked straightforward way by starting from the idea of society the first system of cooperation etc and for the reasons that I just gone over doing this may provide a more particular way to secure the equal baking everything the priority that is it will be no blocking it going on at all times all stages we can be aware of these emotions they were originally introduced so those are some reasons why one might want to be one rather than the other night I'm not saying they are decisive but the general idea was preference for doing things that certain general manner we're rather than another man there's anything anybody like estrogen all right what i thought i would do it at time that the remains does it say something about the motion that appears in the first principle that is the idea of a fully adequate skiing of basic liberties and i just want to make the same point about this enjoying up that scheme that is known maximizing hang again oh she's being used again to illustrate the same general point and let's examine this idea in the light of kinds of things that pepper is talking about and recall that in one way to draw up a list basic integrity is to consider which liberty our political and social conditions essential for the adequate Development and full exercise of the two more pallets of citizens as free and equal persons here i'm referring to something that was said hand at 482 that read a bit there now what a month doers to introduce to what I'll call fundamental cases and hope adventures I go through this it will be clear not what's going on the first fundamental case is a connected with the passion for a sense of justice and concerns the application of the principles of justice to the basic structure of society into its social policy and the equal basic amenities of prema thought and the equal political liberties are to ensure the three informed application of those principles as these principles justice to this structure and its policy by the means of the full and effective exercise of citizens sense of justice of course will be guided by their intellectual powers in that endocrinologists so on so one fundamental case is is the exercise of the power of the sense of justice by using the principles of justice to an appliance to the basic structure and its social policies in order to do that we have to institutionalize certain things make it possible that's the idea we have to institutionalize equal political liberties and the dose would be doing again some kind of account for this and we have to is it institutionalized what I'm calling free and so what's that covers a lot of it the second fundamental case is a connected and with the capacity for a conception of the good and concerns the application of our de- reason in guiding a conduct of a complete lie and here one thinks of every conscience and freedom of association come in here in an out of way that freedom of thought an equal vertical came in the other case so again if you want to develop that attach think so and suppose it work the area in which is it is to be fly is how to cut ourselves over complete like sort of afraid it then again you have to institutionalize certain kinds of a condition to make that possible and the time being were labeling those infected area conscience and previous association now supporting the basic liberties which we have disinformation and connection with the key from mental cases there will be various basic rights that would have to be protected if they have reason to be properly guaranteed it would be a variety of those same rights of protecting the integrity of the person both psychologically and physically certain rights of connected with law and so forth and the nation for example that when in connection with the next principle it said that it in effect if one agrees to that of regards the distribution of United and dominance as a collective asset when try to explain that means that it does not mean that we don't own as it were and they it was are protected already under the first principle by the notion of the integrity of the person and support but I have in these distinctions we can then specify the significance of a political of a particular charity or right in the following way in which we use this to we year to note of funding all cases introduced to try to get a handle on the significance of a taker everything so we say and intend to do this that Aiden favorite is more or less significant depending on whether it is more or less essentially involved in or is more or less necessary institutional means to protect the full and informed exercise of the moral powers in one or both of the fundamental cases now one might give an example for this or obvious example might say the weight of claims to freedom speech are to be judged by this criterion is that's the idea if one of them work it out so that some kinds of beach will not be that professionally protected and others may even be offenses like a lighter defamation of character individuals and not be protected will be offensive and because the ground is there in part is it has no significance in regard to these two fundamental cases and that's do with the thing suggestions it's not a significant the estimation of a product character and applying the principles justice Beck structure and salt and the maybe that because it isn't a significant court doesn't mean it can be the press it just means it will not add this set of protection those things will have and either the case of political speech which does have that protection normally have no protection y becomes incitement to imminent and more lost in use of force would not be protected as basic Liberty or under under under that notion the ground would be is too disruptive democratic procedures should be committed by the rules of order we might say of political discussion now that courses just some brief indications of how I might try to tie certain claims to beach into the notion of certain cases being more or less significant I mean sir certainly and everything more or less significant in support as they exercising the kind of factory that's involved in the two fundamental cases now what is assumed by the notable fairly adequate fully adequate King with equal liberty is that under a reasonably favorable condition that is possible to draw up a coherent scheme of equal basic rights they can normally allow for the full and informed exercise of the two long powers in these and they seized two fundamental cases that Nick does are on this do the basic cases of course these they conflict with one another presumably they will in certain circumstances and none of them alone of course would the absolute but we try to adjust them when they do conflicting to take a private cases so that the more significant aspects well these Jason Liberty it might say it's central range of application would be preserved and packed now what reasonable I had gone over this last point about how one would tend to do this which up only indicate in the roughest kind of way is that I would want to say that in in doing this and trying to adjust these basic equal liberties so that they fit together in a powerful way and in trying to adjust the conflicts alignment none of them are absolutely team as a whole you might say which is under normal conditions absolute the idea is that you're not using a background maximizing notion here to do this for example you're not trying to
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Modern_Political_Philosophy_John_Rawls_PhD_1984
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John_RawlsModern_Political_PhilosophyLecture_4_audio_only.txt
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now on the first day I'm not going to today remember we need somebody we want to think what question is he attempting the extra and open that takes understanding that's some idea and I'll illustrate the point I mean with the contractor now in the case of hog he was concerned with the civil war between this contract opportunity with design for sure that all members of society had sufficient rationale for supporting an effective father with absolute power whenever such an effective sovereign exists now these grants are motive pop star in our bases no interest and preserving their own vital and the means that become a living I said pretty often uses what I have used it this self-interest cosmic art says the main basis the most secure basis of reasoned argument that everyone can be expected to recognize and possible ease at this basis is the best way to argue for an estimate sovereign which pieces that strongly which he thinks is the only protection against civil strife and de classe back into the state of nature what do you think is always they do war it tends to be that highly unstable and jaded nature civil wars conditional and southern pasta peels to I shared rational self-interest reserve and the needs of communities living and he plates decks a baseless action interests of everyone has in common he's trying to define another work something income that people can appeal to you ought not thinking about this case that you think that everyone here self-interested motives the notion of the honorable person emerges he needs it politically we come to little issues that's not reliable it's not with most people is for mothers to determine hey he's trying to find us other bases and he needs a team to my rational interest that we all so he's appealing to okay okay so these are due to an interest but it means we almost everybody has except for religious fanatics and people that so you can't do anything with this under the certain kind of very clear well so that's part of the problem and he Tian's who are presently existing rational self-interest no much problem I think evolving of the difference he wants to provide a justification for resistance to the crown with in a mixed minor or denim makes constitute with the federal aid foot this is a constitution in which the crown has a share in the legislative power is that a to Africa and in which the crown has shared they believe that Barry was a traitor and that's what they were concerned about and they were actually defeated in this now Mott was close the Schatzberg Auckland on beginning 16 sixty-six saturated with a green arrow lived in his London home where he had an apartment or extra house on the spent the first credit at the edge basic understanding was there this estimator believed 1671 and two quizzes were written in 1670 1981 with other operations up to 83 and there were other added in 1689 but the substance of the book the main part of second treatises in those years in those two years and the second treatise was written first it's his statement of his view and the fact that it was written in the mushi controversy explains a lot of its tone revolution because he was and then explains a lot of the preoccupation of luck with that issue is back with the burning issue today now I want to explain this well I want to draw the contract then here we have house is concerned with getting more dates from national without fences as to why people should support and affect that that's loose vibrant you know like this where a lot is doing something quite different he's trying to give justification for resisting though he thinks is attempting to become a sport and he is trying not to do that as we will see on basis of the market it says that all political authority can be only in percent and if we work out to what that means no rational people within the balance of the law of nature would consent to an excellent King but we get really a shock contract or whatever the other similarities of might be in that retention and they're going to do ma is actively engaged in what borders on treason during this time not somebody who's crying now I have to mention damad English in this in the years from 7-9 to 83 the power is engaged in very dangerous activity it was believed assuming all that needs are counted that their agreement seems to Benedict the 30 below the bill failed that they would be active resistance force resistance my lot of Shaftesbury on these planets he even went up the box birth and lively including the chief shepherd yes bottom resistance truth so he gave very good and then he since things have been engaged in this dimension of this I believe in the person in the insurrection fly anymore I attended the meetings of this also even right house or assassination spot so enacted leave so I have gone into this intended cake and background the you some sense of what objective to make you aware of contrast well I can't be known by you by natural read but as the power concerned with that the order of nature which is over to a public beauty and in the order of nature we can discern their view what God's intentions know what God's intention for us and since God has Authority intentions our law for us that's the point of the phrase or the term natural in the name natural law over the quantitative is a birth defect known by a natural speculative reasons vaccination as that part of the law change that way all right quite a tournament wall if that is naturally law that is it is Tama gave us by someone who has legitimate authority over us the idea is that God is at work see sovereign of the world and has the authority and to say that the natural law had promulgated as Jesus birth is of course a metaphor in the sense of but the idea that even so it is naturally law now indicate this we want to make a contract in natural law with a definable so the divine law in that part of the ball the other part of reason this but we cannot know from the order nature using these powers and and now relation that's a contest there keep mine with unnatural divine and we're over natural law is of course the stick from the actual law of states for a weapon sometimes the laws of date or the reform to the principles of natural law when these are labeled as the month says I refer to the numbers always a woman paragraphs and Second Treatise but in 131 Mott says that the obligations of the world nature hold in society as well as the state of nature and that the law of nature quotes dance as an eternal rules all men legislatures as well as to others so that's the fundamental transport of natural law our basic norms that are applicable to political institutions systems and discs I suppose was another reason or another book these are clinical legal institutions now a final point we ought to notice that this principle that block refers to the fundamental law of nature is not the very basic principle of moral theology the reason is there must be some burgers principle or account of the party and maybe in giving an account of that some principle will be appeal to I'm in fourth s today on on the laws of nature which is an early book of lots of snow example kind of thing I mean Locke said that God has a jinn authority over some Jews want me to be deputy Michael the right of creation because God has nothing because every moment God must work to sting us and be if we are thinking this their torch he has about my display of authority so on my steak has it you the right creation whereas up takes a rather different your house is content to trace God's authority to God uninhibited so the Leviathan that dominion of belongs to God as creator and as well thus I think include them we want to take us between the account of why certain danger and cream and the supreme principle that legislation and think of the fundamental nature of the latter is principle if you like in that now when I refer to natural law and use that term I will always exist though understanding the name the sense that I have just explained negative to both depending on by reason this is the traditional sense bhakti and I think it's also the central space that is the fundamental law of nature particulate is central note and nice saying that I named it whenever Locke speaks of natural law for natural right there is usually some reference to either directly or indirectly I'd say usually because it isn't is not always clear that there is information for example in the case of principle of fidelity that is the principle on our to keep their promises or to honor contacts is a principle that provide plenty of holes in the state of nature he may think the primary things as part of the natural law but it's not clear he makes no attempt to show that one can derive it from what I've hit called fundamental nature on what he calls but in the case of now at the present time presently there's a tendency of people to use the term natural law simply to me any reasonable can't be justified and seem like to our reason and that are principles that I am on summarizes rather brought you my son my music in this way we use it in this a traditional way if you use it in this present day way then utilitarianism perfectionism insufficient lots of ethical use the hospital maybe anyway I can't go in but it'll always have good sense now to come to think about that some things about the content of it and once you read very carefully progress for 1257 one puzzle together and there lot of other places the general idea ways- that we are to preserve all men huh and so far as possible so the general way data is about mankind to be preserving so far possible or snow for as consistent public good every member that kind of a general formulation not also said things like when all cannot be preserved then the innocent are the priority and an example of talking and the checker and punch quest is being engaged in Just War one how are we to treat the people on the other side the quote against disempowered in their family innocent they're preserving take enough of their lands to repay the cost of war to us and even that's drawing into question that that cuts us so deeply into their gains of life that they're put in danger of glossing the innocent you have to look through the ecstasy when these it a lot says in the beginning paragraph six that we cannot destroy animals or other nature I take him to stay without a notebook cause I take mean by that unless but we need so yeah I just can't go around killing it so that's behind the foolish clause the case proper you know take so much adoption money at the practice so those are few indications above the general context is that principle now there's an implication the way I read it is that there's an invitation to equality comes out of this which he tossed back and forth and elsewhere that was I'm connecting exactly so there's an invitation to the party the implication being that the that the implication made their Nations is in the then everybody or half necessary natural capacity with some exceptions that of the sage children before the reason idiots does and the disturbance on may be inside that if we assume that everyone has normal powers of reason these exceptions then everyone has a capacity to exercise political jurisdiction over themselves and that's what's relevant one is not saying as he makes perfectly clear in chapter 6 that section 54 contacted before he makes clear that there are all kinds of differences between people ability well son but these are not relative different when it comes to equal the jurisdiction affected so there are these the entrance to equality is an inference based on well I want to discuss under number four knots main thesis social contract these about the principle that he applies to the institution now many places but I'll begin with 95 where it is fairly clear then bank as has been said by nature 803 an independent no one can be put out of this stage and subjected to political power of another that is on consent the only way we're about anyone divest himself of his national integrity and puts on the bonds of civil society is by agree with other men and community but we are subject to know no other way and this thesis of which he takes is required by the various implications and marks arguments for this formally now let's begin though by recalling the definition of political power and remember the power is a form as a a bundle of Rights it's not force we talk about Authority power is a bundle of Rights and connection say political case with the party and Locke says in paragraph three very active that political part is the right of making laws with death and therefore all national penalties for the regulation and preserving the property the Corvette and employing the force of the community in the execution of an offensive and then keep in mind power is above the righteousness or not now observe carefully is not saying all the duties and obligations in general arise by agreement or consent let's go over some example obviously I did he see God doing a ride from the center our obligation to arrive at the center a more interesting case this is our duty to honor our parents my father mother does not arise from consent to Duty week before they born to the claimant and the child had been raised in support and Locke says that even a king can never be released its duty to never and that is somewhat an interesting example because I mentioned during the case of principle fidelity itself and there to be kind of a paradox by trying to account for that is arising in sense so we have to pull that aside again the duty to respect the property of others does not derive from consent and here of course I have my property in the state of nature will be for political power they will so in this very concerned about property right but that's an example again the fundamental nature as I mentioned I know what to do is to give a sketch of what this argument is like what form does it take I stand behind this this reasonably brief being the hope a general idea that's how I think it go and we also remain consideration so how much of an argument against his opponent postponed so later I think we can make his argument as an argument cases one way organizing the early parts of the book until early in the Constitution is think is organized by cases now by that I mean the column we take an education that can reasonably complete and which we had for thinking that different kinds of right candidates say we take the duty of parental power of attorney or take the right of property and picked up the right question war and other alternatives to what political power might be based on and he just let us say - just as a parental power as a basis of political authority and six because he's arguing against film particularly in 6th ed that political authority derives from Anna God created Adam in the world private property and Adam also had political authority over he who was created song had political authority they had we go through these arguments and we try to show that they don't work in every instance except what does work cases they sent so if an argument of this kind to work the hesitate slurs should be fairly complete and is not meant to be any obvious sort of case that we might have would look it ought to be that each bright each basis has a fairly clear meaning accepted meaning amongst right so that we can very good and need anything of political authority on consent for you to work this is very portable we might not think it's a Monica evidence but if we think it's possible and none of the other cases then it's a better argument of course it might be we found it very affordable we might be driven but ma thinks that is a ways of argument and the alternatives who try to deal with so that the general form of the now I don't hate however its Samir this that if it's not as we could grab these alternative because there are around but if we look at the case for parental code now parental power the power the parents have because there are sons of doors that interstate in the Kirk do not reach a reason greatest fashion face when we reach the age of reason we are of course become independent and free and we then have so it's not only a deep back well thinks it's a normal thing you want to say it's a defect that they were born young and I have to grow up as an interval time and others have to look after so because of that there is principal try to account for these other alternative so then to proceed virtually at the end we want to say this sunrise what I take it that you wish that the knot is going at the beginning must a big variety which is a stay of equal to station and he wanted to say that a political regime will be legitimate if it is is a regime that couldn't have been contracted into from a state of equal right without anyone who violate the fundamental law of nature in any variety of respect it is the fundamental nature required us say to respect the image so in that process we can't violate that it also quite this active ways that preserve open content centers as far as possible every we have to back also we cannot rent a more power than we have a right now so the power didn't get the king and the other soccer cannot exceed we also have the duty to preserve our self to look after it for speedway and my also assumes a week are rational that is if we will not enter even if it does not improve our condition is that the process of agreement it takes place that eventually and it has to satisfy beginning from the state of nature the state of a political right and has to satisfy all of these conditions at each so when my honey is agreed to dad has to be rational literally hit digital scope and it can be made subjective is a condition when in the world and territory that also it must be these conditions now all this may sink you rather but in a way his target is fairly easy target but he doesn't have to show any deep there with kind of so long as the Knicks Constitution that he is within the bounds that kind of quickly contracted into you must be able to give a closing argument for that and you should know main objectives throughout comes down to take the protections and ninety-two progress he was already against Royal Africa he's aiming at that so his argument against the absolutism is quite simple that he disagreed with politics Angus David nature is not so bad there is something worth namely being an actual government that's even worse and therefore since we would never make any agreement except to better ourselves and since in this hypothetical way we begin from the state of nature it could never be the case that they were and a social compact with the status of activity within the bounds of the law of nature and and that is a very simple way then they care sacré garden well I want you to use it the way I think a motto and I take you what that's very good question it's not it's a little bit somewhat anachronistic and the way we have to decide but the white I would want to in case something like this that for him the good thing is don't censor I could have to protect or alive memories ten days and all its property the Thunder that there's a broader than our so and we also all have an interest I think he would allow in terms of our affections for our family but society will be fairly much about a circle might say that might clue some other people but it will certainly under properties however that casement sir so in that sense I don't think it's the same notion is it economist notion but it's I think more like an ordinary thing what a nice dense rationality it's very much like him notes again in the treatise over though but I would define it relative to taking the rational root steps to what will make it better off as judged by prospect about preserving that life exercising have rights attending our liberty and property well that raises a different kind of question yeah well maybe I better take it up later but it doesn't interlock monitor acceptance it's hard to talk about
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Modern_Political_Philosophy_John_Rawls_PhD_1984
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John_RawlsModern_Political_PhilosophyLecture_6_audio_only.txt
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oh no no chance to do that but now you hear something it's about okay well I'll leave it the way it is all know it's up a full body hope it doesn't sudden the wrong well monday i should say before we begin that i will go back to pj in the game part of a chapter to the sections will discuss world two times next week 11 set king and Tony debate mental picture of the content of the two principles on Monday and then discuss the problem desert and some other things are connected with that on private and what I will try to do is to display zenit between the things that in doing so far some of the clink there okay well today for the last time is on is one kill and I can't say very much value today but plan to focus mainly on the essay of the original contract but before I do that we call it in connection with each person we're trying to get some kind of idea of their aim and their object and the writings that thing is trying to do and I've heard a couple of times for that saying of calling with the best Lockley being not series of answers to the same question but the answers to a series of different questions we've hardly been to that way of making it of it is it makes them more interesting so you don't think oh gee these guys have been discussing the same thing for 2,500 years they can't divide the answers rather actually isn't quite back there are a lot of different things get asked and I think it tastes like some of the answers are proposed conditions this so in the face of life or for their own purposes pretty good and I think appreciate it was going on and not sent it to think of it as underneath controversy who doesn't seem to get anywhere anyway that's where I like to look at it so in the case of human bomb all be able to say very much about this but I don't need is some indication to what would I take the pages point of view but before I go into that I might say some words about him the course Raven says some things in the introduction I wish you ought to look at his updates are 17 11 276 and that on the whole beginning about 17 20 to 25 is a buffer a stable period in English history so we don't have anything like the bitter controversies of the 17th century where the quiet reasonably sober men like Locke is involved in the kind of concealer the Balkan mentioned several times Hume attended University for a few years and at an early age he seems he gone about him 11 or 12 years old lieutenant for the wall is not liking temporary students also you should keep mine the when he taught people little German boys who came to the universe's on the whole they were sons of Yonkers and they'd crush it they're back 15 this 16 years old he's a young people on the pole and then he went home he was a born of God's gentry but family was a few months after that wealthy but they would recently well-to-do and he gives returned to the universe from the University home and about 18 years old so he got the idea of inviting some philosophical work which eventually came to treatise and he worked at that on his own off and on but that ain't subsidies many buddy just a lonely Starwood home is awesome and abroad finally treatise came out and here's a man had no formal must be biased and as a tall was all before that kind of education was common thing although some of the began exists in this goddess universities in the 18th century we're also publish of this book now what was the main idea of it which I wanted to make some comments about all the Phoenix creamy general but I hope they'd help to set up some time the contrast lot picture it become the thing that really expended different you should be aware of that well I think perhaps the caves and subtitle of the treatise the pile of a treatise of human nature and the subtitle is being an attempt to introduce the experiment Anton method in tomorrow subject now I explain something about the they're the term moral in eighteenth-century English does not mean what it does today now I'm had to somewhat narrow connotation having to do with ethics and virtue it and things of that sort in those days that had a far broader connotation where it includes subtly psychology psychology itself so once they took a moral expectation is hit with an expectation in the mind more when things about was going to happen so it's an item of psychology and some moral science then make an effect psychology things that today but we would include under social theory and also of course the phenomena of morality is part of servants so you have to understand it it won't all subjects has its broad sense also the term experimental has had a more general sense than that it doesn't matter they just meant study based on observation experience in terms of collected Laurie my advice is general theory of some sort that would be experimental methods and him look at his landlord of that kind of of inquiry which is clear from the introduction was I new sudden notify the chemical method new sense to ascertain first potential to govern the laws of motion providers and space and so on and he wants to do the same in the case of immoral subjects of innocence is one we might call today morrow a psychological social theory all kind of in one isn't what he'd attempting to do it rookies taking the attitude you might say of an observer but these of de mama he's a match which they wants to give an account of the first principles and so forth and you want to keep mine this a lot of times you should be alert for changes of sense of terms like visit him to get in your tech exact place of word is but it says it birches a mediocrity between to experience there he has in mind he named it that it's a mean between two extremes well that's example the term has gone downhill and a lot of learners have a tendency to go down hill so that makes them who I often use that when Charles a second was an entered first time into the st. Paul's the hill that for the fire and Christopher Wren was boarding him around under the dome and he looked this very Solomon said it's awful and artificial and he meant by that Oh inspiring but rational those were hyphens pray where those are two terms that have gone down hill a lot of terms seem to do that I don't have any explanation well as I state he seems intent is to be introduced we might take their mental method into these subjects and it's if you like a kind of natural science or social theory is how he often understand Singh so he's in stood in being for and explaining the phenomena oh by moral judgments of them are trubel's trying to explain the principles of ton of which they operate and they give some kind of general systematic account of them and in order to do that we introduced in the treatise the notion of sympathy the motion of the judicious spectator of the motion of sympathy is replaced in being part by what I think is actually a better view principle of humanity and the and although the term a judicious spectator is dropped you do get an account both of chapter five and i should say section i think it calls him such a cry in the last section you do get motion which is an extremely important account now one way then to think of difference between house and far between malaking here the thinking marcus bike you might say a constitutional lawyer who works within the system defined by the fundamental law of nature and he attempts to develop arguments within that framework in order to explain and to justify their resistance to the crown within a next constitution and that's the thing that he is doing and he often talks in terms of historical development as if it takes place within this game of constitutional law in the sense of words that fine but the fundamental wall token nature and the Equal Rights from which everyone again the words as I say human the other hand is operating up what thinking i should say as a natural observer trying to ascertain the fundamental principles of laurel phenomena understood in his broadway and he's then trying to do some account without our concepts actually operate how moral judgments back to make have the moral sentiment support instant institutions how they brought into being their various notions that very soon notice i should say that enable it to be drawn to and to support these institutions now what he does in the course of this is to present of what's come to be done subsequently by the kind of utilitarianism and I'm going to make a few very general observation about that now I think it's helpful to think about literature conception as being an attempt to develop you were relatively few let's say fundamental intuitive ideas into some reasonably works out to the section of political writers justice and we need some kind of systemic infection because they're apart a variety of political questions and the answers intend to get to one or often inconsistent with answers that we tend to get to the other or practically don't have any answer and all the practices correct but any answer to that to be geared is going to have some effect on other answers of Italy whole to so it had to normally tend to develop some kind of systematic account for the categories is inadequate makers of tenancy or some urgency in that direction now add emphasize that social contract music which there are instead of a variety will develop in elgin of agreement between free and equal persons and you get varieties of back depending on how the second hands of the agreement i described persons are described and so forth whereas i think of utilitarian view as depending on the fundamental intuitive idea that right is to bring about the most good it's a very simple idea but it's a very plausible idea what would the right d if it isn't to bring about the most good now in the case of a utilitarian view the right is defined independently of over the good and that also is the case and what i had called a perfectionist q well what distinguishes a utilitarian do is is terrifying for good and I'm posing off okay what I joined into detail that they're bright him when I is it doing it but one way say I do to find him he mystically as pleasure and pain another we'll way to define it as sex satisfaction of desires or the satisfaction of preferences or a third way if you add in an ocean of nationality or national organization over time what then you can say it's a satisfaction of irrational desire as you visit them over time or one might say some more or less organized idea of happiness so there will be different kinds of utilitarian viewed depending on how the good is defined but it's always defining some subjective man dad is a pleasure pain humans are for the fulfillment irrational desire now I got to call your attention to the important sir of the time end of Independence I won't go into it here ace information in TJ a case 24 26 and I think I said is past all necessary to be said but that's an important point in the sense that you will be able to count ended if you like if you can name is a non moral notion as something that you can take a good path of have to be fulfilled or avoided press in that case it's nothing comes pleasant but you can't count a resentment as something to be simply aboard in the same way because we simply as a moral look and you have to all the things you're going to count under the good on this view anyways I'm interpreting it you have to exclude any notion that you would think of intuitively as pulling under the right so if you think of resentment as anger at some injustice or anger at some wrong things until then death will not count as independent in the correct way whereas if you think of envy is just being downcast by someone else's being happy wolfman that doesn't involve any moral motion and then read those that fall under the right so they could be allowed for me such a suggestion and make a Roman are really good so the notion of Independence is open going to play a crucial role now in TJ there's a fundamental idea beautiful which is very much the same of course the idea about society this thing of a corporation and their the notion of agreements use to help to determine the terms of their cooperation so those are just some grief observations on nature of the usual term view of a bird general time and I think as important as I said me to mind the contrast is sort basic underlying contrast between how you view things then how locked us very very different points of view well not this is a great question okay row I'm going on them I want to say some things about the answer of the original contract I take a bit price is handy to think I divided into three parts the first part I mean I count para great because all these editions so it doesn't help to have to assume that the paragraph thing is the same otherwise the students but so far as i know it is the first part is tiger 419 and there's a conclusion there stage in nineteen and then the next part the way i take it is from twenty to thirty one and then part 3 from 30 to 45 and it's in that part that he gives his more philosophical argument against Locke's view and come to that component and then at the very end there's a few remarks of a general methodological kind in paragraphs 46 249 now take these up and turn briefly Hume against in parts 1 by draining lo Satori you and make you act some truth in them but not of course what each of them wants the truth and he concedes would hardly make I had a rather happy as you soon find out he's most court and wicket Tory view he says the crown doesn't d rule by divine right but so does the thief who takes my purse very short that means come typical remark of Kim's is just to not to dwell on something like that but just had it passes a good example paragraph 3 of section 9 of the import on the monkish virtue which I suggest that you read and think of the last sentence is saying well so much for the Saints he says in human life if they had all those virtues that they would be unfit to associate with anyone except those who are as a de beers and dismal with himself but then we pass on we don't we don't elaborate well what can dispense course most of time on isn't the Tory of you but what is in effect it takes to be last year although it isn't a very accurate the count of Loch praxis intended to be but he's packing it I was held by people or inspector Robin thinks is true in the wave you I think my view is that the original contract if I that is meant the first argent government in poison desert when people first satoshi a together then it cannot be denied from those circumstances that all government is spending the first on consent for at this time it's the case that i was there almost 20 nearly equal a whiff of 100 other in bodily force and mental powers and the inequalities at horizons in society from education culture from inheritance other institutions don't exist so in those circumstances consent and price have been necessary for political authority and also for them and had a sense of Roman advantage that they would gain from peace and order and instance society but he goes on and said even this condition a consent was very imperfect and he goes on to give a variety of the conditions of what you think that it's situated sense in which we might say he's showing that are the conditions of consent but don't exist we don't exist the form strong enough to make last case so then when we're talking about government spot today it's a different story and I mention some points that he goes over one is it the social contract garden is not to be recognized or it isn't even known by the common sense of mankind princess regards subjects of their property and assert their right founded on succession based on the conquest and princes would imprison s it as seditious those who propelled the doctor founded on consent and he may at that point had in mind what happened in the years after this collision of controversy in any case he goes on the stage with consent and he's now thinking of originating from Spain as I made that distinction cannot bind now after a long time has passed and I call your attention in fact that mark doesn't actually say that it does a nice dress wait it starts the same things in does here in Parker 116 besides that then goes on to say almost all present government's a were planted on the usurpation or by conquest but I have any pretense of consent a third point he makes is it in elections as they are carried on and had carried on don't carry any great way for the you are often i can show by a combination of a few great figures and that the idea of the social contract has a little correspondence to what actually takes place with to the historical past and he makes it a market for this was the case even in 1688 nine which is often he's in it is a case an actual case we're helping like originating a confirming the contract took place so are they conclusion that he draws then 19 is a consent in any form wherever it takes place and when it does it is so irregular and lemon it is so few people that it cannot happen what you thought then he goes on to say at the beginning of what would i take to be another part i just did his own conclusion that if that's so what jetha that consent cannot have a bunch of guard he can anything then there must be some other foundation government note that he doesn't say here this hume doesn't say that a consent isn't a possible foundation he said that if it is really occurs he said it's the best and the most sacred all means that it sends some things that end up under under mine but he's aligned that in his heart but his point is I had to be some other bases and then he said that he goes through to continue to get some more reasons for showing and some of these be equally effective that the preconditions of consent don't obtain again he would keep saying that people don't believe that that I shall consent isn't is an important phases of obligation and certainly the point being that you can't be bound by a consent if you don't have the concepts of consent you don't believe consent is important then the murder not the circumstances are such that and sent to be binding obviously you don't have the requisite release I'm reticent ocean then I think the importance of his emphasizing the action so of the appropriate police and that the idea that obligation based on consent is contrary to the practice of mankind if it when he gives it Tiger which I think you're funny to you made it must have noticed in 24 that that's right woman oh he's sinking of the case yes it's the 24 when where he described her case of a poor peasant being unable to have any funds travel abroad where he doesn't know any foreign language and how is he in a position to deny consent and to say of someone ally traffic per capita consent he says his my saying that someone on a ship at sea who then carried onboard ins a lot of asleep ohs healthy to the master evening in a storm he should drop overboard and drowned is the only alternative if he has so that's a point thing at various doorways and you acted editions of consent in the case of they belabored poor and Satan hosting nice population man don't exist they don't know the pain she does remark that in the case of foreigners who come to a country we did speaker they're giving tacit consent and that that consent is voluntary but he makes important observation in that case we don't have the obligation as binding is in the other page without elaborating on that now I think that somehow true that's an important observation and where of consent or where political obligation is some sense truly voluntary there's a tendency for us to think like in that case just mention that it isn't as binding now what's behind that I'm not saying that is the case but it's an important observation and we're not to think about you want that shows to be missing and how we can explain it a final point I'm nice and as a human says that if generations came on the stage ol ol dad so instead of one by one individual that is if if we took the economist idea people heading for certain period of time and then a whole movement of dying and everyone else suddenly appeared and that's sort of a picture identity their intervals of time where you might come of age and all on mass or something rather and make some decision and agree to a certain form of regime the him says that that's not possible we come in visually there isn't anything that could correspond to that so anything the notion of that sort is added question and we know notice a homeboy than which these things actually with her welcome that those are his comments were by taking to be attacking what I had called joining consent and marks you as opposed to imaginating consent when society was first established by the social time and government and trusted to some form of regime and what I think human doing is to argue but throughout parts one and two that the preconditions for founding political obligation on consent don't exist and I think he thinks it cannot exist it's not a feasible you it's really not possible and it's not in accordance with the practice and opinion of mankind because it's a case began to kind of summarize it and neither people nor princes a believe that obligation clenched on consent people in general lacquered relevant concept to believe this they are not placed in circumstances in which consent could have any authority and besides even if it did we don't think that consent in the case of parties get it right from an atom example to what you think of this genuine political and binding up with obligations so the point then apart season one and two is to say therefore there must be some other phases of consent but that's where it take to be the point types of these first two parts if we don't hold that did then we're in position of any basis which is anarchy and that's absurd not prepared to entertain and I think of all this so far in ways that attack on as I sit on blocks that plausible attack I had a powerful attack where the decisive another matter on the notion of individual joining in sentence now in part three of the essay goes on 45 345 what he does is to give any more philosophical argument against lots doctor and I want to comment on this upon this argument i gave her grief candidate record to attention he begins by the damage we just a mission between natural duties for example other children gratitude to it benefactors and duties on the other hand are founded on a sense of obligation that is your isa would presuppose some recognition of the general necessities and interest of of society and of the impossibility of orderly social life that this duties are not generally acted from now in the treatise hume holdings duties that I had referred to a sense of obligation were founded of their own as the artificial duties and justice is an artificial virtue now remember the same that it means that a part of grass unit and understanding it is through the operations of raising your hat to comprehend how the general system of society is going to work and that requires an exercise of reason so that's what artificial means at this time you work of ring as opposed to benevolence empathy your attitude what other children all those are more spontaneous and drink from the feelings and the natural sentence so duty of fidelity the duty of an agency government again isn't like the duty of virtue I'm sorry duty of justice and being artificial although that in mind which appears in few years now here's to a hospital argument against lot is it really this doctor I was extremely simple it's that both kinds of duties within his system that is the artificial and the natural or those are based on sentence sense of obligation and and the natural are explained and justified by the appeal to the principle of utility they're both explained town forth in the same way the magma is there going to be explaining any or button reference to the general necessities and interest of society is only if we act on these can we answer to the general necessity and duty and interest already cooked society if the duties are not generally recognized and honored by the members of society then orderly social life will be impossible and this is him basic philosophical explanation of these duties of fidelity and duties of Allegiance and they're going to appeal the same principle although in somewhat different way as the natural duties so on him there was quite pointless to try to explain or to justify the nation's debt we owe to government by an appeal to the duty of the Dalton that is to the motion contract or by some a presumed waver between people for if we asked from his view why they should honor our political obligation that then we're going to have to peel on this view to some notion of agreement or contract with some promise or other and if we ask why a breach honor that then in turn we're going to have to appeal to the principal look tility so he's saying something like well why not appeal straight to the principle of utility why suppose that you gain anything by going through the notion contract talking about animal agreement particularly when that that idea has all these other difficulties that I had just gone over I imagined him to be sane so he views you might say the Tilted contract is an unnecessary stat it doesn't accomplish anything it can't count anything the back key you can't also account for by appeal to the principal would be guilty and he sent which he purposed in the spirit rough way of the gentleness destinies and interest of society this is the overall very very simple form of humans argument of philosophical argument against Bob now I'm gonna make some comments about it because if one really suppose not some out that you can account for and I'm not taking an issue on baman NESN anyway perhaps one might or might not account for promising and infidelity by some principle of reptilians some formal Hugh has not attempted to show that here he just asserts it and within the context of the SAR one team left look at some point some points about this argument now I'm mentioned going through that I to make him wrong in saying that my old that the bridge any consent in the past Bynes anybody now I just mentioned again that chapter eight presented 116 he's explicit that decision so and that each individual has to give their own expressed consent but a more important point is this and this is the very basic point is that you have to mail out as I've emphasized in talking about life that his social contract criterion had two parts to it the first part of concerns the cubic form of regime and put it briefly discuss if it says roughly that beginning from a state of equal right all of us having over ourselves equal political jurisdiction it must be possible that we could have contracted into it for that violating variety of constraints so in a word the criterion for the gentleman regime is it could have been contracted into from a state of people right then the other part of locks try to or his explanation how political obligation arises is that if the cuisine is legitimate if it's legitimate then we become bound to it by getting our express consent I'm maybe a site tacit consent say by inheriting a parent's land or something of that sort it involved press some oath to the crown that's express consent we also then corporate ourselves into our society just be done at the age of reason so it moves my hand that criterion the precondition of if it's a legitimate regime is I've taken 20 now when we can also I think add to Locke's view I think insistently rented that individuals also have a natural duty to support David German team when it does exist and is operating effectively I believe he could maintain that although i don't because it dress me noting at this point if on the grounds that if it is with cinnamon regime then we have an actual duty under the fundamental law of nature and not to overthrow it and like to violate it is something that people haven't timidly entered into and established up for their protection for their lives and mistake and since pentimento law of nature always binds us then we would always have that you need to support it and that would not make us a member of it and we might say like a foreigner when is it country or not to take lead but if any rate of we would be found not to attack it but I got over that now they can push a point then of this is is that we want to emphasize I want an aside crucial role in Locke's view oh when I call this general criteria applied to Jim a form of regime and put in the form of its being such that we could have contracted into it and i don't think the consent would be possible if that isn't so i also believe that lamaze view he's going to have to use that sometime in this hypothetical form that is both of the following happen given an illustration if as often happens there a conquest would take active the Norman Conquest both after a number of years it comes about through political compromise social changes and other things that the form of regime assumed beautiful so it then becomes one that could have been contracted into and one is able to take your whole lot view to understand it then although it hasn't actually been contracted into no one has done so and it come about by accident you might say or compromise any way what you want to describe the process it's now possible for individuals when they come with a to get the binding consents good and presumably that couldn't happen over time so everyone in the society than that and they then accept that form of machines we're in order to make it locks with you to go oh we have to terp it that in this in this hypothetical way now a part of Locke's view and a point of emphasizing what this thing about the individual joining it and sent if you think about it it means that a few of his kind has a potential when radicalism in it that news does not explain that in the following way that well you want social institutions of the be such that individuals put here by an even central and that naming that you had to do various things and I just imagine some of these things perhaps the age of reason you have good way to repay everyone take it somewhere else if I ask her so you have to give them a little state how'd you have to educate prepares a way so that they understand these lotions now of course if that's a long way from LA and he would probably be horrified the P suggestions is human but the point is there is a kind of potential radicalism endless view of radicalism onion from seventeen eighteen century standpoint that hume i think is aware but he doesn't discuss it i think he is aware of it that when he said to have to be some other basis of obligation because it there isn't by then we're open to energy I think he's aware and sit there were other the lifetime of the potentialities of this view I think that's why part it never became it was always minority do we're a minority view among the weeds well the nest of you but I can do that I think that you were already only have a good one moment the past but the difficulty with the environment is this he never really faces up I think to the the content a lot could be contracted into part of the cart here he never as yourself question whether Locke's view imposes constraints on the German form of regime that are different from the constraints that would be imposed on regime on the utilitarian fear that is if it would be to take that Lamar's could have contracted into criteria we turn out to be under I'd say most cases that come from if it would turn out that they would both selected fact they or more or less the same institutions and permit the past be acceptable the same forms of regime then of course he went have a much stronger case but if it turns out and met suppose to make the counter case that he might be possible to humans be more may the point where I'm getting it because it turns out that there are constraints in like you etv we know about athleticism but there others about how every change their nature has to be the general improvement and has to be rational the rationale for everyone to make it so quit song all that so that imposes the constraints that are stronger sharper more fine grain and those imposed by the way which human turret principle of utility or indeed which any filtering in purchase that principle then the content of the Divas is not the thing the content will be different and supposed to make the last assumption or make suppose that somehow if we have to pick between the two views that a social contract me that's better it's a closer fit to what we think are legitimate forms of regime then in that case there is I think Kim's yeah or David I suggested its it is an effective without a lot more argument it was two things cold and I don't think he ever faced tough of that in the in anything I know that this particular kind of a cow noida that much might make me want to eat raw gone over so i'll get on monday you
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John_RawlsModern_Political_PhilosophyLecture_3_audio_only.txt
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well what we're doing and then I think of doing that as an attempt to to gain some kind of orientation so that in tikrit we don't get lost by the detail it's easy to get lost by the detail and I think it's a case from seeing what happened take it the wrong way so whatever happened some explaining how these fundamental intuitive ideas calling them how they kind of hang together and they get verified what I have been calling the most fundamental of these ideas namely the idea between creative person we then from that idea best body miss to its perfect realization and we call that a I ordered the size you then said well we're going to apply this notion and think of it as holding of what we called the basic structure of that society and only that applies primarily that buster so we're developing a special conception of Justice for a very special case we then said well how are we going to determine the fair terms of cooperation because the notion of cooperation about emotion fair terms of cooperation so then work to do that and interest no fee risk position or greedy nation of me and it's the way of supposing that people who engage in cooperation themselves are going to determine nobody else but they're going to determine it as free and equal okay so then we have to go on to verify than those free and equal present and these persons who have the two mall powers and who are capable of taking part and gauging social cooperation over them like some of the details of that why come back and now today I'm going on to the last idea a reflective equilibrium and eventually I'll get on to explaining that term but I began with the notion of justification and will notice that the idea of the liquid equilibrium is related to the other two in a rather different way it does not as work it isn't vacation now the idea of justification can be understood as an element in the notion of because we then specify that to a well-ordered society I didn't realize and you call that a well-ordered society it's defined as a society in which everyone pulls or affirms the same crystals of justice everybody knows this in this public sense so they all know that they hold to and affirm the same conception of justice and also in general that there is more or less just now it's a consequence of that that since everyone in this society accepts the same principles of justice they didn't have a common point of view in their public conception in the life of which today and Judah cake with painted they made against each other and honor when questions of justice arise so one then thinks of this common public assessment justice that regulates society as the kind of basis of justification so we might say that it's characteristic of a well-watered society that has this public basis okay you know the idea of one talked about a bit is this notion of justification in the sense in which I have indicated now first of all let's make a justification as address to other people who disagree with us this is able to serve that role so it's just two other people who disagree with us again we'll always want some matter if there is no disagreement then all can resume the justified practice something to talk about why we agree but there's nothing to justify everything is all right but where there's a need for justification there's some kind of a disagreement so is it just to others and is the attempt to convince a by reason or to reconcile by reason as opposed to the use of rhetoric or opposed to manipulation and obviously the flows to coercion and forth now that's an attempt to to convince a by reason from this commonly shared point of view which is defined by the public conception of justice so a second point is that would be consequence of this that justification isn't simply a valid argument from this premise it's more than that if valid argument is constructed and setting out now general babies are connected how certain principles follow others how certain particular judgments can be shown to follow and so on from other judgments and spitting out some offensive way by the use of argument one chose count fairly complicated few you might say polls together and one is able to understand it as a whole has an intelligible whole so we might think of the accidents of geometry as I'm explaining to us how all these theorems are all these propositions hanging together in a certain kind of way and the same thing might be true although obviously the arguments we give and not break but still it explains kind of you pull together and so argument of certain kind has a place within this view for example helps to show how the view hangs together but it's not in itself just a page it will not be unless the premises from which we start and the conclusions that we get to prove to be generally acceptable in other words justification is always trying to proceed from and depend upon stone public consensus on various starting points or various adjustments that we arrive it and the fact is a waiter's think of it as being a distinct from purely deductive argument and then in this view is not going to be the case that justification or the burden of it is carried solely by the first print is so much it start it will be carried to some extent that we can't bet by an event by all the various kinds but because always going to be based in some way on public the consensus convictions and the attempt for the idea and dating that these fundamental twenty five years is it they do help express and to rehab what I think is a kind of a core element of a conception of justice that people in a democratic society might share and if I'm wrong about that and if you find yourself not in any way attracted by any of these ideas then it's not going to have any force involved in the end these ideas we're going to have to appeal and to allow us to develop various notions that we're going to find what makes I hope what was going on the attraction that were able to accept that they get some weight now I call them the task of political philosophy or as we take it to be time being within a democratic society to attempt to resolve it possible the conflict between I said the iLife attained the addition that that's which extends so on the correct interpretation about how to balance the flames and what we have to do is uncover and he perhaps a fashion some kind of notions that are in the public culture and that will provide this basis for consensus and the fundamental ideas are to do that now I think it's too much to expect that one could ever achieve full of payments on these matters and one isn't dependent to do that but it would be enough of any view if it served to narrow the range disagreement and if it been made in the minds of being able to do that it made social cooperation on a basis of mutual respect easier is able to sustain that so it could be carried on and maintained in the accidents of all disagreement there could be no need for what I call the public inception justice on some particular issues or force or issues that one particular proceed without requiring that now perhaps he could serve some other purpose Pat's he could serve some purpose of just plain understanding but maybe that is high and taken the purpose of trying to work out political deceptive justice as aimed at some sort of fun that it would not strip that purpose and there would be no need for it although I had some remarks to the exit back in TJ maybe 40 45 connection now finally observe the following about justification namely that the aim of it is practical now by that I mean not to all views because in TJ and everyone calling justice fairness if any of it is practical namely to preserve the conditions of social cooperation on a basis of need to respect and since justification depends on some agreement in judgment some agreement in fundamental convictions or what it does is to attempt to fashion a basis for that kind of agreement possible so in that sense it practical and that's been true it was true in indiana's I belong to in a moment is to the kind of agreement that we might be able to reach when all Americans literally convictions are brought into what I would call reflective equilibrium now have this idea and mantle is clear or I can make it clear contrasted with another note namely to show that is very conception or the principles of a conception or truth of an independent and prior moral order of political values for that the second section is is accurate - it has - characterized or described or represent did that is another way in which justification can be and analysis of moral judgments and to value judgments and attempt to characterize the conditions under which they may be true or false or how they can be shown to be now in this view we don't reject that idea in Ordos nor does one asserted it's not being either say a denied or affirmed it's being put aside and they conclusions that may or may not throw a light on that whew so I'm very saying one has it we'll see whether certain kind of agreement in what I'm going to call general and why we effective equilibrium it's possible and on what basis can it be achieved in terms of what sorts of fundamental intuitive ideas and then is another and separate question how far the distance section this being a guard has true for his accurate its own independent moral water I'm here to say I think we should be prepared say that the view is reasonable and adjectives but that kind but those that I've wanted to sting which I'm saying is true but again one isn't denying that then I might make some point to make not to make it and take an acceptance of it depend upon long-standing and still debated probably always will be the big philosophical issues so in a way to use a phrase that won't become perhaps later on we're going in a sense to apply the principle toleration schism to philosophy itself and to see how far one is able to build conception of justice that is acceptable within a democratic society fairly at one these sorts of fundamental tuning ideas leading us five these other birds dishes fundamental and long-standing questions there's anything there that I said that seems particularly spirited people okay well particularly in the book and sections four and nine pages in there they're now saying something about putting it in a somewhat different way but essentially the same notion I hope that's it that's another way of putting it will make it easier to understand what's going on although I don't want to say none of its of authentic it's just a matter of being able to hear the music and the sport thank you what the ideas are so return to the notion of reflective the religion now we begin with the idea that every citizen has a capacity for a sense of justice and that capacity year we call the capacity I want to stand to apply and normally act and not merely accordance with the principles of some public sector justice thanks so that the head neck cancer and this ocean is made that beginning and early life of course so we only have to tax its mere capacity of the child but in the course of life and actually get to what we might call the age of reason one does actually ten and less things if one rather long does Isaac pass because some sense kind of to go and that it is kind of a developed is showing the fact that you're able to make all sorts of judgments of justice about all kinds of things excellent standings from basic institutions to think about the world nations to all the way down to take the dangerous principles practices the actions of individuals and their character there's whole range of things from just ordinary life at the political institutions they will make a judgement and that I'm going to assume shows that this capacity business success has been developed and you're able to exercise a judgment so that's the first point to make and I think others capacity is the part as an intellectual power because it involves the powers of thought reason and imagination and also other palettes that one might characterize in another way but it's important intellectual power but you have to exercise these other capacities now what we do is to select from this great mass of judgments that we make in every day I birthday as it were often spontaneously although sometimes it we are he and collective but we make this grit master judgment all kind of thing what we do is to select first-class political judgments let's say of justice concerning the basic structure we and then within that class we select those that we call in Syria judgments now these are judgments that we make under certain the conditions may be under a condition we had or when we think we have other things equals that the desire the opportunity and the ability to make the sound for careful with judgments so we presume that that were able to base it on the necessary information or able to investigate the information that we are impartial and we don't feel threatened in any way and then we've had time for reflection and this is discussed in section 9 and what the conditions are for us selecting these pages 47 Hey so the dares get you no idea that they just assume every other conditions given that this is an intellectual power when the towers have adequately been brought into play now what turns out to be the case I think is that we make these consider judgments if we examine them they turn out to be at all two different levels of generality that is some of the two judgments that we make our judgments on the actions of individuals one say some political active or some politician who is acting within within the basic structure and holding us from office we just say they acted unjustly perhaps other phrases that we use from individual actions all the way up to rather general principles of concerning the Constitution but that the basic principles in it should be general that the universal in the sense that they operate when in the society that they should be public in the sense that they are known and can be published and understood and generally recognized with that undue enforcement consequent so we had judgments of this sort something highly particular about certain kinds of behavior or certain particular actions of an individual all the way up to and through all the things in between these general principles on the Constitution including reports principles of right now it will turn out that ladies consider judgments everything that has more particularly convictions that those terms like we use more or less interchangeably these consider convictions of any one person that is each of us they are often in conflict with one another they're not consistent so that each of us within our own minds is a bit divided mine in this sense that we often find that if we think through the consequences of the judgments that we make in some cases that these consequences or implications will conflict the judgments are made in other cases so we ourselves are of the divided Minds about it now ordinarily perhaps that does not make much of a difference but it may turn out that that inconsistency happens in the case of some political issue that's of importance and then we have to make up others yes well it may be that they yeah might be a good idea it may be that the minions get we have a punishment if we attend say to justify the views that we have a better punishment we may find ourselves it was in one way that we would account for that the fuse we have if we formulated this principle with going way that were able to account for it but we might find it rests upon some principle of retribution or revenge and one that brought to our attention but elsewhere what has to be fine we don't agree with them well that's it just turns out that there is no inconsistency with something else and but what strikes us is that when that principle is formulated we don't like it we want to think it should be based on something else so the whole Kaizen one moment is in which if we begin to be plexus cookies that we may find within ourselves which are they gonna be some sort of special class just going to generalize the way in which we make decisions on such products question is asked is are these that particular class of judgment that is considered judgment or are they just how we make them on take the matters I think the answer is the latter really I'm thinking first of all you see we want to form when they begin to develop our political concession on those convictions about ours that we are most sure I mean that's the general what is it about which we are really sure or relatively more school now with the book determines use for these things about which people are very sure the term fixed-point henna for but the idea of being there are probably some judgments that we're just not going to change think about them eg that this isn't particularly a political deal with the qualified candidate for political consequences or invitations that it's unjust or wrong unjust being black but you want to say something else to inflict unnecessary suffering on people have set to cruel you know we want to say that stronger ladies example religious persecution all these were things that within a democratic of traditional state our tix points my opinion but there are other things when we come to reflect about our views are not very clear and distribution income as another people have I think a variety of criteria that they tend to apply in that case tonight to think they're relevant it different kind of cases and different levels and we will talk about this for example when we come to milk it's very good on this and it's the manage money to sort these out okay I mean it's just it all helpful so we're trying to find to say first the fixed points would take the granted we're not going to change mind all that I mean even the idea feeling pity I'm sure what you think with someone like Hitler is impossible I wouldn't think of it and so on some other cases where we're just very very short of titty I mean anything that what happens one anyway not to go in today we want to find the judgments that are most secure the most firm and we want to build the political view around that so then to come back to your betray us somewhat random right the idea that that's the idea behind this you want to identify these so we say first since we're interested in political justice we talk about those judgments and especially want to find the firm ones we want to first be sure we got the fixed points and then other things and you can think of just five fundamental ideas that I've talked about earlier what is this particular terminology that's a kind of core I think around which a lot of these can be organized and whether that kind of the stove we don't know we just play it looks so if we take these consider judgments as I say a weekend each person within themselves is inconsistent they reflect about it and I think if you're not you're either probably reflected in sensitive or maybe met where I'm at I mean in the grip of some doctrine and you bring everything aligned at that at the cost of ordinary human feeling experience so I think we have these two conflicts and we really can't nominate to try to see if we can find some basis agreeing political so within one person if we just took their judgments I give a number definitions here I think the I think the hand up itself is clear enough on that so I won't sue those they aren't bikinis that we ended up with just the final remark there's a third reason for introducing the idea of the original position the third reason why should be caught we want to apply the notion of agreement to the basic structure itself so we have to elaborate point of view which in some sense independent of it and a great point of view from which it can be assessed that isn't a point of view inside of it oh that's a metaphor a source the other reason for introducing the original position was that we wanted to determine the fair terms of cooperation by an agreement between those engaged in projects though the additional position is a way of understanding how we might try to make sense of that again the third reason for introducing it and when we come to hope a third reason is that we've taken the admission of position as a kind of focal point in which and through which we can bring and various consider convictions and all levels of generality bring them to bear on each other and see which of them are the premises which will hold up and I talked about this I believe on pages 18 to 21 we want to look at but the idea is that if it should turn out that the principles agreed to in the original position made to judgment particular judgment that we can't accept in practice that if we just find ourselves not able to accept that then we have to go back somehow and revise now the original position was described we can't accept the outcome on the other hand it may turn out when we think about the principle that would be agree to make sure now that we are prepared when we see the consequences to revise our particular judges the case I mentioned that punishment protects an example if it turns out that the judgments that we actually hold tickly ones I depend upon some principle of revenge or retribution it seems and the principle we get from here with my position would make punishment depend only on what's required to stay preserved social cooperation and penalties ought to be ordered in a certain kind of way that out in some fashion and retribution or punished for or revenge himself eluded suppose that so at least you then we might say oh our previous news we're wrong so we're advised to take their judgment in line now yeah well that's the kind of thing I need by bringing consider two convictions and judgments to bear each other we see what the consequences are of affirming them within a certain kind of framework and then if there's a jar between the thing that fell before which one is going to give way and in advance is no way of knowing that is it maybe the principle maybe it can be knighted one it's not with you in TJ that principles for general convictions carry the sole burden of any considered a conviction at any level we may decide what to be held on to against principle there's no there's all these nice judgment can't add credibility and any can override the other what we decide in reflective equal is how to make these adjustments so the kind of justification that we end up with will say is a coherence view as opposed to some of you that seeds from this isn't very popular view today but just to mention it to illustrate as opposed to of you that stinks from first principle which is evident in this view we decided to collectively living have two negative adjustment and it can go either way as opposed to general or in between sorts of judgments but eventually the hope is this sort of ideal note that each of us will arrive at some coherent organization of their and win that so when then says if in the process you have examined the variety of action suggested then on the hand I heard that as why and then everything is in water well any questions anybody like to ask I know this is very well
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John_RawlsModern_Political_PhilosophyLecture_7_audio_only.txt
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graduate study group we got a room in Emerson 305 it will be meeting on Wednesday 2 the 3 that's from our graduate section anybody who wants to come to that welcome Emerson 305 Wednesday the 3 um is this loud enough you hear anything hi are are you not hearing anything I don't know what the settle down all up you should be able to hear can you hear now okay I don't know all the way up I'll do today is to go on and talk about TJ we'll here to our schedule as best we can I know we're rather fast I did feel at the end the last time I talked to some people and I thought that I hadn't explained quite correctly or at least I wasn't clear about it how MOX had radical potential of some sort and also how it was involved in the two-part of criteria and I think there were some UN clarities about that so I will hand out a sheet on that on C uh rather than to try to tid it up now I think I will proceive and I ought to say that I hope that you are are reading the assignments as we go along because I increasingly feel I can cover rather small part here so um I'm afraid you'll have to get a good bit of it yourself but I hope to give some sort of helpful comments that will kind of guide you for well I don't know I'll go over and check um I'm not going to over I don't know I'll find out well we're going on to as I say the the next assignment so uh or we going step back today so that today and Friday I'll hand out another few sheets on that it won't be able to go over but a small part of the Great number of details but I hope to give some kind of guiding idea so you'll know how to interpret of what's being said in there okay and in order to make some kind of smooth transition um make some comments about um's View and him's View and how I see the view inj as as relating to it now we saw that MOX Doctrine had the aim of trying to exclude Royal absolutism as a legitimate form of regime and instead he wanted to set up a Criterion that said a form of regime is legitimate if and only if it could have been contracted into from a state of nature as a stated equal right subject to various conditions called they were that no no one enter into any contracts irrationally and then no one violate either their own case or their impositions on another any of the natural duties that n by reason or they can be collected under what L called the fundamental law of nature now that's a Criterion that applies to a form of regime to government and social institution somewhat analogous to what I've been calling the basic structure so it applies to an Institutional form and it says it is legitimate if and only if it could have been contracted into and that's a rather elaborate criteria and you might say the Criterion characterizes a property that an existing regime might or might not satisfy now did this Criterion I might call Criterion General one for the regime I've said and I think this is plausible it does succeed in achieving his aims now his aim you call was to find a basis of resistance to the crown in next Constitution and I think that it does that for him for his purposes then it's okay it's fine not objecting to it but for our purposes it seems a rather weak criteria because our problem isn't how to justify resistance to World a athletism that seems kind of outed for government for the English of their day of course it meant a regime like that of Lou the 14 that they F against earlier in Philip II of Spain and they associated with Catholic absolutism Catholic state that would be intolerant of other forms of religion but that's what it's meant for them historically and that for us is not our problem so if we want to think of lots Criterion in an interesting way for us we want to see if we can strengthen it in some way can one make it stronger and what we might say one should try to do is to see if there is some way to go from autistic kind of phrase from could uh to W that is to say What mo does is to exclude certain possibilities as this we can't do anything that's irrational we can't violate our duties to preserve ourselves Etc but that allows a lot of possibilities what one would s like to do if possible is to get a form of contract view that would say what people would agree to and that's what I mean from the jump from could to would that's only phras but it gives you an idea now that is of course a very large step because it means in effect picking out some definite form of regime that would be agreable rather than excluding various possibilities and possibilities that might not actually be very interesting in present circumstances so if for example we are concerned with two or more forms of regime as we are or more specifically what we are concerned with is a choice between or deciding between several different interpretations of freedom and equality that is what TJ takes to be at this part and those various forms of equality equ equality I discussed a bit in Chapter 2 the system of natural Liberty as the system of Neal equality there's a system of democratic equality say all against the background of certain equal basic NE itties and very quality of opportunity so one is trying to make a choice between those possibilities now those are are going far harder to choose between than just excluding Royal astis right it's a very different problem it's much more it's harder to do and we might say we're not really going to succeed in it but it might be interesting to explore the possibility and see the kind of issues that arise so we might say within that context we want to exclude if we have say three ways of understanding NE inequality we want exclude two or select one might say and in that sense going to C to work presuming that those Alternatives those three alternatives are are interesting for us so what one has to do is to make these principles a lot more specific than anything you're going to have to build into it therefore more assumptions more apparates in order to get anything out of it it's just like you don't put in any meat you're not going to make a hamburger so to speak good expression you can't get something out of nothing you want to make a choice between three save report reasonably acceptable to a lot of people with in a tradition of thought with an tradition of thought you're going to have to make assumptions you're not going to be able to get it as we're at of nothing so it's going to be harder to do that's the point I'm trying to impress now what the vi course does of course is try to take this idea of society as a Sy of fair cooperation Etc and to specify that rather Lar notion in a way that it enables us to do that that's the idea another point is this that while hum's critique of lock social contract doct seems to me at least quite effective against that part of Block's doctrine that applies at to individuals and the ways in which they're imaginating or joining consent whether the joining consent is Express or passive and remembering that all of these kinds of consent is actual something that people actually do and actually doing it they bound I think the hum's criticism of the conditions of joining consent in Lo is quite effective and it might be interesting to see how could reply to it is in that connection that I suggested it had certain kind of rical potential to it but that'll pass over now I'll hand out something on that next week but him's confidence that the principle of utility is the same or amounts to the same as Lock's view because he thinks this Humes thinks that he has in the Trea already Justified the practice of promising by an appeal to utility I think that confidence of Hume that he can account for promises is misplaced if it turns out to be the case as it seems as if it might be the case that a lock view excludes forms of regime that it's not clear that the principle of utility always EX in those form of regime andal aism is perhaps a rather crude example but it's not clear even in that case that it's always excluded by the way in which Hume States least his principle of utility and if it isn't always excluded then that puts some doubt whether the two principles are the same and off hand it would be surprising if they are the same because they are certainly in meaning quite different if one looks I won't go into this in detail I will men if you look at what human transformity is and what this General Criterion of lot is they are very different in meaning and the concepts they use Marx do inclusive notion of agreement and that Agreements are collectively rational that there some notion reciprocity involved and there aren't those ideas in principle of of futility so it would be surprising if they're going to become to the same thing this is an argument that in some sense they don't but it's not I think all can be expected well so making then this transition um and then want CJ of course attempts to preserve some of these aspects of lock view idea of GRE is collectively rational notion reciprocity is involved in the idea of social cooperation and so on well I'll begin then now with some comments uh on the principles in TJ chapter 2 particularly focusing on 11 through 14 I'm only going to make certain General observations today uh Friday I'll take up some of the points that per difficulty connection with the difference principle notice however that we skip 10 I don't think 10 is very important for our purposes it just emphasizes the fact that the subject of these principles that is the kind of thing they apply to our our institutions and something that emphasized number of times in fact apply to what called the basic structure of society there are other Notions that I discussed in there the idea of a formal Justice or justices regularity in the middle of law at the last three pages so but those are fairly straightforward so I'll pass over so I'll begin them with Section 11 and I'm going to make a somewhat revised statement of the first principle but otherwise the princial are the same the reasons for this St I will take up as we go along they are I think reasonably straightforward at least I hope they are straight forward but first principle is going to be that each person has a right to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic Liberties which is compatible with a similar scheme of lities for Paul and then the other principle goes on about the same as before with a few dtic changes which are not important now one Reon reason for the change in the first principle I'll mention now and I mention some aspects about that principle is this that the equal basic monties in the first principle are specified by a list just simply enumerated and that's point is obscured by just the way the principes stated on 61 in terms of basic Liberty itself and these Liberties are ones of which are St off and on as a with thought and of conscience PR Association and so on I won't to enumerate them they on the they on the hand out now this revision brings out the idea that there is no priority assigned to Liberty as such as if the exercise of something called quotes Liberty is to have some priority some special kind that enables us to rank the first Principle as one does is having priority over uh the second that is we might suppose that that there is something called Liberty of any kind in the abstract that is been given priority that's not the case what is been given priority is basic Liberties and they are enumerated and it will be those that will be assigned priority by this uh principle so the idea is that while sayate is always some presumption against imposing of rest restrictions and limitations on behavior and so one might say there's some presumption from be more or less abstractly understood in that sense there's no presumption for any priority for any accept those actually enumerated and in this since then the view in the book is following what I take to be at least one tradition of democratic thought tries to identify certain Liberties that have been written in some historically important documents bills of Rights and Declarations of the rights of men and so forth and just enumerated some of those and tried to develop a view on the basis of it and that's what TJ does now this of Liberties of this sort could be drawn up in two ways one way is historical namely to look at the history of successful more or less successful Democratic of regimes and constitutions and see from their history which Liberties have been protected in special way which of them play some important role and in that sense seem to be essential and that involves a kind of study that I suppose if I'm not a constitutional historian might make of certain kinds of institutions and probably could say a lot about why certain memories are important some of us have an idea about that and constitutional historian could say something about the history of the development and protection of those Notions so one way is simply historical and we might say well we're drawn up this list through this kind of historical and Des or taking the advice of some constitutional historian or something like that the subject now of course the parties in the original position don't have this information but you and I can find out this information if you know the right people and after all as I mentioned in the first week it's you and I who are setting up this View and examining it and we can give the parties any principles to select between that we want they may not know all this historical stuff but we do and there's nothing to prevent us from from using it and setting up the do and C so that uh is not a problem the second way of drawing up a list of these basic Liberties would be to consider what are the essential political and social conditions that are necessary if people who we're conceiving on this view as free and equal persons if people so conceed with these two moral powers that we describ the power of the sense of justice and so forth and the power of having a capacity for conception of the good we suppose they have those two moral powers and we suppose that they're to be regarded as fully cooperating members of society overate life that's a long phase uses and then we ask well if we regard them in that way and they're supposed to be all participating members of society that sense what social and political conditions or more specifically what sorts of Rights Liberty have to be protected by institutions if they aren't to grow up to have this conception of El and if they are to participate in it as this view of see so we might suppose that citizens of a society once they have a develop sense of justice once they have developed conception of the good and so apply those powers to understanding and to regulating what the basic structure is going to be we might say that the the equal political Liberties and freedom of thought and Association to engage in physical activity and so on everything connected to that freedom of thought freedom of expression that that is necessary if people are to first of all develop and then to apply all their capacity per sense Justice in understanding the principles of justice of their own society and using those in any way to regulate what the particular institutions of the basic structure will be so one is Dan saying some of the basic is including political Liberty are necessary political and social conditions for the development of the moral power and for its exercise to regulate along with other citizens what the social policies and Constitution of the basic structure will be and then we can say the same thing about rity of conscience and so on in connection with the the other moral power the power to have subception of the good so the idea is then that if you can see people a certain way and if you ask yourself what are the conditions for people to develop within institutions in that so that these powers that you assigned to them can be realized and can be exercised that exercised in institutions for a certain purpose Nam thatting Bic structur just and conducting of the of their life so they can pursue their conceptions of the good that may require all that may require certain basic Liberties so that's another way to do it and in a sense um it would be nice if both these ways two stomach and dtail and and we got more or less the same list and that's what at the moment we might assume to see if that's possible we always assume the nicest thing is uh to be the case uh so then you look at it and see well perhaps it is and maybe you can squeeze a little bit here and shove a little bit there pass not so far all I mean that sort of thing is of course is it inject well I'll skip over so you got the time my watches all it gains about 10 minutes a day and I was trapped time I okay well I want to make another Point um which is it is you off with what uh we said about law that as you recall at some point I made a distinction um terms were actually for Julian Franklin's book on law that is between what are called constituent power and ordinary power constituent power the power in people lo as he used that term to constitute a new government if the government is dissolved and that power although it isn't it isn't normally operative it's always there it's enable in that sense and if if regime is resolved it RS to them exercise and that's constituent power in the way the Supreme Over ordinary power ordinary power is the power that's exercised by officers within the Constitution and among the basic Liberties and this is the point of recalling that distinction inlaw are those that you might say embed within the basic structure certain rights that are going in effect to institutionalize what using that other language not called constituent power or we might say has notion that's not actually his term so that among the basic rights in a democratic Constitution going to be right to vote for example but not only that certain rights to amend the Constitution and so forth and all of these together exercising kind of an institutionalizing kind of constition how and that's part of the reason for the priorities see in this do uh which might seem odd at first uh and I suppose exactly pressed is some fible but you're going to give priority to the first principle and what that's will mean is that in relation to the second principle you will not be able to trade off I say that's the term that Economist use you won't be able to make exchanges between the realization of an adequate scheme for everyone of the basic Liberties and ver economic and social advantages you can't make that tradeoff if you accept in the sense in which is meant the priority of the first principle over the second um I give an example perhaps that might uh illustrate the kind of thing I mean um it would not be allowed by the first principle to limit the basic rights of some people if that should turn out to be when might say highly advantageous uh or advantageous enough to society as a whole you can not do that or if we take it in terms of the seconden principle estated you cannot do that for the purpose of achieving greater benefits to the least advantage or whatever there will be no conditions given reasonably favorable background conditions under which you can do that um I give another example perhaps closer to home uh let's see I guess about 20 years ago now um doesn't seem all that long but General Hershey uh who is in charge of the system of induction Justified deferments for students in universities and other people from the Army on the ground that allow allowing them you might say this greater Liberty to conduct their Liv uh if they did it in a certain way and and and denying it through others who of hand would not have that opportunity so you could say you're instituting some kind of discrepancy um it isn't the case of obvious uh persecution or suppression some kind of discrepancy and basic liity he held to be justified on the grounds that itur uh those who could to go into education and to Jo on a higher education and that made the nation economically and militarily stronger that was the reason now the way I would interpret this uh principle you can't that that's a kind of exchange all it isn't maybe historically growth example I mean that's a matter of opinion um it's an example the kind of thing is not loud you cannot monkey around with basic inhib for those sorts of advantages so therefore it's a rather strong principle uh and you might say uh you might not find it acceptable but that's something you can talk about anyway that's what the prior americ me well I have on on the sheets uh few other comments about the and what theyan but I think I'll pass on to the latter part page three I forgot to number the pages so be sure you number them 41 42 and for three because occasionally I I'll refer back to so I'm now end well perhaps I ought stop for a moment I talk a lot is anything is this making sense I have question yes would you agree with Henry that food and shelter are among the most important of our basic and that influence the way um I'm not sure the question I think what you're asking is is it right to basic he says that among our BAS basic lities Primary in that above right to free speech and so forth is the right to an amount of food shelter well on this that's something we could probably come to um it's not in there as it is in that form but if you the thing I'm it's good question to ask because um this viewer is assuming that you have reasonably favorable conditions so when this dealing of the countries where uh setting up Democratic institutions are this sort of very problematical for one one reason or another perhaps the history of the institutions don't exist and so on uh with the belief so on but I'm primarily concerned you might imagine own count countri that resemble it but I'm assuming that what we have to take the three principles uh I'm thinking of the second one split between equal opportunity and the difference principle that if all of those are satisfied then um it should be covered the thing you it should be cover um that is that these principles have to be seen intend we going to work together so that you will satisfy the first and then the second and then the thing would be to ask well what's been left out um and it may be that there are things that that are left out and that we have to ex provision for that but the idea would be well that under the somewhat idealized sumptions I'm making is that this initial stage ought to be taken care of but we can come back that may not saf uh yes can we restate advis first oh well it it's it's on the sheet so you will get that um what I might do then at the end um and I don't mind it um stopping it at the end to take a few questions General if you think that would be the best way to proceed but maybe I should make a few General comments about how the problem of dist distribut Justice is conce now the important point there only a few General sorts of points that I think they get clear about and if you don't get clear about these um things are likely barely to go wrong the first is of course that we're talking about the distributive justice of what all along have been calling basic structure now you notice in hum's VI there a very important thing about hum it's one of this I think great contributions is that he applies he's very clear in applying no of Justice to institutions and to systems of public rules that's what he applies the notion to in the first instance and I hope you will read those chapters of his on just in the in the inquir and I urge you to read the third appendant the third appendant of this screaming night um and add something very definitely new in the theory of the so that's uh that ought to be read but what the idea is is you're trying to design a syst of social cooperation or or design in your imagination if you like such that if if operate that way as a STIs of public rules it will be fair and you have to build into it various adjustments so that it is corrected over time to remain clear that is you're going to have as people accumulate property in society as they uh que it to their descendants is likely to be concentrated in hands say over time monopolies and other things are likely to develop so you have to design the basic structure and background institutions in such a way that you correct these accumulations and other historical contingencies over time so that the scheme remains fair from one generation to uh the next and the difference principle ought to be thought of as a general principle formulating how these Corrections and actual distributions are to be made over over time and I'm not saying particularly what exactly the interval time should be that depends on institutional mechanisms that you use but for example as discussed a bit in chapter five the difference principle applies to the system of Taxation perhaps it's annual income taxation perhaps it's annual expenditure taxation a taxation on consumption perhaps it's inheritance Taxation and other rules and other mechanisms that adjust the the distribution from time to time of whatever the intervals of time are that those mechanisms apply and the important thing then to see is that you never discuss from the standpoint of political how you would distribute um a certain fixed bundle of the Commodities you could enumerate the items you don't ask how you might distribute those to say a certain number of known individuals as they're known to you you you know the taste and the preferences and the needs and and desires and you make the assumption that there are no Cooperative relations among these individuals in the sense that they have not produced these Goods as if they were washed up on the beach or they fell down from the sky or whatever you just have them and then here they are with certain needs and and desires and you ask the question how should I allocate these Goods to these individuals you might do it in terms of their needs or their desires or preferences and you might say say allocate them in a way uh to maximize satisfaction that would be to apply a kind of utility principle now the interesting thing about the utility principle is it can work in that case you just uh divy up these things to maximize fulfillment whether in an instant of time or indirectly in other ways over time now the view in TJ the principles in TJ if you ask that question how should these Goods be allocated to these individuals there's no answer no conceivable answer but it doesn't apply to that case and you should look at Pages 87 to 89 on this where they there's a paragraph in on 88 in particular but beginning with page 87 and inde the the bulk of section 14 is trying us to convey this idea so the idea is this is that you have a Cooperative process over time people uh produce things uh together and according to the public rules of the Cooperative schemes people acquire entitlements or certain amount that they are owed as a result of taking part in it and these entitlements establish their claim on the amount that is produced that's how the scheme has to go so in the absence of knowing who produced what and under what publicly understood system of rules you don't know how they ought to be allocated the principles in the book don't address that it's not it's not dealing with that and it then means that in the language of section 14 that the process or procedure of distributive justice incorporates into it first of all what's called Pure procedural Justice and I don't know if I have time to go into now perhaps I should say that pure procedural Justice um would be Illustrated to take the example in the in the book that I give in contrast with say perfect proced Justice if we say assume ahead of time we have the goods here or C we have people over here who have needs and desires or something if we decide that well the cake should be divided equally then well you all know the rule we have the person who divides the case uh divides a case gets the last peie um making the usual assumption they divid as evenly as they can because they know otherwise they'll end up for the small spe so we have a procedure that we can design that individ can carry out the that will be guaranteed to give the result of equality in which on Independent grounds we take to be perfect now in the case of pure procedure Justice there is no independent criteria so you don't have to distribute them so what we do is to do something else to design a procedure for producing things such that will to add up a way in which various entitlements are acquired such that whatever is produced should be distributed in accordance with those entitlements whatever they are now that would be a procedure of pure procedural Justice now the account in the book is more complicated than that it's What I Call on the sheet and a name that I regret that I didn't use adjusted pure procedural Justice um or for short simply adjusted proced and I give an example to illustrate the kind of thing I mean suppose that we want a poker game to go on over generation anyway we want that to be possible uh so that no matter um if you have a bad night or something and you lose a lot of money you can still play um and your sons can play your daughters can play and so on if they want to waste their time with so one closes perhaps all kinds of rules a certain packs on each pot and you adjust the size of the tax and so on so that there's always amount given to those who lose a lot and if this spoils the game by making people debt rashly and so forth and so on uh well that can be adjusted by certain penalties or whatever so I'm making this assumtion in in other words that the gain is adjusted so people can uh continue to engage in it all along and that these adjustments are occurring well I don't like the analogy of Poker and it probably offends certain people I don't think you should be aced that is when that's trying to understand ideas that maybe it's easi to understand them if we put them in a Riv Contex but I don't think of why that's a PO game it ought to be a PO game or anything like that just to illustrate the notion of what adjusted procedural Justice is and I think of the income tax and inheritance tax and all these things and other things is like this chip in in po time it's a it's an adjustment being made to keep the system of cooperation fair over time and so it can maintain uh basic equal Liberties they require of opportunity and adjusting the scheme so that it's to the greatest benefit of the M Advantage where of course that means not the M advantage of this year but it means in the longer run down to their descendants and so always taking a long term you uh politician looks to the next election statement to the make generation the philosopher has to look as it were all time they going to look all all the way down so there to be a scheme in some kind of equilibrium where you're making these constant adjustments of what will be the long run benefit greatest benefit so the notion of this jich Justice then is institutional through public rules and it's a notion of adjusted P proced Justice and that notion is not as clearly expressed as I wouldn't like it to have been in chapter 14 section of 14 which is on qu of opportunity I mentioned at this point because many of the misunderstandings of the book are exactly on on on this point we fail to see that one is talking about process of the S so that our ordinary Notions am I going over time our our ordinary Notions of what's there within the family within friendship and so forth and so on course don't apply to this and we're not overriding our ordinary Notions of Spanish or dessert we'll talk about the next time we're not denying that they have in general an area of validity we're not talking about a certain kind of institutional system and that's not our everyday framework thought um it is one I think that we can understand enough once we see the difference but it is likely to jar with what we think or believe we think in everyday life between particular individual well then I mean I'm to stay and answer some questions it is I think three so any of you have to go oh um hand
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I thought I might ask before the class begins because they want to know what the C I was told that we appear to be out of Mark text and there no context yet I guess I'll have to get enough of the I have done up to hand out for next week but I assume there are copies of the ground work many of you need copies of the ground [Music] work um usually you can find these another book stores the ground now under 171 okay well I understand that now uh there's plenty of copies of the groundw you got put in the wrong spot okay so how many need the mark from the flower that's a lot more people I'd say that [Music] 35 yes I think you probably but I think how many of you have the trucking would plan to use it off the track that looks like about ask order that's also not that hard to find another book story that and I thought I would say back to handout that the department UHS uh that instead being paid for it and you're not charged for they only do about 100 copies so I think that's enough of you were taking class for those of you who are auditing it of course you are broken to it would wait till everyone else has pick up or what alternatively you might is make some arrangement for those taking class and we could Z then we have enough everybody class okay I think that's not okay well our plans are today I'll go on saying some more things about the two principles of justice and there's a handout up here on that there's also a handout on lock as well um pick those up afterward um so I will really continue where I left off the other day and I find I can only said rather few things I can't cover everything as I have said before um you will have to go over the sections that I don't say anything about and try to make it fit together some extent as I hope EV will what I'll begin by doing is saying some things about the meaning of the difference principle and explaining some some points about it and say some things about some possible objections and then after having done that I want to introduce some things about the notion of dessert and some problems Mis understanding that I think arise in regard to it and with all these things I'm I'm not uh taking offense think of other people I'm just trying to use these objections and these difficulties to explain of what's been said really and I think the point of going through you like this it isn't that I of course expect you to find it closable in the end but I think it brings out some of the problems involved in trying to develop any kind of view at all and so in that way I hope that that you might find it instructive so as I say I'll begin with a few points about the difference between full attent to raise difficulties now keep in mind throughout that it is subordinate to the first principal of Justice and it's also subordinate to the principle of fair equality of opportunity so in this second conception of ORD society that we introduced earlier the differ principle is to be applied within a background framework of Institutions the basic structure that already satisfy those two principles so we take that for granted although we don't intention it all the time so if you have a society where those principles are not satisfied then you can't apply the principle in a straightforward way maybe it tells you something important but it isn't just that you can apply because the background framework doesn't hold for it so to that extent we are dealing with a somewhat ideal notion and I mentioned ear that the point of doing that is if we want to get certain things clear certain relatively basic points and clear in order to try to read some understanding of proper balance of the claims of Liberty and equality that's sort of always a fact problem so we have to understand it's it's it is subordinate and is to be applied with the context these other principles are satisfied I'm going to leave to TJ to Pages 66 and 71 to explain what the principle of prao efficiency is um I think that explanation there is reasonably clear and I think perhap in a class of this size it would be best to go in SE anyway so I will assume that that's more or less understood any of you of course have had any economics of all of our already familiar with that from um very early on in your in your book now as we talked about the last time we know that the principle of efficiency and the other principles of justice and the way in in which they're ranked always apply to the institutional structure regarded as a public system of rules and we're always assuming that through around now a point that is not clearly enough mentioned in the text is that the system of cooperation that we're dealing with is always assumed to be productive that is we're always assuming people are engaged in Social cooperation and they are producing things in and through their cooperation and that the distrib that takes place is the distribution of things that they produce together and in accordance with the claims that they acquire which are call uh entitlements which based on the Gen expectations Etc all that is part of the scheme and it is um productive so be careful to note that in the figures the two figures on page 68 and heav where the explanation of the principle of efficiency is been given that those figures assume that there is no production we just have a fix bundle of goods that uh we can give all to person X1 and all of them person X2 or we can divide them up in some way and if we do that efficiently we get that smooth curve by hypothesis we make these nice assumptions if it's actually divided up in some way was indivisible why then there would be a number of points but we make all night something we can divide it up uh so it get it smooth but the important thing there is just we're assuming a fixed bundle it isn't being a produced by anybody there no Cooperative relations so that's really case of allocated justice as you that the last time under figures on pce of I think it's 76 and and seven we they're assuming that in joining the op curve that we have a productive scheme of good cooperation and and I don't think and as I say in the text I don't think that really very fundamental contast is made clear now um as it should be so that in the figures say on page 76 to 77 the idea is that without cooperation there isn't anything produced at all and so nothing to distribute and that situation with that production would be represented by the origin Z where the Y AIS and the xais now but given a definite scheme of cooperation of some sort then returns to the two groups can be varied with the results indicated by the op curve the another pce suppos to help you remember that it's we concern with the production is how production is affected by the variation of returns to the two groups given a a scheme of cooperation so it is assumed then that the greater returns it go to more Advantage as those who have presented on the extra AIS that those greater rer of returns will then cover the cost of training that they indicate and Mark out positions of responsibility and encourage people act responsibly that they are incentives Innovation all variety of other things rather complicated social ological psychological story that we don't have to go or even know very much about the datails are we just assume that there is some such explanation as why uh the scheme is more productive in those cases now a particular oper indicates the returns from a particular scheme of cooperation as determined by how its public rules say organizer cooperation how it uh arranges a division of labor and things of that sort how it organizes the decisions of responsibility so and how it the science there a role to those engaged in it so we're taking for granted any time we draw a particular curve that very concerned with some particular scheme cooperation and what we are doing is to vary only one aspect of it we're varying in some sense uh the returns measured in for Simplicity at the moment primary Goods have incoming well uh to those who are engaged in it so that's what we're doing uh in order to explain how that is this is to be taken so um what we say is then at any point on the op curve the returns if the returns to the more Advantage are represented on the x axis then the return to the less Advantage indicated by the corresponding point on the Y AIS so to some extent we're considering the returns to more Advantage if you like as the independent variable we don't have to go into that particular matter purposes but that's the thing we're varying and then I come to the really essential point about which one it's not stated in the text and it ought to be namely that the presumption is that when we apply the difference principle we have found out at the moment what we think is is the highest oper or would we suppose of a world order Society it is found if not the highest how can noise optimize anyway that's ideal but let's say it has a high or reasonably efficient op curve and that means that the other aspects of the cooperation are organized effectively the term I use on on on the sheet is effective so the presumption is that we're always dealing with a highly effective or reasonbly eff scheme of cooperation otherwise we would not be interested in the curve or in one might say would be better to say in the scheme of the cooperation that that particular op curve is drawn for there's very inefficient scheme ofal cooperation why don't we forget about it then the non instant so because we know it'll be very flat it's so the point is we want to find reasonably effective organization cooperation in the first place in applying the difference principle and one could say roughly other things equal to indic Cas the thing I have in mind back her is that one scheme of cooperation would be more effective than another if given any point on the this it's corresponding o curve is higher okay maybe I would just draw picture is this a very puzzling yes I'm well uh the I do is this is it we go up like this and if we go like that we draw it the simplest way just one curve under the other that's all okay so what I said was that one op curve is more effective a better design than another other things equal if we take any point for the more Advantage this op curve is higher so this curve here is more effective lay design than this scheme of Che myself up here uh say this represents the alpha scheme and this beta scheme whatever it is then Alpha's more effectively designed so the idea is that we're supposed to operate or apply the uh the difference principle on the more effective for better design SCH of cooperation other things equal would we go up okay that's now I won't go into the complication of what happens if if we get this uh for the time being we assume only nice things happen uh just trying to get the very basic ideas um eous always are doing this I don't see why other people can't do it now consider two objections one objection is I'm not thinking moral objection uh in the sense that we don't when we think about this it doesn't seem as if really um we're going to be able to go along with it it seems to conflict in some way with might say our everyday uh judgments and moral judgments about Justice um one objection is the following suppose that the most effective op C Rises real slowly like this and we don't get to its maximum say until out here where it begins to go down perhaps but by the time we get there the ratio of returns to more Advantage the less Advantage is a large number perhaps the more Advantage have just to have a number of thousand one something like that I might say well that's too much we don't have an exact idea how much there something wrong with that that's really too much uh the other objection is to take another curve we we'll draw another figure uh it might be fairly effectively organized up to the maximum point but then it tapers off real slowly uh just like in Cline so over here we found that if we pick the maximum we had the ratio greatly favoring the more advantage over here we find that if you pick the maximum there's a very small loss that we that one might impose on the less advantage in return for a very large gain let's say to uh the more Advantage did I say that right a very small loss to the less advantage prevents us from allowing the more vents to have a very large gain so in the one case we are worried about the greater ratio of income and wealth of more advantage of the less in the other case we are concerned by the fact that we can't go beyond the maximum because that is something you can't do but it prevents us from a very large G to the more Advantage now what do we say about you well um I'm not going to give any argument anything that you particularly are supposed to find plausible something think about and that's something I don't really know beyond certain to conjecture but the idea is this um this is the first case say all discuss in the first case the problem is that earlier on the ISE this SCH of coration the op curve Rises very slowly now why does that happen well it might happen because there are very few people trained ability and there large uh numbers of of the last Advan PS um p very few people are educated or something of that sort perhaps uh there are things about the society and so forth and so on that makes the productive cooperation hard to do and the life but in the case of this principle uh remember it's applied against a certain background uh that includes their equality of opportunity so it means that one has in mind the societ it people have a chance to educate their their natural endowments so you don't have the case of there being a few educated people the presumption is that education would be in general available and also you will not have a cartel of some sort or some Association that keeps down the competition of others who might enter into certain skills you don't have that so presumably there'll be a fairly good supply of heels and tance and so forth and so on so that you ought be able to organize a fairly efficient scheme of a cooperation ought to have uh an OP curve that rises reasonably quickly in other words I'm going in terms of what's in the background the fact that we're applying this to a certain background means that the curve itself is not okay so that roughly is going to be the kind of answer uh to give to both well to the first one the kind of answer to get to the second one is that surely there must be some way some social device the taxation or otherwise to transfer part of this very great game of more advantage over on the other side could be some way to do that out of by taxation whatever over on on the other side there should be some device uh the tax what is beyond the maximum so it's make some kind of transfer uh so what one is saying then is that one is applying this principle within a certain kind of social World a kind within which Democratic institutions are possible and establish and they satisfying prior principles and it should be as just sayure matter of Ingenuity defines aices so these ratios either way either first case or the second case will not strike us as unjust and that's a conjecture it's not argument it's just uh what the time being is being assumed you might find extremely imposible or not imposible hard hard to verify and I would agree with that that it could be hard to verify it's hard to verify what is implied by it and required by probably any general principle so this isn't aity of this particular U now note that this ratio here is an observable feature of the distribution that is it's a matter it might be hard to estimate because it isn't just a matter of dollars and cents um it involves some measure income and wealth and so but even so it's something that we could or as stus dis or Eon might find out by looking at the distribution of aing within a society was what's the actual pattern of income now the point I want to make is this is that the in this there is no limits no specific limits composed at all no specific pattern imposed on what the distribution should be that is someone might say Well it ought not to be greater than 50 to1 in the first case but we don't say anything like that on the ground that I don't think that we could reach any agreement on what the limits are in either case uh it's not feasible so the idea is to set up a principle that imposes No Limits at all to use adjusted pure procedural Justice and then whatever turns out to be it ought to be within some range or other such that it does not seem unjust to us that is it will not have various sorts of consequences it will not seem to be unjust provided of course uh one is assuming that these returns had been earned within institutions that satisfying all these are conditions now the argument for that is the important thing isn't just ratios it isn't just the amounts it's it's how they're earn and the nature of the functional contributions that are being made so if you believe that the scheme is fair and entitlements are required in the life of P procedure in this sense and where it's is adjusted right then the view is that that's is the important thing not exactly what the ratios are to fall out of it of the actual amounts now again um you might not agree with that I'm just saying that's the approach which has been taken there's one sense in which one might say that the difference principle does impose a pattern or that it's egalitarian like there a number of senses in which one might say see there one sense which I thought I would point out to you is this that if we take uh suppose this is the highest effective op cve then it will select that the maximum here suppose that this is the 45° line then well suppos it comes vertical here then this here to here Theo frer deficiency frer M had what is it figure Pages 56 is it the ear second it takes the the boundary of that Frontier and the boundary is closest to equality it's the closest point on the frontier to equal um so it's giving some is a kind of horal point where we're making allowance both for efficiency because Point here and qualities because it's the closest point to the 45° line um so that's a kind of compromise if you like obviously not the only compromise but kind of compromis it does have that feature well now I know there a lot of questions about this but is it making kind ofle on the last example you mean up here uh that was or what I meant was that this is the max here on the op and it's also the boundary point in the sense of of the interval uh that goes up from here to where becomes vertical so we're so there would be two boundary points and this to this boundary point and Theos a close set it'll be the point on the CR comp closest to 45 that okay so a compromise well that doesn't I I don't think it's good probably to say that it is what it is mly the closest point toy um in the front here but it has that feature oh it's making it it's your like allowance for both these ideas in its own way yeah it equal to the max same as the ma yes the same point the same point yeah of course I'm making uh uh I presume it's always a concave downwards and so um maybe what uh you can think about this as some time I'd be happy to remain afterwards I have questions this I realize this is extremely abstract um so maybe I'll proceed if it's uh all right okay I wanted to say some things about legitimate expectations entitlement and dessert which are likely to cause uh trouble um things said about them are not often in the text is clear as should be now we are assuming that distribution always takes place in accordance with legitimate expectations and earned entitl within this scheme of adjusted procedural Justice and these expectations are specified by the public system of rules always of the scheme of social cooperation that exists suppose for example that these rules include U Provisions that make allowance of the wage agreements and salary agreements POS they include plans for profit sharing on certain kinds of of conditions and so on all those things are all parts of the scheme of the cooperation and other public rules then those who enter into and honor these agreements and cooperate accordingly on the basis of these expectations and of these R then have a legitimate expectation of receiving the agreed amount of the agreed time that is an expectation simply as opposed to a expectation is simply something like one expects the sun to rise and a whole lot of other things which would be based on on evidence conduced grounds and so forth and so on on science or whatever Common Sense here we talking about legitimate expectation which is based on what the institutional public rules are and which if we act in the light of them and do our part entitle us to receive ver in the text it said that uh legitimate expectations of the other side of principal fairness and that principle is discussed in contrast with natural Duty uh in the in the text so that the idea is that what people are entitled to depends on what these rules and agreements say they are entitled to and what the individuals uh do Depends again on what they say they're entitled to and so there's this reciprocal uh interaction between the expect legate expectations and people are entitled to as defined by these rules it said on page 84 and 88 where this idea is assertive now observe that there's no Criterion of legitimate expectation that's aart from what these public rules set always of course is being assumed that the rules satisfy the principles of justice and their reasonably effective efficient in that sense that they are rules that develop within this framework and they satisfy or that they are within a framework of a basic structure that satisfies these overall uh principles so that all CLS that arise um will then be counted as as legitimate or what people are entitled to on the basis of these rules so the precepts that adjust and explain with these en are are generated from within the system of coroporation itself now this statement the one I just made is I think easy to misunderstand that is we often believe that we have a concept of moral deserve which is prior to and independent of existing social practices and it's easy been to think that TJ rejects that concept uh by saying there is no such concept as that of moral desert is defined by whole variety of comprehensive Moral Moral doctrines so I want to examine this I believe that in the text that it recognizes at least three ideas of dessert that we might in ordinary lives count or confuse with let's say all under the notion of moral dessert the perverse of these ideas is the ideas of moral dessert as the moral worth of character or moral virtue what morally good character is is defined by by some comprehensive moral uh Doctrine so that would be one idea another idea is the idea of legitimate expectations and its companion idea of entitlement which we had just talked about and I mentioned this the other side of the principle of fairness and that is discussed in section 48 I was all back chapter five and the third idea is the idea of deserving this as jied by a scheme of public rules which is designed to achieve certain purposes ordinary PA safe and for our purposes social purposes so I'll come in on each of these in turn now the taex justices fairness does not question at all much has to reject the concept of moral dessert nor does it deny that this concept as find within very comprehensive view applies the person's character what it holds is that no concept a moral dessert is a suitable basis for a conception of political Justice for Democratic Society all together different matter that is to say we're working within a political conception by that I mean it applies to political institutions and not within some comprehensive moral Doctrine it's saying that no particular concept of moral dessert where I mean by a particular concept as defined by some particular moral Doctrine say a K's view or Mills view or an inist view or arle or whatever none of those will be suitable as a political conception of Justice within a Democratic Society why because we have these profound differences of view on our conceptions of the good we cannot agree about it and we should not attempt to base or to use in any important way in our political conception a notion about which there is fundamental and very deep disagreement not that those ideas are said to be all false but which not to political understanding about this also I think there another matter practicality that it's impracticable to try to judge people's moral more or of character in any serious way when it comes to political in institutions we might and often that we do think that that that those kind of judgments of moral and worth of character is the kind that only God can make uh or that we make in our personal life but we can't do it for political purposes so it's not being rejected that notion it's saying for very grounds we don't want to use it within a political con turning to the second the idea with Gen expectations overated hly considered all I um am going to add is it keep in mind again that that holds within a political conception is not supposed to apply within the family within personal relationships Orin various associations and and institutions of public in society in general those forms of relationship will have their own suitable principles and criteria and it will be another question in each case how far something like a notion of fairness or do you have an and right applies to them we just um there's another General Doctrine so we have to ask how far the Notions that we develop here p in these other cases okay come to the third idea of deservingness which is very slightly indicated we want to say more about it but so I'm mention it here it's indicated on page 314 Nam the idea of very as besi by a public schem rules designed to achieve certain social social purposes now on 314 it's indicated by a familiar example of a game as when we say the team that lost deserve to win it's a common expression and we know what that means oh we don't mean that they don't win we don't mean that they don't have the title we don't mean that they don't get the honors of go with that and all the rest what we mean is that the game is designed to develop and tune courage certain skills and perhaps even certain virtues of a certain time maybe to be brave or courageous if you're downhill here or whatever and certain people or teams manifest those in a particular play the game more than those who won but all games are subject to chance and to Hazard and who knows what and it may be that that kind of a contingency the team that deserve to win loss but the game itself is designed the kinds of qualities and virtues that c forth give us an idea of what's a deserving team even though it may not actually succeed and analogously to something like uh social cooporation regulated but the difference principle again is designed to cover the cost of educating discipling talents exercising certain positions with responsibility and a variety of things that we've indicated so in this sense we might say that if the scheme is well run and there isn't a lot of fortuitous chance operating and it then most the time or a lot of the time um the those who who are better off P deserve to be so in this sense of deserving but that's not moral dessert and it it doesn't mean they have good character in any interesting deep religious sense or moral sense um I think most us probably realiz that that ofh have some that there are aspects of their character that's really rather bad character um I'm not necessarily sure for example the character of a of a good president uh as opposed to a great one doesn't have a lot of attributes that aren't very attrative from certain points of view but they might deserve it because that's the kind of thing you have to do to run a certain kind of regime well at Le that's thought about it one should not been a confuse the notion of deservingness that goes with the scheme of expect patience as a notion of moral dessert that would go within some comprehensive moral view well so in inj then both the second and the third Notions appear and are used the first notion is not denied I think to exist but that it's unworkable uh for the reasons I mentioned now I come to two final points um hope you all don't find this a too shock s any right I'll proceed anyway um it's what I think is required if you follow through the idea of a political conception you really see um everything that's required by that applied by that under certain kinds of a condition well in section 17 it said that no one deserves in the moral sense of desert that is in the first sense of desert that no one deserves their place in the distribution of native endowments now this statement I take to be a truism I don't think anybody who stood what was being said could deny it and there's a place in the distribution of native endowments not realized endowments native endowments if you like a genetic endowance but that's a fancy modern term not the place in the dis of native endowance is not deserved it's a trism and I think it's clear that neither the second or the third Notions of dessert even apply to that Cas so it doesn't even arise so the only thing that that would hold unless you had another notion of dessert in the three that I've indicated uh would be moral desert so it takes that to be true ISM and not only that someone not in 17 also this is Page 101 is also said that the difference principle represents an agreement to regard an IDE term regard the distribution of native endowments the distribution of endowments now as a common asset and to share the benefits of this distribution whatever it turns out to be now not carefully what this statement others might it said what it is saying is what it means if we agree to the difference principle the idea is the following that if we agree to the difference principle in theal position and if that Accords with our view and FL to equilibrium and so forth we are in effect agreeing to regard to regard the distribution as a common asset it is not said that this distribution prior to agreement is a common asset the question is how if we accept the differ principle we are regarding it and it said that way we're regarding it as a common asset and what it means to regard it as a common asset is actually given by the principle itself words there isn't as it were some independent idea of what it means to regard I think as a common asset other than what that principle says that uh in other words U what's involved in not going beyond the maximum point is the kind of principle of reciprocity you stop here because you come to a point where greater gains to the more Advantage begin hurting the less advantage that's why you stop because at this point reciprocity stops and that's what what it means to regard the distribution as a common asset now the important Point here then is that none of this is an argument for the different princip any argument is going to have to be given within the framework of TJ from the original position other than of course whether or not we can't accept all this when we col the and all that but any argument and any might say we presenting a formal argument or well it this formal but you know what I mean um hanging it out to what people would agree to that's always D from the original position and we aren't doing that here we're just explaining an all chapter two on the whole what this principle involves and what's it mean and I think it's a fall of the text it isn't as clear about that as it should be the point is another thing to say another point is that until principles of political Justice are accepted native endowments and their natural distribution is neither a common asset nor a private asset because the Notions of property and ownership are not yet defined all these things are is parts of biological Parts physiological Parts functional parts of human beings that's we don't yet have the Notions of property or common asset on which an argument could be based oh it doesn't go from well we see that the distribution is a an asset and therefore we arve at the difference principle that argument would be unintelligible uh in terms of how the view set up well I'm going over the time I just want to make one last point and that is that these uh Native endowments are our own in the sense that uh they are protected and can't be removed if you like out of our heads or out of our bodies by the notion of the Integrity of the person which would be guaranteed the first principal but I'll stop here um and remind you that there is a handout on your right for the day hand out to box on the corner
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well a neck 22 to 25 gray and I want to make some remarks about that indicates and i hope you will find helpful anyway I'm over two years perhaps that I hope not and I make women took before again about two elections were classes I always feel it's hard to say anything youthful over conflicts book their time so packs to guide you and leaping about topics that we talked about and guide you in theory I think they're too important thing to get great powerful one would be the general structure of the CI procedure when Nicholas adapt and the general idea involved in subjecting remember a couple thanks Siri to they can rank are contained in the credit or compare for the moral law I took that idea important idea and the idea that robot has the player over the raffle and the Gordon a politically i think is a contrast between any view like that and very cool yada could you say like an ism but it was not happy that to find emotion to judge independently from the right and then they find the right had maximize really good actor rather short contract that i hope i was understood has to explain this i believe so maximum wonder standing so he had been the framework of constituted a number of different notions of the good time built up but i won't believe that but the idea is that you have a different kind of trucks or two more of you a bad time then you can be like the new residents clogging the goal today yeah I did just the idea contract right here lieth and what the most amazing for me time it's hard to convey that but you know the camp is a fully that going into Iraq nevertheless we can't i'm gettin us that first of all content regional contract is an idea and has no historical implications at all it's like how one would understand I so a practical point of view how the station asst citizens could be to mind in blue unit help us understand and the other youth other continent is a good criterion for principle that helps us to understand what the sovereign can do so for example and con argues against the United Harry class in theory right because if that isn't violation the idea originally entre people could not possibly agree to that and that and then it's what this argument to do so the decade employed by the murder of cave-ins as a pistol fire quarter principle well then I hi so I just a very high work and it's like that mimics of what the Scott do so and that was Beckett add latex right here and if we don't have anything like from rightly conducted historically well so I think if you focus another thing then I would hope that the time that he's done on competent you work so i'll begin on effective 20 and 25 next to come economies and what be able to to be helping to guide you through this chapter now the poor murder that we discussed three reasons position the first was that we use it to carry out the idea of the basic structure of the triathlete as a system of cooperation in which the flare terms of the cooperation are specified by fitting regard zoe has free and equal person so i had to get no idea some way thinking how we could get it funded here where the notion of a green going to be applied to the basic structure that the first thing and that's on hand at number 282 to the second degree united realty was as a fair agreement the situation that would help us determine which principled abductors are most appropriate to the creative and equality of citizens in a democratic society and what we want to do is to have this determination made by sitting themselves when they are fairly represented solely ad please and people persons and as the most amazing that they are normally a cooperating members of society like haven't said very much about that so very good at the phone is a perspective or point of view from which we can apply the notion of agreement to the basic structure the other is active to work out in some way what principles citizens in cells so happy and it would agree and we hope that by doing this will they ever had seven padded bounce which compromise or whatever deplaning defeating equality by the third reason that I mentioned when a diff mentioned is also in the end of to the third day one great the third reason I mention was that mutant this is a focal point within which and fluids I consider the convictions on questions of justice at all levels of generality can be brought to bear on one another until they finally or so we hope fall into line so that together can I be made after some we did rather to cohere into my safe prepare Kentucky yeah but anyway there's sufficient degree at support and with this dang total cooperation with me applause so the great things ok so far lacking mention and the last one is on page 31 33 now I haven't indeed it couldn't gonna eat this for reason I'm sorry the living world but in a way I hope they're gonna get to the fourth way is that we take it in original position as a way of embedding into n greener situation reasonable constraints on arguments or principles of justice for the basic structure then the diesel strengths are regarded as feasible and you are considered it invictus now the idea is this that we might say that every day like we have the pasture to reflect that and this just is one another what foldable or technical principles for the basic structure my feet and we're all able to do that's this one and we all have a casa p to say no that will not be any region of the principal or dad not be a native of water for principal cliff velocity and to get some explanation for that and the idea is that if we post our kind of constraint on big argument and embed those in the original position then they may be able to model a reflector captures what the princess Sarah convictions are so the idea would be that if we did this correctly the right then principles act it would be natural for the harder to accept would be plants will let are that reasonable now amazing that would happen my happiness that we did in him risk original Buddhism certain constraints on half the parties are able to meet for example they are not to know various then so in reasons that they give or cat and the original position will not be based on information that we exclude some so whereas in everyday life it might be rational for up but use those grounds for urgent people if we thought they could be persuaded on they protectin we might think they really liked although that rascal that'd be unreasonable view people so what we want to do is to embed in drinking your pee original positions are survivors that so that rational people you think we think would be reasonable and so the clinic of model or intended attacker what life is insofar as we regard our reasoning and expression in line with a considered a conviction now that your nipple example there is one in the focus camera time it looking vegetable say for me if I knew I was terrible with some of the next door dear john people thankful that perfect people should have a certain advantage had a greeter other people in the idea to think that would be unreasonable or unfair so in order to try to capture of what's happening here I would say and the texture suppose we don't know that we then no one dimensional birds that principle Alexis me so I would not her to that Chris go on on that week and therefore it would not be into Jessup we're not Bernard for as that suggested when the park dr susceptible to that and strength so general what they say still of ignorance does work in that way it embeds a variety of constraint on organ ratchet tip with them argue the idea being that if we do that correctly well then the crystals of party would lead to I then affair or maybe both in offensive Native Americans spirited predictions so that's the general idea of bedding into visual position they sort of living space and this idea a very important feature of the original position and it's noted right at places in TJ I I I had them on the sheet so i won't need a nap here but i urge you to break things over it's only a few papers all also made them together yeah at least I hope you will and there's also checklist on page of her 46 47 of all the hell is the position and the average there indicates interpretation and if hearing down but what left are you four sections or anything where you get the text neck ok so that is much by general town of what is going on so let's begin with sex and fighting and up go right through the start now the remarks in the earlier that i gave earlier hand up went went the five already go over and not my point Oh miss Jackson so I'll just focus on a few matters here first of all I begin with things nothing about the comparison between argument and social theory and the kind of oil that had minus a in economics the elementary theory of the household that open silly behavior is a good example and the argument from the original position muscles yes is an analogy between artists of the pipe and he takes what we have this rational person making decisions or arriving at agreements subject to vertical and then constraint their very very best five so that if we know these persons our knowledge and their release that we know they desired an interest and if you know the alternative with their face and we'll add the consequences that they expect to follow something to alternative if they adopt it then they will form some idea of what they will decide to do or what they will agree do unless the court they make some mistake in their reasoning or weather-wise fail to act irrational now in the smoothing that party is in risk r is no position are artificially replied people so they read the behave exactly the way in which the state a bribe me correctly this is said I've laid them employment correctly on a page 147 all that I'm not sure yet but they artificially fire people active as we describe them from furious functions of the different the farm and do that now if this situation this kind of situation rectified by the use of a mathematical assumptions then we may be able to prove correct these persons of the new the course on the assumption that premise has been laid in the hole now water is this analogy between these arguments in social care and the argument enemy from the original position there is a important and really fundamental difference between and I want to Paris and I sent cited on page 122 21 one differences in social terms we are concerned to describe and explain how individual acting very situation how institutions actually work in form whereas trying to develop a clinical conception justice is another matter altogether quit different aim from that so get a describing rational person as as defined them what we do is to interpret them as representative of being equal citizens in a democratic society and we impose on the occurrence people can never come to party with in this construction certainly reasonable condition then and constraints that I suppose with the flat constraints on on arguments that we make it be reasonable now essential here is it is Thank You between the game and Bracknell and this hog hunts the station hypothetical imperative and the category that s is because the eye procedures subject' agents rational and serum accident step one two different strengths of the procedure they were a campaign in depth 2 to 3 and the strictly agents conduct finally requirements of the oven moral law so these reasonable conditions that are imposed on the parties in the original position we pick the kind of argument today from here and in that way we had the same thing in this case as an make a chronology public const view we can say in each case that the major will have priority over them over the rationale and subordination cats solutely now the other day someone asked fact this sense of engagement rational I think it's more like just the guardians of labels that enable to the third and reform what's an important point x2 was met by can we have to go back to the contract constantly things with categorical paradigm comparator than the contrast between what we are pretending to do with the creations so long apart in with no provision and the catalyst has as rational you know observe that the aim of the from the original position is it possible to establish a deductive argument even if the reasoning is presented and I don't think we did get not even if amazing prevented just short of that standard that point is 50 acceptance of the principle for the argument for the new principal isn't supposed to be based on some conjecture of what people's psychology might be in that situation it doesn't depend on some psychological law at some time that we have to conjecture me what it is Enoch all the premises are laid down and never as a parallel the kind of a mountain the yarmouth it went fine again in elegant accounts of the household would say that the household agent if you don't get familiar with this don't worry about if you are you will I think in the point of it is it the household agent goes to market whoever the agent is the head of the family or someone took the hard go to market or whatever will purchase a commodity bundle but it did it gave our the point what sometimes called my respect that is where the budget line is dependent to the highest and difference trip and giving these salesmen that I made that and if you draw picture fuel not to mention for that audience good lot of dimensions it's easy to pee so in that sense all of the premises if you may assume that they hold and assume that those are all the elements involved you can see prove that result so any psychology that's accepted about the household or has aidan of The Hague we're already in the premises and therefore you presume being able to give it true from the same thing ideally likely the case ought of the case and original idea what we going the position of course it does not keep that stand still it's not supposed to depend on what the psychology of people might be some exploring that situation who had no idea that point of the first matter if we do it like what we're building into it is reasonable to space and we're doing that because we want to know what all those constraints in five it's a device for trying to figure out what i owe considered a conviction if properly organized and articulated would lead through and that's why they don't want it to depend on some craig logical injected about how people behave in that situation that my standpoint is totally irrelevant and we want to avoid it apart so the psychology included so far as we can in the presumption that we've already set up and each of these the presumptions we can support the finally why are you are included that okay am I making have well we come to 21 presentations of the alternative now two very brief life TJ is not attempt to move day to get any counter what principles justice parties might think up in this situation what would they might use alternative because to do that would be very complicated business obviously to reflect about when we have to give a rather elaborate psychological account of how people could possibly make up things like crystals and progestin and all that and that extremely difficult I think I'm not sure that you can go there an enterprise but even this will hear what I think the very difficult so that's not attempted what is done but it by you and me who are setting up this framework in order to try to work that wasn't long victory what do is to hang apart the list or what you might call the negativity menu what and we put on the menu the well-known and traditional view that had had an important place in the history of our morale and tradition for the football so we try to catch that kind of a preliminary way by seeing which of these you has a history to it it is important is terrible Elizabeth Corner beauty we hope that by doing that will gain some insight some understand of naked leave years and 11 failing another now of course this is another point to comment or an addendum to the break point is that such a procedure cannot establish I mean if we just had a short menu which were list that won't establish wanted to that of all possible or most appropriate of all possible conceptions of Justice they fall far short of that but I think given where we are historically it's enough for us that we could just have an idea but those that have system and if you know about if we could make some decision among men that would be in stock have to thank you do something that we can accomplish and not aim for too much the best of all possible that probably average it may not be good let that anyways begin this other more mundane but more tactical where so the thing that Adam appointed the notice that the principles are accepted whichever ones they are are not as principals in terms of their content they are not a derived from the other conditions of the original position that is say if we numerate all of the conditions and we need the menu aside let's track that then we can't derive a native from these other conditions we just have to handle it so what the original position God which was this whole apparatus it's select so get then it's a selection device now we have to be something into it you get anything out with that one okay this on them towards this off with katie i know it is teachers what do you know things i had questions they don't ask me why i don't have to get through it so feel free to read question Jennifer spirit well if the nut questions are going to 22 this representative now these are intended to reflect some general aspects of historical conditions under which modern democratic societies it exists I'm not going to say any about the fun tipis type of thing actually cleared up by my comment on the subjective one does it terms of now that's the thing i think of the subjective circumstances and reflecting the fact that their modern democratic state the national and is looking for that this is the firm different and indeed incommensurable and irreconcilable conceptions of the good now later on i hope we get a chance to say what incommensurable name but it means there isn't a way somehow to measure them with estimation by some common acceptable public standard and i make important feature of the gt800 carry you it doesn't offer send that they are in commenced so they had time to talk about that view it is an example of a deal with a big can be read as deniability Oh different receptions of the good so if you make the consumption although of course you're not just five you are in a way opposing or taking a big bad point energy as we still turn you and a clip of this assumption that this has had irreconcilable mortensen sections of the good at historical facts that have existed since the Reformation and we're taking that for granted when questioning it on some assumption of whitwick you might be at the only way over combat conditions would be by the architect mistake power now one look the general view kind of behind this is that although political philosophy can help us reach some kind of agreement least that's the hope on the political conception of Justice that is a conception long exception to apply the basic structure to the Constitution and I think like that the presumption is have an article bit more but the presumption is it what clawford could not do would be to be able to show that one inception of the good and remember the fifth include religious metaphysical moral doctrines to how certain man to be conservative that what lesson did not do is the show that one of those is the best sufficiently clearly to secure public agreement now it's not being said that there is not snow inspecting the good which is best TJ never suspect and you want to avoid this idea right rested clinical perception justice on the denial of anything like that one get this isn't more a difference of that value just keep babies when you are not denying both you and Courtney you want to deny it the key thing that you can you want to avoid philosophical it easily if you can so it isn't thing I denied that there is a best exceptional group what is being assume is that philosophy can't cope would one best sufficiently clear beginning clear dream of a wider kind to be the basis of a political or social justice which is I think a rather different assumption when we write next what supposed to be in the in the background well I was going to say something about the mutual a decision this is a party in fact i'll get over that also pass on then to 23 with the formalin strength of the concept of right that business trains were a good example and they amplify the idea of how to achieve is no position in corporates major with the strengths on arguments for principal adjustable these conditions are under condition with ensure that the parties have to assess triples and agree to them from suitably general point of view so renekton as they are money in strength on an organist and today illustrate this general point which is behind a lot of what's going on chapter three and four reputation of original position now all of these particles spirits are more familiar except possibly for publicity might just call your attention about that it's introduced here and this isn't clearly enough explained in the text as a relative thing given more identified as as the one of the five that's not my sake often to stress it is education that is lay down on on arguments for litter full pistols but Isis a four principles of justice for the basic structure that are going to be part of a clinical connection rights only hold for those of which may be a quite different thing I think is quite I'm saying that they go for moral principles generally whatever the Walton that would be much broader application of this poor condition aiming up need to say that so only saying what the heck said and I think in the case of clinical institutions it's not an unreasonable condition the various political institutions exercise and had behind him the power to stake and have the exercise from inoculum david sensor of force and saw within the law and it is desirable and the right the wipeout it would be reflected in our region with conviction it does and the principles is damn behind in public and capably comes March you might say that if the crystals stick under my medical institutions and have the operator publicly known if people have a session in various away from there pointing with the addition so on and where's our conditions that I won't try to mention out to make my table that would be a society without ideological carpenters in marks of sense where I take audiological consciousness the name false they're in some way defected from the stand point either of NATO illness or nationalities attempt about the music we might say that public principles that the conception justice on and operate and deep detective that condition is necessary requirement if biological consciousness in morn consensus to be avoided so I think it will turn out publicity is important condition and had interesting consequences and the fact is that the parties have to assess principles have been going to agree to in terms of the consequences of being publicly recognized and mutually accepted by members of society and so on voice contracts is that some principles might work okay if it was just a case if nobody knew that those would be crippled with were being applied or the education lattice but here they have to the work work okay even 11 has this public knowledge if their reasons that people dead and the praise their institutions in provider so that the only point I think which needs me I'm sorry call to attention great go on to the veil of ignorance 24 now the Earthlings textin start the opening sense of the section may be that the idea that OB is to set up a fantasy so that the principles of grief you were just in a sense that we've already covered in and to the earlier part of that 21 so I'll stress again that in this section you get the idea of the invisible position as incorporating drinks on arguments so the same right here is here repeated take a bourbon three and one now many questions about the original position into themself if we keep the diff forth use in in mind and remember ever I suggested that you could view it as characterizing a reasoning yeah what we're doing characterizing how certain people would reason in line with certain strengths so few that is the reason again now suppose we do that then one might ask questions like well is it an assembly is it an assembly at one llama of time of all talking through this would be arrived at at any moment apart or is it a 6 mb of all possible persons or something then you want to say no Christmas you might say well when can we enter it but when do we enter it you say well when do we enter or play the game a game like monopoly when can I be owned a room boardwalk and Park Place circle well we played a game of the not ray something right now so another thing we can simulate this position or anything in the sense that if we reason of which somebody or even we imagined when reflecting it for ourselves in light of these little strength negative sense they can say we're in that position if we figured at reflecting in this form this vigil for Madam's vigil for months thinking of the imagery that is provided okay then if you think of as invasion again that's a way of answering certain questions and sustain that way for if one says well how could I reason half of the party reason if they didn't know who they were think they separate them and need using your that source so well they're suffer from and media then who knows what else might go on wall so happy and say well that's all irrelevant just like so many questions to what might be the cake that other ruled your ass Apollo I mean I am boardwalk park place so for destroy all those might be transformed in all kind of ways and sounds like if I got into that thought my name is Lando and stuff well oh that's irrelevant like don't think of it if you make it to take it to realistically in other word gigabit in this other way and think what the incident might be well I mixed I think it's three o'clock our Jets Iceland rationality part I think that's the only thing needs to be said but I really try to do so it's only a bad just account of primary goods which we haven't been yet mention anything about price I talking about that um I guess on Friday is the important thing is just if it's Jenna climber good if not going to be sickly and the TechSoup of TJ very clear breakfast nice try to get up since it's not purely psychological account it doesn't depend on what people happen to want on the various circumspect it depends in part on psychology but a very important element of it is that we can see of the person's represented I created equal person and so primary roads are going to be kind of things that pretty equal person we and creating that free and equal person in general I have to have if they're to carry out a most any conception of the good within a wide range and so importantly there will be the kind of thing exactly two principle of justice or themselves activated for provision for so many point actually is Jessica primary are going to be connected in part but some conception personal stance complete background with the need the status of citizens as such persons so it will not be purely a psychological theory but primary goods are going to be connected in secular person is designed the part of a clinical perception objections so again that sensor will be virtually belongs in the broad sense of moral philosophy and to clear the closet in particular not good psychological
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John_RawlsModern_Political_PhilosophyLecture_23_audio_only.txt
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I won't be able to pair of hands out the machine so if I will hand it out 31 what we will do as I mentioned national last time notice a number of people seems somewhat shocked I thought it couldn't come with a dreadful product that the damn question it will hand out ahead of time and the following scent will be about 12 / 11 question and those who I think will make those available since like a waffle day on monday may set and take it with you may not so we're hanging out at that time and this a lovely 12 of those an example did something like the questions will be divided up into groups some sort safe three groups of four or they might be and they'll be say eight questions on example maybe after NASA forced one to meet group or something like that and then you go to a probability theory chances I won't worry about that anyway that's the idea of how it would be and will be no surprise is on the question of this thing to try to make them a gentleman up so they take into account all the things we talked about but possible the idea of that is focus your study on six quarts of things so you don't have to worry about trying to read you might be asked and I think that works really well but since i have never been it okay well now you call the other day that we were discussing what I would call the second fundamental compassion and I mentioned today that I would bring in fourth kind of consideration divider mentioned last time I was dressed in with some time works on the sheet considerations of publicity and reciprocity and the impossibility of getting some preclude purposes definition or justification of the notion of utility and I said that the day I was going to say something about the for consideration that it's self respect I down after that I will really get to that very much over it today I'm sort of recent communication how that might go but in any case I hope to their will add something about it and and I should say all of this is doing today is really in a way to get creative and somewhat extract but essentially what I'm doing it's just sort of going over and pulling your attention to some of the main themes in section 79 which fo perhaps i'll be able to make some clearer then was done in the text so what I want to do that opposes bring two things first to explain the idea of society as a social union of social unions and to indicate that place of this idea the role of it and just experience the conception and second what I would like to do is any k dad and will not be able to say very much about is to connect this idea Oh society with the idea of respect for persons and of the notion of self-respect wish I take in the form of that and I won't be able to say no fuss about those notions of quiet today and then he potentially actor one had done that comment on half those considerations are related to the kinds of things that are you saying and the second fundamental comparison as to why the two principles justice and particularly in particular the difference principle would be adopted a rather than the principle of constrained pillows now I begin with some background comments on idea of societies of social union of social Union we call this dress done have given to the reclamation and Wars of Religion and after that the gradual acceptance of principle toleration as one of only one of the main origins of what I'm calling negative now we have assumed that I have some within a modern democratic date a plurality of concessions which are to lick thing and team to mental but that is conceptions of the good are bound to exist and hence that as eye patches in last time with social unity and mana democratic state cannot be founded on acceptance of some single comprehensive conception of good bye comprehensive inception of the good i mean for example na nun motion by primary goods which is a very partial conception thought I mean kind of conception of a good to this involvement some for exam a moral conception religious exception with add some guiding principles organizing our like full life the planet and I mean by potential conception and we can't do this in modern state face unity on unless of course it is supported by the autocratic power and Misha case but one might say by definition ciety would not be democratic might think of for temple ii easily Inquisition the middle age now it is against this background that did I have assume that a reasonable basis for social unity is provided by the idea of society as a fair system of cooperation between citizens regarded as free and equal persons and as normal and fully cooperating members of society over a complete lie thus as we noted last time the very end and a 10-place read that social unity and the reward society of Justices fairness disbanded on a conception of Justice and not on a full-time offensive in section first now this you may at first seem very or even third that perhaps one can accept the loss of social unity founded on a full inception of the good say as it was done on my exposing world my latest but perhaps one can accept that and severely reconcile ourselves to divide the social world but it is nevertheless we might be able to divide a social world and even if we recognize if there is no acceptable alternative since you Jackie autocratic useless mistake powers is worse nevertheless them like they brought the sense of loss predominate so the question arises is this sense of loss in etiquette is there some happier possibility that one may be overlooking is it just a suggestion something that the notion of the side of the socially in English but taxes there is a happier possibility and therefore we oughta consider mr. justice as those among other considerations that we evaluate them in terms of how far they laugh for a mighty encourage this possibility of course I'm thinking now the various alternatives on the list have a small list of sense worker than the second unwelcome prior to that's actually within this framework the tourniquet now what's being suggested in 79 section sir is it the snapper possibility it's out of a well-ordered society it's a social union of social unions and I want to explain this like you as it appears and not but I might make before I do that a few comments on what I take to be a part of this idea I was not something that I didn't better been around a long time I think the origin of it is in great German room with a idealism 18 or 19 centuries one finds it con table fish and showing sushi our humble and in many respects one finds anymore also wanted to find clear traces of the side upon whose rights are my point of view and anyway sort of an actual wonder in which so many things that are not only nationally but fruitful are found they just appear for the first time there's no doesn't seen it the preparation for them and they appear all places my brother digital city turning store where i was going to hearing that backward there it is so at any rate facts would be more one place first if again I think table must've read the idea reversal history remember these essays well to my knowledge I prefer to them because they're such a strong resemblance between a lot of things that says well though perhaps the clearest statement Lisa I mean it would fun of this idea of social unit is in the quotation that I get from fonte humble although there are because i have said playing traces of it i think these other records for a time I thought that there was my must be somewhere a clear statement of it Mars that a nascent visions the early right for example of philosophic economic forward for notes on James mill and so on and while I think the idea of motion of society episode 2 m's is often present more at some point I don't think it's always explicit and sometimes interpretation of it is and vigorous doesn't have the same sense that it is I think clearly given humbles the what section 79 trying to do my safe is do just that that is to say to so that explicitly and without ambiguity the idea our society has a social union of social unions and this involves the position this idea the motor ideas other interpretations that might be here's with that and the second thing that section 79 attention do is connect this idea with it in section of a just society has also a good society that is to say that the total system of social institutions and citizens participation in them is a complex our entire complex social activity that is it's so good and that this complex social activity that it is a good can be seen from how conceptions of the good are gradually built up in justice as fairness that if you have very much the same building up process within this view that I mentioned some time back when you talking about cops categorical imperative that it would begin within those primary routes and the idea is original position and then we end up with principal justice and we also begin also with a notion of people having a conception over good although the parties they don't know what that is no ticket reception plays any role then we move on to having principles of justice which are presumably then let's say adopted and that will give us after we had those on board and a concept of permissible conceptions of the good that misconceptions is are compatible with the principles of justice and then effort we had those that we can build with other notions we can build up the notion of marley good character as if fine by the virtues justice and i call those of cooperative virtues and those will be the properties of people that is Rembrandt national for each member of society he want everyone else to happen because they would help to sustain organize and to actively advance the scheme of cooperation so we get a kind of kenosha moral hack their limited to these Property Virgins that's the strut science section 66 so we finally end up with it we have build up this sick society as itself good so that summer prowl avenged and the way in which and we're trying to corporate the same idea the way in which an analogous idea we're trying to build something like cuts the realm of ends as a good into a viewer this other time justices Berenson another analog would be boxes on notion of book for coming the society or it isn't plainly the same idea but it's an analogous notion the different thing or one reference of being here is it he thinks of it as a society was so I think in some way beyond justice joseph isn't needed one of those of convictions whereas the world war two sign in this other case hence month among other things on this being the jar in the public consciousness of people add just well so then I'll beginning saying some things on about section 79 so Paul this is see we get with paragraph 3 and 4 and just make a couple of remarks about the notion asst introducer private society which is an analog of a table calls civil society the various agents in private society where whether individuals or association or whatever have their own private ends and these ends are either competing or else are independent of each other but they're not complementary that is there not comprehension in the sense that no one agent benefits directly from the achievement or fulfillment of the ends of any of the other agents mr. film of the ends of other agents isn't safe and end of mine I don't care about good it may be pain may be independent but it's not that sense contravention second feature of private society on just went over to make once there is that social institution as citizens are participation and then is not thought of as good in itself by them that its citizens and associations assess socially and socially typically solely as means to answer my powerful to their private in now we might add two conditions of the dish work to further things to this first we could say that public goods consist largely in those social memes and general conditions are maintained a by the state for everyone to use for their own purposes as their whole purpose general means say think I think um money permit might might have a case example which is mention there's hizmet highways and rehearsing with each person chooses their own destination apart from the others another point that one could make is it's not kind of economic theory exactly very tightly markers or something like that very bright provide and some forms a good example of how one might conceive of society in this way and when this kind of theory the same sort of general form is extended more comprehensively that is to have social institutions work and say is something like an economic theory of democracies why they have also can become of what I had thought by the society war two and made to exemplify the various aspects of that society and while it's not perhaps impossible than saturate theory could allow for a conception of Justice of some sort the rating which I've had dressed by the book it does not conceive of the corresponding of well ordered society as in itself a more comprehensive good so those are few comments about just passing notes of privacy now make some marks about the concept of human nations or very general observation I think that the idea of society as a social union of social Union so it depends on something sexual in nature and I'm not just rushing paragraph 5 and 7 of section 79 paragraph 5 ones against understanding the social nature of human beings in a trivial fashion and I mentioned this because one often hears this trickle fashion uttered as if it's something the funded some sort of us why I mentioned for example if one says that society is necessary for human life or that it is only by living in society that we acquire particular interest and desires and it's only in society that able to satisfy these desires by cooperating over others or another thing if it is said that it's only in society that wire the capacity to think and talk and it's only in society that we can acquire some knowledge of how even to describe by the interest and in soldiers over my hat and so forth is very elaborate make all of those are trivial ways of interpreting what say humans sociability what that would mean but the implication of these facts it's certainly not trivial but I think to use them to characterize the social nature human being is trivial in this sense that no sensible person denies it is bad if I believe that so I can't imagine anyone denying me back that sense no sensible person coming tomorrow so perhaps in some ways they overlooked and don't take me to a conf I don't think still so in that sense they are truisms and what indicates that could all these facts are true also of the members of private societies and is it would resume and has any kind of people if they talking so forth oh it will be true of them as well so I don't think this motion provides junket way of characterizing sociability now what happens in paragraph six again just drawing on these four old emotions around a long time is that 79 then in this paragraph begins by specifying they can the social nature human things if I contrast with how tax rising private society so we say first that human being had four can have shared final ends and I might explain what I mean by a shared finally a final end is of course something that is good in itself and to say that it shares name two people have it to look ready one in this case I had has it and the thing to emphasize is that people have the bird to say in identically the same not they had the same kind of them they have identically the same thing we might say that players again come share the final end that they all perform good on the good and fair play of the game that's a shared final end or that some cooperative activity he's done well maybe players of the Supreme Court have identical the same image they want to put on a good performance of whatever quartet is identically the same thing among the ship final man this is some a different point are the social institutions in a well-ordered society and the public activities by which these institutions are sustained and carried out their worship but basically we we want to make some analysis between all that activity and the shift vinyl and for example one other things musical performance you see this somewhat maybe while I were engaged I'm speculation here but one huh now and basic feature them how human makes here on this very old idea as it oh it is as opposed to say a native animals all the practice is some matter of degree 3 it's such a great difference a forever mine is that none of us can do that is none of us can train and educate ourselves to do everything that we might do but we might say our own potentialities at each individual person but for HC what we could do in any one life taking normal family that would be something about each individual and a fortiori since our potentialities different from the potentialities of other people we cannot do everything that everyone else can do or make it so even more in this case our potentiality for full or short of the potential as a whole now these are again are true it I don't think anyone would deny this and what they imply is that each of us must select in some way which of our abilities and powers and possible interest we want to encourage or else we live a relief this to happen perhaps it's all right to some degree chance and circumstance an opportunity but in a break there is question of how that selections of may and occurred now the importance in the truisms in this characterizes idealist view is that they that they may allow the suppose they do allow wait for a possibility which social institutions human cooperation of the sustained may try to realize and do what they can to encourage naming possibility the different person with similar or complementary colors and they cooperate so to speak in realizing and in bringing to fruition their share identical potentialities that has to be the case or else if the potentialities differ but they are suitably complimentary or else a match then they could try to realize those so the idea is that that the fruition of our shared identical nation is enjoyed by all who share in this nature it is after all ours and similarly when our potentialities are suitably complementary with those of others and when they make possible an activity that none of us could carry out by ourselves then we enjoy the exercise and the display filmato potentiality the other even though we're cells are not realizing those in our own person so the provided that we are secure in compton in the exercise of our public rome powers and can simply preciate and enjoy the powers of others no I'm starting if we are secure and confident exi the back of their own path that the enemy can enjoy the exercise of powers of others and the way in which they contribute to what I have done for the activities in which we take part of which we could form all by herself so that would be one notion of set emotions that won't have to have in the bank so now one says it is the role of the principal de justice in one word society of justice fairness to establish the background social conditions for us to be secure and confident in this way and so to extend the possibilities of mutual appreciation and enjoyment over society full of course if it's a case that the conflict between conceptions of the good in societies or as full comprehensive conceptions in society when that conflict is sufficiently deep and hostility it pervasive this extension not possible but the idea of society has a social unit of social unions at mace enables us to conceive how this extension could take place within appropriate kind of World War II society so what we're now doing actually is to engage the kind of exercise of political pagination from a moral point of view and trying to see how something might be possible and we were trying then to conceive a possibility sir possibility which might overcome or which might reduce if it were achieved the sense of loss when social unity can no longer be established on a shared and comprehensive conception of the book listen what distinguishes the idea was a tradition in this respect is calling attention to the possibility of social union one describing and the place with the diff possibility has in its inception of society or in justice fairness of the conception of what this possibility has and its conception of the core funding groundwater society so the idea is that one to conceive possibility that a democratic society of Mel water by the two principal justice can be for each citizen a formal comprehensive good and the determinant good of individuals when left to their own devices or my little bear mower associations participation in this more comprehensive good can greatly enlarged and sustain these other things other determined because it doesn't substitute largest sustained so the good social union would be most completely realized when everyone participates in this good but a kind of ordinance circumstances you must want to put forth is it made on a few through that but the aim would be to extend that possibility of far as possible now the various examples ancient of this motion the quotation from Humboldt against 7900 puttin up so I want to mention that right along when I pass over it but I might begin with an illustration what is in it putting out others I here dant is considered a group of reacted of musicians all of whom have the same talents and all who could therefore have learned to play equally well let's say every instrument in the orchestra by non training practice they have become highly efficient on their adopted insulin recognizing that human limitations require is that they can never sufficiently skilled on any influence and much less of course play them or at once because in this special case in which everyone's unnatural talents are identical the group achieved by coordination of activities at the month peers among equals the same fatality capacities hatin and east pratt Ranaut's a musical capacity so that no capacity that anyone has goes unrealized by somebody maybe not quite he's person all but by the group as a whole but even when these natural musical gifts are not equal they may different person person a similar result can be chief provided these gifts are suitably complementary and properly coordinated in each case in my fate persons and another sense it is only an active cooperation with others that anyone attack can be realized and then large part by the efforts goes all so then say the domain activities of social Union can an individual the grill now if this example of the orchestra is a example a social Union but we may consider other examples and here i need one more emphasized that again i've already mentioned it the shared final interests do exactly the same thing and make this kind of progress 985 when you say house kick over that but somewhat gratis small-scale example which has it that bandage obtained from ordinary life is example of games animation there that in the case of a game there are four kinds of ends of when my Seder at the end defiant by the rules of the game the object of the game and then there they aims and rather different things the players have different motives support each of them will will presumably from I have different motives with playing the game some for exercise some excitement so forth will not be acceptable and the mighty some such purpose in the game which perhaps if players don't know but some observing aunt I for someone else in society but in any case there would be shared and that everyone would want to put on and perform a fair and good play of the game Babacan talking about someone I do basically but I think it one thinks that the good game it does have those properties this is a game in which they're all doing it for money they're all the third cut each other's Grothe I can see it so for elaborate also I think they want to see the or conceiver interpret the government of the traditions in our sonic for example alone very much the same idea say night-night philosophy even that way missing link to mention here's this would be a case of cooperation over time and get the idea of from one generation to the next and it was an ocean common on the idea what you find it we caught a lot of other people that generations over time see in cooperating to realize the various of potentialities of human beings in art and culture and sore and one of them might even introduce here on the way which I interpret it as an example this notion over quite different some respect why I turreted the third class on marks name his ideas d she's bidding and what's easy to prohibited was so finally then we arrived a lot of time total power in any case I think I'll communicate an idea at the well-ordered society of Justice factors as social unit social units now we begin by supposing that this society includes a within it within its framework of basic structure many social unions at various times identified for Santa by little kinds of things above what enables us to say that the world Society of Justice's fairness is a social union is this is a team or they say it's itself a social Union so its social of social games is it is a more comprehensive social Union including or within it all the social unions that nachricht if ities basis and there will be two features here that won't have in mine first deriv big is shared and authentic final land that all citizens had to belong to this world or societies citizens that can save ad credential persons and this shared final end is that the institutions of the basic structure the jaws that everyone treated justly and everyone to their part and sing a desk so again prepare players and it again wanting it to put on a good and fair play of the game so they given citizens sense of justice and their agreement on the very same principles of justice and the priority that they assigned to these principles they all have the same in and moreover it is a file into which they give very big weight it is not what might say merely one final end among others the fragment things that would say is that when a provider way in which citizens I can promise to principles of justice from a sense of justice can be understood that if they're doing that can be understood as an element in realizing citizens good here we suppose that we give in the psychology which I haven't said anything about in this class of the art kidding transporters gumption involvement but given that one can say that part of a person's good is the realization and exercise are the various powers once these powers are educated and developed and this good will be greater other things equal when Nick powers are more complex and cola fun more subtle and discriminated skill so you might say throwing that is among citizens powers are the tomorrow but is there since justice and that a state where conception of which powers are realized in their successful pursuit of an international planet light or way of life and Valerie's Society of the sort and one of the among the principles that organizes and is formed to that way of life there will be an affirmation of principles of justice and also that citizens have the capacity of being created equal persons and of being able to cooperate together and graduate having fun in all powers in a young society which is understood as a system their cooperation over a complete lie thus if one accepts the psychology or something like it of the are pretending principle and their other hospitals way to understanding this of accepting that psychology that the exercise of this mall power public private life is part of good members of society what does that then one can understand how all these social activities can be good and the principles of justice of what helped to organize and determine the general dynamics of the form of life for these people so the crucial question now becomes I sacrifice I would end up in midair some point and guess what I'll have to do become the first time is that would be it will rain room returns to this second fundamental comparison question is do the two principles of justice with the difference that's the focal point of this comparison or do does the principal constrained utility which ADIZ is more appropriate to the idea of society social gaming social Union and Mason rich conception of Justice that would be more effective in encouraging the possibility of such a society so I would just make them afraid only had time for somewhat general statement may be that I believe that house effective principals must be recognizably connected with some conception of citizens are created equal person and that yes conception of citizens should be implicit in the content of these principles in one way they should be stated and the conveyed that is enough notion would be nonsense of convey their face also I believe the principles of justice of glucose acquire as principal to the basic structure must contain an idea of reciprocity appropriate to citizens of free and equal persons and I have made a suggestion number 10 by that kind of derivation beginning from people dig that that principle compressed prostate would be for the doc that idea would be given by the difference principle he faces a tirado not satisfied then it's not harder for citizens in to regard the richness and diversity of society's public culture as the result of everyone's at cooperation for mutual good nor can they appreciate this culture as something that the which each can contribute and in which is 10 participate and I think if you think about that I would suggest that principle that is or bodies the idea of mutuality breast prospered was able to sustain that whereas the tape like contract principles drained utility think of what utility means and standard of an aggregated located one aggregates the satisfaction of individuals over all individuals one of some estimation it doesn't embodied in itself the matrix emotion of reciprocity at any rate that's the kind of argument that one would try to make and then of the important addendum to that one who want to introduce notions of respect and self respect and explain how they also were connected with emotion of reciprocity and his other ten schools and someone on its way but I don't have time to do that and I know that very well try to dedicate for what the main idea
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John_RawlsModern_Political_PhilosophyLecture_22_audio_only.txt
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this is the second we can survive it isn't anywhere think so yes this factory workers everyone else hears is a lot i did you know mate ok well it's actually notice on the sheet of topics that we've had to go over we're not going to be able to do everything so had to make some decision about how to cut it short and I'll say something like that in a moment but i think i'm going to resist the temptation to say more about the topic of marks on justice that we haven't talked about it has to leave it way was somewhat of a suspended in midair but i hope i was able to give some idea crawls it raises i hope it will think about that undoubted there will be questions i find wanted to call the Keynesians a special are given here sometime doing very well I won't go into that now then tension that on the Friday the last day but we'll go into that the way I'm going to Percy is to is today so it's someone to it into the fact of this topic as a people to talk about anywhere money to get here harass gadget I thought when I was doing the call a while back we discussed it over i called the first fundamental photography and that was a comparison between justice and the principle of averages tilt and in that a connection the particular problem was try to show where first of all the quality of faces maybe these came from and it prior so one focus on that comparison and attempt to show that and we just so I've told the argument from this riginal position is that general idea in mind now that command that comparison is just that to Crystal doses would be adopted rather than the principal Batra to tilt the fact we're the only principal question now suppose that that argument is corrected who has the chosen or would be 32 with that outcome that that fat does not give very much support to the difference principle itself it only shows that the difference in school makes a safe more or less adequate provision for general all purpose means and I think it those who say nee coming welcome a way to indexing it makes adequate provision of these all-purpose means in order people to enjoy their basic rights and liberties but it may be that there are other principles that are superior on that camp so on why not them to look into that so in order to explore this question what I'm supposed to do on this hand to go over over all of it to get the general idea is that want to discuss a second fundam fundamental comparison in which the two principal de justice are paired with other principles that are exactly the same except that the different principle is replaced by the principle of average utility that is maximized that is utility over the members of society subject to there being a suitable social and maintain so that's the other principle NVR comparative so that this conception and requires that the principle of average utility of be maximized subject to the constraints of these various three prior prisons as we might that is the first that's both equally it's a very quiet opportunity and this idea addresses Social are maintained and I will refer to the misconception is the principle of constraint he killed drained by all these other other of emotions now this conception that the two pistols are being paired with that makes again I make a fundamental comparison because if the two principles are favored in this case then it would appear that they would be favored in any conception in which the principle of utility had a reasonably prominent place this is what we're doing is we first take the case that's fairly straightforward where the emphasis falls on the equality priority and tryna maintain basically let me go to another comparison where we're now using it in this that is it principal utility in a more restricted to any way and if it knows without that comparison to then it would seem this is great with arguments just something i should say it would seem as it is not going to be prominent and principal and conceptions of political justice that I see idea of calling these to fund of fundamental comparisons now wanted to say something about the nature of this argument at this point and to make some comments about publicity needed note that if we use the maximum rule to organize parties of deliberation and the second of comparison only the first and the third conditions of that rule of pain I mean I'm sorry only first and a second of pain the first you called the ones that we discount probabilities or estimates of probability because it parties don't have to make sure that the snack room was of course to love with the conception that had the highest security level and the third which is not whole is to avoid those conceptions that have outcomes that are intolerable acceptable now suppose we agree that the third position doesn't obtain this segment entire suppose black and spanish the principle of utility by these three prior min suppose the worst possibilities have been eliminated so we can't argue in terms of all great together so the result is that the argument turns mainly on the designer ability of the two world wars societies the first one corresponding to the two principal justice the second one corresponding to what I've told the principal of constrained utility so we are to imagine it and what the parties do is to tend to work out which of these well ordered society is preferable from the perspective of the original position that's what do it a lot of the considerations of course that we introduced on earth I'd expected but that's inevitable on any of you okay so fix ideas you might suppose that the argument is it presented in terms of three considerations the first would be the requirement publicity the second is the idea of reciprocity which is implicit implicit in the idea of society as a system of their cooperation and thirdly will be the impossibility I shank of any very well honored by this book though she has suggested impossibility of specifying a veritable conception of utility for a conception of political justice and emphasizing political justice so maybe Portugal conceptions of other purposes perhaps a for the theory of the household or something like that mom but I did not for the purposes of little justice and we'll take these kind of freaking dishes together and I'll make comments on the last one at then next time your thing I'll do on Friday is an introduced a fourth consideration those that are facial emotion self-respect and in order to give some sense of that I will develop the notion and set a time allowed of the idea of society as a social union of social unions and the way in which the two principles justice help to make that possible and in order to understand that it was just that you look at section 7 or not which is important to this indeed all sections timely 8n line and some of them rider sections in chapter 9 but particular section 79 now the transport I'm sorry the notion of publicity recall is one of the formal conditions that introduced and applies to all thin sections over typical justice is your panties on page 133 now let's constrain it requires or this formal condition requires the parties when they are considering principles of justice to assume that these principles belong to what I have threat called a public conception of political justice where Republic I mean that all the principles are are in fine known and recognized by people and we are concerned with always mythical justice so that the parties are to assume that all citizens except and know that the others except the same principles of justice and that this knowledge is in turn publicly recognized the parties are also to assume and ask themselves of more after what happened when the basic structure satisfied with these principles and citizens have a good reasons for this so what they are to try to do is take into account the effect of this sort public knowledge that medicine half of the principles of the parties except in the original position now it's also implicitly what I just said that we are all we are to assume as part of any agreement you need a visible position that the parties agree on certain methods of inquiry and they agree on certain ways of reasoning to be followed when questions of political justice arrive they exceed an amazing for this is that we might agree on certain principles of justice or whatever but if we don't agree on how evidence is to be collected and how we are to evaluate evidence with whether or not they are satisfied or what consequences they apply and certificate paces then we don't have really a helpful agreement other words if people are going is some people are going to have a let's say have a bizarre we're going to ask Oracle's how the principles should be applied and others say no we have to consult past experience and clerical evidence that we might gather the common sense you don't ask your articles to go this other way if they can't agree about how this evidence and application list will be done by then they don't have a workable agreement yet so someone is standing on on how principles are to be applied and how the evidence is to be assessed for the consequences so forth is a very important matter and therefore i'm assuming that all we have it actually in the nation at that point of the four so what does assume that there is some agreement on those matters now the point then of the publicity condition is to require the parties to assess in sections of litical justice as public exceptions and everything like that why so I have to assess the consequences of the public knowledge among citizens that these principles are accepted and so on now the idea here is that is it the maybe first principles which work well not so long as they are not publicly recognized taxi I just follow people may not be aware they're following or there may be no public recognition of this fact and so forth but which when they are made public and they are using public traditions interpretations of institution has various psychological and other consequences indeed they may have horrible and destructive consequences and that's a relevant point on the other hand there may be other principals quite different possible the desirable features of which may importantly derive from the fact that they are publicly recognized and that they are used in the public traditions of the interpretation of political institutions for example by something like take an obvious example something like this Supreme Court and interpret the Constitution right between affect both princes over by the year that are in this sense public I moreover a one has to take account the fact that citizens in edina exerciser it was anything I learn to configure themselves with regard themselves as say free and and and equal citizens or for that matter in other ways by the principles that are public and that are used in the case of political justice in their society and base concepción then how people regardless though are I think importantly learn and acquire they fought through the youth as public for the principles that resets the idea so that's where that's an important iteration and to get ahead of it the general idea is that the principle of average utility human strength has been made public principal certain undesirable consequences or at any rate not to take me desirable consultation we're at the different principle when is public has it are the consequences and indeed many desirable consequences of depend upon being used as a public protocol principle and understood in that way so I'll make a few comments about the idea recipe reciprocity that simplicity as I mentioned before the texts and an idea that is important and it entered in because we start from the idea the most fundamental idea that a basis of society to this affair system of cooperation between citizens you can see 300 person so that the idea of a cooperation lose the idea of their terms of cooperation and the idea for terms of cooperation includes an idea of the reciprocity or you two are 0 each will benefit or something of that sort by contrast I think that the principle of average utility in whatever form includes no such an idea it is a maximizing aggregated principle with no inherent tendency to either the quality or to reciprocity and any sex tendency in practice a would depend on the consequences of applying that principle institutions and these were those particular circumstances there isn't any inherent tendency Britta happens that result although we might do so depending on particular cases so we might reserve in a small anyway how the notion of the reciprocity might enter into the medium of parties in their original position the parties know in this second a comparison which is what i always had mine the parties know that persons that they represent regard themselves as free and equal persons in a democratic society and make that assumption because the fire principles that constrain the pursuit of a baggage utility a require a regime of that sort I'm making that some so that both alternatives in this comparison of required that sort of society so that from the publicity condition the parties also the big inception adjust as if they agree to must be accessible to citizens who themselves than as free and equal persons and they can session of the person there is of course a political second and not the metaphysical psychological or whatever for simplicity that is to sniff apply the argument that suppose that we just think of the inequalities of this concern with our inequalities in the primary goods of income and wealth alone and we regard the different transport and regulating those inequalities so then say that since the parties are symmetrically situated in the original position we're going to suppose that they take the if they take equal division of income and wealth as the starting point and then they asked well what inequalities and what reasons are going to be acceptable if we start from that position however the idea is that if we think again with our existing representatives of pre an equal persons when the idea is a they imagine that they begin from equal division of these primary roads and there's whether there are good reason for the party from that and what those informations might meet now we discussed earlier the various reasons why any markable foldable conception of Justice must take into account the requirements of social organization and economic efficiency and all those earlier we discussed the difference principle and what it meant so we did a run at the different principle in unnatural way taking equal division at the benchmark those who have gained more or i could do so on terms that are acceptable to those with anything less and if you take where those who gain release and that expresses the idea of reciprocity that is contained in high school and this conception of cold justices bears and we mentioned earlier that it takes a point that is a natural focal point between equality which is represented by the 45 degree line and efficiency now one way that parties are might reason to put it I might get over this I think it's easy nuff but I given on the how they might beginning upon me from equal division stating the same point in somewhat the same way so suppose I go on just come from now brings in for some Elvis of an ocean of publicity what I'm supposing that were done has said so far if a region through why the parties might arrive at the different personal abaya this idea of us prosper so we're going to try to induce another reason and the other reason is an indicator their way is the desirable effects of its public recognition and of public knowledge that it is satisfied and well-ordered society requires funds to this view so the idea is that in this more well ordered society there is a sis there is a certain harmony of the interesting social interest that is ensured by the idea of reciprocity that is implicit in the difference principle that is that all differences in income and wealth are perceived as being in what cold face can be hating and none elsewhere in the realm of positive contributions that is everyone has more is contributing something taking equal vision of the fact mark have less and that that's a way of understanding the power to not the only way but spending but a wave of others day what to notion of social harmony of interest might need and that this of course this is speculation but if the idea that this drinkin social type and reduces socially the visit and type in ism and strength now we can stress this is amazing them more formally by comparing the average utility in our society of Justices Brandis at Point selected by the different principle with the aggregate ility of the well-read society that it corresponds to the principle of constrained utility that the point say on the oakley curve effect some point D which is to the right of high one at some point maybe be prevent them at which average until it is maximized subject to these constraints now if this comparison is first made in terms of average utilities far as evidence till these nuts for evaluate only in terms of well why then the average until he closed the society the corresponding strain really might be higher it might be the higher of the two that is higher than 21 they correspond to different pencil hose that is the case but the idea is it once the effects of the public recognition under effective principals of the to reward societies is taken into account then the average of Philip II of the world society that corresponds with the two principal gossip and a difference thankful would turn out to be higher than the average utility of the Society of his dream and the explanation for this with me that citizens on balance I would benefit from the public recognition of the Hornets social level of horniness social interest which is established by the different principle images of proceed and then the absence of the revision so forth in public life that presumably result on this time regulation that one is made so the initial asthma Oh of averages filled with the world Lord society corresponds with the principle of constraining utility were then full or decrease efficiently once these other kinds of grounds are taken into account that the parties are balanced since they have to take into magnet of the interests of both the more and the nation vantage and the happiness that partially they would then agree on the difference principle and the idea would be that you generalize these kinds of argument you try to find other cases where you can say somewhat the same kind of thing and the case that I will go into a bit more on Friday pace of self-respect with a high end with the notion ciety of association and how the two principles of justice wouldn't make that possible don't say that could shake the likely budget language could make it possible now as a final point third consideration that i mentioned at the beginning was that and although i can't go into is that the concept of utility i think is unworkable to use that in any extended way in a conception of political justice I'll try to make a few observations about this so they argument that the making so far is an a concession because what fairness of would maintain is that the idea of utility understood as the fulfillment of a person state final end and interest cannot be used press apply a veritable principle of political justice in modern democratic society and this is because I think of the plurality of conceptions of the good that are espoused and that are followed in that kind of the fact it's also involved in the fact that these inspections of a good argument clicking and they're in commissionable now of course have in mind that none of the things that we call these sections of the good are ready they just moral and philosophical views about how like this we live and so forth and various bank account it's good and because that's so it's impossible to establish within a political concession again I keep their sizes that a reasonable basis for interpersonal comparisons that is it's just I think not possible on the comprehensive is say to arrive in any estimate issues of use for political purposes whether or not people are happier having certain kinds of religious views or not one might have opinions on them or whether people are happier having a certain kind of philosophical or moral views or not making up as always with some confidence in section of the good I don't think it would be possible to get agreement on the degrees of happiness will write wellness human life the cross all those their conceptions on political basis and the reason I think insist is that a political conception of Justice involves some public agreement as to which claims on social resources are legitimate it also involves snow agreement but at the helmet strength different claims are ahead and people are than likely to recognize these grace of these flames on the political basis only if making share has some understanding of that avoid hype these claims are being swings and a half oh and some agreement as to what this account as good for political purposes now I believe that the kind of at the only time that can set a section of a good that will prove workable there's one that one might say is partial conception that is to say a construction of the good are the kind that I had described here occasionally as based on the notion of primary goods and basic idea which I will fill out some on Friday and which I had felt elf at elsewhere an article for social unity and primary good i will put on the service and library and elsewhere you are interested in that is it that we develop the view that certain kind of all-purpose means for objective features of social institutions are the kinds of things but if we regard people as we regardless in the political conception of the person that people as citizens but will then need so among the primary goods will be the basic rights and liberties there will be opportunities and no big things like one Jose income and wealth and also things that will track right on Friday the social basis of self-respect and those kinds of things I then can be identified objectively as teachers of institutions or as all-purpose means for fulfilling all kinds of in saying on any kind of end but for almost all kinds of ends and presumably everyone needs those and so they can be defined it as the needs of citizens within the state partial inception good we don't have to have any agreement about not evaluate and hannah has said all these exceptionally good in any confidential so the argument that for something like primary good as opposed to some kind of interpersonal declares that you have had on an 82 apparently is it the latter proves to be I think not workable not done one cannot back little green on it within a society in which you had a variety of flipping and implementable conceptions of the good so the result is I think that within a democratic date of this kind that social social unity needs to be based in the first instance on some political deception justice not on a comprehensive ocean of good well that's the end of the time that's all stop but don't miss it the energy quite a complicated subject is quite important and I think in one way and make tea dated black it was too accommodating respect which should carry it out blending detail oh yeah
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John_RawlsModern_Political_PhilosophyLecture_5_audio_only.txt
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which we are to for next week and here and I'll talk about that actually week from today because it's callay on Monday so it will get behind but if we get any further behind I'll have to make it up sometime the but if you don't have that you be copies available upstairs is it c um come to my office okay to dany's office he don't have copies of it there that's six six upstairs in the first floor immediately after CL and then on the next Friday I'll talk about the parts in the in the inquiry that were assigned and also a that essay of of the oral concept well last time you call and I'll summarize that very very brief because I didn't want to get on I was attempting to formulate what I call social compact Criterion of the legitimate form of government and the idea was that when begin with st nature and a state of equal rights and then through this series of agreements which he describes in the trus one eventually arrives at Social contact as he calls it and then there is a compact of society that the first go and the compact of government and I'll talk about that in a moment and the latter is actually is a compact which I'll mention but it's a Act of fiduciary Trust on the part of the people now the idea is that for a regime to be legitimate LX view has to be such that beginning in this state of equal right which is to state of equal political jurisdiction now and that you have to keep in mind because it allows for a society and various forms like families and tribes and so on and even tribal band it's not about political jurisdiction that it must be possible through this series of agreements to Contracting it without being irrational putting noone's life anywh in Jeopardy or without viting any of the duties that one has and there are a variety of those that one has under the fundamental law of nature now for Lots purposes to be called of his purposes to argue against Memorial Asis so not for the idea is if you take all of those conditions that I that are attached onto these agreements in order for them not to violate any of the duing that they have under or for them not to be rational they go through those then the way in which he described absolutism of the kind of he's objecting to is going to be thrown out um and the has if his premises are correct more arguments than he needs that is he's uh believes that today the nature is worse than being subject to an abolute mind so if you're rational you're not going to agree to submit yourself to an abolute monarchy or any form of abute arbitary power and then and there other restrictions so if we go through it will turn out that aism in the form which he's attacking it gets thrown out by these restrictions so we can say it could not be contracted into with we without that framework now that imposes various constraints on theate form of regime or Constitution and how the powers that can be related within it but that I'm on the idee and I will do this extremely briefly because under the other point is only part of the account of our political obligation that is this more uniter which we have discussed is that of the for of regim and then there's another part of loot view uh who makes how particular individuals become bound to particular regime and this has been a Criterion not on the form of regime now but the conditions under which individuals become Bal with and the main discussion of this is in chapter 8 of beginning of political societies beginning you called the initial part of that is paragress 95 to 99 then beginning of paragra 1002 paragraph 121 I think it is or two he discusses two objections and then there he distinguishes between rest consent and cic consent now his idea is he's here opposing filmer who believe that people are born into a society and that they are naturally subjected to it as a result of growing up in it and as a result of the passing down of the paternal power which they are born under so they have as were no choice they are bound whereas Mo's view is that although of course one is bound I'm sorry one is Born Into into society as a matter of social fact biological fact and so on one is not obligated through the political institutions until one gives at the Age of Reason some form of consent now it's unclear the form in which is tast whether it's an oath of fidelity to the crown upon inher say the family property or whatever it's not expressly said and there's a distinction between express consent and P consent Express consent incorporates us into society as full member and as a Perpetual or presumably taxic consent does not do this and he makes that point while it's a bit vague what the details are from the text that the point for us that's important is that when you read hum's account of the original contract he gives arguments against unlocks View and you have to ask yourself how effective is K's argument against each of these two parts of lock view as you might think that it's not very effective against the Criterion of the general form of regime but yet think it is effective and highly effective against the idea of individual consent is how indidual become bound to particular regime so that's why I had gone over this question in order to distinguish the two parts or the two things that are discussed namely the just and right and legitimate form of regime and the other is the conditions under which particular individuals become bound to say the regime of England as opposed to the regime of France how does that happen and you want to ask in H's case which of these two and possibly both are his or effed okay then I will go on with this other question uh I want to talk a bit of uh today and it may seem as if I'm getting bogged down in some points of n only theory of constitutions and so on but pension history um I will try to re hang it to Life by at the end sharing the importance of it or at least so I think from a point of view now you recall at the beginning last time I said that a Lo's problem in the second Tre is to formulate or to work out a doctrine of the right of resistance to the crown under a next Constitution as the English Constitution was at that time widely regarded this a sort of accepted view on all sides it's a hex Constitution that this problem as I say arose um doing during the exclusion crisis of 1679 and 81 um the original part of the second CH was written it believe about 79 and 880 and then other chapters that were were added in 81 83 and two chapters added after um James was Theos James second was Theos Willi ofc orange and Harry this room in I think February of 1689 so those parts were add it afterwards but really I men talks about the earlier crisis Now by definition a mixed Constitution is a constitution in which two or more constitutionally defined agents let's say share in and each have a part in What L calls the legislative power that is the supreme power in the constitution is the legislative power and in the case of mix Constitution two or more constitutional agents sharing that power now in the English case of course it's the crown and Parliament so we're only actually dealing with two agents in this case and neither is supreme so we want to say that they are coordinate powers for example the legislation that cannot be enacted without the crowns of consent and the crown must consent to all directives or laws uh that Parliament enacts on the other hand the crown cannot govern without Parliament is depending it depends on that in general the tax monies and is to enforce and has the duty to enforce the laws that problem inact again with the Crown's of consent and it also has the duty to conduct of Foreign Affairs and defense so in mock terminology the crown and the whole combines within itself in this one constitutional agent what call the executive and and Federated power now so in the English case they essentially just these of two agents and we can then we only have to call that two we don't have an independent perhaps in our case a coordinate power of the Judiciary that's the key reality of our system now consequence of there being two coordinate powers and both in a way equal and we can say neither supreme or if we like both Supreme in the sense they can't order each other around with that in the king's case the king's consent what this means is in the case of a long sort of drawn out conflict between these Powers had in a number of times since haven't seen Century there's no constitutional means that is there's no legal framework within which that is within the Constitution for settling the conflict there is no way to do it at law you might say if this conflict persist as it did now filmer had argued against anyone's a denying crowns complete Supremacy precisely on the grounds that if there were conflict there would be no way to settle it so MK is granting filmer point on this there's no way around it so in paragraph 168 he says if there is a conflict of the sort then the people have the right to appeal to Heaven which is a euphemism for for go to war that is Civil War and uh the power then refs to them and they have the right of resistance I'll come for that the moment now I might mention that in our constitution there are devices that tend to prevent this sort of conflict from happening for example suppose we take president in Congress um the elction of4 years means that you don't have a permanent or executive one thing also Congress has a power of impeachment which has been exercised or threaten twice in exercise in the case of Andrew Johnson although didn't past and it tends to make it politically impossible for president to persist over a period of time and a long drawn that conflict of with Congress so I might say that today checks then has this effect and comparable things were not available in the 17th century you had not yet institutionalized these various devices so Mar's problem is to justify existence of the crown in this kind of situ situation now now the source of Lock's constitutional Doctrine the source and thought is a book where at least is belied to be uh a book and many evidences of this uh by man Nam George wson written in 1657 published in 1660 calleda sais that is a sac political law let's say and civil La now when there is a persistent conflict on the M's view between crown and Parliament or between these coordinate Powers the government in itself is dissolved that's laon's view the government in dissolve and all the powers revert them back again to the community as a whole that is the the community that came into existence with the social compact all the political Powers then revert back to the political Community as a whole and the people are then free uh to exercise their Liberty and to establish a new and different form of government with the different powers assigned to various coordinate con constitutional agents or else if they don't do that they can take necessary steps to restore what they believe is the a traditional form of the Constitution which has been violated Changed by conduct of one of the Pres Powers so it was laon's view in this book that actually the English government was dissolved in 1642 so what Mark is saying something analogous to that that it was again dissolved in the course of the exclusion crisis in 798 now the paragraph to on this the word Austin's view dated up for the first time is 149 you want to read great Cas the PPH that follow that uh which describe the coordinate Powers now notice in these paragraphs in1 and 152 Mark is very careful to describe of the crown is having a share iny the careful to describe the crown as Supreme because politically that's the we View and he the except that and the that means he accepting I indicated before the view of next con Constitution and he says that the crown is in a powerful sense uh Supreme 151 now so much for Lock's problem and an indication how he attempts to answer it View and then I'll go into this in some more details now the significance of this for us is the following which I will go on some that later namely that we want to make a distinction implicit in in Lock's View and in aon's view between constituent power and ordinary power uh Now by constituent power I mean the power of the people to determine the form of the Constitution oh it is the power that is exercised by the making of the or placing the political Authority in a certain form of regime not characterizes they legislated as a fiduciary trust and the ACT to placing of that trust in a certain form of regime and they act of determining what the form of regime will be is the exercise of their constituent power now the notion ordinary power will be the power that is exercised by offices of the government say the crown members of parliament any other office of the government but we're concerned primarily the crown and Parliament as they exercise the powers which they're authorized to given the nature of constitution now that's ordinary power so the people have this constituent power and it's to be distinguished from these other powers the ordinary power okay make that and the notion of constituent power and how it's expressed um I'll come back to that's the the important notion well I want to is this clear so well clear not simp um okay I'll make some observations about the social compact I use a term compact that seems to be yes one question I'm a little you mean describe paragraph 151 and 152 where you say lock is careful the proposition that the crown is supreme while a little bit before we talked about how neither well I the problem is how we describe them make it say that they are what lot says there is that the crown is in a tolerable sense Supreme and that it is not re under the Constitution to obey any law or enactment without its consent so it is supreme in the sense it can't be commanded by anybody and when it's own pow the same would be true parli so I think what I said at least I Au said is that they are both in some table sense supreme or you might say that neither is any sense Supreme depending on what you mean by supreme but he's careful there that he uses a phrase in a tolerable sense Supreme the phrase he used uh and he then go and says explains what he means by that is that the king of the crown is not required to obey a law without his consent then this a constitution uh so he's you see granting uh certainment to we sensibilities and also holds this view of the English Constitution also to sensibility but they're not claiming parliamentary Supremacy that's the I say crucial is that yes uh well we use the term compact because that seems to be Mar of preferred term as to cont he sometimes talks about oral contract again um Hing the paragraphs in 95 99 U as examples of what this occur he also talks about political power and I just I as I said being a fiary trust look 149 156 now there are two points about this distinction here that ought to mention one is we want to distinguish between the compact of society in which people are unite into one political Community for the purpose of establishing among them political authorities so that's a compact might say of society and we want to think St from the establishing of political Authority in whatever form the majority shall decide it shall take unless within the social contact with some Proviso that it has to be greater or other than a majority so that action that takes place in the second part will be a fedu will be the exercise of this fiduciary power U and of the cons power interpreted as making aary trust now the thing then to say is that in the compact of sciencey it seems that people make compact with each other and all with each and so forth so it's a compact between the members of the political Community to do something they need to establish political Authority it is not the contact and not a contract is another term not favor term with the government or with the Agents of the government and if not as agents of the government it doesn't make the king for example the compact citizens with each other and there is in fact no such contract contacted government in LW and there isn't in h either but other contract doctrines some sometimes as a talk with a both but here there's only the one contact the concept of Mages power as a fiduciary power the point of that I think is to emphasize the constituent power of the people to emphasize that this act of fiduciary trust is an exercise of that power and that the people always had this right had this constituent power it isn't and cannot be alienated and that in the case of a conflict between the various coordinate agents that it establishes in the form of theim then it is the people who are to judge if that conflict is persistent and a chronic over period of time then the government is is dissolved and then power uh then come back into play and [Music] i68 on this which is the earliest uh time in this Trea over lot gives a clear statement of this um R resistance and also the other aspect involved in the the notion of the power as a p power it connects up with the idea that political Authority is the right of making laws only for the public good says that the very beginning in three since given all of the constraints on parties to the social compact it can not be given uh for any other purpose now I don't know whether I ought to do this I might Ting out kind of what the form of the social compact might be suppose we're imagine ourselves to be sort of loocking constitutional lawyers and we want to write a Social contact what are all the Clauses it might contain and it would be an useful exercise I think to do that um to find out explicitly all the things that we have gone over uh we might say read the people and give some description of who we are perhaps list of names I do here by Compact and we think it just as AAL and express uh consent we hereby compact with one another each with all and all each it's better to unite into more non political Community or political society and we thereby put ourselves each put ourselves under obligation to comply with the loss of political power as defined say in section three political power of the purose of community um for the regulating and the preserving of property and so on and I don't know as I would as I will go through all of this but you can imagine if you we could include everything on the contract in this way um make a list of all your conditions that we have satisfied in doing it like we can delegate more power than we have um we cannot act irrationally so this has to be rational agreement it doesn't violate any any Clauses of or duties that are consequence of fundamental law of Nature and so on I think I'll skip over that um but it's sort of an exercise I believe to try to uh write it down now I'm want to say where two about mck's view was not accepted by the other wigs uh and in fact Mo never admitted during his life uh that he wrote this book um although his friends knew it uh he just assumed that it was not known that he wrote this book it isn't he because to changed his mind he thought perhaps it was not all together safe never knew in England the English were regarded in those days as very unstable people uh and not now we think of them as how and settled down or any rate uh 200 years after that they we regard as a model and longer of stability and and political common sense but in those days there were but that wasn't the picture and Mark was afraid well who knows uh may be different I don't want people know what I said in the past it might be unsafe I don't want to have to flee to Holland again but his view was that Charles II then had violated his trust and it altered the form of the Constitution and therefore the government was dissolved against to power of the Comm brought into play said over that now notice that this view has a rather striking consequence namely has consequence that Parliament is also dissolved if the regime is dissolved the form government is is dissolved and this constituent power RS to the community then Parliament is equally I say politically legally incompetent because the regime as a foreign government is dissolved people are now free to establish a new Constitution and to change the powers of government including it would seem to follow the those who voting for representation in Parliament even even that could possibly now get changed because it's specified by the form of the Constitution now Mark says nothing about the details of of this process that is how does he Enis that this constition power is actually to take place he doesn't give any institutional account of how he supposes actually might be done laon is also vague on this he says something has the idea that it would begin in the county courts and they organized there and would then they presented Des sent uh from there to a parliament now acting in another way now it's sort of something like what we would call the Constitutional Convention but again the details are extremely big I think the reason for that is obvious you don't want to go into details until the time have come and you want to be pre in some sense to act in accordance with some politically organized party so we don't find inlock what is supposed to happen in that case but the implications are quite are quite uh obvious in some sense this is inly radical U Democratic Doctrine or it could be although I don't pain that either of them or actually what we would think of today is either Republicans Or democrats of come to that in in a moment so the point is is not surprising those that the wigs rejected this do and no doubt they did so partly because of the radical implications if thought through of L's View and it might have been a politically unappealing Doctrine so far as in might estimate also the other way wanted to emphasize the continuity between Charles II James II and of Orange and Mary Mary was James's eldest daughter and they wanted to emphasize the dynastic continuity between the two and they maintained in effect that James had just advocated or meod from bacon and the Parliament finding a bacon Throne had simply found an occupant for it and that act did not imply the parliament was Supreme that is a view that they prepered to maintain they thought that was uh from the standpoint arguable and politically more acceptable to the English Nation than the other now why did L refuse to alter his view I think we have to assume that he didn't change his mind and he persisted in the doctrine that he formed earlier in 79 and 880 I think partly because his views are more radical than the standard view of his college that that would be one reason but also because he felt I think that it was inconsistent now there isn't this view in the trus but if one sort of HS it through perhaps one can see that it is any rate in danger of being insistent problem is roughly this that the M view was that Crown was an independent coordinate power in the mix Constitution and yet they wish to hold that the Monarch could be removed of for cause and that the rule of succession could be changed and Par acted to do this and they W one of the maintain both of these propositions without conceding that the government had been dissolved or else PA change the succession as in effect it did without claiming parlamentary Supremacy now not think that view is inconsistent uh whereas the other view uh which he found in lawon and of which he gave a very clear and re statement is consistent and it presents he thought a more or less adequate account of the basis of sovereignty in a constitutional regime and I think in a way that this is locks one of his main contributions is to see the importance of Bon's view which otherwise uh no one paid very much attention to and it might easily get passed Into Obscurity was a rather long involved in someone academic book and came out at a time when there was an interest in its view came out too late in 166 restoration what I did was to see the importance of this view formulate in a very brief and readable clear manner I think uh and it is I think reasonable account of the basis of sovereignty in a constitutional machine now what is important I say is the not formulates or we can find in this view this the distinction between constituent and and ordinary power and the idea of power is is connected with the motion of aary trust now the this distinction between this difference and ordinary power raises the question of how this constition power gets expressed in institutions and may effective you see it's all very well to talk about power and say that there is such a thing and talk about it uh coming into play when there's this kind of a conflict but if you don't have some kind of ideas how to be expressed in institutions and how to be made effective then it's always some extent this problematical as I mentioned that or inlaw form this how is institutionally expressed um and La all said something about it is quite vague so the problem for constitutional Theory subsequence a lot is to ask how constient power can be institutionally expressed and and how it's and how the account of the institutions that do express it can be connected up with an countless sovereignty of the kind that laon and lot present and when one want be able to have in that account some basis of the distinction between it of course and and the ordinary and the ordinary Powers well I think that what happen since losty is that one has found ways to express what appear to be elements of or features of cons digent power EG by by having a procedure for Constitutional Amendments and and how they are done one then has an Institutional procedure where you might say exercising this constition power there's nothing comparable to that in Lo day also you might say I think this is the case will come on to this later on in the class we may want to think of certain basic rights of the people as protected by the Constitution they cre of thought cre of speech and so forth and certain room rights to vote may think of those as also institutionalizing the basis through which and institutions through which this constituent power can be expressed so that because of the great importance and fundamental determining power expressed through the power we may want to say uh come to this later on that these basic rights ways of politically expressing this power have a kind of priority over over other rights and reason I mention this is I want to think of the basic structure what I earlier called that as of course including these institutions or whatever they are that provide ways through which this conuent power can be both expressed and protected it's the importance of this notion now I'm not I want to mention at the end I gu about the last for some minutes um I'm going on to mention a witness in lock view from from our standpoint uh might say maybe from my standpoint allend it doesn't matter uh namely the fact that is clear from paragraphs say 138 to 40 particularly 40 and 157 to8 that Mark is presupposing and taking for granted that only a few people vote relatively few people vote to whole certain amount of land or Capital assets that add up to a certain some of money and so the in accurate I don't know the exact size of the scent I me to look it up rather small percentage of it is able to vote on this view uh now Mar is not arguing that point one way or the other taking it for granted and also when he talks about property he's not attempting to justify property in the sense of explaining it and justifying it to those who don't think there should be part of father he's trying to give an account of the institution how much it come about an institution which politically Tak from point of view everyone accepts D's argument had been that MOX or any social compact view or contract view the earlier agreements could not account for prodate property and if so lot felt that would be a decisive objection against the view because everybody Grant that political I mean that that institution is acceptable so he had to give an account of it and in that sense it's not a justification but attempt to explain how property could arise within the social contract cont well there are has it ought to distinguish three kinds of inequalities there would be economic inequalities simply in in the amount of land that people held and so on then would be inequalities you might say in the worth of people never how much in terms of meemes and resources they were able to take advantage of what inhes and opportunity they did have and then there are what I'll call political inequalities I'll be primarily concern with these EG um the right to vote is only shared by a few people now the question is that L lawr to argue that beginning with a state of equal right and going through all these agreements the contact of society would take place consistent all these other constraints and and yet the form of regime would be one in which most people did not have the right to vote and how could that come about and we don't have a clear explanation in L of how that might come about also we don't know who is included among the people uh when M talks about it excludes a lot of people excludes those that are dependent or some kind of servant it includes women all women and a number of other people so U it isn't defined exactly but we know that on that definition it's a fairly small number of people um whether that's so the same account lot we can't help Le we can't help the text that we have so the problem is can it really be the case on lock view that one could begin from a state of equal right enter into all these agreements and end up with the form of regime in which say small percent of the people vote and exercise political power the amount that you have to vote Mark certainly thought that everyone those most people had what we might call Freedom of opportunity had some opportunity to accumulate the amount of of land and me tackle in order to be able to vote so it was not let's say cast system which was uh one could not by social institutions cross from one to to the other but it would probably hard for most people um and what I'm looking at it from the standpoint of those who are born into a family that say doesn't have a right to vote how can one account for that on this scheme uh or show that that could happen without violating some of these other conditions now presumably the answer is something like or at least would be one answer that one might get is something like well even though one does not have land sufficient of to vote nevertheless given the hazards the defects and the lacks of the data nature given the benefits to be expected under government and very thing it's rational even for those who lack efficient land to agree to social Compact and for the majority to vote or to place the legislative in the form of a regime that excludes most people from actually voting I we might say adding on the condition provided that everyone has or most people have the opportunity uh to mer and gain and to acquire that amount in other words it isn't the cast system perhaps some argument of that sort it would be rational to do that and given the circumstances it would not violate any of the other conditions which are consequence of the fundamental law of nature now the defect of that from our point of view I say from our point of view because I believe that Mark more or less achieve his objective in this book which is to give an argument per it's easy to argue against but to give a coherent argument for the right of resistance in mixed Constitution so it isn't a criticism of what M does in terms of his aim but from another point of view our point of view uh we might say that we want to free the notion of constition power from being exercise subject to these sorts of historical conditions where it will make a big difference on the form of regime who and who does not have the right to vote and what the conditions on it are maybe we want to free it from that of course what I'm thinking of eventually um is that that that would be one motivation for introducing an idea like the origal position that say it's a way of conceiving how con power might be exercised uh through what comes out of that kind notion so it in a way free what appears to be of block view uh from Semite point of view uh free it from the continu of this historical proect but again I'm careful I don't know if that is a criticism L from his point of view I think he does rather well uh so appreciate that his purposes uh no point in criticizing someone for something they didn't intend to do okay well I think it's stop so remember there's no class here Monday so the next class here will be next Friday
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Modern_Political_Philosophy_John_Rawls_PhD_1984
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John_RawlsModern_Political_PhilosophyLecture_1_audio_only.txt
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those of you who don't have the the class readings and the schedule of the lectures and so on we will hand some of those out after the class we have run out of those but I hope majority of you have that uh schedu of group and it gives the assignments and so forth and I might talk about that for a moment and say some things about it and then if you all have any questions while you can ask me can you hear me no I have to talk can you hear me now anybody is there anybody who can't hear me now can you hear me now well the light is on the mic come on don't we have there is aor well as a philosopher I don't know how toope with these things the real world anybody knows how toer but there you need a to get anyway I'm sorry about this confusion I don't know how it the first time I've Leed in this room and I don't I think the things on here are for slides I imagine that's why it isn't working can you hear me now that hear me now pressing all the M well I'm sorry I just have to talk as loud as I can um and in the interim by Monday I hope to know how it works U on the on the handout sheet for the assignments and all I hope that is self-explanatory that is uh topics in a are spliced in with the historical topics so there'll be two classes under a A1 uh today and Monday and then after we're through with that why we move on to lock and who and then we'll go down ABC and each matter is a separate class so it means there'll be three classes under lock and hum then we go back to A2 okay and then the proceeds on from there I think there are are enough instructions as as to how it's supposed to go and it adds up to 24 classes and perhaps there were only 22 or 21 I didn't count them but we'll do the best we can to get through this material as plan any questions about that now in past years there been some of complaint about the assignments being a bit vague and I have tried to correct that by saying that for each class there's a particular reading that you should do so if you're conscientious and you keep up with the reading while you know where we are and I will try to follow this and I think if you do the readings you'll be able to uh get more out of what said in here uh and in the section so I hope you'll be able to do that is anybody hearing me at all back there okay uh so I hope those are self-explanatory and we'll be able to follow and any R I will explain it as we go along how it's supposed to go now on page two there's a remark Mark in there but I know that a lot of these meetings are extremely difficult and in fact I don't believe any of them are easy but some are more difficult than others and in fact if you haven't read and you C before you probably make very little sense out of the groundw very little sense however it's a book you should try and I'll do the best I can to convey the way I read it no two people probably who have thought about it a lot read it the same way it's a very hard book and that there are a lot of books of which that is the case these are hard things and um people interpret them in different ways and it isn't that any way to interpret them is equally good some interpretations are lousy but there are a number of them that really quite good and it's hard to pick the I hope at any rate we offer one that is respectable um even it's not generally accepted in so far as we have time to talk about Kant and about any of the other writers so don't be dismayed if you disagree if you disagree with each other and those are in sections and don't be surprised if the teaching fellows don't say the same thing I do that's entirely proper and I hope that happens happen or you some Alternatives now I forgot to add under the text um TJ there but I believe they have it in the stores I'm going over afterward this coup I don't believe everything's in if they're all out I'll order some more teex now there on after there any questions about anything say a con Ed with after that's about the exam and about the make these sections will begin the week after next I don't think we can organize them before that time but beginning the week after next why we shall have SE I ought to say about the examination that I will hand out I will hand out in advance um m the questions that will organize your reading preparations for the examination so it's not a surprise examination uh these may be difficult questions but at any rate you know what you'll be asked and you can prepare for it the idea of that exam is to organize your study for the course so you don't frantically try to learn everything that's simply impossible you can't do that so we will have them out ahead of time and if any of you have not met the formal requirement to take a class if you come up afterwards I I'll I'll be happy to sign a card and to wave that um the idea being I will give a kind of warning of some sort that you you I mean you can do it if you try but you should it's a it's it's a way of saying that some previous philosophy does help it isn't a matter of knowledge or technical knowledge particularly but it's knowledge of having some awareness of what this subject is like now this year is something of an experiment and I may find out that it's not a good idea that that is spending so much time on a book that I wrote myself and know when I was an undergraduate I just I was very unhappy that professors had talk about their own book and I think probably at that time I was right rather than now but in any case I'm going to do it at some risk I've not done this before and maybe I will never do it again we'll see uh so while 171 will be given next year or in all likelihood it'll be given I doubt very much they'll do it in the same way a third thing I thought I would mention is that in these texts they're extremely difficult I said particularly a few of them you're only responsible for the things that we talk about and the problems that we actually take up in here and take up in section but you're not required to know everything that you might know about about marks for example or about cont even about the groundwork you be responsible for things that we talk about them and at the level that we're able to talk about so in that sense you know the kinds of things that you ought to be aware of another thing I thought I might another observation I thought I could make about the class is that on to that it tends to be cumulative in the sense that if you don't know uh what has gone on say the first month you tend to get lost after a while and you don't see the point of the things that I said later and how far that's actually the case I don't know I've been told that's the case so I pass it on to you it's a good idea to keep up if you can if that is so well those are all the introductory comments I thought I would make about this does anyone have anything they'd like to ask at [Music] this are you sure thank I know this is a large room but there might be yes office hours H well I'll have office hours yes after the class on Monday um get some time for it to be over but say beginning about 3:30 okay now uh beginning of class I handed out three sheets which is kind of a summary of what I had hoped to get over today and I I'll do this every day because this is just come to add to your burden uh but I thought I would do it at the beginning so we would be able to have uh some Hecker of fundamental ideas that I had gone over to start with um yes what sorry lot of yes I know you don't uh we'll have some more done up so they'll be handed out on Monday how many of you do not have a copy of the three pages that I handed out so that's and how many of you do so that's about another okay so that's about half if you have a copy and half don't so that's an estimate if if they want to wait we could do them after class if anyone Zer has time otherwise Monday have yeah well if you want them right away um we'll try to do some after class otherwise they'll be available Monday okay and I will go over them so you'll be able to know what uh is being said now I I begin on the list or on the sheet um with a few introductory comments the first one is that since in this class we're going to approach political philosophy and take away I want to emphasize that there are many ways in which political philosopy can be conceived and different writers will at different times think of their work and its nature and AIMS in a different way and this will be true of all the writers who we read but all of them are and might I belong to what I here call the modern democratic tradition of thought and all of them except for Marks we count as liberal so what we discussing is a particular group of writers all of whom are in the r way Democrats and all them but one or we could count as liberal now in this class I regard liberalism from within the tradition of political philosophy so it isn't a view about particular social policies although at some particular time it it may be identified with such but it's a kind of philosophical view about the nature and grounds of the institutions that we uh today associate and have been associating with constitutional democracy it's how do you explain justify and so from a philosophical point of view these institutions uh and that's the meaning of it that I have in mind and it has some characteristic elements of the Lial View and as we go through I will try to identify those and how they are regarded and understood by different writers now like much else going on now to Second comment political philos ophy arises often from different felt needs these needs are not the same but a particular one that I mentioned here is that in any society there are certain sharp and divisive and apparently irresolvable political questions and sometimes over a long periods of time the they seem irresolvable and I'm mention an example of that is in the case of the wars of religion in the 16th and 17th century and then as a result of that or in part as a result of that and beginning would say about the 18th century people accepted some form of the principle of Toleration uh we might say that that principle is a way of coping with the problem of religious pluralism it's as a result of that so we might say that in those two centuries there are many philosophical tracks and discussions about that principle and how far it's uh compatible with Christianity how far it depends on skepticism how far it depends on indifference to Rel religion and all those matters was was hotly discussed it's not now discussed because it's not a problem but that's the historical origin of the principle and I think also that one of the important historical origins of nalism is in that controversy not the only one but it's a basic principle I think of nalism is some kind of principal toleration and different philosophical views will give a different account of it and the source of it now passing on to number three is then EMP to comment on that and say that the purpose or aim or one purpose or aim of political philosophy is to discuss these kind of sharply divisive issues in a certain period of time and the one that in this class plan to discuss or to focus on or we can see things as uh beginning from is the conflict over the understanding about what conflicting claims between liity and equality that's a phrase that I use and I'm thinking of over the course of democratic thought over the past roughly let's say two centur CES or course so makes plain to us I think that there's no public agreement on how basic institutions of democracy or of our society are to be arranged if they are to be and here I use a somewhat vague FR appropriate to the harties and nature of citizenship uh regarding citizens as free and equal persons in other words there is a division between division within the democratic tradition of thought between the tradition that deres from Lock let's say uh and the tradition that deres from so and I use here a way to express that saying that the of deriving from lot and emphasizes what con called the lities of the of the moderns that is freedom of speech and of thought Liberty of conscience and various rights of equal citizenship uh civil in nature and on the other hand the are tradition that deres of from Russo which conone said emphasizes the lities of the ancients stor was a French writer who live from about 1770 to about 1830 I don't I forgotten the exact St now the nties of the Ancients were roughly the nties of citizens namely adult male citizens of the Athenian democracy and so by saying that the tradition derived from r emphasiz those uh Conant meant that it emphasizes the values of public life and public participation and politics and so on as opposed to the other uh Tradition now that's a very sharp conflict within this tradition and it it it while both sides of it will recognize all of these values on on each side not to say they're going to wait them in very different ways and there's an explanation for this namely in how certain things are conceived and how certain philosophical Notions are interpreted so although now going on to number five although it's the case that this conflict is supported by um conflix of interests of different kinds material interests religious interests and so forth organizational interest and it's also um supported by or by differences of opinion about the consequences of certain social policies so we might say that's an empirical matter as to what are the effects of certain institutions but also at the same time I think there's a conflict of view as to how these Notions are to be conceived whereby conflict of view I mean some philosophical or moral or political view and it's those that in this class we are particularly interested in so there are as I mentioned here two particular views that we're concerned with on the one hand we're concerned with the uh doctr of the social contract which we can take to be represented by Hobs and lock ofo and K and there's the utilitarian tradition which we can take to be presented by Hume and benam and JS Mill and sck uh and that's a very impressive philosophical tradition and as I mentioned includes almost also includes almost all of the great English economists over say a period of 150 years to 1750 to about 1900 so it's not only a moral and political view it's also these people were also at the same time very important economic political and social uh theorists and that way it's very rare to find that happen over such a long period of time at such a high level well it's no surprise there were that many smart people in it it's been a very strong view it's had enormous influence I might say it's uh even at today it's the dominant view in some form or other lots of people uh in different subjects so to come to the final introductory remark I mentioned about I make a reference ref to the preface of TJ paragraphs of 2 and five where uh the aims of of the text is stated uh first aim being to work out a reasonably symatic conception of political Justice that provides an alternative to the dominant utilitarianism of our and I put in brackets englishing philosophical tradition I put in those brackets because if you go to the continent uh you wouldn't at all find the same thing and second that to show that this conception of political Justice provides a more appropriate basis for Democratic institutions and a more accurate characterization of our consider the convictions about political Justice than say the utilitarian view so it should do two things if it succeeds it will first offer a reasonably systematic alternative political conception say reason systematic uh because the utilitarian view is also reasonably systematic so you want want to try to offer something that pass some of the same virtues but of course system itself is not the prime value um or the prime Criterion you want to view that is a more adequate more appropriate basis of democratic institutions so that's the second of these is perhaps actually the more important of the two but commenting on the preface it does say uh both things now the view that is proposed adapts various ideas from the social contract tradition and also adapts various ideas from the and as I emphasize there I say it adapts them and not adopts them because they're not the same idea these IDE ideas on the go of ships when you put them in another framework so I urge you to keep in mind that the idea of the social contract for example is not going to be the same in hob as it is in in lock it won't be the same in waso or con or any other wrer probably that you pick there going to be variations on these that is in the case of of four people like that lock uh Ando and Hobs they're going to be different you want to be aware of the differences and how they change and why uh and it's knowing how they change and why that U is always the the most interesting thing so I just want to emphasize that while there are contract ideas in TJ um continent ideas they're not the same and I will try to uh make clear what the differences are but it's interesting uh to make comparisons between any two writers in this sense to see why those differences occur so it's the nature of the you might say of the whole View and why it's set up the way it is is going to determine how any particular idea in the end is interpreted and gets used you want to be sensitive to that well those are some introductory comments on kind of things that doing why um am I making any sense um I know this is a large room but if I get tickly something seems extremely dense I don't mind if somebody were were to say so or raise a question uh it's going be hard to listen to well I'm now on page two for those who have it the the heading of that is fundamental ideas and I might say to those of you who don't have the sheets I am going over it so you're not really missing anything alth I'm not going over precisely the same now since the aim of TJ is to provide moral basis for Democratic institutions or let's say an appropriate moral basis for Democratic institutions and to address this longstanding conflict as to how the claims of herty and equality are to be understood how we to deal with that well in this particular case and setting up TJ I think if it is looking to the public political culture of a Democratic Society for certain basic intuitive ideas and principles that can be worked up into a conception of political Justice in other words uh we're going to try to look somehow on ideas of with which we're all familiar as members of this kind of society and knowing something about its history knowing something about its Constitution knowing something about important documents like the Declaration of Independence and so forth you've heard those things and the general nature of the political culture you should be somewhat familiar this isn't a matter of being extremely educated it's a matter of paying some attention to the political culture uh say reading papers about Supreme Court cases and Sony had some idea what the Supreme Court does I'm not talking about anything but family deep and sense of goly knowledge but some awareness of the political culture one looks to that for certain basic intuitive ideas and then tries to work them up into some kind of political conception of justice so the idea is you should have a lot of familiarity with these from everyday discussion of political matters now I emphasize that well I will come to the C side uh but you'll notice I keep using the phrase political Justice and not just Justice now I don't that that is not done in TJ and that has encouraged a lot of misunderstanding but I'm doing it now this is a conception of political Justice um but I will come to that now some of these basic intuitive ideas are more basic than others you might say some of them are used and say some View and this will be true of justice as fairness will be used to give structure to the whole View and to organize the whole View and some kind of systematic doct and these ideas has a few of them I will call fundamental intuitive ideas and I'll go over three today if I have time and go over three more on Monday and that will serve as a kind of in introduction to what will be going on now the basic or the maybe I say the most fundamental you can use that phrase in justice as fairness is the idea of society itself as a system of social cooperation between citizens regarded as free and equal persons that's the basic intuitive idea that Society itself is a system of cooperation uh between citizens as free and equal persons now I'm not saying you accept that idea not saying that you believe it's true of the society in which you live but that you can understand that after some reflection and developing it into a notion of some sort it's accessible to you now perhaps it isn't but anyway I believe it is uh and we're going to try to work on that idea and others of them that are analogous now in saying that Society is a system of cooperation between citizens uh we suppose that from a political point of view and in the context of public discussion of political questions citizens do not regard their social order as a fixed natural order they can change it they can change institutions they not fix natural order that can be change or they do not regard the social order as an instit U hierarchy publicly justified by political or aristocratic values it may be that lots of people believe that that they are also justified by religious values it may be that some people believe they're also justified by uh the values of other countes but from the context of public discussion going to adopt the idea when we work with this model that it's not justified in those ways but in terms of values that be that can be connected with the the way in which we develop this idea of society as a system of cooperation between citizens as free and equal person it will have to be values in some sense it come from that that are basic ones in political discussion as opposed to other areas of life now there are three elements in the idea of cooperation that I would like to mention the first element features I call them here is it social cooperation is distinct from merely social coordinated activity an example of social socially coordinated activity would be a lot of people doing things but it turns out that and they're doing them in a coherent way they know what the others are doing and so forth but they're all following orders from some absolute Central Authority that they never question now that's very well coordinated but it's not cooperational I'm going to use the term now of course here you uh our ordinary sense of the cooperation is not so precise that it obviously practic excludes that case so what I'm doing is actually defining it if you like in a certain kind of way I'm just going to say that that uh is not going to be what I mean by cooperation if the orders from the center and the center can't be questioned then it's not cooperation so that would be one feature of it another feature of a cooperation that is that it involves some notion of fair terms of cooperation if people are cooperating then they have an idea of what the terms of cooperation are and that these terms are fair or ought to be fair if Co if it's truly cooperation in some in some sense if we were forced into it uh the terms aren't such that we could accept but therefore we had no choice we had to do it and that puts some doubt that it's cooperation so cooperation involves that there are fair terms of cooperation and that these Fair terms are publicly recognized and they involve that is fair terms of cooperation involve some principle that characterizes the fair terms of reciprocity or mutuality there must be some kind of of fairness between the parties uh and that kind of a notion has to be involved and the third notion is it involves the idea of each participant's rational Advantage for each participant's good so that the idea of rational Advantage specifies what it is that those engaged in cooperation are seeking to advance each from their own point of view oh it's at any rate going to involve uh that is the notion of cooperation is going to have those three uh features now I'm mention in advance to give you some some idea that the thing is how are the fair terms of cooperation cap pafy now there are different ways of doing that but in Justice is fairness they get specified by those engaged in cooperation and of course it's at that point that some uh variation of the notion of contract enters in in other words if by some agreement of some sort that is an agreement on certain principles that determine what the fair terms are going to be so further development of the notion of cooperation is that we're going to say that those engaged in cooperation the ones that are to determine the fair terms of it but that's we'll be getting ahead a bit now I turn next to down to four on the sheet for those of you who have it talking about the role of the principles of justice as part of a conception of Justice their role is to specify what the fair terms of cooperation are it's the go the principles of political Justice to Define what Fair terms of social cooperation are when we think of soci side of the hope and the test is discussed although not exactly in the same ways I have discussed it here in section one uh which is part of the assignment for today um sections one and two for the day and three and for uh for Monday okay so that's their role is to define the fair terms of the cooperation now these principles if we look at the content of them now actually what they do is specify basic rights and duties to be assigned by the main political and social institutions and they regulate the the of benefits that arise through or as a result of social cooperation now hence in a Democratic Society citizens are thought of as free and equal persons that is within this model of of that kind of society a conception of justice and may be viewed as I said as specifying the fair terms of political cooperation between citizens as free and equal persons okay I I hope that's uh some idea of what's this First Fundamental idea um from which by adding on other things and helping Notions are within it or requirements are within it you're going to attempt to develop not deduce of course but to use as a framework for marking out some kind of view now I'm going on to another fundamental idea uh this is introduced on page five of section one and I'm going to State it here in more or less the same form that it occurs there that that's the notion of the idea I should say of a well-ordered society now let's say that a society is well ordered if it is not only designed to advance the good of its members but also when it is tactically regulated by a publicly recognized conception of political Justice Now by definition this is going to mean the following um first it will mean that it is a society in which everyone accepts and knows that everyone else accepts the same principles of Justice now of course there has never been a society like that at least I can't think of one that fulfills always the conditions but that for the time being try not to worry about that we'll see maybe that this has some some reason for doing this in this way um but it would mean first that every citizen say if we think this is the language that we've been using they all accept the same principles of political Justice ID political Justice because elsewhere they may hold other moral views but they agree on holding the same principles of political and the other or second characteristic of aord society as defined here is its main political and social institution are publicly known or with good reason believed to satisfy these principles so it will be a society in which everyone holds the same principles of justice and also a society in which those institutions that exist satisy those principles so it's a society which is institutions of which are are just now this has a consequence that in a well-ordered society there is a we might say that the publicly recognized political conception of Justice establishes a shared point of view from which citizens claims on their political and social institutions can be adjudicated in other words they're going to make a variety of claims on these institutions and they're going to argue about whether not they're just and unjust and so forth and so on this argument in their case will not be truthless or not not principle truthless because they agree on what the principles of political Justice are so if they also agree on certain General beliefs consequences and so on these questions will be often although not always a resolvable there will be a publicly accepted answer answer that's possible I say not always resolvable because uh no principles can possibly resolve every question but they can specify a kind of framework within which people can at least talk and the 16th and 17th centuries in matters of really ages Toleration that is simply not true there is no common basis from which people can even begin to talk but if you have um publicly recognized principles in this sense then although they don't provide some kind of a you might say a deductive apparatus from which you can grind out answers they may provide enough of the time some kind of framework within which these questions can be discussed so that's beginning characterization of a society now the point is although there may not be may not ever indeed have been and maybe there cannot even be in any precise way even even in heaven I suppose or ideal conditions of soci this kind nevertheless there may be some conceptions of justice that it's not even possible for them to serve in this role so one way to think about a conception of justice is or certain principles is is it possible that these principles could ever serve in a society of this sort and I think we'd like to believe that any conception that we accepted would at any rate allow for this possibility so in this respect I think the notion of society is a kind of a Criterion that we can use to compare conceptions of justice and they're very principles in the sense that well at least under ideal conditions there isn't anything about the content of these principles that makes it impossible for a society of this kind to exist now the third fundamental intuitive idea I won't be able to get through this today we'll have to get on it on on Monday is the one that's introduced in section two of TJ so if you can you should look at that uh namely the notion of the basic structure of society and that's an attempt to make and I won't say anything about it now actually it's 3:00 so I will stop but it's the primary subject of justice and uh it's the thing that in the sense I talk about political Justice it's about just that structure can you hear me this way anybody who who can't hear me okay I might prefer that to doing the other [Applause] what Happ
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thank you Jesus go Oh later a last time you saw what we did was a regular braid what I call the setup and by that I met the guys that are going over in Section 25 where we describe the nature of the argument with the police and information and the motivation of a party is on and the alternatives that they have available all that the idea of being a sports that if you know those things and if we describe that information for the setup in the right way then we should they will work out not at all the technical fact but yes it's coming to it come since way which are the principles on the list the authorities would agree trip oh yeah that's the same thing as going to market or something you know what you want to buy and so when how much you have and all that sort of stuff in it it's lexa if we describe what the agent of the household is aiming at that believes in song well then you can make some accounts boom well it's the same idea only course this different position of moral elements in it and therefore has another purpose but there's an aspect of it is the same now the thing I want to do today is to give a brief sketch emitting a lot of things in sections 26 to 28 which is going to talk about 29 actually or 30 actually just a cute things in 26 to 28 and I'm going to simplify that a good bit just to convey what i think is the main idea so it if the main idea is explained then one ought to be able to handle more comp take his place now exact as it explained in section 25 and I might remember this the argument for the two principal justice is actually split into two parts the first part is made on a presumption that the part of the rational those that they have irrational in the special sense that they're not swayed by what the text called occasionally natural psychologists and in particular the thing I'm concerned with here is it they're not swayed by angry that is envy is understood not a resentment not as indignation but just what I have what other people have if they had more than us so that we move ing if we would be better off if they had less that's how angry is understood we would be better off if they had left if they were made were so it's not necessarily pleasure and others a misfortune of others lost but its response somehow to relations me to bojangles that whereas the officer that despite say those who had more feeling worse off if those who've had less have more so it such as are the people to stay far down there not from all reasons but some one just has left side so what to do it is expecting to those kinds of motivation the first part in our you soon as a second part of the argument where at in chapter 9 and chapters 89 you discuss the question and the dimension of party to doing this with noise that whether he crystals adopted in this first part specify sufficiently stable Prince section of justice where that means among other things and I did the custom eight right it means among other things that in the World War II society are the institutions of a society like that the art world works and that means of satisfying the two principles they do not cause or generate the lots of ended between social group and on the other side of that saved us by it so that the institutions don't operate will in fact there's so much envy and so forth that the parties have to be considered and perhaps about some other principles that could make any less and when I say manage now today only discussing the first part of the argument ignoring a question of how these detrol psychology is in particular ng enter so I'm talking about the park within seconds 26-28 now much of the other part of the orbiters I say is in part three in particular in chapters 89 just tape where it is I don't have time to go now I'm because I mentioned the last time I believe I did that it says on page 147 nectar is this in mind that the parties in the opie are theoretically defined individuals that is if they had only the features that we that is you and me who are setting up the OT and trying to develop the notion of Justice it is based on this idea that society sis mo fair the cooperation between creating the person she's so close on they have only to take as a way described to them for this purpose so that one ought not to take of the way to party are described as an attempt to describe our moral experience in an interesting way it's not as if we were trying to get a count of variances or con amounts of people we're not doing that we're scribing to them attributes then this construction which is designed to reflect certain thing design of the fair situation and today we have two good it's reasonable for us to tribute to them and deal that objective if we were trying to describe to the phenomenology of a more experienced or the nature of it as what connoisseur three games and so forth we will be seen a good way and so the account book other parties isn't intended to do that well that's just kind of chilling my remarks now let's move on to another point the way in which the argument actually precedes for the differences with justice is by various two-way comparisons by which I mean that we take the two principles and we compare them with other alternatives on the list and if we had a let's say at five alternatives then we would prepared with each alternative on the list and if say the two principles one then that would include the argument with respect to that list now we could always largely argument by including other alternatives on the list and peaceful towards the argument goes on I suppose in some sense forever although any given time the plausible alternatives are more or less a finite so that we might be able any rate becomes some sort of a provisional conclusion by going through the more important alternatives and that's what is done now the first comparison that I'll discuss him I think it would have been better if in the book at these two comparisons have been separated and it'd be clear the way the art was presented Richards being done and to take the time but the first and most fundamental comparison is to run the two principles against the principal average agility just back to Paris and I think it that is the most fundamental one because presumption is all those who might dispute this that principle average utility is more plausible than the classical principle which is discussed in sections five and six and then again in section 30 and the contrast between the average and classical is discussed in section 27 so what the average principal says is that the institutions are to be designed in such a way that or i should say the institutions of the basic structure is always talking about that Jesus questions book institution for the basics doctor could be design so as to maximize the average utility those it the utility as a worker kacta of the members of society beginning now into the future by their hearing clue future possibilities in this calculation of any break them up it's off the standpoint however hard it might be to do that so that's what the address in school says is discussed in section 20 so I don't think elaborate on over here when we come to mill next week I shall talk about it more and considering what kind of principal milla falls far as time allows the path of it now now amazing that this comparison is the most fundamental is because of the angle teacher angwin CJ is to first of all to find some alternative that seems more plausible than but better than were scary to the dominant utilitarianism of a traditional political foe and think courses the English edition mainly it's not correct to say with your own kind we want to find something superior to that it possible and something which also is what provides a better normal basis for the institution of a Democratic Society so if in this person Harrison that principals are superior to provide the end sing to us on Election be a better model basis of the institutions of the Democrat society then actually to consider what's their name TJ is already achieved we've already shown something that's what I like to emphasize even though there may be other principles that are superior to the principal justice presumably they're going to share some of the features of the two principal path in contrast with the extra bag of utility now on I brought the term average this resume I talking about average as opposed to class Bluto so any transport a trapeze p rior to the two principles of presumably share certain basic features of a prince wouldn't comment at opposed to crystal futility I haven't given any argument for that that just somehow seems kind of foldable a priori praxis of a priori highest probable projected maybe some my feelings another advantage of beginning with this comparison is that it shows reasonably clearly a fairly simple case how these arguments go and therefore there's some point in communing with the second fundamental comparison which on that is just today and hope you able to get to add two marks or sometime in there and postpone fits who think that I would like to do something but in any case the second fundamental comparison is a comparison in which one substitute for the difference principle the principle of utility subject to some I constraint that certain social interim we maintain so with this comparison the first principle justice and principal fair equal opportunity or are already adopted so they're taking for granted so what we're doing and it's just running attack against the st. background institutions the parental average until take against the difference principle and in order to make it even harder for the different principle we constrain if you like if you think that helps the principal ravager till devise some kind of circular now that's going to be a much
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anything I met to bring in I've had enough copies open and like the cookiecutter program is intended by the whole thing that are higher than I extra to mimic felon and a fam a little accident for getting it but it would be available two sections I'll hope if I don't forget wednesday and i hope we will pick it up then it doesn't paint a whole pack which I cement you can climb tomorrow unfortunately miss in the selection love the last time that's today lundi well that's Wednesday I thought about market economic use a bit I'm afraid I have to end up someone hurry I will not try display all things I had a little bit my partner I might have been able to say I think i will so as to keep going and hope this somehow it would go in you recall that what I did I gave a gentleman script attack that they can pack with the social system divided into these two clack deleted with had a different function in the economic King have a whole and I then went on and commented on the like the aim one of the lightest areas of value to take I was concerned to say it doesn't had three aims of people have from time to time norfolk and one of them is safe and the genetic explanation of the source of value namely labor and nice thing about the beginning part of critic of the greater program is that Mars get an explanation why who rejected that another exit the nation view of the period marks useless term exploitation pro 4 pack some account of what adjust near your prices that would be and I made a suggestion i'm quite plainly that i take on a holden horse employs atomic boy taken within the economic theory as an economic notion that make is a moral motion within that being of his economic theory and planet i don't think it's annoying i sense that the laughable Commodore present-day academic economist with a good at the period of price although mark mcverry accompaniment flying one of any cases and I think their support now we all his assumptions between pike reason later babe is he defines it I think the aim of the do when I mentioned very briefly to understand how it possible that capitalism which he characterizes as a system of personal independence with anybody breeding equal some formal sensibly in able to contact on the market really house in that sort of system surplus value can be extracted work which is the thing that if tau exploitation can exist good at the time the other thing is trying to plan now all that compact neither except us valuable attractive without the agent minister for being aware that that's what's happened and indeed proposal on all these markets some sense that if they're not monopoly if it's not forceps not fraud where then fighters are are there by the conception of yelp to fit the prize to this economic system so against did you pay attention awesome through when he's characterizing the economic system but between how things appear and what say that we're going on and we the institutional appearance of the economic fiction and particulars important here is the last second attacker one a viable capital where they talked about commodity fetishism so to speak hope it's important to be able people back to back so I then interpreted the economic view which is a idea not at all middle course with me both elaborate kind of it I know is by anatomical bummer Gerald economic literature what did this interpretation and the idea is to take it plain the two points if I mentioned and to keep track of the blows of mega values in the economy not to prevent a theory of price but to keep track of how circles is being extracted and who benefit come back deeply tie together the end the fourth sect of chapter one environment with Max's account of what turns out to be the standpoint of a later age marginal productivity theory distribution and factor 48 x + 3 under the local clinic informant the title to get it we then I think although maybe I want to have a chance at Yuka rented that it's probably things are concealed and how we hope that the long view will make them here well so I pass on today to the third second of the three which I left it at the cricket of liberalism of this consecutive right and duck club begin on that now let's take of liberalism which is plenty very comfy motion lots of variations on it first in terms of how it differs from and say in flood apart help to change the regime of the month of the modern day as a scheme of royal activism fated to live the 17th century has a better plan 14 in France and also a much less forceful example to wake up had a lot of opposition is attempted Greece north kings to government that later kanina now considered these changes from a game of more elasticity if you think of it as an alliance under the leadership of the director Triple Crown then it's the life of things people need to say altar and throne and the ever thought and one wouldn't and there isn't behaving at the following for the changes over time first of all there were constitutional limitations on the exercise of royal power as executive power then we thought the backers and locks second treatise neck will my foot constitutional limitation on the exercise of royal power as a legislative power as opposed to executive power R example at the crown and Parliament raising again my second Street should be an example of that 30 we could say constitutional principle affirming in some form critical polishin and here while there still may be an established church other churches are tolerated and recently accepted in here would be but Madame au cabaret also in a later point emailed I played on Liberty portly we could say they're very constitutional extensions of the franchise except to political office beyond the aristocracy a thinning and links to the middle class and early third and eventually to the writing class say by the end early towards the end that is developed in the 19th century here were my Tecna sample biggest survey for that mill representative government we didn't read that but if the very much concern with that column and indeed in director Sullivan limited return home then as the principle of equality of opportunity in smoke form as the oath which was created over the talents or with access to social and economic opportunities to all classes hence in society and milk duct of it thank you very much concern with this in the essay which we did not without it not the doctors i hope you weak women so as far as we take these five critical interpreter in some form and never getting what's in the liberalism meant mid 19th century and we can take a nail with example and the wood steps it may not be any better example of course a reminder if accepted for their lack of variations on having pimples or interpret combined and i haven't said anything about the paper post apologies with which they are you wish these principles we use to support for talking about it a very hectic level now from marks is point of view I think the constitutional political and social principle moist to find a noble institution simply represent the ideas and principles which specify and regulate the system of personal independence with activity of capitalism as a social system I empathize with I the personal independence more with the crazy uses and go to assess the more capitalism of the main the best site last time get as much as fuel ISM a social system in which surplus value is extracted and so it is by definition of exploitation hey looks system of exploitation and people more than men making an introductory comments at that taking within more economic system exploitation is not the wall like any system that extract surplus value that isn't one which produces surface value without being based on an institution of free associate of producers that make that decision is i think the mark with fluid that how he's going to find in to use that term so that court case is simply a feature define an eggnog the traditional terms of a certain time of fact there are a number of them certain kinds of social and economic systems want one or more problem beneath kapil's I had said it's explained very colored boy takers possible in a hit my personal independent and second to explain how it is working from you so neither Kappas under workers are we're in general that is being extracted now our question that many sides to mark the critique of federalism in on a good question 1843 he criticizes the red vigil view of the significance of political rights and the form of emancipation in contrast with full human masturbation which he thinks and if he a lien his notion of full common in society and in the critic of Griffith program 1835 he criticizes other coklat for their metric rates death identifying the importance of this rivet adjusted and if distribution is somehow independent of the mode of production and can a lonely can't go although discusses rather brief but I can quite clearly and the critique of the greater program rather than discuss either he's writing for bit more involved musings of the latter part of the German ideology and decide of lots of criticism of liberalism that they illustrate thing I plan to do today is to examine marks is doing on capital and to look at I only have a chance did a new plate that without the information they're very few references to it in the in the long text but there are some and i will mention the couple of those it turns out i think that what one would first from these new mattress consistent with what he says at movies other places so the preliminary of the remark on this is a marxist view to think that a certain conceptions of right and justice are part of what we call the and is the common phrase impediment look the superstructure tackler the fun but i think that just knowing that it not by itself very helpful in explaining the doctrine is I think you might also have an idea of how conceptions of right and justice are idiot idiot logical that is to say how as affections the principle of which govern the system of personal and they serve to hide the facts facts circles by the extracted beneath the institutional circle and work of marketing of the other institutions of the time I know briefly here I will come back to it on Friday and talk about the local the time of you have of a full comment society I never distinction between two kind of ideological consciousness we call the ideological consciousness is always in some sense full consciousness so I do not take a lot the other fella properties and generalist ideology there are only ideologies it first of all there is some way Walter incorrect and it's those who hold them are in some way p are mistaken about things and only if they play some kind of role in society so that's mark the center of it than that turn if I don't flip will not paying attention to what i should say so first of all this ideological consciousness advent irreligion and ideological kinda pathetic delusion il-1beta yielding and the evening breakfast and the other and the first case where it's an illusion we are fools we are taken in by the institutional appearances say if signal appearances of the market which Marx argued in capital captive one by one section for that these appearances concealed from us that with active duty James is later certain as it were a mass of labour time are being filled and that has been sealed by us from the surface of the market and everything taking play through quiet exchanges we don't proceed was actually going on take an end by that but we're cool and it's like compared it to optical illusions were taken in by the perceptual experiences and the second case where we talk about a delusion iberia that we are deluded the where you think people are deluded that they hold these views from some subjective or psychological need some time they need to believe they sing they need to friendly you where the need is supported or co-created by their place in a social system by how that system works and the system the way depends upon people affirming and holding these views and and it your fate of religion of the key things will want the need that appears to this form of faith and common the society will no longer get whether that form of ideological consciousness of the pub will no longer exist well when we re capital I'm not going to say anything about social justice in the text when weari casual we may easily take preventive that we are meeting the account of what mark believes is an unjust social clifton marks describes a society divided into two classes were a small flat google-owned all the means of production and made and relative I put their other people the cactus to create the product of labor of others and they use it for an accumulation of greater wealth and the other class as we talk about the bay the workers um nothing but their labor power of which they are forced to sell to some member the capitalist class port a ways it is often just efficient to cover the cost of producing and the reproducing of the neighbor power so called the Pistons way so also the tax and marks constantly speaks of a pathetic exploiting the workers and as a pro creating product was produced by unpaid or surplus labor and then selling the profit profit profit surely he given the language that we think that mark muted and this is christian capitalism at the photosystem he must believe catabolism is getting let me consider markers writings we going to find the father vs there is no 10 x mark in d capital or elsewhere to present a philosophical moral argument to the effect this capitalism is under the more days mark tufo a conception of Justice in the life of with the condemnation of capitalism and Tyga would be supportive another point is it that there it seems to be no equip the 13 capital that capitalism is undone or contrary to praise will jump the floor the basic rights of persons there isn't some pantages a certain sarcasm about it lieutenant equal rights and various other attitudes express but there is no explicit assertion of that button some philosophical context it would imply that claim the goddess is important that it the capitalism is unjust in addition of the district line third and to mark clarified with the coking socialists who did name some places who did invent capitalism as unjust and who advocate very kinds of social scheme and they were establishing a just social system and in a part of marked the criticism of the utopian socialist that they think it's important to criticize capitalism as adjust where he i think is not finally for although it is clear that Mars has strong moral feelings America's which are deeply hostile capitalism and feeling an attitude which we easily recognize and addy which are modeling Natalie's even says in a few places in capital the capitalism is not unjust for example as a cleft by the standards which are copious to it the waves under capitalism is perfectly fair now it did remark get made by correct then our initial expectations as to Marx's meaning within to be mistaken but points are making to get the following kinds of emphasis at the back and what little tension which I will see to take up first that that there is a conception of Justice appropriate to capitalism or perhaps a conception appropriate to East mode of production during the time when that mode of the duck and fulfilling it historical throat do i find this conception of Justice papal ISM is just on the street of course there it did this is compatible with there being many particular instances of injustice under capitalist with me for any social system may fall short of its own standards and may do so a good bit at the time nevertheless there is on the view a conception of Justice and a bacon right appropriately capitalism and when this inspection is real life capitalism is perfectly done a second inference that we might make it that than the labor theory of value whatever it her purview is not named at showing the capitalist unjust women over that the left on what purpose of it is a commission someone had the beginning it's not a theory then adjust brightness make a difference when I am in the 3rd and concepción might make is that of whatever philosophical or moral argument that Mark would give the socialism it would not be an argument based on a concession of justice or on the Rights of Persons perhaps who would not get a wall or philosophical of any time for the talent explicit argument of any kind but if he would it would be presuming terms of other kinds of values I think this is the case because of other kinds of values and values right and Dustin I suggest though then something like the following this preliminary remark about how fitting and what he could be favorite and reputation of his do not sign it means the only one but hey one but they don't he thinks birth that bull communist society is one in width and seventh of judges and the rights of persons do not have a significant role it is a society we might say beyond up in someone and what I will hope it did explain at the next time on friday what we might mean by that might also think detective that means circumstances would produce the need for conceptions of right conducted our precisely circumstances in which the requirements of this inception cannot be adequately satisfied in if we were through a fermion conceptions of right and justice are in this sense in flickable or incoherent they impose a demand at connecting that under those conditions when they would be needed this is illustrated I think by the view of the night just listen on the Jewish Question leave idea I said to rise at Park of civil design p as boundary line detecting heuristic individuals against one another and the rights of citizens which appear to offer kind of emancipation political emancipation proved illusory and this is because the worth of these rights is overridden by noon qualities a wealth and property ownership from the background which then determine the real basis of political and social power and of course if that scheme of property ownership that behind the institutional appearance of the tax regime is what makes exploitation possible so to conclude then reggel doesn't assumes it is impossible to get beyond justice it has a work I their permanent feature of human society Lamar's thinks it is possible to get beyond it beyond that and thanks in fact it will be achieved and not all that far a different picture now one might be tempted to go over a mission various ways and warwick one to counter the user has rejected but it could explain a wider that all the marks I do not if it is correct of what just said I did not taken capital give an argument that capitalism is under and it doesn't make the kinds of a search of the bat that city would expect one of my favorite all the same he believed it was yup they had right reasons for not saying that and there are number but they will be here faster when my sake she is wife at the sentence to he did lot he disliked creaking and moralizing and even if he believed that something is unjust he prefers to make other argument not to say that and also one might say that variety of reasons he wants to distance himself from the utopian socialists who did make these sorts of arguments and one way to do that is to avoid making those kind of argument and to present a third kind of a cup economic view about the laws of motion of capitalism trying to make your argument depends on that and certainly it is the pace that the marks a does that but i don't think that explanation for why there isn't any that means it glitter the surgeon in capital and some talking so if you question whether the r para sufficient to explain what needs to be explained in any case i will make an alternative suggestion the water we don't find these curtains and had kind of to develop with you in capital maybe the idea is that justice is a juridical section that the pain don't is Terry Terry time I go into this perhaps the explanation that prevented the why Martha does not criticize cap with them as unjust and even seems to say that in it just was the following he thinks that the construction of justice as a political I'm sorry he thinks of their conception of dealt with as a political and human medical infection that goes with the integral separation of faith and the time this institutional separation presupposes that need for the faith and dust presupposes of the knee I'm sorry to the trust tree supposedly with different of a dominating and a dominated class when David exploitation mark sixth sense also we did and political and legal entity we belong to what the beer earlier called terms of this belong to the superstructure these institutions have a regulatory role and are adopted to the requirements of the forces of production and the relations of production each social for each kind of economic organization and production and a thinker conception of Justice Vantiv appropriate for its political and political institutions within but bodies might they need and it presses the princess that regulate from the standpoint of political system directors when these institutions are properly adjusted to the underlying mode of production they serve in the best way the operative requirements of the mode of production I believe that after mark then those heartily adjusted interpretations of of the superstructure embody and corporate Athens session of Justice with best serve the historical role of the underlying economic mode of production capitalism like any other form of both rulem economic organization has a correctly adjusted superstructure and they conception of Delta appropriate to it the difference section is the one that set for papal isms historical role they suggested explanation then is as follows on my preview capitalism especially in concord that is to say depending when is effectively carrying out its historical role of building up the means of production effective efficient way if not under for there is a conception of Justice appropriate tab and by the misconception is just by mark and magnified all these particular instance like every sort of being good inception violated other concessions get justice are at the time simply irrelevant they may apply to other economic modes of production a weekend existed in previous time or which made this in a later time to come but they do not apply in historical division capitalism in the third time when it fulfilling its historical role effectively thus there is no no conception or market there will be no conception of Justice that is always applicable or that applies to all local forum and did this then there are the mark no universally valid principle drunkard whether a conception of Justice apply to the Hitler political and social system is settled by whether it it appropriate to the existing mode of production and its historical role there one passage in capital that suggests this kind of view in sin x + 3 my addition I was just justified an all the different capital one and saying an adjournment not my thing is the English is important but anyway my english edition 521 I'm sorry chapter 21 habit like that long after 21 of x + 3 at the big theme it's a beginning of a chapter and it's on interest-bearing capital more excessive follow it's rather long quotation but i think it's nick lee i'm making comments about it rotation again is here the week here of natural justice at your bar di l VAR ki thug is not sent the depth of the transactions least go on between ages of production rest on the fact that these transactions arrive as a natural consequence from the relations of production in theoretical forms in which these economic transactions appear as voluntary action of the participants and as contracts that may be in forth by the state against a single party cannot determine this content since they are mere forms they that it be theoretical forms merely expected this content is just whenever you're correspond to the mode of production whenever a dead content and adequate to this mode the bank employee sentence of meet again the content is just whenever correspond motorbike from when every content is adequate to the mode yes content is unjust whenever he contradicts this mode of production slavery on the basis of the capitalist mode of production is undone so also is fraud the quality of commodities that's an end of the quote now it's not with the fairly unclear quotas termica network comment on I'm not sure correct that had a typical but any rate i will try get patted the curved my marker discussing interest-bearing capital and in a footnote heat quotes of your bark from the book monday 834 as saying apollo begin a quotation that ax men who borrows money method due to making a pontiff i should give some proportion of the profit through the lender is a self-evident principle of natural justice they hope your bar here is title is Howie this is fake a principle of natural law something of that kind mark says that favor of interest is not a matter of self edit print full from that for breakfast r added a payment of interest arises of the natural consequence of supply and demand for fun in the money market as this market exists within the framework of catholicism a mode is a valid contract within the capital scheme and the legal system fourthly right isn't that anything to do with the natural log it arrived results of supply and demand and the micro / / funds and the legal system will in portrait now the disk packet by itself is not of course an account of the conception of crony capitalism but it does suggest several points first there is a distinction of which mark make between a juridical forms for example the critical form of a valid contract as they do an agreement to make alone or purpose of the kinds of some pics of climate monitoring or whatever and the content of these forms the theoretical forms are like the notion of the public contract for the contract is a general legal motion may be found in many different legal system and may apply to economic transaction under widely different mode of production in different kinds of societies on the other hand I assume that the content of the juridical form of contract the general notion contract faith prefers to the specific kinds of contract that can be mega be made and that will be enforced by the legal system thus under capitalism a contract into slavery safety or for the buying and selling of play is void ab initio will not be important in that sense it's unjust and that part of the content radical form under catalyst of regime I assume also that the content of the juridical form of contract cover the various conditions under which valid contract I'm a kind of thing that have to be satisfied and so forth so that fraud becton and entering into these and certain kinds of it can also invalidates the contract and that would be partly the content of these forms on your cattle isn't the antagonism fraud and deception and making agreements would also be who that is unjust and there any help mainly incompatible with the regime of pre-contract second imprint that I'm sort of withdrawal the faces of group after this that it seems that where the slavery abroad and so forth is unjustice emotive the doctrine is satisfied better not committing slavery or one of practices that defies of content for the law of contract with you most adequate to the Cystic lifting mode of production and well adapted to the operation of this mode as it carries out the court that the Piedmont in the background its historical role efficiently we call it this historical role may take capitalism is the rapid killing of a real capital real investment plans new kings go forth and development of technology to use it and native ways hence the juridical form of the law contract under capitalism is most adequate when it content is adjusted so if the native of motor production to fulfill its role if you are in capital in the most effective way and since slavery a market you would think Canada with this requirement capitals as a mode of production is undone one essential feature that was like a there's a system of freedom competitive market including free market for the high of labor in this connection is relaxes viewed with the competitive wave of welcome amymarie viewing this connection is heading they formed the market rip the native relation the Zen is an essential feature of the system and totally just provided that the records are paid the full value of their labor power that that is the equivalent of the socially necessary labour time that it takes to produce and to reproduce the records neighborhood in discussing the labor contract in chapter 7 volume 1 of capital mark says the father netizen the McClellan at page for the better suppress what since I honor the bull Detroit if you will read that I won't read the passage of entire I just called your attention it ends up and went to pray that the pack of night saying to us a fair trade sweetly I could be gay nerd on balance of I this but then i'd end up with saying it is by no means an injury to the seller that is worth it we chose the labour-power there's not more wise here than I take it is no injury every word injury for me no injustice and marked it below some lives then equivalent has been exchanged for equipment and so they can section Justice of probity capitalism the way I'm payin attention is satisfied not really good bit of sarcasm endless passage now I'm tapping the sarcasm to big break the hostility with the court is a pervasive through our capital but I'm having it based on other mall notions another compatible when we're saying that accordance with Catholic and not notion of justice which is the only one that can relevant in this context and that kind of is never less satisfied so pain record mantener value of but the math then d value of their bank account would be only launches new of his understanding of definitely part under Catherine that would be unjust and this is far more interesting I think I'm relevant example than the examples of slavery with Nick farthest but that he returns that the new age relations women fake equivalent is within this incredibly just as an interesting example so I'm saying that it is marking you that under the capitalism as a picnic for free competition when way these are perfectly just and not always work for lack of equipment but in general whenever quitter let me pay for privilege in terms of change of men necessary labour time and he does assume many take tackle with that condition is satisfied now put somewhat differently markley that capitalism of this system of exploitation that is assistive extraction of when favorite power death is under feudalism just as much so and under few isn't exportation visible one that open to view because fatalism was an institution of personal defended the cert was farmed by the voice to work family days a year on a Lords field and was there punished if that was not done so it's open to view and when that was exactly the ratio of exploitation and biddable in institutions under attack ilysm economic things I can supersede under a regime of free contracting independent person who are equal persons at in the eye of the law and marks comments that in the way contract there is no way for anyone to tell how it is the sea and let down up Emily hours are magic fairy for the workers to work in order to an equivalent of what's required to may produce their labor power and how much is circle spider sip that you work eight hours a day day for five days a week and nobody knows it doesn't occur than the ash how much of it is the nectar mega common in that sense of how much of it is on a great flavor so well I'm not here but pointed written anything in the institutional form that revealed that fact whereas there is obviously a new rhythm well I can stop here and pick up to get in here
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Modern_Political_Philosophy_John_Rawls_PhD_1984
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John_RawlsModern_Political_PhilosophyLecture_12_audio_only.txt
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I'm sorry the other day that I went over kills view it bad what I was calling a judicious spectator whenever that very fast and i don't know if i will try to give a proper account of it yeah but I i should say that i think that that idea is one of the most interesting important ideas moral philosophy and it's really worth paying attention to and that idea appears for the first time in him clearly stated in this way now i have used the term a judicious spectator I don't think that appears in the in bar but it does appear in the trees so that's where the time comes from the third book of the TV and the thing I was trying to emphasize the last time that he was full of you doing good things we talked about on Friday guys account of property and lead you disrespect tater what they understood is and it's temp to give an account of a moral thought as might be done by a psychologist brothers I'm trying to incite contrast between him and this regard remember sometime back I said it beginning of class that I refer to any mark of collingwood to the effect at the history of political philosophy isn't a lot of different answers to the same question but but history a lot of answers to a lot of different questions and the certain things you should be or have in mind when you begin meeting someone is how are they doing this subject what's their way of approaching it and so forth and in case of Hume he's trying to explain how it is in this in that notion of the dude is expected how it is that we are able to make moral distinctions but where does a distinction between right and wrong come from he's not talking about moral motivations not talking about until the very end of the 30 inquiries not talking about and why it is that we are moved to do what's right to do what what please be right he's innocent where does that distinction itself come from it's like someone asking how do we things between colors or something of that sort giving some account of rods and cones and all that sort of stuff ah well here's someone how do you make thinking right and wrong and how is that set up from a social point of view how does if you learn to make that distinction how is it that so we come to agree upon the thing our rightful and so forth and his idea is it is that we learn in the course of growing up in society we learn to take the point of view of the Jew disrespected and that's fun to do that can be characterized by reason it's a point of view that we put ourselves into by acts of imagination and having done so we then respond to the standard optics that we're talking to consider or that we pick up language in everyday life to consider we respond to things in the same way because the only thing that's aroused or the only thing that's moved from that point of view is principle of humanity they trying then to give an account of how we're able to make these distinctions and it's a broadly speaking such as psychological account now in last time I am sorry I think I mention it again because I think it's so important if we can try say Hume lots of counsel probably we might think of locks a as a constitutional lawyer only beer the Constitution is a constitution of the universe in a sense it's the community of all human beings who are created by God and sofa and the basic law that Constitution bank goddess has cream authority and the law of nature and la marquise arguing with in that Constitution license filmer is it helmut characterizes it in a different way and lock in another way and the reach trying to account to the basis property within their inception of the Constitution so it's all as it were normative view taken for granted these fundamental moral ideas and then within that Lamar wants to account for father poverty how it comes about now back in strange legitimate going on and so forth him he was entirely different he doesn't believe in any of that he is he's a skeptic right for a sort although it's complicated exactly what Jim skepticism is but he was raised as a Presbyterian Scotland and it's plain that it doesn't very often say so but you'll come across places where he said extremely i want one moment made you some of the pastor she'll notice paying attention and he really can't stand it might suit well so he's not working at all with them locks framework he's just trying to explain the fact that there is property what natural factors in society explain this institution why does it exist and not looking at from a normative one of you in first sentence that why should it exist why audit to exist it's not asking that so much as why does it exist how did it come about and what sustains it what social purpose does it serve and so on the dad seems opposed to all this and its really kind of a another my sake it's another view on things so while the first today did we discuss the contractor in LA mocking him and his criticism of mock social contract view when I did that it might had seemed as if was over them the same view and they were disagreeing only about what criterion is you might say of a judge machine or the gym energy well they are disagreeing about that and that's not inaccurate but you are also this is how different Kim background few is and take that into account so for sophie hulme anything about past history in the case a property port or government is not essential it isn't important for whether not property now is G ossified or acceptable and the same thing with the case of that government might shake him by going to bygones on the utilitarian view what counts is how the institution operates now how I can be expected to operate future and this is the case of all the institutions of possible the institution that we have now is one more like than any other to serve the needs and interests of society well aware then of those let's say so basic points of view that people have because they shaped so much else and it was intention of this a is to give these things from the standpoint of what the baby called social science he doesn't names those terms of course but it's like that be trying to give the first instance interval account of these matters well now I turn into Jones to it milk his day so 18 six to eighteen seventy three aunts big jump from hume to know and i'm going to do the same thing regard to mill that it did in the other cases it which is inside some things about how they viewed matter as everyone knows and noah was the eldest child of the hill apparent philosopher james mill her along with the anthem was one of the leaders of philosophical radicals as in the early 19th century Nell's far the required him to tutor his younger siblings knoweth kept so busy doing this that in fact he had is a sensing which he never had a childhood and he bitterly resented that I think you all can share a dislike to his brothers and sisters and I think this is part because he felt he had used up his childhood and teaching them and he resented that as anyone I think would but he was a prodigy and by the age of 16 he was a formable intellect in his own right I mean he could do economics at that time sept-iles Ricardo is very very very proud now I think to understand mill it is important to recognize his choice of a vocation that is what was he trying to do and why was he trying to accomplish in his life mill did not aim to be this good scholar he didn't ain't i right important books or originals marks in philosophy and economics or political theory and he did not wish it to become a public figure or mana party wouldn't her sensitive to make his way politics the whole eyes how instead he saw himself i think is he as an educator of advanced and enlightened opinion in his time his name remorse it explained what he took to be the fundamental philosophical all and political principles in accordance it with which he thought modern society then coming into being in the end of the day had to be organized if this society wants to be but was too cheap harmony and this duality of what helen is early days calling for Gannett days that is idea of an organic did help took from Santa sansom oh it was a French French philosopher who had a following the 1820s and the idea was that organic ages came about only if there was kind of a green basic principle how society is organized and since they succumb or modern society was going to be secular industrial and Democratic nature that is the kind of society that women health saw coming into being they'll suck out basic principles and grants for them in a society of this kind as on society was going to be secular democratic and industrial and he wanted to set out the basic principles and I'm readily intelligible form so that they could be a hood by those of influenced by those who did have control and power in the society of this day so in that that sense he saw himself as an educator of advanced and informed and be my opinion now observe that it is no part of a chosen a vocation of this sort that many males work should be original or that they or that they ship hippocampal works is our or that they contribute in any way to the historical tradition and to the development of economic and social social theory that that foundational the car and house golly the art is not in itself a matter dan point of this chosen purpose now I think in fact that Neil is original and he often has a profound ideas but i think is imagine r is now live on the whole of repressed and the two reasons for this one one of them is the choice of vocation that is he isn't trying this entropy of original even you may proceed that it's harmful for bad for his aims to be so unto the scholarly and difficult i think the other reason is the very complicated rumination to his part it is his father brought him up as his tutor he'll never went to school anything like that although he taught them mention four siblings what he learned he learned from reading and from having his father as a as a tutor Jesus sit as far as my library work the back of the book and every night and he asks for help he has to help too often for the skull with ample not acting probably not interrupting him but he had this complicated relationship slaughter obviously he disliked them he was a more wonderful man so for the song I think what happens is is it mill can't break from being a you a utilitarian he cannot he introduces his on mention as we as we go on a lot of ideas that don't know handsome fit with the classical a utilitarian there isn't ever an open break in the sense that he's always introduces of these ideas under the rubric that they are utilitarian is a form of you till eternity so there's this very complicated relationship and I think it affected all those messages only a guess how can you tell about these sorts of things but I believe it affected his recent written out that is willingness to break into the open and introduce service or abused now in the mills actual vocation that is iain to be an educated about might an advanced opinion he was surely very successful so that's way although he may not and in the first rank as a plus rewards and economist all done singer crepes arguable but even if he does not he is certainly very successful and the thing he actually chose to do and set up to do when I'm will begin doing is to try in this Thursday to say something about the essay on youth on utilitarianism which will be the first one that will pick up and a one way to do that is to introduce I think its background niltor critique of Bentham and in short a collection of remark published in 1833 which held acknowledged as it was over not at the time no makes a number the criticisms of bentley and i go over these because i think that if one somewhere them we see had the essay on on utilitarianism is attempting to correct for these the first objection that a mill makes the Bentham is it phantom does not attempt to give any serious philosophical justification the principle of utility he's very Curt and dependence and dismissive and tongue and the mill thinks that people who all panners pushed to eject the principal think it's incorrect I deserve better than that and in the essay bill apparently no attempts to provide among other things to teach ossification of this principle will come today another objection that makes is it he says it Bentham interpret the principle of utility in the narrow sense as what a female calls the principle of Pacific consequences this is a principle that proves or blames of an action from a calculation solely of consequences a tune it's that action if practice generally or that kind of action if practice generally would itself me now no grants it has kind of criticism is appropriate and of course when we take an account the consequences of an action is generally practice we're thinking of consequences that general tractors on the general happiness now he'll grant from the standpoint of a legislature enacting laws and so forth that this is a natural way to assess or to the Iowa actions and to encourage certain kinds of actions and discourage other kinds by various sanctions and penalties Mills jection though is it this understanding of the principle much too narrow from the standpoint of dealing with four fundamental social questions of the age what one has to take into account as the consequences for human character as a whole and from this we didn't have to work out and not only licensed bottled in couraging and discouraging certain action in terms of the consequences of general practice but how to design social institutions so that people can have the kinds of characters and with the kinds of aims and ends and ideal and the life such that they are incapable of say committing crimes that is if we're looking first at an action in terms of principle is this epic consequences making bank of penalty and rewards and thereby witching tanay Detert and notice these Civic circumstances but a broader view from hill standpoint is how do you design institutions and social orders has a whole so people have certain sorts of characters and they come had certain sorts of things so that they don't have those kinds of desires that it desires to do action to tend to the ordinary sense to tend to be thought of as crime so what the hell is think about is that the two things to look at when one thing is consequences of the action it generally acted upon the other is consequences of acting on actions of that sort upon character and upon institution and upon institutions that form character and so forth they all had in mind that the what the killer parent also had to develop was period organic institutions as he calls in these remarks and general forms of policy and what was needed was a conception of utility for that purpose another objection death of meld takes to benefit well perhaps I ought to say that I'm taking for granted that that you all know that the ensems notion of you tell if it was on the whole he didn't keenan hedonistic that is the idea what was a pleasure pain wasn't I was good and bad and principle of utility was to design institutions so it's some eyes might say that balance of pleasure / / pain and this is it's a dish and what narrow notion that is going i think 250r take a bog Amell hello as a win notes from the beginning of the essay on utilitarianism chapter to the hell was not in any official statement abandon attended 19 to heat milk third criticism Beckham is it he interprets Bentham is saying where is giving account of human motivation which says that people are moved by a balance of motives expressed in terms of perspective as future pleasures and pain that the idea being that the woman we contemplate an action we try to estimate in some way the balance of pleasure over pain its consequences of rust and then tried falls into the course of doing them help you into a form of psychological egoism whereas no want to say that the defendant fails to see that the greatest hope for human improvement lies in a change of character and in our negative and predominant motives these barriers Bentham are connected with his failure to see political and social institutions as a means for social education cup of people means it have to be adjusted with certain particular conditions of people given their history and stasia civil civilization and so forth so it's this idea of seeing of the developing and notion of utility that will make it possible for some criteria for how social institutions design has changed its social education the denser kind of thing that has mind finally they'll think that the anthem are the era see makes is the brakes on only part of the motive that actually new people and also to regard them as much more international and calculating and they actually are this tendency which is a connected with phantoms a dark on the artificial identification of of interest that's the doctor that what I just write or ought to do is to design institutions so that everyone from their own interest and without any conception of public is never less led to act in ways such that consequence is a very one's actions taken together maximize or produce greatest happiness reason is called the art of official identification adventures as a proto safe in Nashville because it brought about by institution but had they designed rewards and about side effects and there is no view change in nature of human motives are taking people as they are then design institutions so that collective result of their action is to maximize happiness more one thing they will want to do is to not do the garden others as they are but to think of new ways in which institutions could change them and he'll then things that Bentham underestimates important to this over emphasizes the calculated international aspect in the behavior and underestimate 62 n to which people identify with their institutions view them as a framework that preserves historical continuity of the time enables them to give a sense of themselves and of a community and also business petitions for serving as a whole to shape their characters well thinks all of these important aspects are over the hug 5m well this will then give us one way to read you might say the essay on you two alternatives I say one way to be the current leader a lot of ready but first and keeping in mind health critique a better than what you have to survey we can regard each chapter in in utilitarianism as attempting to formulate an aspect of utilitarian document on my sadism they formulated or to restate it so as to meet Nils objections to Bentham's you so that's no professors always to be a utilitarian and intends to revise it as it were from within but of course there is a controversy about whether these revisions are really consistent with any sort of Utila parent you or the name regionals specification of it or whether they actually change it into a substantially different view and this is something that a nation up off and on and something that you think about is it a case for example information of the most famous case coming when Heather Hills distinction between quality and quantity of pleasure is consistent with a utilitarian view now chapter one addresses third point that i mentioned above Nell said that that he really discussed the justification of the principle of utility and these sketches out what is needed for that and this chapter that Jackie wants together with chapters four and five complete Mills justification of principle of utility now what mill does in effect is too great figure an argument that citric will give form of argument that cyclical given very elaborate detail later roughly the argument is something like this of everyone including even the intuition of school no mention indirectly in chapter one he has a mind people like you and the 18th century table like the price and others that everyone including the intuitionist you can see that one round of right conduct is a tendency to promote happiness so everyone is going to agree on the elbow that that's one grand tour and then both how and citric are going to say that then if there's some other first principle than this pose imagined that principle of utility is as it were one of the first principle everyone agrees that then suppose there's another first which in the makin flick with principle of utility then mill says we must have some way of deciding which will learn is to govern h1 is it take priority then the next step in the argument is that there isn't any other principles accept the principle of utility that is sufficiently general and has the required content and features to serve as this first principle which is going to regulate and adjust the complex of other principles that's the general form of the argument is that everyone will grant that a first principle if you say there is another principle then how are you the deal of the conflicts between them and then their argument of will take the form that the only person in school has the aggregate characteristics and content that they can serve in this judicata droll tillery you will also help to the argument that common sense and its judgment implicitly appealed to the principle of utility and then in fact if we examine our common sense moral judgments will see that they fit on the whole this principle this is again an argument that Civic makes them in great detail characterizes common senses unconsciously a utilitarian pretending to be that in the long run as it makes this judgment to change in certain things some milk sketches an organ of the ID sordid chapter one and is completed birth parts of of chapter four and five and chapter 20 states his fundamental revisions of the notion of you tell a team which is take these up below companies for the moment chapter 3 contains an answer to Benson few on unhuman of psychology rotten failed attempts to do in this chapter is the gift and account of how human beings can naturally acquire a desire to act from the principle of utility for its own sake that is a desire to act from this principle independently of any external sanctions that is rewards or penalties or of any kind of my sake of public opinion that simply have a desire to act from this principle something we might say as a principle dependent desire that's in order to describe this desire or we have to explain and set out the principle of utility to dust Josh's chapter 2 of utilitarianism the bed because I was a conception of utility that looks beyond Bentham view and application principal city consequences one-nil doesn't chapter three is if develop a more elaborate of psychology and the more hope it psychology than because i just mentioned in this house artificial dedication of interest for example you capoten and hope i pronounced chris magnificant pleasures name then take them and no one wants to reject imagine psychic psychological egoism takes into that and note that in paragraphs and momentum I'm sorry eighth and eleventh chapter three days I regresan not only rejects psychologically with prefers forms but but i think all nearly social conditioning views of model functions as well as domestic on notion of human nature well i think how i would suggest information chapter four and five already done that base the completion of now just justification what I think I often do in the time I have this is say some things about the notion of utility and introduced of the early parts of chapter 2 now 11 difficulty make the classical darkened by the classical doctor I mean the principle that institutions and actions are writing then that they maximize happiness conceived in a hedonistic way one of the dip codes is sister and maximizing some n is to be reasonable as a social thing the end impression must be something that we should want all things considered up to maximize but question of rises on the Hamptons view why should we want to maximize pleasure without any consideration of the kind of activity within which it arises or without any consideration of the nature of the object activity from which it arises is for or also why giving one to maximize pleasure leaving out of account relationship between persons and the life with the activity question presupposes in other words every understand pleasure in some specific way why should II G as a variable feeling for a sensation on any way which is my feet let's say thought of as and identifiable something why should that be the thing in itself the kind of thing that we shouldn't want to maximize the taking one when we only take into account its intensity and duration no thinks of this view if we think hedonism in this fairly ton creek way as classifiable object then that tends to undermine who thinks the value of human life and we have to find another interpretation of the notion of utility in Mills autobiography chatter on his hands of Isis and it's clear I think that one of the elements put back the crisis it was realizing or the time rates in one way in which is drugged him that the just key missing notion of your utility to be valued life the major parts from Hell to carry on he stacks how he explains his ample Christ there are lots of other explanations of it but that's how he explained it and in part that nature himself well the genetically just stated kids rise to the objection that key until apparent ism is a doctor we're the only hook swine that's what the best of the milk says I think that was Carlisle who raised edges so he's got to he's got to deal with it but there's a second difficulty which concerns how we are to make my interpersonal comparisons of well-being that is on what basis are going to say that one person's happiness is greater than another work has greater value as in measured by the ocean timothy then someone someone else's happens clearly on the best we can do this in some way or other unless you can do that and they sprang from roughly the notion of amazing happiness some of the wrong persons who are protected cannot be reasonably apply and here L makes i think in chapter 2 a very important a distinction between happiness and contentment and your want to think about that and she milk makes a human beings at least make this distinction and in erica's happiness involves a certain kind of mode of existence it isn't isn't a character I zabal solely in terms of certain forms of experiences as a pleasure thing but it involves an exercise its circle higher as well as in our powers so that what L will do and you ought to notice it throughout the early parts of chapter 2 when you talk about a pleasure for a pain or happiness after we get beyond paragraph 2 which is where he gives is official statement of lethal you a pleasure of the kind of activity in no longer I think I actually talking about variance and happiness he characterized off in terms of a mode of existence of a certain kind so that for us will be able to make that it thinks in between happiness and contentment is a contentment that would be alive in which only certain sorts of powers of work were exercised in which only the lower pleasures work enjoy and although we might even not complain about that perhaps contentment involves a certain sort of tranquility and acceptance so we might not have any view of anything higher nevertheless we might be content in the sense that the desires that we actually had were satisfied but that would not be four mil that would not be happiness because it would not involve what he regards as an appropriate mode of existence well I don't know at the end of a have time to get in under any extent the beginning progress of chapter two of em utilitarianism I will give this on Friday and trying to give to create your dedication what I think of the main points of that nails art reception of utility the key things in there are two hope for and did he clear about I think integrating rd how does he explain vegetation between the heart and the lower pleasure what are the two sources of these pleasures and it's higher that is exercised at a higher exercise of our faculty and what is the basis of the criterion that they decided preference right here in which he is in order to make a distinction between them what I believe that all this is is a problem is it females account of utility depends upon a very important that basic psychological thesis about human beings it depends on an assumption about their psychology namely the given choice between certain ways of life certain modes of existence they're going to choose what milko of my heart pleasure in preference to a life if includes a lower point and that is a basic psychological thesis and fundamentally I think Mills view and the question isn't whether that also includes certain not psychological or well in it is it the is against it section of utility will introduce it here is it I conception that time to explain period cycle psychologically or does he have in it certain normal notions pretending were one of the forms of motivation that he described is a sense of dignity that is one reason that we would not prefer my accounting have the lower pleasures in it is a sense of our own dignity it's that introducing a mall notion of feta purely psychological pieces well up again with this and try to say something about any paragraphs and they only halfway through project good work right
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Introduction_to_Psychology_with_Paul_Bloom
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12_Evolution_Emotion_and_Reason_Emotions_Part_II.txt
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Professor Paul Bloom: So what we're doing today is continuing on the theme of emotions. "Emotions" is a two-part lecture and we're continuing along certain themes. I want to begin by responding to a question which was raised in the last class concerning smiling and nonhuman primates. It was a very good question. The issue was: we know that humans have different sorts of smiles to convey different sorts of information. The question was, "do nonhuman primates, like chimpanzees or gorillas or gibbons, have the same many sorts of smiles?" So, I contacted the world's expert on smiling, who did not return my e-mails. So, I contacted the second world's expert on smiling who told me that the answer is "no," that primate--nonhuman primate smiles actually correspond almost entirely to appeasement smiles. They're "don't hurt me" smiles. They're equivalent to the "coy smile" that we saw on humans. But that nonhuman primates do not use smiles for greetings; there's no equivalent to the "greeting smile" or "Pan Am smile"; nor do they use them as genuine expressions of happiness. There's no equivalent to the "Duchenne smile." That's as far as I know. If the world's expert gets back to me and says something different, I'll keep you posted. Another thing. Going back to the beginning theme of the class, what we started--just to review, we talked about the different functions of emotions. And then we talked about smiling and facial expressions. And then we turned to some--to a nonsocial emotion, the case of fear. And then we shifted to social emotions. And we talked about social emotions towards kin and the special evolutionary reasons that would lead them to evolve. And as we were ending, we were talking about the relationship between an animal and its children, particularly in cases like humans and birds and mammals where there tends to be a close relationship with our children. We invest in quality, not quantity. I might produce very few children in my life. And my evolutionary trick then is to focus very intently on them and make sure they survive. If I were to produce 100 children, I could stand to lose a few, but if I just produce five in my lifetime or two or one, they become very precious to me. And so, the story of the evolution of a species like us involves a long period of dependence and deep, deep bonds between the parent and the child. And that's part of what I talked about, how parents respond to children. And I want to begin this class by giving an illustration from a documentary about parental response to children, but I want to give it in a species that's not us. And here is why. I'll explain why with an analogy. I have a friend of mine who studies the psychology of religion. He studies why people hold religious beliefs. And he tells me that when he's talking to a non specialist, somebody not in the field, he doesn't ever tell them, "Yeah, I'm really interested in why people believe in the Bible or why people light the candles on Sabbath or why people go to church" because these are religions that people around here hold, and if you tell people you study them they'll sort of be puzzled, "why would you want to study something like that" or offended. If you want to talk about the psychology of religion to an audience like this, what you do is you start with the exotic. So, you start by talking about people who put butter on their heads. Dan Sperber talks about a culture where the men put butter on their heads in the summer. And it kind of melts and that's part of--one of the things that they do or--you talk about a culture that believes in spirits or that trees can talk. You say you're studying it and they say, "Oh, that's interesting. I wonder why they believe that?" And you use that as a way to look at more general facts that exist even in our culture. You use the fact that we don't take the exotic for granted as a way to motivate the scientific study of things we do take for granted. And this is, of course, true more generally. This was the point in the William James quote when he talked about things that are natural to us and noticed that some very odd things are equally natural to other species. And it's true, I think, in particular when we talk about things like the love we have for our children. So, one way to look at the love we have for our children scientifically, isn't to look at it head-on, because the love we feel towards our own children feels sacred, it feels special, but look at it in other species. And so, one of the nicest illustrations of this is the Emperor penguin, which was--which--whose childcare and mating practices were dramatized in a wonderful movie called "March of the Penguins." And this is interesting because they had this incredibly elaborate and quite precarious system of generating and taking care of offspring. So, I want to show you a brief clip of the movie to illustrate some parts of this. What they do at the beginning, which is not--which leads up to this, is they take a very long trek from the water to their breeding grounds. Their breeding grounds is--are protected from the wind and they're on a firm piece of ice so they could hold the whole pack. They do the breeding there and it's there that the eggs are created. So, this is where the movie begins at this point. "March of the Penguins" was the second best--second most popular documentary of all time, beaten only by "Fahrenheit 9/11." And people responded to it in different ways, which are informative when we think about the generalizations you could make from animal behavior to human behavior. Some conservative commentators saw this as a celebration of family values, such as love and trust and monogamy. Some liberals, who hate everything that's good and true, [laughter] responded by saying, "Well, yeah, they're monogamous for one breeding season. It's a year. Then they go and find another mate. If you add it up, it's pretty slutty." [laughter] I think more to the point, people were impressed and stunned by the rich and articulate and systematic behavior that these animals were showing. Plainly, they didn't pick it up from television, movies, culture, learning, schooling, and so on. To some extent, this sort of complicated behavior came natural to them. And it's understandable that some proponents of intelligent design, or creationism, pointed to this as an example of how God creates things that are deeply, richly intricate so as to perpetrate the survival of different animals. From a Darwinian standpoint, the Darwinian would agree with the creationist that this couldn't have happened by accident, this is just far too complicated, but would appeal to the--to this as an exquisite example of a biological adaptation, in particular a biological adaptation regarding parental care to children shaped by the fact that children share the parents' genes and so parents will evolve in ways that perpetrate the survival of their children. Then there's the other direction, which is how children respond to parents, how the young ones are wired up to resonate and respond in different ways to the adults around them. And we quickly talked about some different theories of this. And I'll just review what we talked about last class. Babies will develop an attachment to whoever is closest. They'll usually prefer their mothers because their mothers are typically those who are closest to them. They'll prefer her voice, her face, her smell. It used to be thought that there is some sort of magical moment of imprinting that when the baby is born, the baby must see his or her mother and "boom," a connection is made. If the baby doesn't, terrible things will happen with attachment later on. This is silly. There is no reason to believe there's some special moment or special five minutes or special hour. It's just in the fullness of time babies will develop an attachment to the animal that's closest to it. They will recognize it as, at an implicit level, at an unconscious level, as their kin. Well, how does this work? How does the baby's brain develop--come to develop an emotional attachment to that creature? Well, you remember from Skinner that operant conditioning could provide a good answer to this. And this is known as the "Cupboard Theory," which is babies love their moms because their moms provide food. It's the law of effect. It's operant conditioning. They will approach their mothers to get the food from them. And they will develop an attachment because their mother provides food. And this is contrasted with a more nativist, hard-wired theory developed by Bowlby which claims that there's two things going on. There is a draw to mom for comfort and social interaction and fear of strangers. Now, in the real world, it's difficult to pull apart these two means of attraction because the very same woman who's giving you comfort and social interaction is also the one giving you milk. But in the laboratory you can pull them apart. And that's what Henry Harlow did in the movies you saw last week. So, Harlow exposed primates to two different mothers. One is a wire mother. That's a Skinnerian mother. That's a mother who gave food. The other is a cloth mother set-up so that she'd be comfortable and give warmth and cuddling. And the question is, "Which one do babies go for?" And as you can remember from the movies, the results are fairly decisive. Babies go to the wire mother to eat--as one of the characters said, "You've got to eat to live." But they viewed the--they loved the cloth mother. They developed an attachment to the warm, cuddly mother. That's the one they used as a base when they were threatened. That's the one they used as a base from which to explore. Okay. And that actually--Oh, that's just--I have a picture. And that actually takes me to the--Oh, except for one thing, it almost takes me to the end of the question of our emotions towards kin. One question you could ask is, "What if there's no contact at all?" Now, you could imagine the effects of how--A lot of people are interested in the question of the effects of the child's early relationship to adults around him or her in how the child turns out later. This becomes hugely relevant for social debates like daycare. So for instance, a lot of psychologists are interested in the question, "Is it better for a child to be raised by a parent, usually a mother, or does it make a difference if the child goes to daycare? What if the child goes to daycare at six months? What if the child goes to daycare at two years? How does this affect the child?" The short answer is, nobody really knows. There's a lot of debate over whether or not there are subtle differences and it's deeply controversial. But we do know that it doesn't make a big difference. We do know that if you got raised by mom, or perhaps mom and dad, or maybe just dad all through your life until going off for school and I--my parents threw me in a daycare at age three months--it's not going to make a big difference for us, maybe a subtle difference though it's not clear which way it would go. But it won't make a big difference. But what if there's no contact at all? What if--What about terrible circumstances where people get no cloth mother, they get nobody for attachment? This is a really--In the real world, of course, you can't do experiments on this. And in the real world with humans, this only happens in tragic cases. But this has been studied. So Harlow, again, raised monkeys in solitary confinement so they were raised in steel cages with only a wire mother. In other words, they got all the nutrition they needed but they got no mothering. It turned out that you kind of get monkey psychotics. They're withdrawn. They don't play. They bite themselves. They're incompetent sexually. They're incompetent socially. They're incompetent maternally. In one case, one of these monkeys raised in solitary confinement was artificially inseminated. When she had a child she banged its head on the floor and then bit it to death. So, you need to be--you need--This shows--This is kind of a stark demonstration that some early connection, some early attachment is critical for the developing of a primate. Obviously, you don't do these experiments with people but there are natural experiments, humans raised in harsh orphanages with little social contact, and these children--If the--In other words, they get fed, barely, but nobody picks them up and cuddles them. These children, if this happens for long enough, they end up with severe problems with social and emotional development. From an emotional point of view, they're often insatiable. They really need cuddling and support or they're apathetic, they don't care at all. Now, there's some sort of good news, which is if you get these people or these monkeys early enough you can reverse the effects of this bad development. So, there's some research done with monkey therapists. So then, what they do is they take the monkey, they raise it in a steel cage, the monkey comes out, the monkey is kind of psycho, and then they send in a younger monkey who is just goofing around, jumping all around the place and everything. And experience with this younger monkey who just follows them around and clings to them leads to gradual improvement. It makes the solitary monkey become better. There might be a similar effect with humans. So one story more about--of an anecdote than an experiment was a situation where at the age of one and a half, children were taken away from a really harsh orphanage where they had no contact and brought into a home for mentally retarded women where these women gave them plenty of contact and cuddling and apparently, from what we know, brought them back to normal. And this is all I want to talk about, about the emotions we feel towards our kin, towards our children, and towards our parents. Any questions or thoughts? Yes. Student: Do children in orphanages comfort each other? Professor Paul Bloom: It's a good question. Do children in orphanages comfort each other? I don't know. The situation probably wouldn't be there--The problem is children in orphanages who are in these terrible situations tend to be babies and very young and they wouldn't be thrown together in situations where they could comfort each other. It's a really interesting question. What if it was a situation where children were raised without a supportive cloth mother at all, would not be able to pick them up and hold them, but they could play amongst themselves and support each other? I don't know the answer to that. Teaching Assistant: Yes. Professor Paul Bloom: Yes? Is there evidence on that? Teaching Assistant: Yes, there is. [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: Yes. [laughter] The answer is there is evidence, [laughs] as everybody knows, [laughter] that this sort of--amongst the young, support can actually help the monkey and the children. Somebody else had a question here? Yes. Student: What does that tell us about the middle ground, if the parent is comforting just a little bit and then not that much [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: Right. So this is--The question is, "What does that tell us about the middle ground?" So this is an extreme case but what do we know about the middle case? Say your parent--You're not raised in a cage, you're not in a Romanian orphanage, but your parents just don't pick you up very much. They don't love you very much. There's no good evidence that that has any effect on a person. The problem is, and we're going to talk about this in much more detail in a couple of weeks, is it's true that parents who aren't affectionate have kids that aren't affectionate but it's not clear this is because of a genetic connection or an environmental connection. The one thing we do know is that in the middle ground, effects tend not to be dramatic. So when you get away from extreme cases, effects are hard to see and require careful experimental research to tease out. I think what it's safe to say for a lot--for everything but the severe conditions is we don't know what kind of effects there are. But if there are effects they are not big and dramatic ones. Okay. Animals' good feelings, animals' emotional attraction to their kin, is not a huge puzzle from an evolutionary point of view. Evolution is driven by forces that operate on the fact of how many genes get reproduced and replicated among your descendants. So, it makes sense that animals would be wired-up to care for their kids. It would make sense that kids who are wired-up to survive would develop attachments to their parents. What's more of a puzzle though is that animals, including humans, seem to have exquisitely complicated relationships with non-kin. In particular, animals are nice to non-kin. You are nice to people that you're not related to. There are a lot of examples of this. Animals groom one another. You go, you pick off the lice and the bugs off your friend; they pick it off you. They give warning cries. So, warning cries--All sorts of animals give warning cries. You are--I don't know. You're a little animal and a big animal comes charging and you say, "Hey!" Oh. You may sort of cry and everybody runs away. And that's very risky for you but you do it anyway, often to protect people you aren't related to. Often animals share childcare. And from a cold-blooded, natural selection, survival-of-the-gene point of view, you would imagine that if you lend me your kid for the day I would eat him for the protein and "it's not my genes and actually it gives more for my kids." That's not quite how it works though. Animals share food. In fact, that animal, hugely ugly, the vampire bat, shares food. What happens is the vampire bat--vampire bats live in caves and they fly out. And what they do is often a bat will strike it big. She'll find a horse, for instance, bite the horse, pump in tons of blood and then fly back. And what it does is it doesn't keep it to itself. Rather, it goes around the whole cave and vomits blood into the mouth of all the other vampire bats so everybody benefits. Isn't that nice? [laughter] Now, what you're tempted to say is, "Well, that's really nice. Everybody benefits," but this raises a puzzle from the evolutionary point of view. Remember, animals benefit more, and to this situation, animals benefit more by working together than by working alone. The benefits outweigh the costs. This is known as "reciprocal altruism" meaning my behavior to you, my good behavior to you, my altruism for you, is predicated on the idea of reciprocation, "I'll benefit from you." And you imagine how vampire bats, for instance, why this makes sense. This is--If you're a vampire bat, it's a better system when anybody strikes it big to feed you rather than for anybody who strike it big, use the blood and then spit out all the rest of it. But here's the problem. Here's why it's such a puzzle. The problem is the existence of cheaters. And in economics and sociology these are also known as "free-riders." And what a cheater or free-rider does is it takes the benefits without paying the cost. Imagine two genes. Imagine one builds a vampire bat that accepts blood from others and shares blood. The other gene accepts blood from others and doesn't share blood. In the long run, "B" will actually out-produce gene "A" because in fact, "B" will be healthy while other vampire bats get sick. And then so the offspring will do better. An even sharper example is an example of warning cries. So, gophers give warning cries when there's a predator. It is extremely adaptive to give a warning cry. Sorry. It's extremely adaptive to respond to a warning cry. You hear a warning cry, you-- "Oh, crap," you run away. It is not very adaptive to give a warning cry. A really good solution then is to listen to warning cries but not to give them. Suppose we had a system--It is very adaptive when people are going to the bar, when people buy drinks to accept the drinks. It is not so adaptive, from the standpoint of one's wallet, to buy people drinks. Here is a solution. Accept drinks but don't pay for drinks. And if everybody fell to that solution, the idea of buying a round would fade. So, there is the puzzle. Since cheating--Since a cheater, in the short run, can always out-win--does better than a non-cheater, how could this cooperation evolve? How could it be an evolutionarily stable strategy? And the answer is "cheater detection." Reciprocal altruism can only evolve if animals are wired up to punish cheaters. Now, that requires a lot of mental apparatus. You have to recognize cheaters, you have to remember cheaters, and you have to be motivated to punish cheaters. And not every animal has this degree of complicated apparatus but actually we know that vampire bats do. So, in one clever study--So the theory says--the evolutionary theory says "yeah, I see what these vampire bats are doing," but you see--and this is a case where evolution makes a nice prediction that couldn't evolve unless bats are keeping track. If bats aren't keeping track, then the system could never exist because the cheaters would just take it over. They must be watching for cheaters. So, the experiment which was done is you--a vampire bat strikes it big, it flies back, and then you keep it--as a scientist you keep it from giving blood to anybody else. Then what happens? Well, what happens is when the other bats strike it big they starve the selfish bat, just as if we go to bars and everybody buys a round except for me. And this happens over and over and over again. Pretty soon you're going to buy a round but you're not going to give me one. And so, just as humans are keeping their eyes out for people who are taking the benefits without paying the costs, so are other animals. And it is argued that this sensitivity to cheating, this focus on reciprocation, plays a powerful role in the evolution of social behavior and the evolution of social emotions. And a classic illustration of this is The Prisoner's Dilemma. Now, many of you, I think, have seen The Prisoner's Dilemma in one course or another? It shows up--It is one of the main constructs in the social sciences. It shows up in cognitive science, psychology, economics, that you could--The teaching fellows are passing around something which you're not going to use right away. But for some of you this is the first time you're going to be exposed to The Prisoner's Dilemma so let me spell it out. Here's the idea. You and a friend commit a crime. You rob a bank, for instance. For the sake of this example, you are prisoner two. You get caught. The police put you in a little room and they say, "We want to know everything that happened. In particular, we want you to rat out your friend." Now, here are the options, and one thing about this is nothing is hidden. The police officer could actually print out a copy of The Prisoner's Dilemma and put it right in front of you. And what he could say is, "Look." You're prisoner two. "You could cooperate--Well, you have two options. You could either cooperate with your friend, you could stay silent, or you could defect or you could squeal." But the police officer says, "Look. If you--Let me tell you something. If you cooperate with your friend and he squeals on you, you'll go to prison for life and he'll walk out. However, if you squeal on him and he cooperates, he keeps quiet, he'll go to prison for life and you'll walk out." So, what do you do? Now, on the nice side, what you can do is you could say, "No. I'm going to be quiet. I'm going to cooperate." Now, if you could trust your friend to cooperate, you're fine, you each get a little stint in prison, but of course your friend might defect. Your friend might squeal. Here is the important structure of The Prisoner's Dilemma. No matter what you--what your friend chooses to do, you're better off squealing. So, suppose you're prisoner two. You believe your friend's going to cooperate with you. He's not going to be--he's not going to give the information out. Well, then your best thing to do is squeal on him. What if you believe he's going to squeal on you? Well, your best thing to do is squeal on him but if you could get your act together and you could coordinate this, you would both be quiet and get a fairly minor penalty. And you could see this--This is the standard origin of the prisoner's dilemma, why it's called "The Prisoner's Dilemma," but you could see this all over the place. So, here is the logic. The best case for you is to defect while the other person cooperates. The worst case is to cooperate while the other person defects. Back to the police thing. The best case for you is to give up all the information; the other guy stays silent; you cut a deal; you walk home that day. The worst case is you're quiet, he cuts a deal, you go to prison for life, but overall the best is that each cooperate and overall the worst for both is if each defect. And the reason that makes this tragic is this. Regardless of what your opponent does, it pays to defect, but if both people defect both are worse off. I'll give a couple of other examples. No. That's just to show that there's a cartoon corresponding to The Prisoner's Dilemma. It is that common. Here's the idea. I am--I break up with my wife. We've been married for a while. We've decided we're not going to go through it together anymore and we break up. We're living in separate houses and we're starting to talk divorce. It occurs to me--Here's me. I put that out there. "Should I get a divorce lawyer?" I ask. Now, I know divorce lawyers are really expensive. And it's kind of difficult to get a divorce lawyer. But if I get a divorce lawyer--And so neither one of us get a divorce lawyer we'll just do okay. We'll get a mediator. We'll split the money down the middle. That'll be okay but I'm kind of tempted. If I get a divorce lawyer and she doesn't, my divorce lawyer will take everything she's got. I get everything, she loses everything. Maybe I should be nice. Hold it. What if she gets a divorce lawyer and I don't? Well, then I'll lose everything, she'll get everything. Well, we should both get a divorce lawyer then but we'd both do pretty badly. Imagine we're two countries, country "A" and country "B." Should I do nuclear disarmament? That's pretty good. We'd do okay if both countries disarmed. We would live our lives; we'll raise taxes; we'll do whatever countries do. But wouldn't it be cool if I build up my weaponry and they don't? I'll invade, take everything they got. That's kind of tempting. Uh oh. Also, if I don't do anything and they do it, they'll invade my country, take everything. So, we both build up our weaponry and we both do pretty badly. Once you start thinking about things this way, there's no end to the sort of notions that could fall under The Prisoner's Dilemma. A good example is a drug deal. Suppose I want to buy marijuana from you, or "reefer" as they call it on the street. [laughter] So, I have $1,000 and from you I'd like to buy a ton of reefer so--I'm rounding off. [laughter] So, you say, "Wonderful. Wonderful. Let's meet behind the gym, two in the morning on Friday, and we'll do the exchange. You bring $1,000, I bring the reefer." "Oh, cool. Okay. Good." And I think, "that's pretty good, a thousand bucks, I get the reefer, you get a thousand bucks. That's okay, that's the normal thing." But now something occurs to me. "Nobody's going to go to the cops if things go badly. So instead of doing--bringing the money, why don't I just bring a gun? You come with your reefer, I stick a gun in your face, take the reefer, go home." Maybe I won't do that, but now I worry because you're thinking the same thing. So, you could show up with a gun, stick the gun in my face, take the thousand bucks, go home. I'll have no reefer. What will I smoke? [laughter] So, we both think this way. So, we both show up behind the gym, two in the morning, with guns. [laughter] Well, that's not as bad for either one of us if I had--I--you had a gun and I didn't have a gun. But still, we're both worse off than if we could cooperate and just do the damn trade. And so that's the structure of The Prisoner's Dilemma. You can only appreciate The Prisoner's Dilemma by actually doing it. So, here's--here is a numerical equivalent to The Prisoner's Dilemma. Everybody should have a card in front of you, a file card. If you don't--If you didn't get a card, a piece of paper will do just as well. Please write on one side "cooperate" and on the other side "defect" and then please find a partner with whom to play one game. This is a one-shot game. One of you is player one. The player on the right-most side from my right could be player one. The other one is player two. Do you each have a partner? If you have three people, you could cluster together and do two and then two and just think. It is actually best if you've never met or spoken to the person you're about to deal with. And the game is, when I say "go," simply show the person your choice. To be clear, if you are player one and you cooperate and player two cooperates as well, you each get three dollars. If you are player one and you cooperate while player two defects, player two gets five dollars and you get bupkis and so on. On three, just show the card to your opponent, to your person you're playing with. One, two, three. [laughter] Okay. How many people in this room cooperated? How many cooperated? How many defected? [laughter] Okay. How many people are now five dollars richer? Okay. How many of you got nothing? [laughter] Okay. So, you're learning. You're learning that the person next to you is really an SOB. [laughter] Now, find the person next to you and you get to play again. And you get to play five games in a row. Play five games in a row and keep score. You just show it to each other, record the numbers, show it, show it, show it, show it. Go now. [laughter] Anybody here win twenty-five dollars? Yes, twenty-five? So you-- Student 1: He cooperated four times and I defected-- Professor Paul Bloom: That's twenty, twenty-one. [laughter] Okay. That's good. That's good. So, it really is a measure of honesty. [laughs] Anybody win twenty or more? Fifteen or more. Fourteen or less. Anybody do five or less? You're a good person. It's good. It's good. You played it with him? Student 2: Yes. Professor Paul Bloom: Bad person. [laughter] It's not really about good or bad. There was a great game once. It's a simple game, but it was a great game, a great, famous competition a long time ago, about 20 years ago, set up by the great computer scientist Robert Axelrod. And he put together a competition where people brought in computer programs to play this game, to play The Prisoner's Dilemma. And there were sixty-three competitors. And these computer programs were incredibly--Some of them were very simple, always be nice, always be--always cooperate, always defect. Some were elegant, prime number solutions and prototype responses, genetic algorithms crafted to figure out what the other person was doing and suss them out. But the winner was developed by Anatol Rappaport. And Anatol Rappaport actually died about a month ago at quite an old age, a great scientist. What was interesting about this was he was the winner with his program but his program was also one of the simplest. It may well have been the simplest. It was called "Tit-for-Tat" and it worked very simple. It took four lines of basic code. The first time you meet a new program, cooperate. The first time you meet somebody, be nice. After that, do on each trial what the other program did on the previous trial. This beat sixty-two others. And here is why. It had certain beautiful features. It starts friendly. Remember the best long-term solution is everybody's be--everybody's nice. It starts off nice but you can't--it's not a sucker. If you screw with it, it will defect back on the next turn. It is, however, forgiving. Do you want to get nice with it? Be nice. If you're nice, it'll be nice back at you later on. It's also transparent, nothing complicated about it, and that's actually important. It's not merely that it's not a sucker and forgiving. More to the point, it is--you could tell it's not a sucker. And you could tell it's forgiving. And this very powerful algorithm learned to cooperate even in the situation--and helped--learned to make it out the best even in a situation where there's a risk of cheating and betrayal. Some psychologists have argued that our emotions correspond to the different permutations on The Prisoner's Dilemma. We like people who cooperate with us. This motivates us to be nice to them in the future much as the Tit-for-Tat algorithm says, "If you are nice to me now, I'll be nice to you back." We don't like being screwed with. We feel anger and distrust towards those who betray us. That motivates us to betray or avoid them in the future. And we feel bad when we betray somebody who cooperates with us. This motivates us to behave better in the future. You can break down the cells of The Prisoner's Dilemma in terms of emotions that they give rise to. I did an experiment last night with my seven-year-old and my ten-year-old. I explained to them The Prisoner's Dilemma. I didn't give the divorce lawyer example but-- [laughter] and we gave them a big thing of chocolate chips and--the good chocolate chips. We had the good chips and we had the matrix and we had them play. Now, what they did isn't so interesting, but what's interesting is they were furious at each other. One of them, the younger boy, was--kept being betrayed by the older boy including tricks like he'd say, "Okay. Let's both cooperate." "Yeah. Okay." Then he'd cooperate-- "defect!" And [laughter] the response was anger, though not actually guilt on the part of the other boy [laughter] but rage. And we see these sort of things all the time in real life. You're familiar with The Prisoner's Dilemma but there's another game, which you might not be familiar with. It's called The Ultimatum Game. How many of you have encountered The Ultimatum Game? Okay, some of you. Very simple. Choose a partner. It's a very simple game. When economists study this they actually do this with real money. I do not have real money to let you do this too. One of you is "A," one of you is "B." The one on the right most from this side is "A." The other one is "B." Here is a very simple rule. I'd like "A" to turn to "B" and make an offer. "A" has ten dollars. You can give "B" any amount you choose from that ten dollars, from one dollar to ten dollars. "B" can do only one thing. "B" can accept it; if you accept it, you agree to take home the money and "A" keeps what ever's left--or reject it. If you reject it, you get nothing. Nobody gets anything. Is everybody clear? So "A" is going to say, "I'll give you so and so dollars." "B" would say, "Okay," in which case "B" walks away with so and so dollars or--and "A" walks away with whatever rest or "B" could say, "Reject," in which case nobody gets anything. So, this game comes in two steps. The first thing: I would like "A" to turn to "B" and make your offer. Don't--"B" doesn't do anything yet. Make your offer. Your offer should be one word. People are explaining their offer. Make your offer. Okay. Stage two. Do not negotiate. [laughter] You're not--I see people waving their hands and it's complicated. It should be a number from one to ten, a positive integer. Now, "B" --I would like "B" to say one word and you can say it really loud on three. Accept or reject. One, two, three. [laughter] Wow. How many people accepted? Anybody reject it? Good. Okay. How many people offered ten dollars? [laughter] How many people offered more than five dollars? Okay. How many people offered one dollar? Okay. When you offered one dollar did you accept? Anybody else offer one dollar? When you offered one dollar did your partner accept? Okay. How many people offered either four or five dollars? Okay. This is an interesting game because the person who offered--who accepted one dollar was being rational. One dollar is better than no dollars. So, the psychology of human rationality is such that, from a logical point of view, you should reason one dollar is better than nothing. A rational person should accept one dollar. And because we're smart, a--you should offer one dollar but not many of you offered one dollar. Why? Because you knew people are not purely rational. People, even in a one-shot game, won't accept unfair distributions. They'll reject them just out of spite. And so, you need to offer more. And this has been studied from a neuro-economic point of view, which basically provides neuroanatomical evidence that people--if you offered them one dollar they get really pissed. [laughter] Nobody likes to be offered a dollar. Now, there's a more general moral here, which is actually an interesting surprise of some relevance to everyday life. A rational person is easily exploited. A rational person's responses to provocations, to assaults will always be measured inappropriate. If you know I'm rational and you're in a sharing situation with me, you could say to me, "Hey. Here's a dollar. Hey, Mr. Rational, a dollar's better than nothing." "Well, okay," because I'm rational. Similarly, you could mess with me because you could harass me in all sorts of ways, take things that I own, as long as you reason that a rational person wouldn't start a fuss about this. There is some advantage to being irrational, to having a temper. Because if you have a temper and you're known to be irrational, people are forced, by dint of your irrationality, to treat you better. Who am I going to take from? The person who's extremely reasonable or the person who has a hair-trigger temper? Well, I'm going to pick on a reasonable person because the unreasonable person might do unreasonable things. And this is faintly paradoxical, but often to be irrational, or at least to have a reputation for mild irrationality, gives you an edge. Now, this isn't focus of provocation but this has also been presented in the theory of why people fall in love. Suppose you're choosing who to devote your life to, and it's a matter of huge trust. We're going to raise kids together. It's very important for you that I don't leave. And I am very rational so I say to you, "We should mate and have children because I find you the most attractive of everybody who was available that I've met so far. I'm very rational and so long as this continues to be the case we'll be together." Well, that's reasonable and rational but wouldn't you rather be with somebody who's head over heels in love? Head over heels in love is irrational but it's also, within certain parameters, endearing because the irrationality of the person means you could trust them more in the long run, just like the irrationality of somebody who has a temper means you don't mess with them as much. The studies have been done more with regard to violence than with love. And in fact, the irrationality--the benefits of irrational violence have been translated in terms of the study of homicide and other crimes. Daly and Wilson describe the cause of murder. Most murder is not caused by reasonable provocation. Most murder is not rational in its response. Most murder is generated by insult, curse, petty infraction, but this is not crazy irrationality. It's adaptive irrationality. Daly and Wilson point out, "in chronically feuding and warring societies an essential manual--manly virtue is the capacity for violence. To turn the other cheek is not saintly, but stupid or contemptibly weak." If I show myself a rational person when picked on or harassed, I'll be known as somebody you could pick on and harass. And in fact, it turns out even in the modern world--This is from a New York Times I just picked up a year ago today. And the point is that the violence is due to people disrespecting each other or giving a dirty look. And you might think "isn't that irrational?" But it's not irrational in circumstances where people live together in an environment where they have to deal with each other over and over again, and often where there's not much support by the police as indications they talked about here. What's particularly interesting is this sort of importance of a reputation for violence differs from culture to culture. And I've been talking so far in this class--and in fact, so far in this course--about universals, about things that are built in, things that show up across humans and other animals. I want to turn now and end this lecture by talking a little bit about a cultural difference. And it's a psychologically interesting cultural difference with regard to the emotions. And it's built around the difference turning around what sociologists call "cultures of honor." A culture of honor has certain properties. You can't rely on the law. And it has resources that are easily taken. And sociologists have argued that when those conditions are met it becomes important to develop a reputation for violent retaliation. That becomes important. Examples of culture of honors include Scottish highlanders, Masai warriors, Bedouin tradesmen, and Western cowboys – all cases where there's resources such as cattle that are vulnerable and easily taken, but you can't count on calling 911 and having people come help you. But the culture of honor that's been studied the most by modern psychologists is the American South. This was settled by herdsmen and traditionally has less centralized legal control. So, the sociologists say the American South has more of a culture of honor than the American North. But how do you know? What does that do? We're interested in this class in claims about psychology. So, it took Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen to study cultures of honors and look at differences. And they found some interesting differences. Gun laws tend to be more permissive in the southern--in the American South than the American North. Corporal punishment and capital punishment tend to be more approved of. Attitudes towards the military are more positive. In questionnaire studies, people are more forgiving towards cultures of honor. Somebody insults my woman and I punch him in the face. This is considered less bad in the American South than the American North. There's a higher rate of violence but only in certain circumstances. The streets of the American South as a rule are not more dangerous than the American North. The difference is there's a higher rate of crimes that are crimes of honor such as, for instance, if somebody breaks in to my house, me shooting him. Or if somebody insults me, me killing him. Now, this is sort of survey studies. So, Nisbett and Cohen did one of the more interesting psychological studies I have ever heard of. And they did this at--This--Sorry. This is Nisbett and Wilson. They did this with University of Michigan undergraduates. They did a subject pool thing like you're doing now, and on it your demographic information was listed. And what they did was they took white males who are not Hispanic and not Jewish. That was their sample. Culture of honor is a phenomena limited to males and they wanted to make it sort of a clean study so they wanted to focus--get a homogenous sample. So, not Hispanic, not Jewish. And they provoked them. And the provocation was genius. What they did was they said--they brought people in to the psychology building, as you'd be brought in to Kirtland or SSS or Dunham and they said--they had somebody go in to the desk and they said, "Yeah. Go down the hall for the experiment." There was a hallway and then you walked through the hallway. And walking in the other direction at that moment a graduate student--a male graduate student would start to walk. And he's holding some files. And what he does is he bumps the person, looks at him and says, "Asshole" [laughter] and keep walking. Now, to be fair, the graduate student survived bumping into hundreds of males, calling them assholes and then walking to--Fights did not break out, nobody was shot. But then they brought the men--now went in to a room and they were tested. And it turned out that there were differences in the stress response. On average, males from the American South showed higher hormone response and stress response than males in the American North--increases in testosterone and cortisol. There's always differences in later behavior, the people--suggesting that they were made angry. They gave differences in fill-in-the-blank questions, for instance. I don't remember the examples but it's examples like "John went to the store and bought a 'blank'" and then the northerners would say "and buy an apple." And the southerners would say "an AK-47 [laughter] to kill that freaking graduate student." [laughter] Now, again, the American South--people in the American South were not overall more violent than the American North, but they were more sensitive to provocations of honor. Now, when I gave this lecture a few years ago, a southern student contacted me afterwards and said that she felt that picking out the southern minority at Yale was in some regard offensive and that people say things at Yale about southerners--American southerners that they would never say about any other minority group. So, there's two points I want to make regarding this. One is, of course, these are average differences. Not every northerner and southerner would differ along these lines. But another one is I think the effect is real, but it's not entirely clear that it reflects poorly on the cultures of honor as opposed to the other cultures. So, Nisbett, for instance, is himself a southerner and he points out that he went to the North he was most astonished by how rude people are. And this is because the North--the American North is not particularly a culture of honor, and so there's less proper behavior towards other people because there's no fear of retaliation or response. Moreover, the culture of honor virtues like honor, loyalty, courage and self-reliance, are on the face of it not necessarily bad things. In any case, this is an interesting example of how there's an evolutionary background but culture modifies and shifts it in different ways. More generally, I've suggested over the last couple of lectures that emotions like fear, the love you have towards your children, anger, gratitude are not aberrations or noise in the system. Rather, they're exquisitely complicated motivational systems that are crafted to deal with the natural and social environment. And we know this only from an analysis that starts from an evolutionary approach. So, to bring us back to D'Arcy Thompson, "everything is the way it is because it got that way." And your reading response for this week is that. And I'll wish you good luck on the exam on Wednesday. And I'll see you there.
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Introduction_to_Psychology_with_Paul_Bloom
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1_Introduction.txt
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Professor Paul Bloom: I'd like to welcome people to this course, Introduction to Psychology. My name is Dr. Paul Bloom. I'm professor of this course. And what this is going to be is a comprehensive introduction to the study of the human mind. So, we are going to cover a very, very wide range of topics including brains, children, language, sex, memory, madness, disgust, racism and love, and many others. We're going to talk about things like the proper explanation for differences between men and women; the question of whether animals can learn language; the puzzle of what grosses us out; the problem of why some of us eat too much and what we could do to stop; the question of why people go crazy in groups; research into whether you could trust your childhood memories; research into why some of us get depressed and others don't. The style of this is there'll be two lectures a week, as well as course readings. Now, to do well in the course, you have to attend both the lectures and do the readings. There will be some overlap. In some cases, the lectures will be quite linked to the readings. But there will be some parts of the readings that will not find their way into the lectures, and some lectures--some entire lectures that will not connect at all to the readings. So, to pursue this course properly you have to do both. What this means is that if you miss a class you need to get notes, and so you should get them from a friend or from the person sitting next to you. The slides are going to be made available online. So, one of the things you don't have to do is you don't have to write this down. You take notes any way you choose, but if you don't get anything on there it'll be available online. I'm going to post it in a format which will be black and white and easy to print out so you don't have to worry about this. But again, attending to the slides is not a substitute for attending class. There's a textbook, Peter Gray's Psychology, 5th edition, and there's also a collection of short readings, The Norton Reader edited by Gary Marcus. It's an excellent textbook; it's an excellent collection, and you should get them both. They're available at Labyrinth bookstore on York Street or you get them online. I should note that last time I taught the course I used the Marcus Reader, and when Professor Marvin Chun taught his course last semester he used Peter Gray's 5^(th) edition textbook. So, there may be a lot of used copies floating around. You should feel free to try to get one of those. The evaluation goes like this. There is a Midterm and there is a Final. The Final will not be held in the exam period, because I like to take long vacations. It will be held the last day of class. The exams will be multiple choice and short answer, fill in the blank, that sort of thing. Prior to the exams I will post previous exams online, so you have a feeling for how these exams work and so on. There will also be review sessions. Starting at the beginning of the third week of class – that is not next week but the week after – on each Monday I'm going to put up a brief question or set of questions, which you have to answer and your answers need to be sent to your teaching fellow. And you'll be given a teaching fellow, assigned one, by Friday. This is not meant to be difficult. It's not meant to be more than five, ten minutes of work, but the point of the question--15,20 minutes of work, but the point of the question is to motivate people to keep up with the material and do the readings. These questions will be marked pass, fail. I expect most everybody could pass all of the questions but it's just to keep you on track and keep you going. There is a book review, a short book review, to be written towards near the end of the class. I'll give details about that later on in the semester. And there's also an experimental participation requirement, and next week I'll hand out a piece of paper describing the requirement. The point of the requirement is to give you all experience actually seeing what psychological research is about as well as to give us hundreds of subjects to do our experiments on. The issue sometimes comes up as to how to do well in the course. Here's how to do well. Attend all the classes. Keep up with the readings. Ideally, keep up with the readings before you come to class. And one thing I would strongly suggest is to form some sort of study groups, either formally or informally. Have people you could talk to when the--prior to the exams or--she's patting somebody next to her. I hope you know him. And in fact, what I'm going to do, not this class because it's shopping period. I don't know who's coming next class, or what but I'll set up a few minutes prior, at the beginning of the class, for people just to introduce themselves to the person next to them so they have some sort of resource in the class. Now, this is a large class, and if you don't do anything about it, it can be very anonymous. And some of you may choose to pursue it that way and that's totally fine. But what I would suggest you do is establish some contact with us, either with me or with any of the teaching fellows, and I'll introduce the teaching fellows sometime next week. You could talk to us at the beginning or at the end of class. Unless there are special circumstances, I always try to come at least ten minutes early, and I am willing to stay late to talk to people. You could come by during my office hours, which are on the syllabus, and you could send me e-mail and set up an appointment. I'm very willing to talk to students about intellectual ideas, about course problems and so on. And if you see me at some point just on campus, you could introduce yourself and I'd like to meet people from this class. So, again, I want to stress you have the option of staying anonymous in this class, but you also have the option of seeking out and making some sort of contact with us. Okay. That's the formal stuff of the course. What's this course about? Unlike a lot of other courses, some people come to Intro Psychology with some unusual motivations. Maybe you're crazy and hope to become less crazy. Maybe you want to learn how to study better, improve your sex life, interpret your dreams, and win friends and influence people. Those are not necessarily bad reasons to take this course and, with the exception of the sex part, this course might actually help you out with some of these things. The study of scientific psychology has a lot of insights of real world relevance to real problems that we face in our everyday lives. And I'm going to try--and when these issues come up--I'm going to try to stress them and make you try to think about the extent to which the laboratory research I'll be talking about can affect your everyday life: how you study, how you interact with people, how you might try to persuade somebody of something else, what sort of therapy works best for you. But the general goals of this course are actually I think even more interesting than that. What I want to do is provide a state of the art introduction to the most important topic that there is: us. How the human mind works, how we think, what makes us what we are. And we'll be approaching this from a range of directions. So, traditionally, psychology is often broken up into the following--into five sub-areas: Neuroscience, which is the study of the mind by looking at the brain; developmental, which is the area which I focus mostly on, which is trying to learn about how people develop and grow and learn; cognitive, which is the one term of the five that might be unfamiliar to some of you, but it refers to a sort of computational approach to studying the mind, often viewing the mind on analogy with a computer and looking at how people do things like understand language, recognize objects, play games, and so on. There is social, which is the study of how people act in groups, how people act with other people. And there is clinical, which is maybe the aspect of psychology that people think of immediately when they hear psychology, which is the study of mental health and mental illness. And we'll be covering all of those areas. We'll also be covering a set of related areas. I am convinced that you cannot study the mind solely by looking at the discipline of psychology. The discipline of psychology spills over to issues of how the mind has evolved. Economics and game theory are now essential tools for understanding human thought and human behavior--those issues connecting to philosophy, computer science, anthropology, literature, theology, and many, many other domains. So, this course will be wide ranging in that sense. At this point I've been speaking in generalities so I want to close this introductory class by giving five examples of the sorts of topics we'll be covering. And I'll start with the topic that we'll be covering next week on Monday – the brain. This is a brain. In fact, it's a specific person's brain, and what's interesting about the brain is that little white mark there. It's her brain. It's Terri Schiavo's brain. You recognize her more from pictures like that. And what a case like this, where somebody is in a coma, is without consciousness as a result of damage to the brain, is a stark illustration of the physical nature of mental life. The physical basis for everything that we normally hold dear, like free will, consciousness, morality and emotions, and that's what we'll begin the course with, talking about how a physical thing can give rise to mental life. We'll talk a lot about children. This is actually a specific child. It's my son, Zachary, my younger son, dressed up as Spider-Man, but it is Halloween. No, it's not Halloween. Oh. Well, there's more to say about that [laughter]. I study child development for a living and I'm interested in several questions. So, one question is just the question of development. Everybody in this room can speak and understand English. Everybody in this room has some understanding of how the world works, how physical things behave. Everybody in this room has some understanding of other people, and how people behave. And the question that preoccupies developmental psychologists is how do we come to have this knowledge, and in particular, how much of it is hard-wired, built-in, innate. And how much of it is the product of culture, of language, of schooling? And developmental psychologists use many ingenious methods to try to pull these apart and try to figure out what are the basic components of human nature. There's also the question of continuity. To what extent is Zachary, at that age, going to be that way forever? To what extent is your fate sealed? To what extent could--if I were to meet you when you were five years old I could describe the way you are now? The poet William Wordsworth wrote, "The child is father to the man," and what this means is that you can see within every child the adult he or she will become. We will look and ask the question whether this is true. Is it true for your personality? Is it true for your interests? Is it true for your intelligence? Another question having to do with development is what makes us the way we are? We're different in a lot of ways. The people in this room differ according to their taste in food. They differ according to their IQs; whether they're aggressive or shy; whether they're attracted to males, females, both or neither; whether they are good at music; whether they are politically liberal or conservative. Why are we different? What's the explanation for why we're different? And again, this could be translated in terms of a question of genes and environment. To what extent are things the result of the genes we possess? To what extent are our individual natures the result of how we were raised? And to what extent are they best explained in terms of an interaction? One common theory, for instance, is that we are shaped by our parents. This was best summarized most famously by the British poet Philip Larkin who wrote, They mess you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra just for you. Is he right? It's very controversial. You-- It's been a series of--a huge controversy in the popular culture to the extent of which parents matter and this is an issue which will preoccupy us for much of the course. A different question: What makes somebody attractive? And this can be asked at all sorts of levels but a simple level is what makes for a pretty face? So, these are, according to ratings, very attractive faces. They are not the faces of real people. What's on the screen are computer generated faces of a Caucasian male and a Caucasian female who don't exist in the real world. But through using this sort of computer generation, and then asking people what they think of this face, what they think of that face, scientists have come to some sense as to what really makes a face attractive, both within cultures and across cultures. And that's something which we're going to devote some time to when we talk about social behavior, and in particular, when we talk about sex. Not all attractiveness, not all beauty of course, is linked to sex. So, pandas for instance, like this panda, are notoriously cute, and I don't have anything to say about it really. It's just a cute picture [laughter]. Morality is extremely central to our lives, and a deep question, which we will struggle with throughout most of the course, is the question of good and evil, evil and good. These three pictures exemplify different sorts of evil. What you could call institutional evil by somebody behaving cruelly toward somebody else, perhaps not due to malice but because of the situation that she's in. It has picture of Osama bin Laden, a mass murderer or driven by political cause? And then there's this guy on the bottom. Anybody know who he is? Ted Bundy. Who got that? Film that man [laughter]. No. Ted Bundy, exactly, and that's before we get into the technical stuff like crazy-evil, and we're going to have to come to terms with why some people are like that. And again, the same situation comes up. Is it part of your nature to be good or bad or is it largely due to the situation that you fall in? And there's a lot of some quite spectacular experiments that try to tease that apart. If we're going to talk about evil, we should also talk about good. These are pictures of two notoriously good men, Oskar Schindler and Paul Rusesabagina, each who at different times in history saved the lives of many, many people at great risk to themselves. Schindler in the Holocaust, and then the other guy, in – and I can't pronounce his name – Rusesabagina, in Rwanda. And they both had real good movies made about them. But what's interesting with these cases is you couldn't have predicted ahead of time that they would be heroes. And one personal issue within any of us is what would we do in such situations? Finally, throughout this course we will discuss mental illness. Now, towards the end of the class I want to devote a full week to discussing major disorders like depression and anxiety, because of their profound social importance. Such disorders are reasonably common in college students. Many people in this room are currently suffering from a mood disorder, an anxiety disorder or both, and I won't ask for a show of hands but I know a lot of people in this room are on some form of medication for this disorder. And we'll discuss the current research and why people get these disorders and what's the best way to make them better. But I also have a weakness for the less common mental disorders that I think tell us something really interesting about mental life. So, when we talk about memory, for instance, we'll talk about disorders in memory, including some disorders that keep you from forming new memories as well as disorders of amnesia where you forget the past. And these are extraordinarily interesting for all sorts of reasons. Early in the course, in fact I think next week, we will discuss, no, later on in the course, in the middle of the semester, we will discuss an amazing case of Phineas Gage. Phineas Gage was a construction worker about 100 years ago. Due to an explosion, a metal pipe went through his head like so. Miraculously, he was not killed. In fact, his friends--it went through his head, went--ended up 100 feet away, covered with brains and blood. And Phineas Gage sat down and went, "uh, oh." And then on the way to the hospital they stopped by a pub to have some cider. He was not blind, he was not deaf, he was not retarded, but something else happened to him. He lost his sense of right and wrong. He lost his control. He used to be a hard-working family man. After the accident he lost all of that. He couldn't hold a job. He couldn't stay faithful to his wife. He couldn't speak for five minutes without cursing. He got into fights. He got into brawls. He got drunk. He lost his control. He ended up on a circus sideshow traveling through the country with the big steel pipe that went through his head. And this is again an extraordinary example of how the brain can give rise to the mind, and how things that go wrong with the brain can affect you in a serious way. We'll discuss cases of multiple personality disorder, where people have more than one personality. And also, discuss the debate over whether such cases are true or not; whether they could be taken as a real phenomena or a made-up phenomena, which is--there is a matter of a lot of controversy. And then, we'll even discuss some rarer cases like Capgras syndrome. Capgras syndrome is typically – there's hundreds of cases, not many – hundreds of cases. It's typically the result of some sort of stroke, and what happens to you is very specific. You develop a particular delusion, like it's getting dark . And the delusion is that the people you love the most have been replaced. They've been replaced by aliens or robots – thank you – by Martians, by CIA agents, by trained actors and actresses. But the people--But the idea is, the people you care for the most you believe are gone. And this could lead to tragic consequences. Capgras syndrome is associated with a very high level of violence. One man in Australia a couple of years ago was under the delusion that his father was replaced with a robot and cut off his head. A related disorder involving the very same parts of the brain is called Cotard's syndrome. And Cotard's syndrome is you believe that you're dead; you are persuaded that you're dead. You're walking around. You know you're walking around. And you know that there are people around, but you think that you're dead. And what's striking about these is--it's not--these are not just sort of big, screwy problems of messed up people. Rather, they're located--they're related at a pinpoint level to certain parts of your brain. And we're going to talk about the best modern theories as to why these syndromes occur. Now, the reason to be interested in them, again, is not because they're frequent. They aren't. And it's not because of some sort of gruesome, morbid curiosity. Rather, by looking at extreme cases, they can help us best understand normal life. Often by looking at extremes it throws into sharp contrast things we naturally take for granted. The issue of psychopathy, of people who, either due to brain damage or because they are born that way, have no moral understanding, can help us cope with questions of free will and responsibility; of the relationship or difference between mental illness and evil. Multiple personality cases force us to address the question of what is a self. To what extent are all of us composed of multiple people, and to what extent are we a single unified person over time? Cases like Capgras are important because they tell us about how we see the world. They tell us for instance that there is a difference between recognizing something in the sense that you could name it, and knowing what it is. And so, by studying these abnormal cases we could get some insight into regular life. So, that's the end of the illustration of the example topics. The syllabus lists many more. I'll end by telling you that there's a lot of stuff that we'll be talking about, that I want to talk about, that I am not expert in. And fortunately, there is a community at Yale of the best scholars and teachers on the planet. And so, it would be a shame for me not to use them to cover some of these issues. And so, I'm going to include four guest lecturers. The first one is Dr. Marvin Chun who teaches the Introduction to Psychology course in the fall and is my competition. And he's going to give an amazing lecture on cognitive neuroscience, especially the cognitive neuroscience of faces. Dr. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema is the world's authority on depression, and in particular, on sex differences and depression, and she's going to talk about this towards the end of the course. Kelly Brownell is going to talk--is head of the Rudd Center, focuses on obesity, eating disorders, dieting, and he'll talk about the psychology of food. And finally, Dr. Peter Salovey, Dean of Yale College, is going to come to us on Valentine's Day and tell us everything he knows about the mysteries of love. All of these details are in the syllabus and I'll stick around and answer questions. Hope to see you next week.
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Introduction_to_Psychology_with_Paul_Bloom
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8_Conscious_of_the_Present_Conscious_of_the_Past.txt
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Professor Paul Bloom: I'll begin the class officially with a different sort of demonstration. I want to just show you one of the change-blindness studies that has been done in the real world. And these videotapes are not available publicly. We get them from the web and see them as little Java scripts. So, this is one of the first studies done by Dan Simons when he was at Cornell. And his adviser at the time was our Frank Keil, who's now in our department. So, here's the study. [laughter] And you don't notice it. Change blindness is one of the more striking phenomena discovered by laboratory scientists and by psychologists. But it's important to realize, to get away from the sort of surprise of the gorilla and the fact that it's hard to see the flickering--the object that's flickering, and appreciate the big moral of this, because the big moral of this is actually, I think, striking and quite important. You think right now that you're perceiving the world. I look down on you and I think I have a whole sense of where everybody is. I can't see everybody perfectly in back. You're kind of far away and blurry but there's a sense in which I have a world around me. Similarly, if I'm to close my eyes for a second, everything just remains and I could sort of remember some of the things that are there. That's really good sound localization by me . So you're looking up and you think you have a sense of the world both in perception and memory. The change-blindness experiment suggested this isn't true. The change-blindness experiment suggests that if you look at me for a second and during that second all of your classmates change positions, including those next to you, you are extremely unlikely to notice. The change-blindness experiment suggests that if you turn your eyes away from me towards there for a second and turn back, and I'm dressed entirely differently, you wouldn't notice. The exceptions would be if you told yourself consciously, "Remember what this guy is wearing; he's wearing this, that and the other." But if you don't do it consciously you'll lose it, and usually this is okay. Usually, it's okay because your memory and your visual system exploits a basic fact about the universe, which is that most things stay the same most of the time. I don't have to explicitly remember that you're over there when I turn my head for a second because you'll be over there in any case. You don't need to hold precise representations of the world. And so you only notice it in certain clever circumstances. One sort of clever circumstance is when psychologists change reality as in the change-blindness studies. A second sort of circumstance is in movies. So, one of the big surprises when people started making movies involving cuts was it is extremely difficult to get everything continuously right. And you need to work very hard to notice. So, there's all of these continuity errors that creep up into movies and you have to be a film buff or writing it down to even notice this. And the overall moral here then is that your perception of reality is a lot more sparse, a lot more limited, than you might think it is. So, this is where we were at the end of last class. We were talking about the different sorts of memories: Sensory memory, which is the sort of fraction of a second of sensory residue of what you're hearing and what you're seeing, working memory, short-term memory, and then long-term memory. And we talked last class about how things get into sensory memory, into working memory, the role of attention. And in fact, the change-blindness studies are actually just studies of how something gets from your senses to your consciousness and what does and what doesn't. Now I want to move to the distinction between working memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. Now, the obvious distinction is actually just in fact--is storage differences. So, long-term memory or "LTM" has a huge storage capacity. This is your memory like the hard drive of your computer. This is the memory you walk around with. It includes all the words in English, just for example, 60 to 80,000 words. It includes everybody you've ever met, languages, faces, stories, locations, nursery rhymes, songs, TV programs. Nobody knows the storage. It is not true that you remember everything that has ever happened to you. There's no reason to believe that this is true. At the same time though, you have a huge amount stored in your brain in long-term storage and nobody actually--It has to be limited because it's a finite, limited brain. But nobody knows how big it is. Nobody knows how many terabytes you carry around in your brain and--but it's a lot. Compare this to working memory – the short-term memory, which is actually very limited. Your memory of what you could store on--in--where you could hold in consciousness right now is quite limited. Here is an exercise. Do not write these things down. I want you to remember them. I'm just going to give you a few numbers: 14,59, 11,109, 43,58, 98,487, 25,389, 54. Please write them down. View this as an IQ test if that would relax you. How many of you who decided to participate in this experiment got three or less? Good. Good. Four, five, six, seven, eight, nine or more? Anybody get all eleven? This is a particularly difficult memory task. The numbers are meaningless. And I told--and I forgot to tell you to get your pen and pencil ready, so some of you just glared at me. But [laughter] under normal circumstances the cognitive psychologist George Miller said that this sort of suggested that the standard memory storage of short-term memory is seven, plus or minus two. And what that means is anywhere from five to nine roughly. Some of you, I bet, can beat that. Some of you on a not-so-good day maybe won't make it that much. Now "seven plus or minus two" is what you--;so, that's what you hold in consciousness. I can tell you 14,21. You walk around, "Oh, yeah, 14,21." You hold that in consciousness with no problem. But I throw eleven numbers at you, you can't. Some dribble out. You can't hold that in your conscious window in your short-term memory. Now, this raises the question "seven plus or minus two" what? And the answer seems to be what George Miller calls "chunks." And a chunk is a basic memory unit, something you think of as a single, individual entity. So, suppose you see the string of letters "L, A, M, A, I, S, O, N." If you don't know--If you can't form these into words and you have to remember them, these are eight chunks. You have to just pick them up separately. On the other hand, if you break them up into four words you could just remember it as four chunks. And if you break it up into two words in French, "la maison," "the house," it could just be one or two. How much you know depends--affects how much you memorize--how much you could store in memory because it affects what counts as a basic unit of memory. And there's all sorts of examples of this. If I tell you "1,1, 0,1, 1,0, 0,1, 0,1, 1,0," those of you who don't know binary numbers might have to remember that as "1, 1,0, 0," whatever I said. Those of you who are computer scientists or mathematicians or, for whatever reason, know binary numbers could convert it into a single binary number. Anybody know what the number is? No, I cannot say it again. [laughter] Some number, 24, or not 24--to some number, 24, and then you remember "24." It's easier. Suppose you see a chessboard and the chessboard is set up and you don't know how to play chess. It is murderously hard to remember that. They've done the experiments. They've taken people in a lab who don't know how to play chess. They set up a chessboard and then they say, "Okay. Look at this for five minutes." Then they take it away, set it up again, and it's murderously hard. "There is a horse-y thing on the side there and everything." But if these chess pieces are set up in some way that's logical for a chess player, then a chess master could look at it and remember it in a glance, "Oh. It's the Fibonacci defense" or something like that [laughs], and then immediately recover it. Similarly, football coaches have been tested on their memories of football diagrams. And they have a photographic memory for football diagrams because it corresponds to things that make sense. Architects could have a photographic memory, a perfect memory for floor plans because it makes sense to them. They understand it. And so the way you store things in memory, and this is a theme we're going to return to when we get to long-term memory, depends in a large extent on how much you understand it. And this shows up in expertise effects. Now, this is what's happening so far in short-term memory, how much you hold in there. The question is how do you get it into long-term memory? So, you have long-term memory, your major storage system. How does information get from your consciousness to long-term storage? Well, there's one thing--there's one way which sort of works sometimes but not very well. And it's called "maintenance rehearsal." Suppose I said you have to remember this number, this string of numbers. And if you remember it in twenty minutes you will get one thousand dollars. And the string is my phone number when I was a kid. I'll include the area code: 514-688-9057. Now, if you tell that to a four-year-old, well, the four-year-old will say, "I'll remember it." And then you ask them, "What did I just say?" "Well, I don't know." If you tell it to an--because you know something--If a lot depended on it, you would know to do something. What you would do is you'd say to yourself, "514-688-9057,51 4-688-9057,514-688 --" You'd rehearse it in your head over and over again. The problem is you could hold it as long as you can do that. It's like these movies. You see this all the time, like an episode of 24: "Jack, call CTU and tell them Agent 11 is trapped in a--" And I can't even remember this but the way to remember it is you hold--you've just got to repeat it over and over again in your head. But this will not typically get things into long-term memory. To get things into long-term memory, rehearsal is usually not enough. You need to do other things. Typically, what you need is structure and organization. And one way to demonstrate this was in a classic "depth of processing" experiment which nicely illustrates the fact that the more you structure something, the deeper you think about it, the better it gets entrenched in the long-term memory. So, in this study what they did was they asked people--they told people that there's going to be words flashed on a screen. And all of the subjects saw the same strings of words. There were forty-eight words. They were not told to memorize the words. One third of the subjects was told, "Look. Some of these words are going to come out in capital letters, some of them not capital letters. Press a button for capitals, non-capitals." "Sure." The other group was told, "Some of these words will rhyme with 'train,' Others won't. Press a button if it rhymes in 'train'." The third group was told, "Does it fit into the sentence ‘The girl placed the blank on the table'? Press a button if it does. Press a button if it doesn't." Then they were asked as a surprise, "What words did you see?" And the findings looked like this. When they were asked to focus on just what the word looked like, memory was very poor, the sound better, the meaning better. If you want to remember something, the best way to remember it is to give it meaning, to give it sense. This is illustrated through a very ancient technique, which is that the way to remember things that are otherwise arbitrary is to give them some organization through memory tricks, through vivid imagery or songs or poetry. And there's a lot of examples of this. Do you know how to remember that the hippocampus--There's a part of the brain called the hippocampus. This is the worst memory trick ever but it will stick with you for twenty years. The hippocampus is involved in spatial memory. It's involved in finding your way around. Think to yourself, "The way I find my way around campus is through the hippocampus." And you think, "Well, that's stupid," but you'll never forget now that the hippocampus is in charge of spatial memory. It's going to be all you retain from this course. Memory books on how to remember people's names usually try to exploit this sort of thing when you try to get poetry or dramatic images. So, the memory books always typically involve somebody--like you meet somebody with very spiky hair and they say, "My name is Mr. Fish" and then you remember--you think of their--of a big fish impaled on their hair. And then whenever you see them you remember their name. It only really works for names like "Fish" but [laughter] the idea is you try to generate vivid imagery. When stuck with a situation where you have to remember ten letters, turn it into a song where--or a dirty poem where each of the letters is the first words of it. When having to remember something that seems totally arbitrary, try to figure out a grand and obscene image that will come to mind easily. And this is how--these are one way to get things into memory. At a deep level though, the way to get things into memory, and this applies to this course no less than anything else, is by understanding the--understanding it. I'm going to read you something and I want you to try your best to remember what I tell you. These are not going to be strings of numbers. These are going to be--This is going to be a series of sentences: "A newspaper is better than a magazine. A seashore is a better place than the street. At first it is better to run than to walk. You may have to try several times. It takes some skill but it's easy to learn. Even young children can enjoy it. Once successful, complications are minimal. Birds seldom get too close. Rain, however, soaks in very fast. Too many people doing the same things can also cause problems. One needs lots of room. If there are no complications, it can be very peaceful. Finally, a rock will serve as an anchor. If things break loose from it, however, you will not have a second chance." And here is what I said . This is murderously hard to remember. Now try it. Knowing what this is about, being able to put a context to it helps the memory and helps it come to mind. [laughter] Okay. So, this is about how to get memory--how to get information into your memory. How do you get information out? So, it's exam period. You got the stuff presumably into your head. You have to get it out. You have to retrieve it. There is a court case. You have to figure out--You have to recount the crime that you witnessed. You see somebody and you want to know his or her name. And you heard it; you just have to get it out. Well, how do you do that? Well, there's "retrieval cues." Retrieval cues make sense. Retrieval cues are just things that have been associated with what you--what you're trying to remember. If I have to remember to replace the windows, when I walk in to my living room and see that a window is cracked that will remind me to replace the windows. If I had a lunch date with you and forgot about it, when I see you, "Oh, yeah. We were supposed to get together to have lunch." Retrieval cues bring things back but it's a little bit more complicated than that. There's a more general relationship between encoding and retrieval called the "compatibility principle." And what this means is you're much better to remember something in the context in which you have learned it. And this is also known as "context-dependent memory" and "state-dependent memory." It's illustrated by one of the strangest experiments in the history of psychology where they had people on a boat and then they had them scuba dive underwater. And they taught them things either on the boat or underwater with things that they held up. And then they tested them later. And it turns out that you'll remember it better if you're tested on it in the context in which you learned it. And it might be because then the retrieval cues help bring it back. But it's more general than that. If you have to remember something you learned in this class, you will do better if you try to think about the room in which you learned it in. You will do better on your final exam if you were to take it in this room than if you were to take it in another room because being in this room will bring back the cues. It's not just the environment. People who learn things when they're stoned remember them better--keeping stoned at a sort of a low-level that doesn't disrupt other mental activities--remember them better when they're sort of stoned again [laughter] than if they're non-stoned. Similarly--So, if you study while you drink you should tipple a little bit before coming in to the Final exam. [laughter] It's sort of like the "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" sort of result. And so, similarly, it even applies to moods in that if you learn something when depressed you have a slightly better recovery of it when you're in that same mood of depression than when you're elated. And the idea is that part of what memory is--part of what recovering memory is is getting back your original context in which you learned it. "Elaborative rehearsal" and retrieval involves the connections between different things. Elaborative rehearsal is that the more you think about something the easier it is to remember. If you have to think about--If you have to remember something, try to connect it to as many things as possible. Think of an image. Make a joke out of it. Imagine how you would explain it to somebody else. Imagine how the world--what the world would be like if it wasn't so. And the idea is that this sort of thinking about it makes connections in your memory from that thing you have to learn, to other memories. And so it makes it easier to recover. "Elaborative retrieval" refers to a finding that when you want to get something back out of memory people tend to give up too soon. It turns out that there's a lot of stuff that's in your memory but it needs work to extract; it needs various sort of searching strategies. One study asked people who were considerably older than you to remember their high school classmates. And in the first pass people were terrible. Maybe they had a couple of friends they kept in touch with. Otherwise, pretty bad. And this is a good experiment because you could use high school yearbooks to judge whether or not they get it right. But then what you do is you tell the person, "Look. Keep trying. Were you--What sort of--Who was your teacher? What sort of clubs did you belong to? What sort of sports you--did you participate in? How did you get to school? How did you get from school? What did you do during lunch? What did you do during break?" And you keep ask--"Do you know--have any friends whose letter--whose last name began with ‘B,' with ‘C,' with ‘D'?" And you keep pushing and pushing and pushing. And over the span of time things come back. Again, it's not true that you never forget. There is honest to God forgetting but sometimes you think you forget and it's because you haven't looked long enough. There's a real physical notion of searching for the right answer. We've talked about retrieval. Oh. Every class I've given somebody asks either in class or by e-mail what about déjà vu? And déjà vu is a feeling that an event has happened before. So, you're looking at me and I'm lecturing and you say, "I've heard this before. I know this before." You see somebody and say, "I've been in this situation before." This is not evidence for psychic powers, [laughter] which many people say it is, but nobody really knows why this exists. We know, and this is a clue, it's worse with frontal lobe damage. If you get damage to this part of the brain, you get a lot more déjà vu experiences. I asked some experts in memory, including Marcia Johnson who is chair of our department, what the best explanation for déjà vu is. And the answer she gave, the--say one big theory, goes like this. Déjà vu is a feeling that it's happened before. The answer is it has happened before. It's happened half a second ago. And so what happens is sometimes there is a glitch, a disturbance in the force. I don't know. There's a glitch [laughter] and you are talking and then something happens to you and you put it in your memory. But it's as if you don't put the stamp on it of what time and what date. So, you're talking to me and then you store it in memory but you don't store it in memory as happening right now. Then half a second goes by and you're talking to me and you say, "This is strangely familiar." And that's one theory of what goes on in déjà vu. Okay. So far, there's the sort of good news – remembering – but then there's bad news – forgetting. How many people can remember, without looking down at your notes, at least two of the numbers I gave you earlier? How many people can remember at least four? Oh, impressive. If I asked you in an hour, the number would go down. These are sort of statistics in a similar experiment. And this graph illustrates that people forget. Over time, you'll forget. Why do you forget? Why is there forgetting at all? Well, there's different explanations for this. One explanation is your brain's a physical thing, it's a physical piece of meat, and it kind of goes bad. Physical things decay. And so, the memory traces that are laid onto your brain will just decay over time. A second answer is interference. So, remember those numbers? Here's a few more: 114,81, 66,42. Well, the more information that comes in that's similar to the stuff you're trying to remember, it blocks your recovery of original information. So your ability to remember something can be impaired by learning more things which are related to it because they get confused in memory. Finally, and maybe this is most interesting, there are changes in retrieval cues. So, the more time goes by the more the world changes. And if your memory is to some extent dependent on cues bringing it back to life, then the change in retrieval cues can make it more difficult to recall certain things. This leads to a puzzle where there's considerable scientific debate over the case of childhood amnesia. And the case of childhood amnesia is--doesn't refer to when a child gets brain damage and gets amnesia. What it refers to is people have a difficult time recovering very early memories. I want people to just take a second and try to think back on what your first memory is and roughly how old you were. How many people don't think you have a first memory until you were about five years old or older? Okay. How many people think you have the first memory of around age four or younger? How many people think you have the first memory of around age three or younger? Two or younger? How many of you think you have the first memory when you were about one years old or younger? And I'm not asking about past lives but that [laughs] happened last year. How old is your--roughly your first memory do you think? How old? Student: Between one and two. Professor Paul Bloom: Between one and two? Anybody think they could beat that? Same guy? Yeah. Student: One. Professor Paul Bloom: One. [laughter] Anybody else? The literature is unclear on this because it's very difficult to test people's recollections of their first memories. If I'm to ask people about their first memories, they'll often say, "Oh, yeah. I remember I was in this room and there was a crib and I'm going ‘Ga ga, goo goo' [laughter] and I was on the potty. I was walking. I was so cute. I remember it." It's very difficult to tell and, as we'll discuss in some detail, there are a lot of reasons to distrust people when they--not that they're lying but to distrust the accuracy of people's memories. We also know from studies about trauma where people have terrible experiences when they're one or two. Typically, this trauma is not remembered later on. People know of trauma because they're told about it but they don't typically remember it with any accuracy. Even children--older children don't remember back beyond that age. Nobody knows why childhood amnesia occurs. Nobody knows why it's very difficult to recover memories before about the age of three. One theory is that the retrieval cues change radically. I had a friend of mine who's a clinical psychologist and he suggested a new form of therapy where they make these giant tables and chairs and then they bring you in to the office and you're standing there with these giant tables and chairs [laughter] and all these memories of being a baby would come flooding back. [laughter] And he dropped out of the field and-- [laughter] Really, but it's such a cool idea. Some people think language is to blame. So a child, a baby, starts out with no spoken or signed language. Language comes to be learned at around one, two, and three, and it might be that the learning of a language reformats your memory. And once the memory is reformatted it can't go back to the previous state prior to language in the end. It could be neural maturation. It could be that those memory parts of the brains grow around age two or three that just weren't there prior to that. And nobody really knows. It's a fascinating research area why--about memory changes early on. Another case of memory failure is brain damage. And brain damage comes in a couple of flavors. There is retrograde amnesia; "retro" for past. Retrograde amnesia is when you lose some memory of the past. This could be in a case where you get some sort of head trauma and you lose memory of your entire episodic memory. But typically, if you have any sort of serious accident that involves you losing consciousness you'll have a blackout of some period prior to that, say, blow to the head. And the reason for this is as you're having these experiences now they need to kind of get consolidated into your brain. Your brain needs to rewire and catch up to the experiences you're having. A sudden blow to the head will knock you unconscious and then the memories that have happened immediately prior will not get consolidated and they'll be lost forever. Another sort of memory is anterograde amnesia and this was the case of--This happens in Korsakoff's syndrome. It happens to a very famous patient known as H.M. who actually lives in Hartford, Connecticut. And it happened to Clive Wearing, the film you saw last class. And this sort of amnesia is a sort of amnesia where you lose the ability to form new memories. And so you live in a perpetual present, unable to accumulate new memories. But it's actually a little bit more complicated than that. What happens is--And this was an exciting discovery about these patients that led to some real insights about normal memory--What happens is--And this is the brain damage in these cases, the temporal lobe and the hippocampus, very useful for spatial memory you'll know. One discovery made about people who couldn't form new memories is that they could form new memories, but of certain types. So for example, this is a task here involving filling in a star while looking in to a mirror. And if I asked you to do it you'd find it pretty difficult. It's just kind of difficult to do. You'd be clumsy at it. You bring in an amnesic who can't form new memories and you say, "Hey. I want you to try something new. I want you to try this star game." He'd say, "Okay. I've never seen it before but I'll do it." Tries it. Does very badly. You bring him in and over and over again--Each time he does it he starts off by saying, "I've never seen this before. I'll--I'm sure I'll give it a try" but he gets better and better at it. And this is known as implicit memory. The claim is that in these sorts of cases you lose the abilities to form explicit conscious memories that you're aware of, that you understand. But some sorts of memories persist and you are able to form them. This has actually been illustrated in a couple of dramatic movies, one of them a very bad dramatic movie [laughs] where Drew Barrymore loses the ability to form new memories and somehow falls in love with Adam Sandler. [laughs] Definitely don't watch that. But a very good movie called "Memento," which is about a character who loses his ability to form new memories while trying to track down his wife's killer. "Memento" is a movie which is fascinating because it's told backwards. But throughout "Memento" there's another story told forwards. And I like this story because it very dramatically illustrates what does, and what is and is not impaired in cases of severe memory damage. So, I'm going to show you a couple of clips that illustrate the disassociation from "Memento." Those of you who have seen the movie know that this ends up quite tragically for Sammy. I highly recommend the movie. We've dealt right now with two sorts of failures of memory. One is everyday failure of memory when you forget. How many of you remember three or more of the numbers I originally presented? Yeah? Go ahead. Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: Fourteen, 59,11. Is that right? [laughs] Fine. [laughter] All right. I'm going to ask you again in a month. [laughter] Well, people are supposed to forget [laughter] and some things will--you will forget. That's normal forgetting. A second case is forgetting due to brain damage. Forgetting due to brain damage is exotic and unusual but it's interesting in that it illustrates some more general themes about how the mind works. Remember one theme of this course is we're going to look at exotic cases like the case of Clive Wearing, not just because they're interesting in their own right but sometimes by looking at the extremes we could learn something about how normal people's normal, intact minds and brains work. The third case of forgetting is more interesting and it actually--Well, I want to do a little trial here. What I want to do is I want to--You to listen to three children describe an event that happened. I want you to come to some--your own guess. Imagine you were a judge, you were a childcare worker, you wanted to see--I want you to be--come to your own guess about who you believe and what you think happened. [inaudible] [laughter] You've heard three children. Who do you believe? Who believes--There's three of them, one, two, three. Who believes the first one? Who believes the second one? Who believes the third one? Sort of an even split. Twenty-three hundred experts were shown these films and asked about the different actions, whether or not the person ripped the book, messed up the bear, tossed the book in the air and, as you could see, the majority thought that he did. This is work done by Steve Ceci who was gracious enough to lend me the film to use for teaching purposes. It turns out the second girl was right. Absolutely nothing happened. [laughter] The teacher said, "There is somebody named Sam Stone who's going to come in." A guy walks in and says, "Hi," walks around and leaves. [laughter] The first and third children had their memories implanted, not through any sort of science fiction means. They had their memories implanted--Well, they had their memories implanted like this. Some of the children would just ask questions. The interviewer, by the way, was herself unaware of what happened so the interviewer was a perfectly naive interviewer. And it turns out if you just interview children and you ask them questions about whether the book was ripped, "Did you see him? Did he really do it?" they don't say anything. They didn't see anything and they won't say anything. Other children were told about Sam Stone. They were told a stereotype about Sam Stone – that he's very clumsy and he tends to rip things and he trips and he breaks things and he spills things. And in fact, the third child mentioned that in passing. He said, "He always does that." Just knowing this about Sam Stone tends to raise the proportion of kids who say, for instance, that he ripped the book. Other children were given suggestions. They were given suggestive questioning. They were a series of leading questions like, "Oh. Sam Stone came in? Did he rip a book while he was there?" And still more children got both. And in fact, the children you saw were from this group. They heard Sam Stone being described as a clumsy fellow and they were given a series of suggestive questionings. In this condition they were given several suggestive questionings over the period of several months. These children, like the first child and the third child, are not lying. They honestly believe that Sam Stone came in and did these things. Also they believe it and they're so convincing in their belief that experts, including police officers and child caseworkers and judges and lawyers, find these children to be extremely believable. And I think they probably find them to be extremely believable because the children are not lying. They really believe they saw what they saw. But these memories were implanted. And Ceci, and many other investigators, study how memories can be implanted in people's minds through suggestion and through leading questions. It turns out that the same sort of experiments and the same sort of research has been done with considerable success in implanting false memories in adults. There are dramatic cases of people remembering terrible crimes and confessing to them when actually, they didn't commit them. And this is not because they are lying. It's not even because they're, in some obvious sense, deranged or schizophrenic or delusional. Rather, they have persuaded themselves, or more often been persuaded by others, that these things have actually happened. Psychologists have studied in the laboratory how one could do this, how one can implant memories in other people. And some things are sort of standard. Suppose I was to tell you a story about a trip I took to the dentist or a visit I took to--or a time when I ate out at a restaurant and I'm to omit certain details. I omit the fact that I paid the bill in a restaurant, let's say or I finished the meal and then I went home. Still, you will tend to fill in the blanks. You'll tend to fill in the blanks with things you know. So, you might remember this later saying, "Okay. He told me he finished eating, paid the bill and left," because paying the bill is what you do in a restaurant. This is benign enough. You fill in the blanks. You also can integrate suppositions made by others. And the clearest case of this is eyewitness testimony. And the best research on this has been done by Elizabeth Loftus who has done a series of studies, some discussed in the textbook, showing how people's memories can be swayed by leading questions. And it can be extremely subtle. In one experiment, the person was just asked in the course of a series of questions--shown a scene where there's a car accident and asked either, "Did you see a broken headlight?" or "Did you see the broken headlight?" The ‘the' presupposes that there was a broken headlight and in fact, the people told--asked, "Did you see the broken headlight?" later on are more likely to remember one. It creates an image and they fill it in. In another study, she would show film segments and then ask, "Did you see the children getting on the school bus?" Now, there was no school bus but people who hear that question later on when asked, "Did you see a school bus in the film?" are more likely to say yes. In another study, she would show people film segments and ask them either, "How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?" or "How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?" A week later she'd bring people back in to the laboratory and ask, "Did you see any broken glass?" Those who hear a smash tend to see the broken glass more than those who hear a hit because the question has changed their memory, making it more of a dramatic event. Hypnosis is the clearest case where there's a sort of reconstructive effort led by--led as a result of leading and probing questions. Some of you are readily hypnotizable and you can be hypnotized. And what we would learn about a past event from hypnotizing you will not necessarily then be inaccurate. What hypnotizing does is it makes people very willing to cooperate. Unfortunately, it isn't as if there is a memory storage there where you could just go through and look as in the movies where you just say, "What's the license plate?" The person's hypnotized and then the flashback comes in and then they zoom in on the license plate. Memory doesn't work that way. What happens is--What somebody will do in a hypnotizable state is they'll be very eager to please the hypnotist. And so they'll make stuff up. And people under hypnosis just make stuff up. And they do very enthusiastically and very believably make stuff up. This is particularly the case with hypnotic regression when we ask you to go back to your sixth birthday party, for instance. And what's great as a developmental psychologist is if I ask you to go back to your fourth birthday party and you're hypnotizable you'll be oh, just like a four-year-old except you won't be like a real four-year-old. What you'll be like is an adult's notion of what a four-year-old is supposed to be. In fact, this has happened in the extreme case with hypnotic regression where people claim to speak languages like from ancient Egypt. And linguists love these studies because you don't--of course you don't really sound like you're speaking a language from ancient Egypt. What you sound is like a North American who believes he's speaking a language from ancient Egypt so they're, "nonsense sounds." [laughter] And so what it makes you is--Hypnotism brings out the actor in you. It makes you want to give a persuasive account of what happened. And so hypnotism is just an extreme form of what normally happens in eyewitness testimony. Repressed memories. We could devote a class--We could devote a semester to the very heated debate in the United States mostly about repressed memories. There are many adults who have claimed to have experienced traumatic sexual abuse. In some cases, this is unexceptional from a memory point of view. People know this happened to them. They've always known it happens to them and then they tell people about it. But there's a subset of cases where people have had no memory up to a point of what happened to them. Then they go to a psychologist or a psychiatrist; they undergo questioning, often using hypnotic techniques; and then they recover a memory of past traumatic sexual abuse. And what this is--what makes this so debatable, and there is a debate about this. I don't want to try to preclude it one way or another. What makes this debatable is some psychologists believe that, in at least some cases, these memories are real and they have been repressed through a Freudian mechanism – that they're too terrible to bring to consciousness, and the therapy brings them out into real life. But most psychologists believe that these memories cannot be trusted, that these memories are created through the actions of the therapist. And so, there's actually considerable psychological and legal battles over the veracity of the therapists where women who have claimed to have sexual--be sexually abused, for instance, have pressed criminal charges against their fathers on the basis of false memories. Similarly, people who have been accused of sexual abuse have pressed criminal charges against psychiatrists claiming that these psychiatrists have implanted the memories into their sons and daughters. It is controversial whether memories are ever repressed. What isn't controversial is that, for at least some cases, you can implant false memories in people, not because you're a sinister or evil person but because you really believed something happened. And you talked to them about it and then you caused these memories to come into being. A final case is flashbulb memories. I asked this early in the semester. I'll ask it again. How many of you remember where you were on September 11,2001? Is there anybody who doesn't remember where they were on September 11,2001? It would be interesting. It was a socially relevant event, but here's the problem with these flashbulb memories. Flashbulb memories are the idea that these memories being so vivid, and they are vivid for many of us--exactly where we stood, what happened; well, they can't really be trusted. And here is why not. Because they are such important events, I bet many of you have actually heard the question before, "Where were you on September 11^(th)?" and talked about it. What happens in these conversations is stories change. I have my--I knew where I was on September 11^(th). My wife knew where she was. But I spent as much time listening to her talk about it as I spent time me talking about it. And now maybe my memory is actually of her experience and not mine. It's not--For all of these cases, the temptation you have to resist is saying, "Yes. I know memories can be swayed. I know they could be distorted and everything but, you see, I really am sure that happened." You have to resist that temptation because there are so many cases we know, including the tape of the girls that we just saw, where people are entirely sure things happened. And we know full well that they didn't exist. Being sure is no guarantee that a memory isn't false, reconstructed or even implanted. So, this part of memory has three main morals. There are many types of memories. I talked about short-term memory, long-term memory. I talked about implicit memory and explicit memory. These are sort of separable sort of memories. You could break one while having the other one impaired. Arguably, there are brain systems dedicated to memory for faces, memory for everyday objects, memory for spatial locations. The key to remembering is organization and understanding. Introduction to "X" courses, including Introduction to Psychology courses, are among the hardest courses at Yale. And the reason why is there is just a lot of material that is diverse and you have to command each aspect separately. The easiest courses at Yale tend to be highfalutin seminars where you kind of have enough of a background that everything is--can be clear and understandable. The more you understand something, the easier you'll remember it. And finally, you can't trust some of your memories. Your reading response for this week is you have to use your powers for good and not for evil, [laughter] though if you manage to succeed at this I will be very impressed. [laughter] But you have to describe, based on the lecture materials and the readings, how to implant a false memory. We have a few minutes. Any questions on memory. Yes. Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: Uh huh. Hey. Please-- Student: [inaudible] Is that long-term sensory memory? Professor Paul Bloom: The example is, "What sort of memory is it when you know how to play the piano?" And it's a very good question. It is long-term memory because you might know how to do a concerto or a song and then you have it stored in your head and you carry it around with you. You'll remember it a year from now, two years from now. It is long-term memory but it is also an excellent example of implicit memory because you know how to do it but you could do it unconsciously without attending to it. It's not sensory but it's as if, put it crudely, that your fingers know and not your mind. We have time for one more question. Yes. Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: The question is about photographic memory. There are a lot of claims about photographic memory. My understanding is they do not tend to be substantiated. Sometimes photographic memory, and this came up when we talked about autism a few classes ago, is linked with savant-like skills. People who have severe impairments in some ways may have photographic memories in others. I am not convinced that photographic memory in the sense that you see something, you take a picture of it, you hold it in memory really exists. I think there may be one or two case studies that suggest it might be real but I think it's controversial. Okay. We have a guest lecturer on Wednesday. Dean Peter Salovey will talk to us about love.
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Introduction_to_Psychology_with_Paul_Bloom
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10_Evolution_Emotion_and_Reason_Evolution_and_Rationality.txt
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Professor Paul Bloom: We began the course by talking about one of the foundational ideas of modern psychology. This is what Francis Crick described as "The Astonishing Hypothesis," the idea that our mental life, our consciousness, our morality, our capacity to make decisions and judgments is the product of a material physical brain. What I want to talk about today and introduce it, and it's going to be a theme that we're going to continue throughout the rest of the course, is a second idea which I think is equally shocking, perhaps more shocking. And this has to do with where mental life comes from, not necessary its material nature, but rather its origin. And the notion, this other "astonishing hypothesis," is what the philosopher Daniel Dennett has described as Darwin's dangerous idea. And this is the modern biological account of the origin of biological phenomena including psychological phenomena. Now, people have long been interested in the evolution of complicated things. And there is an argument that's been repeated throughout history and many people have found it deeply compelling, including Darwin himself. Darwin, as he wrote The Origin of Species, was deeply persuaded and moved by this argument from--in the form presented by the theologian William Paley. So, Paley has an example here. Paley tells--gives the example of you're walking down the beach and your foot hits a rock. And then you wonder, "Where did that rock come from?" And you don't really expect an interesting answer to that question. Maybe it was always there. Maybe it fell from the sky. Who cares? But suppose you found a watch on the ground and then you asked where the watch had come from. Paley points out that it would not be satisfying to simply say it's always been there or it came there as an accident. And he uses this comparison to make a point, which is a watch is a very complicated and interesting thing. Paley is--was a medical doctor and Paley goes on to describe a watch and compare a watch to the eye and noticing that a watch and the eye contain multitudes of parts that interact in complicated ways to do interesting things. In fact, to change and to update the analogy a little bit, an eye is very much like a machine known as a camera. And they're similar at a deep way. They both have lenses that bend light and project an image onto a light-sensitive surface. For the eye the light-sensitive surface is the retina. For the camera it's the film. They both have a focusing mechanism. For the eye it's muscles that change the shape of the lens. For a camera it's a diaphragm that governs the amount of incoming light. Even they're both encased in black. The light-sensitive part of the eye and part of the camera are both encased in black. The difference is--So in fact, the eye and a camera look a lot alike and we know the camera is an artifact. The camera has been constructed by an intelligent--by intelligent beings to fulfill a purpose. In fact, if there's any difference between things like the eye and things like a camera, the difference is that things like the eye are far more complicated than things like the camera. When I was a kid I had this incredible TV show called "The Six Million Dollar Man." Anybody here ever seen it or heard of it? Oh. Anyway, the idea is there's a test pilot, Steve Austin, and his rocket jet crashes and he loses his--both legs, his arm and his eye, which sounds really bad but they replace them with bionic stuff, with artificial leg, artificial arm and an artificial eye that are really super-powered. And then he fights crime. [laughter] It was [laughs] really the best show on. It was really good, [laughter] but the thing is this was in 1974. It's now over thirty years later and it's true then and it's true now, this is fantasy. It doesn't make it to the level of science fiction. It's fantasy. We are impossibly far away from developing machines that could do this. We are impossibly far away from building a machine that can do what the human eye does. And so somebody like Paley points out, "Look. The complexity of the biological world suggests that these things are complicated artifacts created by a designer far smarter than any human engineer. And the designer, of course, would be God." I went to Goggle Images. That--I don't mean that to be sacrilegious [laughter] in any sense. You could try this. I went to "Google Images" and typed in "God" and this is what showed up right in the middle so--And this, Paley argued, and it was--has been convincing throughout most of history, is a perfectly logical explanation for where these complicated things come from. It also has the advantage of being compatible with scripture and compatible with religious beliefs, but Paley made the point this stands on its own. If you find complicated things that--complicated artifacts, you don't assume they emerged by accident. You assume that they were created by an intelligent being. Now, this view has always had problems. This view, you could call it "creationism," which is that biological structures were created by an intelligent being, has always had problems. One problem is it pushes back the question. So you ask, "Where did that intelligent being come from?" And this is a particularly serious problem from the standpoint of the evolution of psychological structures. So, we want to know, "how is it that creatures came across--upon this earth with the ability to reason and plan and do things?" And then the answer is "well, another creature with that ability created us." That doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong, but it means it's unsatisfying. You immediately want to get an explanation for where that other creature comes from. More to the point, there's always been evidence for evolution. And what I mean by evolution here isn't necessarily a specific mechanism, but merely the fact that body parts like the eye didn't emerge all of a sudden, but rather have parallels both within other existing animals and across human and biological history. This evidence comes in different forms. There is fossil evidence for different body parts suggesting that they have evolved from more rudimentary form. There is vestigial characteristics. And what this means is there are characteristics that human bodies have that are somewhat inexplicable, like the human tailbone or goose-bumps, unless you view them--the human body in its current form as modifications from a previous form. There are parallels with other animals. And this is clear in psychology. So, a human brain is different from the rat, cat, and monkey brain but at the same time you see them following a sort of common plan and common structures. And one rational inference from this is that they're linked through evolutionary descent. Finally, there is occasional poor design. So, Paley rhapsodized about the remarkable powers of the human body and the different body parts, but even Paley admitted that there are some things which just don't work very well. Your eye contains a blind spot because of how the nerves are wired up. In the male urinary system the urethra goes through the prostate gland instead of around it, which leads to many physical problems in men later on in life. And so you're forced to either argue that these are really good things or that God is either malicious or incompetent. And those are difficult arguments to make. So, these are problems with the creationist view. But still, for the longest time in human intellectual history there was no alternative. And in fact, Richard Dawkins, the most prominent evolutionary--one of the most prominent evolutionary biologists alive and one of the most staunchest critics of creationism, has written in The Blind Watchmaker saying, look, anybody 100 years ago or 150 years ago who didn't believe that God created humans and other animals was a moron because the argument from design is a damn good argument. And in the absence of some other argument you should go--defer to that. You should say, "Well, there are all of these problems but humans and other biological forms must have divine creation because of their incredible rich and intricate structure." What changed all that of course was Darwin. And Darwin--Darwin's profound accomplishment was showing how you get these complicated biological structures, like the eye, emerging through a purely non-intentional, non-created process, a purely physical process. And this could be seen as equal in importance to the claim that the Earth revolves around the Sun and that we're not the center of the universe. And in fact, some scholars have made a suggestion which seems plausible, that the idea of natural selection is the most important idea in the sciences, period. So, this is not a course in evolution and I expect people to have some background. If you don't have a background in it, you could get your background from external readings but also from--the Gray textbook and the Norton readings will both--will each provide you with enough background to get up to speed. But the general idea is that there are three components to natural selection. There is variation. And this variation gives rise to different degrees of survival and reproduction and gets passed on from generation to generation and gives rise to adaptations, what Darwin described as "that perfection of structure that justly excites our imagination." And the biological world has all sorts of examples. You look at camouflage. Prior to Darwin one might imagine that some intelligent creator crafted animals to hide from their prey. But now we have a different alternative, which is that animals that were better hidden survive better, reproduce more, and over the course of thousands, perhaps millions of years, they've developed elaborate camouflage. There's been a lot of work on Paley's favorite example – the eye. So Darwin himself noted that the human eye did not seem to emerge all at once but rather you could look at other animals and find parallels in other animals that seem to suggest that more rudimentary forms are possible. And more recently computer simulations have developed--have been developed that have crafted eyes under plausible assumptions of selective pressure and what the starting point is. So, this is the theory of natural selection. The good question to ask is, "why am I talking about evolution in Introduction to Psychology class?" And the answer is that there are two ideas which come together. And in fact, they're both of the dangerous ideas. One idea is that Darwin's idea--that biological forms evolve through this purely physical process. The second idea, the rejection of Descartes, is that our minds are the product of physical things and physical events. You bring these together and it forces you to the perspective that what we are--our mental life is no less than the eye, no less than camouflage, the product of this purely physical process of natural selection. More to the point, our cognitive mechanisms were evolved not to please God, not as random accidents, but rather for the purpose of survival and reproduction. More contentiously, you could argue they've been shaped by natural selection to solve certain problems. And so, from an evolutionary point of view, when you look at what the brain is and what the brain does, you look at it in terms of these problems. And this is what psychology is for. This is what our thinking is for. We have evolved mental capacities to solve different problems: perception of the world, communication, getting nutrition and rest, and so on. Now, we're going to talk about how to apply evolutionary theory to psychology. But as we're doing so we have to keep in mind two misconceptions. There are two ways you can go seriously wrong here. The first is to think that, well, if we're taking an evolutionary approach then natural selection will cause animals to want to spread their genes. So, if we're being biological about it, that means everybody must run around thinking "I want to spread my genes." I want to--and this is just really --Oops. I shouldn't do that. This is really wrong. It's even in red. And what this fails to do is make a distinction between ultimate causation and proximate causation. And those are technical terms referring to--Ultimate causation is the reason why something is there in the first place, over millions of years of history. Proximate causation is why you're doing it now. And these are different. Obviously, for instance, animals do all sorts of things to help survive and reproduce but a cockroach doesn't think "oh, I'm doing this to help survive and reproduce and spread my genes." A cockroach doesn't know anything about genes. Rather, the mechanisms that make it do what it does are different from its own mental states, if it has any--why it does them. This is a point nicely made by William James. So, William James is asked, "Why do we eat?" And he writes, Not one man in a billion when taking his dinner ever thinks of utility. He eats because the food tastes good and makes him want more. If you asked him why you should want to eat more of what tastes like that, instead of revering you as a philosopher, he will probably laugh at you for a fool. And it's really the common sense answer. "Why are you eating?" Nobody's going to answer, "Because I must sustain my body so as to spread my genes in the future." Rather, you eat because you're hungry. Those two theories, you eat because you're hungry and you eat to sustain your body so you could spread your genes in the future, are not alternative. Rather, they're different levels of explanation. And you can't confuse them. The ultimate level which does appeal to survival and reproduction does not--is independent from the psychological level. To give another example, people protect their children so you ask, "Why do people protect their children? Why would somebody devote so much effort to protecting and helping and feeding their children?" Well, the evolutionary explanation is animals that don't protect their offspring don't last over evolutionary time. We protect our offspring because they contain fifty percent of our genes, but that's not the psychological explanation. Nobody but a deranged psychologist would ever answer, "Oh, I love my children because they contain fifty percent of my genes." Rather, the psychological explanation is a deeper--is different and has a different texture. And this will be a lot clearer when we talk about the emotions, where you could really see a distinction between the question of why we feel something from an evolutionary point of view and why we feel it from a day-to-day point of view. The second misconception is that natural selection entails that everything is adaptive, that everything we do, everything we think is adaptive. This is wrong. Natural selection and evolution, more generally, distinguish between adaptations and byproducts and accidents. Many of you are currently, or will as you get older, suffer back pain. If I was to ask you, "So, why do you suffer back pain? How does back pain help you survive and reproduce?" Well, the answer is it's not an adaptation. Back pain is an accidental byproduct of how our backs are shaped. Don't go looking for an adaptive reason for hiccups or self-pity or bloating after you eat. There's all sorts of things a body will do that have no adaptive value, rather just accidents. We have a body that does all sorts of things. Some things it will do by accident and this is certainly true for psychology. So, a lot of the things, for instance, that occupy our interest or our fascination in day-to-day life are almost certainly evolutionary accidents. The number--The three--Three of the main preoccupations of humans are pornography, television, and chocolate but if I asked you, "Why do you like porn?" and you'd say, "Because my ancestors who liked porn reproduced more than those who didn't," [laughter] it's not true. Rather, you like porn, assuming you do, [laughter] as an accident. You have evolved--For instance, should you be a heterosexual male, you have evolved to be attracted to women. That is most likely to be an evolutionary adaptation because being attracted to women and wanting to have sex with women is one step to the road to having kids, which is very good from an evolutionary perspective. It so happens, though, in our modern environment that people have created images that substitute. So, instead of actually going out and seeking out women you could just surf the web for hours and hours and watch dirty movies and read dirty books – evolutionary adaptive dead ends. They're accidents. Why do you like chocolate bars, assuming that you do? It is not because your ancestors in the African savanna who enjoyed chocolate bars reproduced more than those who didn't. Rather, it is because we've evolved a taste for sweet things. And we've evolved a taste for sweet things, in part, because the sweet things in our natural environment like fruit were good for us. In the modern world we have created things like chocolate, which are not so good for us but we eat anyway. A lot of the debates--There's a lot of controversy in psychology over the scope of evolutionary explanations. And a lot of the debate tends to be over what's an adaptation and what isn't. There are some clear cases. We have color vision. Why do we have color vision? Well, I think everybody would agree we have color vision as an adaptation because of the advantages it gives us for seeing and making visual distinctions. We are afraid of snakes. We're going to talk about that in more detail but there's a straightforward adaptive story about that. We are afraid of snakes because, really, our ancestors who weren't afraid of snakes didn't reproduce as much as those that were. We like chocolate bars and we enjoy NASCAR. Those cannot be adaptations because chocolate bars and NASCAR are recent developments that could not have been anticipated by evolution. Those are easy questions. Here are some hard questions. Music. Everywhere in the world people like music. Is this an adaptation for some selective advantage or is it an accident? Steven Pinker, who wrote The Language Instinct that you read before, caused a huge amount of controversy when he argued that music is just an evolutionary accident. He described it as auditory cheesecake, something we like to gorge ourselves on that have no--has no adaptive advantage. Other people argue music does have an adaptive advantage. Sometimes males use violence to coerce sex. Is male sexual violence a biological adaptation or is it an accident? There's more than one language. Is that just an accidental byproduct of the way language works or is there some sort of group or selectionist advantage sketched out in some way of having multiple languages? What about visual art? What about fiction? What about our love for stories? Those are all matters of heated debate. And so, we have to keep in mind some things plainly are accidents. Some things almost certainly aren't accidents. Where the action is in the study of psychology and the study of evolution of cognition is trying to figure out which is which. So, those are the misconceptions we have to avoid. But still, who cares? Again this is an Introduction to Psych course. Why are we talking about evolution? Why should it matter to a psychologist how the mind has evolved? I'm going to talk about evolution now but for the rest of the course I'm just interested in how our minds are, period. S,o why would evolution matter? Well, many people think it doesn't. For instance – and they think it doesn't for different reasons – one claim is a metaphysical one. You might be a dualist. You might reject the idea your mental life is the product of your brain and hence evolution is irrelevant to psychology because the brain and the mind--because the brain, which may have evolved, has nothing interesting to do with the mind. Lisa Simpson got it wrong when she said the Pope--She got it half right when she said the Pope favored evolution. It is true. John Paul II, many years ago, made a statement saying that Darwinian theory is not incompatible. Darwinian theory is a view about the evolution of species that is not motivated by any animus, is a genuine scientific theory, and should it turn out to be true, it is not incompatible to truth about man as taught by the Church. And scientists were thrilled by this and they were--they said he's endorsing evolution. But what a fewer people talk about is the fact that after he said this he drew the line. He allowed for evolution of the body but he would not allow for evolution of the mind. So it was--he wrote: If the human body takes its origin from preexisting living matter, the spiritual soul is immediately created by God. Consequently, theories of evolution which consider the mind as emerging from the forces of living matter or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter are incompatible to the truth about man. So, you might not want evolution to be true about the mind because you might believe that the mind is not subject to the same physical laws as the rest of the physical world. That's one way you could reject evolutionary psychology. Another way to reject evolutionary psychology is to accept that the mind is a physical thing but then argue that all of these instincts and these hard-wired facets of human nature might exist for other animals but they don't exist for people. So, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu in '73, close to when The Six Million Dollar Man was shown, by the way, said: With the exception of the reactions of infants to sudden withdrawals of support and to sudden loud noises, the human being is entirely instinctless. Man is man because he has no instincts, because everything he is and has become he has learned from his culture, from the man-made part of the environment, from other human beings. You might say, "Look. He could believe that in '74 but, of course, all of the infant studies that have come out since then suggested that's not true and nobody would believe that nowadays." But in fact, the view is often hold--held--Louis Menand in a New Yorker article a few years ago wrote, "Every aspect of life has a biological foundation in exactly the same sense, which is that unless it was biologically possible it wouldn't exist. After that it's up for grabs." And this is in the context of an argument that evolution can't tell us anything about what's most interesting about people. Menand is not--is an educated, intelligent scholar. He is presumably well aware of the findings of Spelke and Baillargeon about how people are hard-wired to understand the objects in social life and so on. But his point is just that when it comes to the more interesting aspects of human nature, the stuff we're naturally, intuitively interested in, that's more cultural. And the evolutionary theory and Darwinian theory just doesn't have anything much to say about it, not because the mind is separate from the brain but just because humans are much more cultural organisms, and so biology has little to say about it. There's a third objection, which is you might think, "Okay, the human mind actually does contain instincts. There is a human nature but we should just study it by studying people. How could evolution, the study of evolution, the consideration of evolution tell us anything interesting?" I actually, in my own work, think evolution can tell us some interesting things. And I want to try to make a case for ways in which evolution can inform and enlighten us about the mind as it is. First, I want to make a point, which is although this course is Intro Psych and it is about the mind as it is, still I think by any account the evolution of consciousness, morality and so on, just is intuitively interesting. It's the sort of thing that people are just fascinated by and I think it's a question of interest in and of its own right. But here's how it could tell us about psychology. For one thing, it can tell us what can be innate and what cannot. So, some problems, some evolutionary problems, have been around for a long time and could lead to special biological adaptations. If I told you there is a biological adaptation for talking, mate selection, childcare; maybe it's true, maybe it isn't, but it's not crazy. From an evolutionary point of view, it's a reasonable possibility that it is. Other problems are recent and our brains could not be specialized to deal with them: written communication, interacting with strangers, driving a car, playing chess. If you were to argue that there's a part of the brain devoted to playing chess, I would say you're utterly wrong. You cannot be right because, from an evolutionary point of view, there could be no such part of the brain evolved because playing chess is a recent innovation. As a result, a focus on evolution could help discipline us to make coherent claims about what is built-in and what isn't built-in. Third, we're going to talk about human differences in this course. We're going to devote a class to human differences of the sort of what makes you different from her, different from her. Why do we have different intelligences in this class? Why are some of us arrogant and some of us humble? Some of us like--attracted to men, others attracted to women, and so on. But there's also questions of group differences. And evolutionary theory can help us say intelligent things about what sort of group differences you should expect because evolutionary theory predicts that some populations should evolve in different ways than others. The most obvious example is that children should be different from adults. The evolutionary problems faced by a child are very different from the evolutionary problems faced by an adult. And you can make specific and rather interesting predictions about how children's brains should different--differ from adults' brains. Evolutionary theory predicts--does not make any predictions about racial differences or ethnic differences. Some might exist, but there's no adaptive reason why humans who have evolved in different parts of the world should have profound differences in their mental capacities. What does evolutionary theory say about sex differences? Well, it says some interesting things, and we're going to devote a class to discussing them, but what I think is going to be true--proved to be important is that we'll be able to use evolutionary biology to talk sensibly about what sort of distinctions between the sexes, between males and females, one would expect to find and what sort one wouldn't expect to find. We can make educated predictions. I'm going to have--I want to put here a clip of a man. This is a scene from a movie, the movie "Roger Dodger," that begins with a man making quasi-evolutionary claims about the differences between men and women. And I want to put this as an example of what you could call "barroom evolutionary psychology." And I want us to hold this in our minds because we're going to return to these claims and discuss their validity. I like this for a few reasons. First, I like the backward reference to William James and utility. Second, it is a gorgeous combination of some things that are actually reasonably rational and total bull crap. And--but what evolutionary biology will give us is the tools to distinguish between the two. On the face of it immediately, the ability to read maps, the claim that that has a biological--that differences in that ability have a biological root is crazy. On the other hand, the claim that one--that males may develop a trait not because it's advantageous but to attract females is less crazy. The telepathic stuff is really crazy but--;So, I'm not at this point--We're going to devote a lecture to sex. I do not, at this point, want to make any claims one way or another. But what I want to suggest is that from a biological point of view we could say sensible and intelligent things about what differences should exist and what shouldn't. Finally, and most of all, looking at something from the perspective of design, the perspective of what's it for, can often give you interesting insights as to its current nature. And I'll give you two quick examples, one that's not from psychology, one that is. Women suffer--Often women who are pregnant early in their pregnancy suffer from morning sickness, nausea, throwing up and so on. This has traditionally been viewed as just a breakdown in the system--too much hormones, everything's askew; women get nauseous. Margie Profet suggested an alternative and this won her the MacArthur Genius Award. And this was the claim that maybe pregnancy sickness is not an accident; rather, it's designed, it has a biological purpose. In particular, as the baby develops in the uterus, it is vulnerable to various sorts of poisons or teratogens. Profet suggested that pregnancy sickness is a hypersensitive period where women are extremely sensitive, get extremely nauseous towards the sorts of foods that could damage their baby. Now, if she just ended there it's a story. How do we know it's true? But then she went on to examine it the same way that any scientist examines any claim – by making predictions and testing them. And this makes some interesting predictions. It suggests the timing of onset and offset of pregnancy sickness, of morning sickness, should correspond to the period of maximal vulnerability on the part of the developing embryo or fetus. Suggested the types of foods avoided should correspond to those sorts of foods that were most deadly for the fetus and that were deadly for the fetus during the periods where humans evolved. This last qualification is an important one. Women do not develop an aversion to alcohol during pregnancy even though alcohol is extremely dangerous to the developing child. The answer is an easy one. Alcohol wasn't around during our evolutionary history and we could not have evolved a system to protect ourselves from it. And finally, there should be a relationship between miscarriage and birth defects in a surprising direction. For Profet, and she has evidence to back this up, pregnancy sickness is not a glitch in the system. Rather, it's the sign of a healthy act of protective mechanism going on. And in fact, the more morning sickness the more the baby should be protected. Something which, by and large, appears to be true. That's an example of how the question--when dealing with this they say, "Hey. Women throw up when they get pregnant" and then say, "Look. Maybe that's not just a glitch. What's it for?" You could then learn some interesting things. Here's a different example based on the last lecture, this wonderful lecture by Peter Salovey on sex and love where he talked about the "big three." These are the "big three" to remind you of what attracts us to somebody else. You are very attracted to the person next to you or a person that--because of proximity, similarity, familiarity. And there is abundant evidence supporting the truth of this. It's almost always true but the evolutionary psychologist looks at this and says there's something seriously wrong here. There are some cases where that has to be totally, absolutely mistaken. To realize what this is, think for a moment. What humans are you most close to, most similar to and most familiar with? What humans did you spend over ten years of your life with who are genetically and environmentally as close to you as if they were related, who you are intimately familiar with? Are those the humans that you find the hottest? [laughter] No. They're your siblings and they are not hot. [laughter] I was on Google Images this morning. I put up some hot siblings and--but--although we may find them hot, they do not typically, with some rare and bizarre exceptions, find [laughter] one another hot. Why not? Well, this is not a huge puzzle from the standpoint of evolutionary biology. Evolutionary biology posits that humans, as well as other animals, should have incest avoidance. We should love--we should be attracted to those familiar to us, similar to us, close to us, but not kin. Kin are off limits. There is a good reason why. Because if you inter-mate with your kin you have bad offspring [laughter] and so animals should be wired up not to mate with their kin. And in fact, this is what happens. There are--Parents of teenagers have all sorts of concerns. And a lot of the concerns are, in fact, sexual. How do you keep your son and/or your daughter from going out and having sex with too many people, or the wrong people, or unprotected sex? But there are no parenting guides in the world that say "How do you keep your children from having sex with one another?" [laughter] You typically do not need to because they do not want to have sex with one another. Now, this is--actually also illustrates the difference between proximate and ultimate causation. So, you think for yourself, "Eew. Do I want to have sex with my sister?" You don't think to yourself, "I would prefer not to, for the offspring that we will create will be nonviable and it'll be a waste of my reproductive efforts." Rather, you think, "Eew," because at a gut level you respond. And this sort of instinctive response is what you get from an evolutionary analysis of sex. But this story is deeply incomplete because the question that gets raised is "how do you tell?" You don't want to have sex with your kin but how do you tell your kin? People don't carry their DNA markers on strips that you could see. How do you tell who your kin are? And this actually turns out to be a really interesting question. It used--And some research suggests that the answer is simple. You avoid sex with people you grew up with. And these studies actually come from kibbutz studies, studies where people are raised communally on an Israeli kibbutz. They know they're not related, but still, the fact that they were raised together as kids suggests that there's a cue at a gut level not to be attracted to one another. It turns out there's some reason now to believe this story is incomplete. A paper that came out in Nature five days ago reported a series of extremely interesting studies. And they found that the cue of being raised together as a child with somebody--yes, that does diminish sexual desire, but an even bigger cue was "did you observe your parents, and in particular, your mother, taking care of that person?" If you did, that seriously diminishes sexual desire and brings it down to the level of disgust. And again, these are the sort of questions and issues you begin to ask when you approach things from an evolutionary perspective. Okay. For this lecture--the rest of this lecture and then the next couple of lectures, I'll be discussing some basic aspects of human nature that are, to some extent or another, informed by evolutionary theory. And what I want to start for the remainder of this lecture is a discussion of rationality. Now, some of you maybe not want to go into--not want to go into psychology because there's no Nobel Prize for psychology. You might all think, "Hey, if I'm going to go into the sciences I want a Nobel Prize. Think how proud Bubby and Zadie would be if I won a Nobel Prize. Wouldn't that be the best?" You can get one. Psychologists have won the Nobel Prize. Most recently, Danny Kahneman won a Nobel Prize. You win it in economics, sometimes medicine; not a big deal. He won it for his work done over the course of many decades on human rationality. And this work was done in collaboration with Amos Tversky, who passed away several years ago. And this work entirely transformed the way we think about human decision-making and rationality. Kahneman and Tversky caused a revolution in economics, psychology, and the social sciences more generally, by causing us to shift from the idea that we're logical thinkers, who think in accord with the axioms of logic and mathematics and rationality, more towards the idea that we actually have sort of rough and ready heuristics. These heuristics served us well during the time--during our evolutionary history, but sometimes they can lead us astray. And I want to give some examples of these heuristics. And I'll give four examples of heuristics that are argued to permeate our reasoning. The first is "framing effects." This was a classic study by Kahneman and Tversky involving this sort of question. The U.S. is preparing for the outbreak of a disease that's going to kill six hundred people. There are two programs. Program A: If you follow it two hundred people will be saved. Program B: There's a one-third chance everybody will be saved and a two-third chance nobody will be saved. Who would choose program B? Who would choose program A? Okay. And that fits the responses. Most people choose program A. That's--It could go either way. What's interesting is if you frame the question differently, like this, you get very different responses. And instead of focusing on the people who will be saved, you focus on the people who will die and, instead of focusing on the chance that nobody will die and the chance that everybody will die, you'd flip it around, you get a corresponding flip. And this is known as a "framing effect." The idea of a framing effect is that you could respond differently to a situation depending on how the options are framed. And, in particular, this combines with "loss aversion." People hate a certain loss. "Four thousand of these people will die" is extremely aversive and so the framing can influence your decisions. And clever advertisers and clever decision makers will frame things in different ways to give you--give rise to different intuitions. Sometimes this could be fairly simple. So, you have this ad of a hamburger that's eighty percent fat free versus twenty percent fat--You don't have to be a brilliant ad executive to figure out which one to go for. It turns out that this sort of fundamental act – the fundamental role of framing effects – is not limited to humans. So, I want to take a second and tell you some work done by my colleague, Laurie Santos, with capuchin monkeys. And what she does is she takes these capuchin monkeys and she teaches them to use money. She teaches them to use little discs to buy themselves either pieces of banana or pieces of apple. And they like to eat this. And they very quickly learn you can hand over a disc to get some banana or some apple. [laughter] Now, Dr. Santos and her colleagues have done many studies using this method, but the study I'm interested in illustrating here shows framing effects in these nonhuman primates. So, what she does is--There's two options. In one option, the experimenter shows one object to the capuchin and low--and then either gives one or two--half the time gives one, half the time gives two, for an average of one and a half. The other experimenter does exactly the same thing; gives one or two for an average of one and a half, but starts off displaying two. Now, if you weren't a human, how would you feel about these two experimenters? They both give you the same amount. And capuchins are extremely sensitive to how much they get, but it turns out as predicted they don't like the pink experimenter because the pink experimenter is--he gives you two--shows you two and half the time he gives you one. This guy shows you one, and half the time gives you two. And over time they develop a preference for the experimenter that shows them one initially, suggesting that they are being subject to framing effects or choices relative to a reference point. A different sort of demonstration is the "endowment effect." This is a robust and very interesting effect. Here's the idea. I show you something like a cup or a chocolate bar and I say, "How much will you give me for this chocolate bar? It looks like you're pretty hungry. How much will you give me for this chocolate bar?" And you say, "I'll give you two dollars for this chocolate bar." Most people on average give two--the chocolate bar--gives two dollars for a chocolate bar. The other condition's exactly the same except I hand you a chocolate bar and say, "How much money will you sell me that chocolate bar for?" There, people say, "Two fifty," and in fact, what happens is once you own something its value shoots up. And this has mystified economists and psychologists. It makes no sense. The chocolate bar doesn't even have to move. I just leave it on the table and say either "How much will you spend," "How much will you give me for this?" or "Okay. It's yours. How much do you want for me to take it back?" The answer is, it's framing. If you're asking how much you want for it, it's a game. It's just how much will you pay to get something. But if you're being asked how much do you want for me to take it from you, you treat it as a loss. And as a loss it becomes more valuable. Those are framing effects. The second example is base rates. There are seventy lawyers--sorry, seventy engineers and thirty lawyers and John is chosen at random. Let me tell you about John: forty-years old, married, three children, conservative, cautious, no interest in politics, awkward around people. His hobbies include carpentry, sailing, and solving mathematical puzzles, like online dating. [laughter] What do you think John is? A lawyer or an engineer? Who thinks he's a lawyer? Good. Who thinks he's an engineer? Okay. Most people think he's an engineer, but here's the thing. You switch it. Right? Thirty engineers, seventy lawyers? It doesn't change. People--No matter what this number is--these numbers--it doesn't seem to change who you think he is or how confident you are. People look at John as an individual and they ignore the background status of where he came from. They ignore base rates. Base rates are very difficult to think about and I want to give you an example of this. And the example will be on the slides for when you print them out--print it out because you might want to work through it yourself. But I'll give this to you quickly. There's a disease that hits one in a thousand people, a pretty common disease. There's a test for the disease and if you have it, it's going to tell you you have it. It tests for a certain thing in your blood and "boom," if the thing is in your blood the test will go "boom." If you have it, it will tell you you have it. It doesn't miss. On the other hand, it's not perfect. It has a false positive rate of five percent. So, if you don't have the disease, five percent of the time the test will say you have it. So, if the test says you don't have it, you're fine. But if the test says you have it, maybe you have it but maybe it's a false positive. You take the test. It says you have the disease. Without pen and paper, how likely do you think the odds are you have the disease? Who says over fifty percent? Okay. Before people sinisterly shouted the right answer, people will tend--medical students were given this, medical students less savvy than you, and the average is between fifty percent and ninety-five percent. The answer is, as some people quickly noted, two percent. And here's how it works. One percent of a thousand will have the disease. That person will test positive. The test never misses. That leaves nine hundred ninety-nine people who don't have the disease, and we'll say about fifty percent of these people have it. So, for every fifty-one people who test positive, only one will have the disease, giving an average of about two percent. This sort of thing is very difficult. Our minds are not evolved to do base rate computation. And so, any problems involving base rate computation, including real world problems, like what to do when you come back with a positive test, we screw up. And often we screw up in the direction of panic. The third bias is the "availability bias." And this is simply that if you want to know how frequent something is, how available it is to come to mind is an excellent cue. But this could lead to mistakes. A classic example by Kahneman and Tversky is you ask people--one group of people how many English words end with "ng" or what proportion of English words, another group of people what proportion end with "ing." It turns out you get much bigger numbers for "ing" than "ng" though, of course "ng" has to--"ing"--sorry, "ng" would include everything with "ing." It's just a lot easier to think about these things. This can show up in the real world. What are your risk of getting killed--What's your risk of getting killed by a shark? Well, if you ask people what their risk of getting killed by a shark is, they characteristically overestimate it. I will give you the news of what the risk is for getting killed by a shark. Injured in any given year: one in six million. Killed: one in five hundred million. If you live in Florida, which apparently is Shark Central, your chance of getting injured is about one in a half million. People will overestimate the risks because shark attacks are very salient. They are always reported in the news and they're very interesting. What is the chance of getting killed by potato salad? [laughter] Well, food poisoning, death by food poisoning, injury by food poisoning runs to about one in fifty-five, one in 800 for some sort of injury and one in 55,000 killed. Potato salad is 1,000 more times more dangerous than shark attacks. But you get it wrong because you don't think, "Oh, my God, big news story. Somebody dies by potato salad." [laughter] And so, we tend to overestimate the chance of being killed by dramatic effects. How many Jews in the United States, what proportion? Who thinks it's over three quarters of the United States is Jewish? [laughter] I'm kind of anchoring here. Okay. Okay. Who thinks over half? Who thinks over forty percent? Who thinks over twenty percent? Okay. Who thinks over fifteen percent? Who thinks over ten percent? Who thinks over seven and one-half percent? Who thinks over five percent? Okay. Who thinks overall there's more than five percent of the United States that's Jewish? Who thinks over three percent? The answer is somewhere between 1.9 and 2.1%. Most people think--The average American thinks it's twenty percent. There is-- [laughter] If you're curious about demographics, and this map isn't to be entirely trusted because I got it from Wikipedia, [laughter] this is the distribution of the Jewish population, self-identified as Jewish in different parts of the United States. [laughter] New York City is, of course, the most dense population with nine percent. New Haven has 3.5%. Now, why do people get it wrong? Well, there's all sorts of reasons and this is going to come out in the context of social psychology when we talk about how people think about human groups. But one quick answer is people who are plainly Jewish are prominent in positions where people notice them, like entertainment or, in the case of you guys, academia. And this could lead to--this availability-- "Can I think of a Jew? Yeah." [laughter] This availability causes us to overestimate the proportion to which Jews are represented in the population. Final example. Confirmation bias. This is a very nice study and it's very simple. It's--You're in a jury of a custody case. You have to give a child custody – either a mother or father sole custody. One parent has average income, average health, average working hours, reasonable rapport with the child, and a relatively stable social life. The second parent has an above-average income, minor health problems, lots of work-related travel, a very close relationship with the travel--with the child, and an extremely active social life. Think for a moment. Who would you award custody with? There's no--Obviously, there's no right answer here. Just think for a moment. Who would award custody to parent A? Who would award custody to parent B? Okay. As I think there is in this room, when this study is done there's a slight advantage to parent B. Here's what's interesting. You give another group of people this question. "Which parent would you deny custody to?" You get a slight advantage for parent B. Now, this is to some extent an illustration of framing problem but it's also a more general illustration of the confirmation bias. So, when you're asked to award custody to, you then ask, "Well, what is a good--what is a sign that somebody's a good parent?" And the good parent aspects of B jump out. When asking about denying custody you ask, "Where is a cue that somebody's a bad parent?" And the bad parent aspects of B jump out. In general, when we have a hypothesis we look for confirmations. This makes some things, which are logically easy extremely difficult problems when we face them in the real world. And I'll end with my final example, that of the Wason selection task. Here's the game. And people--I don't want people to shout it out just yet. There is four cards. Each card has a letter on one side and a number on the other side. You have to judge whether this claim is true or false. "If a card has a 'D' on one side, it has a '3' on the other side." How many cards do you have to turn over to test whether that rule is right? Okay. Somebody shout out what one card is you have to turn over. "D." Everybody gets that right. What else? Do you need to do any other cards? How many people think it's "D" and "3"? I'm raising my hand to fool you. [laughter] People answer either "D" or "D" and "3" but think about it. What would make this rule wrong? It's wrong if it has "D" on one side and not "3" on the other. Right? That's what it would be to be wrong. You then would have to check "D" to see if there is a "3" on the other side. You were all right about that. That means you'd check "8" to see if there's a "D" on the other side. "Three's" not going to tell you anything. That's hard. People find this very hard. Okay. Big deal. But what's interesting is you can modify it in certain ways to make it a lot easier. And this is the work of Leda Cosmides and her colleague, an evolutionary psychologist at Santa Barbara who has argued that if you frame these questions in ways that make ecological sense, people are much better at them. And basically, she does studies where she has people who are evaluating a social rule. Imagine these cards. On one side of the card is an alcohol--is a drink. On the other side is a person's age. You are a bartender and you want to make sure nobody under twenty-one drinks beer. Which cards do you turn over? Well, now it's easier but the logic is the same. It's a violation that there's "under twenty-one" on one side, "beer" on the other side, so you need to check the "under twenty-one" here and you need to check the "beer" here. And when you make these logical problems more ecologically valid they turn out to be much easier. Okay. There's a little bit more but I'll hold it off until next class. And I'll end with the reading response, which is to do your own bit of reverse engineering and evolutionary psychology. And I'll see you all on Wednesday.
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Introduction_to_Psychology_with_Paul_Bloom
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3_Foundations_Freud.txt
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Professor Paul Bloom: Okay. The last class we talked about the brain. Now we're going to talk a little bit about some foundations. So today and Monday we're going to talk about two very big ideas and these ideas are associated with Sigmund Freud and B. F. Skinner and are psychoanalysis and behaviorism. And I want to talk about psychoanalysis today and behaviorism next week. Now, one of these things--One of the things that makes these theories so interesting is their scope. Most of the work we're going to talk about in this class--Most of the ideas are narrow. So, we're going to talk about somebody's idea about racial prejudice but that's not a theory of language acquisition. We'll talk about theories of schizophrenia but they're not explanations of sexual attractiveness. Most theories are specialized theories but these two views are grand theories. They're theories of everything, encompassing just about everything that matters, day-to-day life, child development, mental illness, religion, war, love. Freud and Skinner had explanations of all of these. Now, this is not a history course. I have zero interest in describing historical figures in psychology just for the sake of telling you about the history of the field. What I want to tell you about though is--I want to talk about these ideas because so much rests on them and, even more importantly, a lot of these ideas have critical influence on how we think about the present. And that's there. Now, for better or worse, we live in a world profoundly affected by Sigmund Freud. If I had to ask you to choose a--no, name a famous psychologist, the answer of most of you would be Freud. He's the most famous psychologist ever and he's had a profound influence on the twentieth and twenty-first century. Some biographical information: He was born in the 1850s. He spent most of his life in Vienna, Austria, but he died in London and he escaped to London soon after retreating there at the beginning of World War II as the Nazis began to occupy where he lived. He's one of the most famous scholars ever but he's not known for any single discovery. Instead, he's known for the development of an encompassing theory of mind, one that he developed over the span of many decades. He was in his time extremely well known, a celebrity recognized on the street, and throughout his life. He was a man of extraordinary energy and productivity, in part because he was a very serious cocaine addict, but also just in general. He was just a high-energy sort of person. He was up for the Nobel Prize in medicine and in literature; didn't get either one of them; didn't get the prize in medicine because Albert Einstein--Everybody loves Albert Einstein. Well, Albert Einstein really wrote a letter because they asked for opinions of other Nobel Prizes. He wrote a letter saying, "Don't give the prize to Freud. He doesn't deserve a Nobel Prize. He's just a psychologist." Well, yeah. Okay. While he's almost universally acclaimed as a profoundly important intellectual figure, he's also the object of considerable dislike. This is in part because of his character. He was not a very nice man in many ways. He was deeply ambitious to the cause of promoting psychoanalysis, to the cause of presenting his view and defending it, and he was often dishonest, extremely brutal to his friends, and terrible to his enemies. He was an interesting character. My favorite Freud story was as he was leaving Europe during the rise of the Nazis, as he was ready to go to England from, I think, either Germany or Austria, he had to sign a letter from the Gestapo. Gestapo agents intercepted him and demanded he sign a letter saying that at no point had he been threatened or harassed by the Gestapo. So he signs the letter and then he writes underneath it, "The Gestapo has not harmed me in any way. In fact, I highly recommend the Gestapo to everybody." It's--He had a certain aggression to him. He was also--He's also disliked, often hated, because of his views. He was seen as a sexual renegade out to destroy the conception of people as good and rational and pure beings. And when the Nazis rose to power in the 1930s he was identified as a Jew who was devoted to destroying the most sacred notions of Christianity and to many, to some extent, many people see him this way. And to some extent, this accusation has some truth to it. Freud made claims about people that many of us, maybe most of us, would rather not know. Well, okay. What did he say? Well, if you ask somebody who doesn't like Freud what he said, they'll describe some of the stupider things he said and, in fact, Freud said a lot of things, some of which were not very rational. For instance, he's well known for his account of phallic symbols, arguing certain architectural monuments are subconsciously developed as penile representations. And related to this, he developed the notorious theory of penis envy. And penis envy is an account of a developmental state that every one of you who is female has gone through, according to Freud. And the idea is that you discovered at some point in your development that you lacked a penis. This is not--This is a catastrophe. And so, each of you inferred at that point that you had been castrated. You had once had a penis but somebody had taken it from you. You then turn to your father and love your father because your father has a penis, so he's a sort of penis substitute. You reject your mother, who's equally unworthy due to her penis lack, and that shapes your psychosexual development. Now, if that's the sort of thing you know about Freud, you are not going to have a very high opinion of him or of his work, but at the core of Freud's declamation, the more interesting ideas, is a set of claims of a man's intellectual importance. And the two main ones are this. The two main ones involve the existence of an unconscious, unconscious motivation, and the notion of unconscious dynamics or unconscious conflict which lead to mental illnesses, dreams, slips of the tongue and so on. The first idea – the idea of unconscious motivation – involves rejecting the claim that you know what you're doing. So, suppose you fall in love with somebody and you decide you want to marry them and then somebody was asked to ask you why and you'd say something like, "Well, I'm ready to get married this stage of my life; I really love the person; the person is smart and attractive; I want to have kids" whatever. And maybe this is true. But a Freudian might say that even if this is your honest answer – you're not lying to anybody else –still, there are desires and motivations that govern your behavior that you may not be aware of. So, in fact, you might want to marry John because he reminds you of your father or because you want to get back at somebody for betraying you. If somebody was to tell you this, you'd say, "That's total nonsense," but that wouldn't deter a Freudian. The Freudian would say that these processes are unconscious so of course you just don't know what's happening. So, the radical idea here is you might not know what--why you do what you do and this is something we accept for things like visual perception. We accept that you look around the world and you get sensations and you figure out there is a car, there is a tree, there is a person. And you're just unconscious of how this happens but it's unpleasant and kind of frightening that this could happen, that this could apply to things like why you're now studying at Yale, why you feel the way you do towards your friends, towards your family. Now, the marriage case is extreme but Freud gives a lot of simpler examples where this sort of unconscious motivation might play a role. So, have you ever liked somebody or disliked them and not known why? Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you're doing something or you're arguing for something or making a decision for reasons that you can't fully articulate? Have you ever forgotten somebody's name at exactly the wrong time? Have you ever called out the wrong name in the throes of passion? This is all the Freudian unconscious. The idea is that we do these things--these things are explained in terms of cognitive systems that we're not aware of. Now, all of this would be fine if your unconscious was a reasonable, rational computer, if your unconscious was really smart and looking out for your best interest. But, according to Freud, that's not the way it works. According to Freud, there are three distinct processes going on in your head and these are in violent internal conflict. And the way you act and the way you think are products, not of a singular rational being, but of a set of conflicting creatures. And these three parts are the id, the ego, and the superego and they emerge developmentally. The id, according to Freud, is present at birth. It's the animal part of the self. It wants to eat, drink, pee, poop, get warm, and have sexual satisfaction. It is outrageously stupid. It works on what Freud called, "The Pleasure Principle." It wants pleasure and it wants it now. And that's, according to Freud, how a human begins – pure id. Freud had this wonderful phrase, "polymorphous perversity," this pure desire for pleasure. Now, unfortunately, life doesn't work like that. What you want isn't always what you get and this leads to a set of reactions to cope with the fact that pleasure isn't always there when you want it either by planning how to satisfy your desires or planning how to suppress them. And this system is known as the ego, or the self. And it works on the "Reality Principle." And it works on the principle of trying to figure out how to make your way through the world, how to satisfy your pleasures or, in some cases, how to give up on them. And the ego – the emergence of the ego for Freud--symbolizes the origin of consciousness. Finally, if this was all there it might be a simpler world, but Freud had a third component, that of the superego. And the superego is the internalized rules of parents in society. So, what happens in the course of development is, you're just trying to make your way through the world and satisfy your desires, but sometimes you're punished for them. Some desires are inappropriate, some actions are wrong, and you're punished for it. The idea is that you come out; you get in your head a superego, a conscience. In these movies, there'd be a little angel above your head that tells you when things are wrong. And basically your self, the ego, is in between the id and the superego. One thing to realize, I told you the id is outrageously stupid. It just says, "Oh, hungry, food, sex, oh, let's get warm, oh." The superego is also stupid. The superego, point to point, is not some brilliant moral philosopher telling you about right and wrong. The superego would say, "You should be ashamed of yourself. That's disgusting. Stop doing that. Oh." And in between these two screaming creatures, one of you; one of them telling you to seek out your desires, the other one telling you, "you should be ashamed of yourself," is you, is the ego. Now, according to Freud, most of this is unconscious. So, we see bubbling up to the top, we feel, we experience ourselves. And the driving of the id, the forces of the id and the forces of the superego, are unconscious in that we cannot access them. We don't know what--It's like the workings of our kidneys or our stomachs. You can't introspect and find them. Rather, they do their work without conscious knowledge. Now, Freud developed this. This is the Freudian theory in broad outline. He extended it and developed it into a theory of psychosexual development. And so, Freud's theory is, as I said before, a theory of everyday life, of decisions, of errors, of falling in love, but it's also a theory of child development. So, Freud believed there were five stages of personality development, and each is associated with a particular erogenous zone. And Freud believed, as well, that if you have a problem at a certain stage, if something goes wrong, you'll be stuck there. So, according to Freud, there are people in this room who are what they are because they got stuck in the oral stage or the anal stage. And that's not good. So, the oral stage is when you start off. The mouth is associated with pleasure. Everything is sucking and chewing and so on. And the problem for Freud is premature weaning of a child. Depriving him of the breast, could lead to serious problems in his personality development. It could make him, as the phrase goes, into an oral person. And his orality could be described literally. Freud uses it as an explanation for why somebody might eat too much or chew gum or smoke. They're trying to achieve satisfaction through their mouth of a sort they didn't get in this very early stage of development. But it can also be more abstract. If your roommate is dependent and needy, you could then go to your roommate and say, "You are an oral person. The first year of your life did not go well." A phrase even more popular is the anal stage and that happens after the oral stage. And problems can emerge if toilet training is not handled correctly. If you have problems during those years of life, you could become an anal personality, according to Freud, and your roommate could say, "Your problem is you're too anal." And, according to Freud, literally, it meant you are unwilling to part with your own feces. It's written down here. I know it's true. And the way it manifests itself, as you know from just how people talk, is you're compulsive, you're clean, you're stingy. This is the anal personality. Then it gets a little bit more complicated. The next stage is the phallic stage. Actually, this is not much more complicated. The focus of pleasure shifts to the genitals and fixation can lead to excessive masculinity in females or in males or if you're female a need for attention or domination. Now, at this point something really interesting happens called the "Oedipus Complex." And this is based on the story, the mythical story of a king who killed his father and married his mother. And, according to Freud, this happens to all of us in this way. Well, all of us. By "all of us," Freud meant "men." So, here's the idea. You're three or four years old. You're in the phallic stage. So, what are you interested in? Well, you're interested in your penis and then you seek an external object. Freud's sort of vague about this, but you seek some sort of satisfaction. But who is out there who'd be sweet and kind and loving and wonderful? Well, Mom. So the child infers, "Mom is nice, I love Mom." So far so--And so this is not crazy; a little boy falling in love with his mother. Problem: Dad's in the way. Now, this is going to get progressively weirder but I will have to say, as the father of two sons, both sons went through a phase where they explicitly said they wanted to marry Mommy. And me – if something bad happened to me that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. So, there's this. But now it gets a little bit aggressive. So, the idea is the child determines that he's going to kill his father. Every three- and four-year-old boy thinks this. But then because children, according to Freud, don't have a good sense of the boundary between their mind and the world, which is a problem – the problem is they don't – they think their father can tell that they're plotting to kill him and they figure their father is now angry at them. And then they ask themselves, "What's the worst thing Dad could do to me?" And the answer is castration. So, they come to the conclusion that their father is going to castrate them because of their illicit love for their Mom. And then they say, "Dad wins" and then they don't think about sex for several years and that's the latency stage. The latency stage is they've gone through this huge thing with Mom and Dad, "fell in love with Mom, wanted to kill my father, Dad was going to castrate me, fell out of love with Mom, out of the sex business." And then, sex is repressed until you get to the genital stage. And the genital stage is the stage we are all in – the healthy adult stage. Now that you're adults and you've gone through all the developmental stages, where do you stand? You're not out of the woods yet because unconscious mechanisms are still--Even if you haven't got fixated on anything, there's still this dynamic going on all the time with your id, your ego and your superego. And the idea is your superego--Remember, your superego is stupid. So, your superego isn't only telling you not to do bad things, it's telling you not to think bad things. So, what's happening is your id is sending up all of this weird, sick stuff, all of these crazy sexual and violent desires, "Oh, I'll kill him. I'll have sex with that. I'll have extra helpings on my dessert." And your superego is saying, "No, no, no." And this stuff is repressed. It doesn't even make it to consciousness. The problem is Freud had a very sort of hydraulic theory of what goes on and some of this stuff slips out and it shows up in dreams and it shows up in slips of the tongue. And in exceptional cases, it shows up in certain clinical symptoms. So what happens is, Freud described a lot of normal life in terms of different ways we use to keep that horrible stuff from the id making its way to consciousness. And he called these "defense mechanisms." You're defending yourself against the horrible parts of yourself and some of these make a little bit of sense. One way to describe this in a non-technical, non-Freudian way is, there are certain things about ourselves we'd rather not know. There are certain desires we'd rather not know and we have ways to hide them. So, for instance, there's sublimation. Sublimation is you might have a lot of energy, maybe sexual energy or aggressive energy, but instead of turning it to a sexual or aggressive target what you do is you focus it in some other way. So, you can imagine a great artist like Picasso turning the sexual energy into his artwork. There is displacement. Displacement is you have certain shameful thoughts or desires and you refocus them more appropriately. A boy who's bullied by his father may hate his father and want to hurt him but since this would--this is very shameful and difficult. The boy might instead kick the dog and think he hates the dog because that's a more acceptable target. There is projection. Projection is, I have certain impulses I am uncomfortable with, so rather than own them myself, I project them to somebody else. A classic example for Freud is homosexual desires. The idea is that I feel this tremendous lust towards you, for instance, and--any of you, all of you, you three, and I'm ashamed of this lust so what I say is, "Hey. Are you guys looking at me in a sexual manner? Are you lusting after me? How disgusting," because what I do is I take my own desires and I project it to others. And Freud suggested, perhaps not implausibly, that men who believe other men--who are obsessed with the sexuality of other men, are themselves projecting away their own sexual desires. There is rationalization, which is that when you do something or think something bad you rationalize it and you give it a more socially acceptable explanation. A parent who enjoys smacking his child will typically not say, "I enjoy smacking my child." Rather he'll say, "It's for the child's own good. I'm being a good parent by doing this." And finally, there is regression, which is returning to an earlier stage of development. And you actually see this in children. In times of stress and trauma, they'll become younger, they will act younger. They might cry. They might suck their thumb, seek out a blanket or so on. Now, these are all mechanisms that for Freud are not the slightest bit pathological. They are part of normal life. Normally, we do these things to keep an equilibrium among the different systems of the unconscious, but sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes things go awry and what happens is a phrase that's not currently used in psychology but was popular during Freud's time: hysteria. Hysteria includes phenomena like hysterical blindness and hysterical deafness, which is when you cannot see and cannot hear even though there's nothing physiologically wrong with you – paralysis, trembling, panic attacks, gaps of memory including amnesia and so on. And the idea is that these are actually symptoms. These are symptoms of mechanisms going on to keep things unconscious. It's a common enough idea in movies. Often in movies what happens is that somebody goes to an analyst. They have some horrible problem. They can't remember something or they have some sort of blackouts and so on. And the analyst tells them something and at one point they get this insight and they realize what--why they've blinded themselves, why they can't remember, and for Freud this is what happens. Freud originally attempted to get these memories out through hypnosis but then moved to the mechanism of free association and, according to Freud, the idea is patients offer resistance to this and then the idea of a psychoanalyst is to get over the resistance and help patients get insight. The key notion of psychoanalysis is your problems are--actually reflect deeper phenomena. You're hiding something from yourself, and once you know what's going on to deeper phenomena your problems will go away. I'm going to give you an example of a therapy session. Now, this is not a Freudian analysis. We'll discuss later on in the course what a Freudian analysis is, but this is not a pure Freudian analysis. A Freudian analysis, of course, is lying on a couch; does not see their therapist; their therapist is very nondirective. But I'm going to present this as an example here because it illustrates so many of the Freudian themes, particularly themes about dreams, the importance of dreams, about repression and about hidden meaning. So, this is from a television episode and the character's--Many--Some of you may have seen this. Many of you will not have. The character is suffering from panic attacks. Freud's contributions extend beyond the study of individual psychology and individual pathology. Freud had a lot to say about dreams as you could see in this illustration. He believed that dreams had a manifest content, meaning; "manifest" meaning what you experience in your dream. But dreams always had a latent content as well, meaning the hidden implication of the dream. He viewed all dreams as wish fulfillment. Every dream you have is a certain wish you have even though it might be a forbidden wish that you wouldn't wish to have, you wouldn't want to have. And dreams had--and this is an idea that long predated Freud. Dreams had symbolism. Things in dreams were often not what they seemed to be but rather symbols for other things. Freud believed that literature and fairy tales and stories to children and the like carried certain universal themes, certain aspects of unconscious struggles, and certain preoccupations of our unconscious mind. And Freud had a lot to say about religion. For instance, he viewed a large part of our--of the idea of finding a singular, all-powerful god as seeking out a father figure that some of us never had during development. What I want to spend the rest of the class on is the scientific assessment of Freud. So, what I did so far is I've told you what Freud had to say in broad outline. I then want to take the time to consider whether or not we should believe this and how well it fits with our modern science. But before doing so, I'll take questions for a few minutes. Do people have any questions about Freud or Freud's theories? Yes. Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: So, that's some question. The question is: The conflicts in psychosexual development that Freud describes is--always assumes that a child has a mother and a father, one of each, in a certain sort of familial structure. And the question then is, "What if a child was raised by a single parent, for example?" What if a child was never breast fed, but fed from the bottle from the start? And Freudians have had problems with this. Freud's--Freud was very focused on the family life of the people he interacted with, which is rather upper class Europeans, and these sort of questions would have been difficult for Freud to answer. I imagine that what a Freudian would have to say is, you would expect systematic differences. So, you would expect a child who just grew up with a mother or just grew up to be a father--with a father to be in some sense psychologically damaged by that, failing to go through the normal psychosexual stages. Yes. Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: The issue--The question is, "Do modern psychoanalysts still believe that women do not have superegos?" Freud was--As you're pointing out, Freud was notorious for pointing, for suggesting that women were morally immature relative to men. I think Freud would say that women have superegos, they're just not the sort of sturdy ones that men have. I think psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic scholars right now would be mixed. Some would maintain that there really are deep sex differences. Others would want to jettison that aspect of Freudian theory. Yes. Student: Do you define sublimation as being displacement? Does that make it sort of a subgroup of displacement? Professor Paul Bloom: Well, what sublimation is--A lot of these--It's a good question. The question is sort of, what is sublimation? How does it relate to the other defense mechanisms? A lot of defense mechanisms involve taking a desire and turning it. Now, what displacement does is it takes it from you to her. I'm angry at you but maybe that's forbidden for some reason, so I'll be angry at her. What projection does is takes a desire from me and then puts it on somebody else heading outwards. And what sublimation does is it just gives up the details and keeps the energy. So, you stay up--Your roommate stays up all night working and you say to your roommate, for instance, "That's just because you haven't had sex in a long time and you want to have sex so you devote all your energy to your math exam." And then you say, "That's sublimation. I learned that in Intro Psych." And your roommate would be very pleased. One more question. Yes. Student: What kind of evidence is there for cross-cultural variation? Professor Paul Bloom: The question is, which is related to the issue--extending the issue of the two-parent versus one-parent family is, "To what extent are these notions validated cross-culturally?" And that's such a good question I'm going to defer it. I'm going to talk about it in a few minutes because that's actually--That speaks to the issue of the scientific assessment of Freud so I'm going to try to get to your question in a little bit. Freudian theory is now, at this point of time, extremely controversial and there is a lot of well-known criticisms and attacks on Freud. This is just actually an excellent book on The Memory Wars by Frederick Crews, which--and Frederick Crews is one of the strongest and most passionate critics of Freud. And the problems with Freud go like this. There are two ways you could reject a theory. There are two problems with the scientific theory. One way you could reject a theory is that it could be wrong. So, suppose I have a theory that the reason why some children have autism, a profound developmental disorder, is because their mothers don't love them enough. This was a popular theory for many years. It's a possible theory. It just turns out to be wrong but another way--And so one way to attack and address a scientific theory is to view it as just to see whether or not it works. But there's a different problem a theory could have. A theory could be so vague and all encompassing that it can't even be tested. And this is one of the main critiques of Freud. The idea could be summed up by a quotation from the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. And Pauli was asked his opinion about another physicist. And Pauli said this: "That guy's work is crap. He's not right. He's not even wrong." And the criticism about Freud is that he's not even wrong. The issue of vagueness is summarized in a more technical way by the philosopher Karl Popper who described--who introduced the term of falsifiability. The idea of falsifiability is that what distinguishes science from non science is that scientific predictions make strong claims about the world and these claims are of a sort that they could be proven wrong. If they couldn't be proven wrong, they're not interesting enough to be science. So, for example, within psychology the sort of claims we'll be entertaining throughout the course include claims like, damage to the hippocampus causes failures of certain sorts of memory, or everywhere in the world men on average want to have more sexual partners than women, or exposure to violent television tends to make children themselves more violent. Now, are they true or are they false? Well, we'll talk about that, but the point here is they can be false. They're interesting enough that they can be tested and as such they go to--they might be wrong but they graduate to the level of a scientific theory. This should be contrasted with nonscientific programs and the best example of a nonscientific program is astrology. So, the problem with astrological predictions is not that they're wrong. It's that they can't be wrong. They're not even wrong. I did my--I got my horoscope for today on the web. "A couple of negative aspects could make you a little finicky for the next few days." Okay. I'm going to watch for that. "The presence of both Mars and Venus suggests you want to box everything into a neat, ordered, structured way but keeping a piece of jade or carnelian close will help you keep in touch with your fun side." And starting this morning I got from my wife a little piece of jade and I have been sort of in touch with my fun side. The problem is, a few days aren't going to go by and say, "God. That was wrong." It can't be wrong. It's just so vague. I got a better horoscope from The Onion actually: "Riding in a golf cart with snow cone in hand, you'll be tackled by two police officers this week after matching a composite caricature of a suspected murderer." Now, that's a good prediction because "wow." If it turns out to be true, I'm going to say, "Those guys really know something." It's falsifiable. Arguably, Freud fails the test because Freudian theory is often so vague and flexible that it can't really be tested in any reliable way. A big problem with this is a lot of Freudian theory is claimed to be validated in the course of psychoanalysis. So, when you ask people, "Why do you believe in Freud?" they won't say, "Oh, because of this experiment, that experiment, this data set and that data set." What they'll say is, "It's--The Freudian theory proves itself in the course of psychoanalysis – the success of psychoanalysis." But it's unreliable. The problem is, say, Freud says to a patient, "You hate your mother." The patient says, "Wow. That makes sense." Freud says, "I'm right." The patient--Freud says, "You hate your mother," and the patient says, "No, I don't. That's titillating. That's disgusting." Freud says, "Your anger shows this idea is painful to you. You have repressed it from consciousness. I am right." And the problem is the same sort of dynamic plays itself out even in the scientific debate back and forth. So Freud--Freudian psychologists--I'm putting Freud here but what I mean is well-known defenders of Freud will make some claims like: adult personality traits are shaped by the course of psychosexual development; all dreams are disguised wish fulfillment; psychoanalysis is the best treatment for mental disorders. Scientists will respond, "I disagree. There's little or no evidence supporting those claims." And the Freudian response is, "Your rejection of my ideas shows that they are distressing to you. This is because I am right." And this is often followed up, seriously enough. "You have deep psychological problems." And now, I don't want to caricature Freudians. A lot of Freudians have tried and made a research program of extending their ideas scientifically, bringing them to robust scientific tests. But the problem is, when you make specific falsifiable predictions they don't always do that well. So, for instance, there's no evidence that oral and anal characteristics, the personality characteristics I talked about – about being needy versus being stingy – relate in any interesting way to weaning or toilet training. And there's been some efforts cross-culturally, to go back to the question this young man asked before – looking at cross-cultural differences in toilet training and weaning, which are really big differences, to see if they correspond in any interesting way to personality differences. And there's been no good evidence supporting that. Similarly, Freud had some strong claims about sexuality, for why some people are straight and others are gay. These have met with very little empirical support. And the claim that psychoanalysis proves itself by being--by its tremendous success in curing mental illness is also almost certainly not true. For most--Maybe not all, but for most psychological disorders, there are quicker and more reliable treatments than psychoanalysis. And there's considerable controversy as to whether the Tony Soprano method of insight, where you get this insight and there's discovery, "Oh, now I know," makes any real difference in alleviating symptoms such as anxiety disorders or depression. This is why there's sort of--often sort of a sticker shock when people go to a university psychology department where they say, "Look. Hey. Where is--So I'm in Psych. How could I take classes on Freud? Who's your expert on Freud?" And the truth is Freudian psychoanalysis is almost never studied inside psychology departments. Not the cognitive or developmental side, not the clinical side. There are some exceptions but, for the most part, even the people who do study Freud within psychology departments do so critically. Very few of them would see themselves as a psychoanalytic practitioner or as a Freudian psychologist. Freud lives on both in a clinical setting and in the university but Freud at Yale, for instance, is much more likely to be found in the history department or the literature department than in the psychology department. And this is typical enough but, despite all of the, sort of, sour things I just said about Freud, the big idea, the importance of the dynamic unconscious, remains intact. We will go over and over and over again different case studies where some really interesting aspects of mental life prove to be unconscious. Now, there's one question. I'm actually going to skip over this for reasons of time and just go to some examples of the unconscious in modern psychology. So, here's a simple example of the unconscious in modern psychology: Language understanding. So, when you hear a sentence like, "John thinks that Bill likes him," in a fraction of a second you realize that this means that John thinks that Bill likes John. If you heard the sentence--Oops--"John thinks that Bill likes himself," in a fraction of a second you would think that it means "John thinks that Bill likes Bill." And as we will get to when we get to the lecture on language, this is not conscious. You don't know how you do this. You don't even know that you are doing this but you do it quickly and instinctively. So much of our day-to-day life can be done unconsciously. There are different activities you can do – driving, chewing gum, shoelace tying – where if you're good enough at them, if you're expert enough at them, you don't know you're doing them. I was at a party a few years ago for a friend of mine and we ran out of food so he said, "I'll just go pick up some food." An hour later he was gone--still gone and it was around the corner. And we called him up on his cell phone and he said, "Oh. I got on the highway and I drove to work." Yeah. He works an hour away but he got on the highway "drive drive drive." And these--some version of these things happen all of the time. Maybe more surprising, Freud's insight that our likes and dislikes are due to factors that we're not necessarily conscious of has a lot of empirical support--a lot of empirical support from research into social psychology, for example. So, here's one finding from social psychology. If somebody goes through a terrible initiation to get into a club, they'll like the club more. You might think they'd like it less because people do terrible things to them. But actually, hazing is illegal but a remarkably successful tool. The more you pay for something the more you like it and the more pain you go through to get something the more you like it. From the standpoint of politics for instance, if you want loyal people in a political campaign, do not pay them. If you pay them, they'll like you less. If they volunteer, they'll like you more. And we'll talk about why. There's different theories about why, but my point right now is simply that people don't necessarily know this but still they're subject to this. Another example is some weird studies done in a discipline of social psychology known as terror management which involves subliminal death primes. The idea of subliminal death primes is this. You sign up for your human subjects requirement and then you--they put you in front of a computer screen and then they tell you, "Oh, just sit in front of the computer screen and then we'll ask you some questions." And then the questions come out and they're questions like, "How much do you love your country?" "What do you think of Asians?" "What do you think of Jews?" "What do you think of blacks?" "What do you think of vegetarians?" "What do you think of people's political views different from yours?" Here's the gimmick. What you don't know is on that computer screen words are being flashed like that but they're being flashed so fast it looks like that--You don't see anything--words like "corpse," "dead," "dying." The flashing of these subliminal words, "subliminal" meaning – a fancy term meaning below the level of consciousness, you don't know you're seeing them – has dramatic effects on how you answer those questions. People exposed to death primes become more nationalistic, more patriotic, less forgiving of other people, less liking of other races and people from other countries. Again the claim--the explanation for why this is so is something which we'll get to in another class. The point now is simply to illustrate that these sort of things can have--that things you aren't aware of can have an effect on how you think. The final example I'll give of this is a short demonstration. To do this, I'm going to cut the class in half at this point so you'll be on this side of the class, the right side, my right, and this will be on the left side, and I simply want everybody to think about somebody you love. So, think about somebody you love, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your mom, your dad. Think about somebody you love. Just think. Okay. Now, on this screen is going to be instructions but I want to give the instructions to this half of the class . I'm going to ask everybody in this half of the class please either turn your head or shut your eyes. Okay? Teaching fellows too. Okay. And everybody on this half obey . Okay. Has everybody read that? Okay. Now, turn your head, this group. Now this group: Look at this and take a moment. You don't have to do it on paper but take a moment to do it in your head. You--Each group had instructions. Some people might have seen both instructions. Follow the instructions you got for you. Now, this was research done by Norbert Schwarz and here's the question I want you to ask yourself, "How much do you like this person?" And here's the effect: Half of you were asked to list three features of the person. Half of you were asked to list ten. The finding, which is not a subtle finding, is that liking goes up in the three group and liking goes down in the ten group. And here is why. I have to think about three positive features of somebody so I think about my girlfriend. I have a girlfriend. I think about my girlfriend, "but oh, she's smart, she's beautiful and she's kind. Good. How much do--What do I think of her? "Pretty, good, smart, beautiful, kind, smart, beautiful, oh, yeah." But the problem--;Now, Schwarz is clever though. He says, "List--" The other group gets ten positive features, "smart, beautiful, kind… really nice… good cook… punctual, smart… No, I mentioned that." The problem is nobody has ten positive features! And the effect of being asked to do ten positive features is people find this hard. And then those people, when asked, "How much do you like this person?" say, "Couldn't really make it that ten. I guess I don't like them very much." Now, the point of this illustration, again, is that it shows that you don't know this. Subjects who were asked to do ten positive features and then later ranked the person lower and then asked, "Why did you rank the person lower?" Don't say, "'Cause you told me to list ten." Typically, we are oblivious to these factors that change our points – what we like and what we dislike – and this is, in fact, a substantial and an important part of the study of psychology, and particularly, for instance, the study of racial and sexual prejudice. Where--One of the big findings from social psychology, and we'll devote almost an entire lecture to this, is that people have strong views about other races that they don't know about and that they don't know how to control their actions. So, to some extent, this rounds out Freud because to some extent the particulars of Freud are--for the most part have been rejected. But the general idea of Freud's actually been so successful both in the study of scientific psychology and in our interpretation of everyday life that, to some extent, Freud's been a victim of his own success. We tend to underestimate the importance of Freudian thought in everyday life because he's transformed our world view to such an extent that it's difficult for us to remember if there's any other way to think about it. So, to some extent, he's been the victim of his own success. We have time for some further questions about Freud and about scientific implications of Freud. I took a class once on how to teach when I was a graduate student. And I just remember two things from this class. One thing is never grade in red pen. Those--People don't like that. The second thing is never ask any questions, because presumably it is very frightening to ask, "Any questions?" and people find it's intimidating. I'm supposed to ask, "What are your questions?" So, what are your questions? Yes, in back. Sorry. Student: Did Freud believe in [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: Did Freud believe in [inaudible] Student: Medication Professor Paul Bloom: Medication. Freud had an--It's a good question. The question was, "Does--did Freud believe in medication?" Medication, of course, being a major theme of how we deal with certain disorders now, particularly depression and anxiety disorders. On the one hand, Freud made his start as a neuroscientist. Freud studied the mind and the brain and was intensely interested in the neural basis of thought and behavior. But the answer to your question in the end is, "no." Although Freud was very sensitive to the brain basis of behavior, Freud was totally convinced that the method through which to cure disorders like depression and anxiety would not be medication but rather through the sort of talk therapy and insight. Moreover, modern therapists, including some people who aren't psychoanalytically defined, will say, "Look. These drugs are all well and good but what they do is they mask the symptoms." So, if you have panic attacks, say, it's true that drugs might make the panic attacks go away, but the panic attacks are actually not your real problem. And by making them go away you don't get to the root of your problem. So, the answer is both Freud and modern day psychoanalysts would think that medications are substantially overused in the treatment of mental disorders. Yes. Student: Are there any [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: The question is, "What about research on dreams?" "Dreams" is such a fun topic that I'm going to devote half a class to sleeping and dreams. So, for instance, I will answer the question "What is the most common dream?" I will also answer the question "Who thinks about sex more in dreams, men or women, and what proportion of--" Oh. There's so many great questions I will answer. Dreams from a Freudian standpoint. There's been some evidence that dreams do, and some often do, have some relationship to what you're thinking about and worrying about through the day. But the strong Freudian view about symbolism and wish fulfillment has not been supported by the study of dreams. What are your other questions? Yes, whoever Erik is pointing to. Professor Paul Bloom: Purple shirt. Yes. Student: [inaudible]--Electra complex? Professor Paul Bloom: The Electra complex? The Electra complex is the penis envy story. Freud developed--This is a crude summary, but Freud developed the Oedipal complex, "Mom, I love Mommy, Dad." And then it's as if somebody reminded him, "Sigmund, there are also women." "Oh, yeah." And that story I told you with the penises and the penis envy and the replacement is sort of a very shortened version of the Electra complex. I think it's fair to say that the Electra complex was a sort of add-on to the main interest of Freud's Oedipal complex. One more, please. Yes. Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: According to Freud, the--there's not a fixation in the stage, in the same sense as an oral or anal stage, but yes. The claim that Freud would make is that the woman's discovery that she lacks the penis plays a fundamental role later on determining her allegiances in life and in fact her own sexual preferences and interests. So, it's not the sort of thing that affects her just for a short period.
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Introduction_to_Psychology_with_Paul_Bloom
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14_What_Motivates_Us_Sex.txt
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Professor Paul Bloom: Sex is really strange. You ask people, "What's your favorite activity?" and if you ask people, particularly college students, particularly just fresh from spring break – I've seen teen movies – they'll often answer, "Sex." or some word that is synonymous with sex. But there's a kind of a puzzle about how much time we spend on sex. And it turns out there is data on this. So, people say sex is their favorite activity, but it turns out we actually know how much time the average American spends on sex. And the data I'm going to follow from was summarized in this wonderful book by James Gleick: Americans tell pollsters their single favorite activity is sex. In terms of enjoyability, they rank sex ahead of sports, fishing, bar-hopping, hugging and kissing, talking with the family, eating, watching television, going on trips, planning trips, gardening, bathing, shopping, dressing, housework, dishwashing, laundry, visiting the dentist, and getting the car repaired. On the other hand, these same studies suggested the average time per day devoted to sex is four minutes and three seconds. [As Gleick says,] This is not much, even if the four minutes excludes time spent flirting, dancing, ogling, cruising the boulevard, toning up in gyms, toning up in beauty parlors, rehearsing pick up lines, showering, thinking about sex, reading about sex, doodling pornographically, looking at erotic magazines, renting videos, dreaming of sex, looking at fashion magazines, cleaning up after sex, coping with the consequences of sex, building towers or otherwise repressing, transferring, and sublimating . And I like this passage because it illustrates two points, two important points. One is we don't actually spend that much time on sex. In fact, the four minutes and three seconds is an interesting number because when you do times studies on how much Americans spend filling out tax-related forms for the IRS, it's four minutes and a few seconds. But the passage also points out that regardless of the brute time we spend on it, it is extraordinarily important. Everything in life follows from it – marriage, family, children, much of aggression, much of competition, much of art and music and creative pursuits. Much of everything follows from it. If we were a creature without sex, everything would be different. And what's interesting is, there are creatures without sex. There are creatures that reproduce by cloning. And in fact, this basic fact about people – that we fall, roughly, into males and females – is an evolutionary mystery. It's not clear why animals that are somewhat large have two sexes. From a biological Darwinian perspective, having two sexes is bizarre because each time you have an offspring you toss away half your genes. My children only have--each of them have half my DNA. If I were to clone, they would have all of it. And so, it's a puzzle how sex ever evolved. This is not a course in evolutionary biology, and that's not the puzzle we're going to be looking at today. We're going to look at a few questions. First, we're going to talk from first a theoretical point of view and then an empirical point of view about how males and females are different. Then we're going to talk about sexual attractiveness, some research about what people find to be sexually attractive, and then we'll talk a very little bit at the end about the origins of sexual preference: why some people are straight, others gay, others bisexual, and others harder to classify. Now, of all the topics I'm presenting, sex is one of the sort of dicey ones from an emotional point of view. These are difficult issues because sex is, by definition, an intimate part of our lives, and it matters a lot. Moreover, sex is fraught with moral implications. And since I'm talking about this from, at least at the beginning, from a Darwinian evolutionary perspective, I'm obliged to start off by dealing with some of the moral consequences and moral implications. So, for instance, many biologists – all biologists I would say – will have argued that sexual behavior, sexual action, sexual desire is, to some extent, a biological adaptation existing to spread our genes. From that perspective then, non-procreative sex – including gay sex, sex with birth control, sex by post-menopausal women – does not serve this reproductive goal and, in some sense perhaps, is unnatural. And one might argue then, "Does this mean it's wrong?" We'll also be talking about sex differences, differences between men and women, for instance, in how much you want anonymous sexual encounters, differences between men and women in social intelligence, in aggression and empathy. And regardless of what you think about these differences, whether you think they're right or wrong or it doesn't matter, you'll ask the question, "To what extent are they mutable?" That is, if they exist through Darwinian natural selection, to what extent can we ever get rid of them? And I want to address those two issues, the issues of morality and inevitability, from the very start. And I want to start off with--for each of them have a quote by a prominent evolutionary scholar. So, the first one is by Steve Pinker in How the Mind Works. And he writes, Nature does not dictate what we should accept or how we should live our lives. Well into my procreating years, I am so far voluntarily childless, having squandered my biological resources reading and writing, doing research, helping friends and students, and jogging in circles--ignoring the solemn imperative to spread my genes. By Darwinian standards, I am a horrible mistake, a pathetic loser, but I am happy to be that way, and if my genes don't like it they can go jump in the lake. Pinker's point, I think, is a reasonable one. It is true that certain things we do exist to serve the dictates of natural selection, but that doesn't make them right? If you think that something is only right if it leads to the generation of more genes, if it leads to reproduction, then you're not going to think very much about birth control. You're not going to think very much about any sort of non-procreative sex. On the other hand, if you're--Moreover, if you think something's wrong if it's unnatural, you're going to think much about flying in a plane or refrigerating food or surviving a severe infection. More generally, our bodies and brains have evolved for reproductive success, but we can use these brains to choose our own destinies. Nothing moral necessarily follows from the facts of biology. That's all I'm going to say about morality. But I want you to keep it in mind when we discuss different claims about what's evolved and what hasn't. What about inevitability? Here I want to turn to Richard Dawkins. Richard Dawkins writes, If a child has had bad teaching in mathematics, it is accepted that a resulting deficiency can be remedied by extra-good teaching in the following year. But any suggestion that the child's deficiency might have a genetic origin is likely to be greeted with something approaching despair. If it's in the genes, it is determined and nothing can be done about it. This is pernicious nonsense on an almost astrological scale. Genetic causes and environmental causes are in principle no different from each other. Some may be harder to reverse, others may be easy. What did genes do to deserve their sinister, juggernaut-like reputation? Why are genes thought to be so much more fixed and inescapable in their effects than television, nuns or books. I like the nuns. And the point here is what causes something is logically separate from what can reverse it. And you can think of clear cases where something is plainly genetic but is fairly easily reversed and where something is cultural and is very difficult to reverse. Here's an example. My eyesight is quite poor. The reason why my eyesight is quite poor is not due to the patriarchy, television, culture or "the man." Rather, my eyesight is quite poor due to the crappy genes Mom and Dad gave me. It is genetically determined if anything is. It is also fairly easy to fix. There are these machines where they put panes of glass in front of your eyes and help you to see better. More advanced machines known as contact lenses actually stick the thing into your eyes, and at the cost of occasional infections you come to see better. It's biologically caused but fairly easy to fix. On the other hand, take an example of society's treatment of the obese. It turns out when we – and we'll get to this a little bit when we talk about sexual attractiveness – how thin somebody is or how fat they are; what you think of that is actually not particularly hard-wired. It varies a lot from culture to culture. But once it's in a culture, it is almost impossible to shake. So, the point, there is just that genetic does not mean inevitable, and cultural does not mean easy to fix. Okay. That's general background. Let's start with basic Sex Ed. What's the difference between males and females? Well, don't even think penis and vagina. There are a lot of animals that have neither one. And the difference actually runs deeper. By definition, when biologists talk about this, animals that are males have a little sex cell, which carries genes and nothing else – sperm cells. Animals that are females have a big sex cell, which has genes but also food and a protective cover and all sorts of other stuff. Typically, the little sex cell is much littler than the big sex cell. This is the only erotic picture I'm going to show you today. It's a bunch of these little sperm circling around the egg. It's romantic. But this raises a puzzle. I just described male and female roughly in terms of a size difference. Males are the smaller of the sex cells; females are the bigger. Why is it then that for so many animals males are the bigger ones, physically, and the more aggressive ones. This has been a puzzle that has occupied scientists for a long, long time. And we're pretty--there is now a pretty clear answer to it. And the answer goes like this. It is based on an idea by Robert Trivers called "parental investment." And what parental investment is, it's defined here as, any investment that's going to increase the offspring's chance of survival at the cost of the parent's ability to invest in other offspring. So, for example, suppose an animal could create an offspring by blinking an eye and then the offspring would run off? That would be extremely little investment. Suppose another animal had to work for ten years, and during those ten years could not create another offspring. That would be a huge investment. Trivers points out that within a species, females typically have a much higher parental investment than males. Because females have these big sex cells, they typically incubate them internally. They carry them. If they're eggs, they might have to sit on them. And hence, each potential child is a huge cost. For males, which have the small sex cell, you don't have the same thing. For males, it might just be a few moments of copulation and that's it. If you could ask yourself, for humans, each one of you in the room, "What is the minimum effort you can do to create a child that has half your genes?" And it's apparent that the male investment, on average, is lower than the female investment. Males can choose, or might do better off in some circumstances by putting a lot of investment into their offspring, but females don't have a choice. Females, barring technological advance, have a huge investment into any offspring; not investment in the sense or hard work and effort, though there's that too. Investment in the sense that when you're--when you're pregnant with one offspring, you can't have another. What this does is it has ramifications that percolate upwards. So, it leads to different psychologies. Males--and a single male could fertilize several females, forcing some males to go mate-less and giving rise to competition to see who can mate with the most females. For females, however, females can always find mates. So, sheer numbers don't count. But there's competition to mate with the right males, those whose offspring have the best chance of surviving. The competition now explains the puzzle we started with. It explains why males are typically larger, and often why males have evolved special weapons. These special weapons evolved for fighting other males for reproductive access. It also explains something else. Females, biologically, are choosy. And so males have to compete not merely with other males to get reproductive access but also to woo females. And so often, males have evolved special displays like this , which exist only to be beautiful, only to be attractive and to attract mates. This cold evolutionary logic was captured in this cartoon, which really does sum up a hundred of mate-selection research. The logic goes like this then: difference in the size of sex cells leads to differences in typical parental investment, leading to differences in the sorts of psychological and physiological mechanisms that evolved. Okay, that's a good story. What sort of evidence is there for it? Well, it turns out this could explain some otherwise surprising things. For instance, there should be--there are some cases where the parental investment is switched, some cases where it turns out--where the males end up with more investment than the females. And it--and the theory predicts that in these cases you should get an asymmetry. So, in cases like pipefish, for instance, the male takes the eggs into a pouch and plugs them into his bloodstream. The females shoot off. They have less of an investment than the males. In this case, you would predict, as is true, the females should be larger, the females fight other females more than males fight males, and the females try to compete for the attention of the males. Recall the movie "March of the Penguins." We saw a clip from it, and this was in the context of discussing the emotions that have evolved toward our offspring. But remember the story and how both the male and the female have to go to tremendous lengths to protect the egg. And if one of them fails, the egg dies and neither one has it. You should then not even have to remember whether male penguins are much bigger than female penguins. You should realize they should not be, and in fact they aren't. They're about the same size because the parental is equal. You should be able to predict the size differences and aggression differences based on differing parental investment. So for instance, elephant seals are four times--the males are enormous. They're four times bigger than the females. And this is in large part because elephant seals compete for harems of females. It's a "winner take all." Gibbons are about the same size. And this is because gibbons are pretty monogamous; they raise children together. This illustrates something, which is, it's not always the case that male parental investment is low. There are some species, including gibbons, where it's in the male's reproductive advantage to care for the offspring. Imagine a situation, for instance, where an offspring would die if both parents didn't watch it for many years and where the effort devoted to that offspring had to be exclusive. If you focused on another family or went away, the offspring would die. In that case, you'd have equal investment. It would matter equally to the male and the female to invest in their offspring, and the cost would be the same. There's no species--it's hard to see species that have that much of an equal system, but some primates are close to it. And this raises the question then, "What about humans?" What about us? What do we know about the differences between males and females? Well, humans are a relatively polygamous species. Most cultures--most human cultures are polygamous. American culture is what they call "serial monogamy." So, we're not like some species of birds. We don't mate for life. We do a series of peer-bondings for some period of time. It could be for life, but indeed may not be and usually isn't. Males are bigger than females. Human males--the size estimates vary so much, but the average human male is about fifteen percent larger than the average human female. This suggests that there's some--there's been, in our evolutionary history, some male-male competition for access to females, which suggests, in turn, that the parental investment is not quite equal. Males have smaller testicles for their body size than chimpanzees, but larger testicles than gorillas and gibbons. And this suggests that there was some intermediate amount of competition for the capacity to create sperm. And this is relevant for a different sort of competition, which regards the impregnation of females that have multiple mates. And this suggests that over evolutionary history women were not wantonly promiscuous, but were not entirely monogamous either; so much so that it paid from an evolutionary point of view to evolve--males to evolve the capacity to produce more sperm than other males. Aggression. Males are meaner. I mean I'm summarizing here. Meaner is not a technical term. Yes, females can be meaner, but males are at least more physically violent. They're more violent in the womb, in utero; they're more violent as children, and they're more violent as adults. Again, this is not to say that you can't find violent women or non-violent men. It's just on average there is this difference. They kick more; males kick more in the uterus. As children they're more involved in play fighting and violent combat-like sports. And as adults, wherever you go you will find a prison. And wherever you go you will find that prison is mostly full of men. They are far more likely to kill one another and to harm one another. Male sex hormones, like testosterone, are not the sort of thing one would want to inject in somebody unless you want them to turn kind of mean. They increase aggressiveness, both in humans and in other primates. What about sexual choosiness? Do male humans and female humans differ in the extent to which they will favor anonymous sex? And this is relevant from an evolutionary perspective, because the parental investment theory predicts males should be more receptive to anonymous sex. Because for males, to impregnate somebody else might fortuitously lead to another offspring; it might be good for you and doesn't carry the sort of harm that females, on the other hand, have to be very picky. Because they have to choose carefully. Remember, these systems evolved before birth control and vasectomies and so on. So, what do we know cross-culturally and psychologically? Well, prostitution is a universally, or near universally, male interest. There are male prostitutes, of course, but contrary to some various fantasies and sitcoms, they cater to male customers. Pornography is a human universal. In every society, males have done some sort of depictions of naked females for the purposes of arousal. Often they carve them into trees or do sort of sculptures. One of the weirdest findings in the last decade or so is that this extends as well to monkey porn. And so, some scientists at Duke set up a situation where monkeys could pay in fruit juice, by giving up fruit juice, to look a picture either of the female's hindquarters or of a celebrity monkey, a socially dominant monkey, some sort of combination of People Magazine and Penthouse. And so, there's some interest in this even by non-human primates. What about actually preference for sexual variety? Well, you can get at this in different ways. There is what biologists describe as the "Coolidge Effect." I have this here. And the Coolidge Effect is based on President Calvin Coolidge. And it's a story about Calvin Coolidge and his wife, who were being shown around a farm separately. And the person showing around his wife pointed out that there were a lot of hens; she noticed that there were a lot of hens but only one rooster. And she asked the guy showing her around, "Is one rooster enough?" And the guys said, "Well, you know, the rooster works very hard. The rooster has sex dozens of times a day." And she said, "Well, be sure to tell that to the president." The story goes, the president went around, the guy tells the story to the president. The president asks the man, "Huh. Has sex dozens of times each day. Same hen every time?" The guy says, "No, different hen every time." And he says, "Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge." Now, there are two responses to this sort of story, and they're both kind of negative. One thing is, "Well, everybody knows males prefer anonymous sex with strange women. Duh." The other response is, "That's sexist claptrap." You might think--you might be a male and say, "That's not me." You might know males and say, "The males I know are not like that." So, how do you find out? Well, there are indirect measures, such who goes to prostitutes. But there are also fairly direct measures. One fairly direct measure is you could ask people in anonymous surveys. So, in fact, I'll give you some anonymous surveys. I'm not going to ask people. And you just ask them. So, for instance, I want everybody to consider this question. How many sexual partners do you want to have in the next month? What is it--we're coming up to April. How many sexual partners do you want in April? Next two years? Take many of you through graduation. When you leave Yale, what do you want--like, "I had X sexual partners, and that's what I wanted." Or your lifetime? We get people to answer these questions. Professor Chun last year in this course had clickers, and he got people to do it. We are not so high tech, so we'll just do it in our heads. But here is the way the answers come out. Women say less than one in the next month. That doesn't mean they want less than one; that means many of them--many of them say zero, some say one and so on. One--four to five. Men--two, eight, eighteen. You can ask other questions from this population. So, you could ask, "Would you have sex with a desirable partner you have known--so somebody really desirable--for a year; women say yes, six months--unsure, week or less--no. Men [laughter]--and with men you could get a majority going to five minutes. This is all Q & A, pen and pencil sort of things. Some brave scientists have actually done experiments. And in one experiment somebody--I don't, you know, this is the sort of thing which you probably wouldn't do nowadays. This work has been done ten years ago, where they have an incredibly attractive man and an incredibly attractive woman and they approach people on campus. They're not from campus; they're actors brought in. And they go to people, to strangers, and they say, "I've been noticing you around campus. I find you very attractive. Would you go out with me tonight? Would you come over to my apartment tonight? Would you go to bed with me tonight?" The experiment you wouldn't think anybody would've done has been done, and women about--a very attractive man, over half of the women approached say, "Yeah, I will." Very few agree to this ["Would you come to my apartment tonight?"], and nobody agrees to this ["Would you go to bed with me tonight?"]. For men, the data are like this, they go up to there and then up to there . In this study, the twenty five percent of males who said "no" apologized profusely, and they said, "Oh, you know, my fiancé's in town, and [unintelligible]." What about behavior? Well, you--if we're interested in sex differences, you can't actually figure out what people want, male female differences, by looking at simply at the average number of times people have sex because if males and females have different priorities, then heterosexual sex is a compromise between two groups of people with competing interests. What's a more clear reflection then is gay sex between two women or between two men, because then you get a pure reflection of sexual desire. Now, the data here tend to be very messy. Again, they're survey studies but by and large every study done tends to find a difference in the expected direction, which is that females tend to be--lesbians tend to be much more monogamous than gay men. Some studies prior to AIDS – this was many years ago – found gay men to be extremely promiscuous, often having over a hundred or over a thousand partners. You wouldn't find this sort of promiscuity in females. And a way to think about this is, what these gay men are doing is exactly what your average heterosexual man would do if he had that degree of willing females who were as willing as he was. And this all suggests that there's some sort of difference along lines expected in sexual choosiness in humans. What about sexual attractiveness? What about mate preference? What do we find attractive? Well, unlike the choosiness studies, here we actually have some pretty good cross-cultural data. So one study, for instance, was done in 10,000 people from thirty-seven countries, asking people, "Who do you want to be with?" And there are different studies, some of them asking, "Who do you want to marry?" Other studies, "Who do you want as a mate? Who do you want as a sexual partner?" And one main finding is kind of reassuring, everybody likes kindness and intelligence, or at least everybody says they like kindness and intelligence. These are valued pretty highly. But at the same time, there are sex differences. Females focus more on power and status and more on interest in investing in children. And think about that from an evolutionary point of view and it makes sense. It doesn't matter hugely, from the standpoint of reproduction, how old the man is. The difference between fifteen and twenty-five and thirty-five and forty-five may matter a lot for his status in the community, his physical strength, his lifespan but from the standpoint of his sperm it doesn't matter hugely. Later on there's a drop off and it does begin to matter, but it doesn't matter hugely. What does matter is his interest in being a good father, in protecting you from predation, from murder, from assault by other people, and in taking care of the kid. Women's brains are wired up to find males with those properties. Similarly, males focus a little bit differently. They're more interested in all of these things, but also on the ability to have children. So, from an evolutionary point of view, there's actually a very big difference between a twenty-year old and a fifty-year old, from a male standpoint looking at a female, because the one can have offspring and the other cannot. So, this is a difference. But what I want to focus more on right now is back to another similarity. Everybody likes beauty. And I want to devote a little bit of this lecture to talking about physical beauty. Physical beauty, as these beautiful people say, is a curse. So she--she's like a big model, a supermodel, maybe even a super-supermodel--points out the arbitrariness of finding her devastatingly beautiful. Famous actor points out how frustrating it is that people only ignore his accomplishments and focus merely on his physical beauty. This is very frustrating. So what is beauty? What does this mean we say we find--you know, yeah, they really are very attractive people. What is it about that that makes you look and say, "Yeah, that makes sense?" Well, we kind of know the answer. We know some universals. Beauty seems to signal two things. Beauty seems to signal youth--I mean, not pre-school youth, but youth like sexually mature but young. And so the cues we find beautiful are cues to that – large eyes, full lips, smooth, tight skin. Beauty signals something else. Beauty is a marker for health. And so what we find beautiful, things like the absence of deformities, clear eyes, unblemished skin, intact teeth – that's very big – and an average face. And that last part might seem a little bit strange. What would be so good about an average face? And there are different answers to that, but one answer is, an average face, on average, should be considered attractive because any sort of deformities are variations from the average. And if you average every face together, you get a face that--where nothing bad has happened to it. There's no distortion, there's no deviation. As one gets older, the face gets less symmetrical and so on. Average-ness seems to factor out all the bad things that could happen. Good theory. How do we know it's true? Well, there's a photo roster that comes--that I have access to for this class. So, I can look at each of your pictures, and I will make you a bet about who has the most beautiful face in this course. The bet is it would be all of you. Aw. Wouldn't it be funny if I shouted out somebody's name? And you know, A) I don't have the energy to do this, and B) it would probably violate four hundred different privacy laws or whatever. But if I took all those faces and morphed them together, I would get a very pretty face. And how do we know this? Well, people have done this. They've done it with--so look at the faces from here to here. And if you are like most people, you see as you're going to the right they're looking better and better and better. It's subtle, but it's actually not so subtle that babies don't notice it. The same researchers who constructed this--these face--these average Caucasian faces, male and female, have shown these faces to babies and find that babies that prefer to look at average faces--suggesting that our preference for averaging is not the product of culture but rather is to some extent hard-wired. These two people don't exist. They're computer composites. They're a heavily averaged male face and a heavily averaged female face, both from a Caucasian data sample. They don't look bad right? They're good faces. They don't cheat. So the hair, for instance, is identical--so they don't--you can't use hair cues. But they're pretty attractive. But the story of attractiveness does not end there. How do you get a better than average face? What can you do to these faces, these average faces, and make them look even better? Well, I'll have a vote. Who's prettier? Who says the one on the right? Who says the one on the left? Left is average face, and there might be variation in this class. There are definitely variations in what people favor. This is a feminized version of the average face where certain prototype features were made more feminine than average to cue this as more of a sexual object. This is more complicated. Who thinks face A is more attractive? Who thinks face B is more attractive? Okay. Most people like face B. The exception is, and this has been statistically replicated, I think, now in three labs. Face A is preferred by women who are ovulating, and the story about why is complicated and will take us beyond the scope of this class. But currently the idea is that this is a really handsome guy; he's young, he's healthy, he looks strong, good provider; this guy is really hot, and he may not be a good provider and everything, but I'm sure he has wonderful genes. So, the idea is that one should have sex with him and then have him raise the kids. We've talked so far about things, about sex and sexual attractiveness largely from a biological perspective, looking at universals. And in fact, there are some universals in what men and women have in common and what distinguishes men and women. And in some of the sex differences, particularly related to aggression and mate preference, seem to be universal. They seem to show up to some extent across every culture you look at and, hence, are likely candidates for biological adaptations. But there are other sex differences that people are aware of where the origins are far less clear. And I think that intelligent, reasonable people could disagree about this, but I am personally quite skeptical about the extent to which these reflect biology. I'll mention them to capture the debate, but the thing to keep in mind here is that biology, natural selection, is one reason why the men in this class might differ from the women in this class. But of course, there are other, social, factors. Babies are treated differently. There have been many studies where you take a baby and swaddle it in blue and describe it as a boy versus swaddle it in pink and describe it as a girl, and people treat it differently when they think it's a boy than when they think it's a girl. You're treated differently too. It matters a lot--and there's study after study suggesting, for instance, that when you send an email or a job application or a paper to a scientific journal, it matters whether it has the name John Smith on it versus the name Joan Smith. It matters because people have different expectations and different reactions to males versus females. Some if you may have firsthand experience with this if you're a man with a name that could be taken as a woman's name – friend of mine is named Lynn, and often people think he's female – or if you're a woman who has a name that could be taken as a man's name, or if you have a name sufficiently foreign to Western ears that people can't easily tell. You'll often find people saying, "Oh," people are high-fiving each other there --you'll often find some degree of surprise and some degree of people saying, "Oh my, I didn't know you were a man. Now I will treat you differently." And so, these social factors could play a role in explaining some male and female differences. Also, there are the facts of gender self-segregation. So here something very interesting happens developmentally. Males segregate with other males; females segregate with other females--for a period lasting, it depends on the culture, but say from age four to age eleven. This self-segregation might exaggerate and enhance sex differences. It might be, for instance, as Eleanor Maccoby has proposed, that boys are slightly more aggressive than girls. But then boys go into groups of boys, and that enhances and exaggerates their aggression while the girls' non-aggressive behavior is enhanced and exaggerated in different ways by them falling into girls' groups. So, what sort of differences are we talking about when we say we're not sure of their cause? Well, one difference is one in empathy. So Simon Baron-Cohen wrote a wonderful book called The Essential Difference where he argues that men are by nature less empathetic, women are by nature more empathetic, and that this is a core sex difference. So, what do you know? Well, what's the source for this? One thing is men are more violent. Simon Baron-Cohen describes violence as the ultimate act--murder as the ultimate act of a lack of empathy. There's some relationship between how much testosterone you have in your system and how social you are – more testosterone, less social. Boys tend to be less empathetic than girls, and there's some evidence, though it's not conclusive, that boys do worse than girls on social cognition theory of mind tasks. That's what I have here, though that is quite debated. And the biggest effect, which isn't debated at all, is problems with empathy, problems of social cognition, are much more frequent in men than in women. So, these disorders like autism, Asperger's Syndrome, conduct disorder and psychopathy are predominately male. And Simon Baron-Cohen suggests that--basically, he has this slogan where he says, "To be a man is to suffer from a particularly mild form of autism." That males are just socially clueless relative to women. Final bit of trivia--This is Simon Baron Cohen, who is a very famous developmental psychologist, but his cousin Sasha Baron Cohen is far more famous. Another debate is a debate concerning sex differences in the capacity for math and science. A few years ago there used to be a president of Harvard known as Larry Summers. There are so many reasons to hiss at this point. And Larry Summers is no longer president of Harvard for various reasons, but one reason was this quote, which included in his speculations about sex differences, "...in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude..." He argued, or suggested, that the under-representation of women in the sciences in academia is because of an intrinsic aptitude difference; women are, on average, less biologically predisposed to do this sort of reasoning. The variability point is that he wasn't suggesting that there's just a difference on average. In fact, he agreed that the average skills of men and women are identical. The claim is that males show more variation. This means that there are more male retarded people and more males who are just horribly bad at this, but it also means there are more male geniuses. And he suggested that this plays a role. This, as you can imagine, proved to be an extremely controversial claim, and rather than go through it – because it would take me a class to treat the pros and cons of this argument responsibly – I'm going to refer you to a wonderful debate between Steve Pinker, who was quoted earlier, and Liz Spelke who's one of the big infant cognition people. And we spoke a lot about her work earlier on in the course. And they have a wonderful debate between two of the smartest people I know on The Edge, which was done at Harvard about a year ago and is on video here . So, if you're interested in sex differences and different theories about the mechanism of sex differences, this is where you should go. Finally, and a final topic, some of us, about 98%--and the numbers are very difficult to pin down. Maybe it isn't 98%; maybe it's ninety-seven, maybe it's ninety-nine. Let's say 98% of women are sexually attracted to men. About 96% of men are sexually attracted to women. And the numbers vary and it's very difficult to estimate it properly. As you could imagine, there are all sorts of problems with this sort of research. But there's some proportion of the population that's exclusively homosexual--some proportion of the population of men who are only attracted to other men, some proportion of the population of women who are only attracted to other women. When people talk about sexual orientation here, it's important to realize we are not talking here about behavior. There are all sorts of reasons why somebody might have sex with somebody of the same sex. You know, they might be bored. You may, you know, be experimenting, be whatever. The question is, "What do you want to do?" All things being equal, what sort of person--if you could be sexually or romantically involved with any person, who would it be? And most people are heterosexual. There's a considerable amount that varies cross-culturally of people who are bisexual. But the real puzzle is exclusive homosexuality. So, why? Well, nobody knows. We know some reasons, some answers are probably not right. It is not the case, almost certainly – maybe there are some exceptions – but it is not the case that people choose their sexual orientation. I'm not going to do this in this room, but if you asked people to raise their hands as to how many people decided who to become sexually attracted to, very few people would. Part of the issue rises in the fact that people who are gay are often extremely discriminated against, and they have no wish to be gay. They might even think it's morally wrong for them to be that way. That makes it implausible that their sexual orientation is a conscious choice. What about experience after puberty? So, there is a view that keeps coming up over and over again in the literature that people who are gay have in some sense been seduced by people, by other people--or something happened to them afterwards. This seems unlikely. There are in particular the seeds of sexual orientation later on in life seem to show up quite early in life. Again, the studies are sort of suspect, but there's some reason to believe that people who are gay and people who are straight are different long before they hit puberty with regard to their sexual and romantic fantasies. You would now expect me to say, "Well, being gay and being straight is built in. It's hard-wired. None of these stories seem right. It seems to be built in." And the answer to that is, sort of. So, if you do the standard behavioral genetic tests, and you by now know how to do them--you'd look for differences between monozygotic and dizygotic twins, you'd do the adoption comparison--you know adopted siblings and biological siblings. The answer is yes, you find that there is some sort of genetic predisposition towards homosexuality. But it can't be entirely genetic. One reason why it can't be entirely genetic is, if I'm gay and I have an identical twin, the odds that my identical twin will be gay--it's about fifty percent. Those are very high odds compared to the average in the population. But if it was truly genetic, entirely genetic, what should the number be? A hundred percent – he's my clone. He should be exactly as I am. And it's not. So, we know then that some sort of experience, possibly prenatal experience, is what explains it. Why is it so – I said before this is a huge puzzle – why is it such a huge puzzle? Well, exclusive homosexuality is an evolutionary mystery. Again, do not think that this carries any moral weight to it. What it does mean though is that it doesn't seem to follow as a biological adaptation. The puzzle is not why is it that some men have sex with men. That's not a big puzzle. Maybe they have sex with men as some sort of recreational things or pair bonding or whatever. That's not the puzzle. The puzzle is why are there some men who don't want to have sex with women? Similarly, why are there some women who don't want to have sex with men? From an evolutionary adaptive standpoint, you would think that the genes that give rise to such a behavior would be weeded out because creatures with that behavior typically, putting aside modern technology, don't have offspring. And that's what makes it such a puzzle. So, your reading response for this week is "solve that puzzle." I know I said early on in the course that reading responses would be really easy and just require you reciting back things, but that proved to be too boring. So, just solve this deepest of all puzzle. The thing in brackets at the end is very important. Your account, whatever it is, should bear some relationship to the facts as discussed in lectures and readings. We have about five more minutes. Any questions or thoughts? Yes? Student: I like your leather jacket. Professor Paul Bloom: Thank you very much. She likes my leather jacket. Any questions or thoughts, just like that one? No. Yes? Student: My question's not exactly like that one, but in other animals do they--is there similar data on other species? Professor Paul Bloom: On sexual preferences? That's a very good question because certainly your answer to the origin – give me two more minutes – certainly your answer about the origin of sexual preference in humans will be informed by the question of cross-species data. What we do know is that there are many animals that engage in homosexual behavior; they engage in sex with members of their own sex. What I don't know is whether you get exclusive homosexual behavior. So, I don't know what the rate is in nonhuman primates, for instance, of primates who do not want to have sex with members of the opposite sex. Okay, I'll see you all Wednesday.
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Introduction_to_Psychology_with_Paul_Bloom
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15_A_Person_in_the_World_of_People_Morality.txt
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Professor Paul Bloom: Let me begin by just reminding us where we are in this course, reminding us of what we've done and what we have yet to do. We started by talking about the brain, the physical basis of thought. And then we moved to some general introductions to some foundational ideas in the study of psychology, Freud and Skinner. We spent a bit of time on more cognitive stuff: development, language, vision, memory. Then we took a little break and the dean told us about love. Then we dealt with the emotions, rationality, and evolution, and a lot of that. What we learned particularly regarding the evolution of the mind provided supporting material for what follows. We learned about cognitive neuroscience using the study of face recognition as an important case study--human differences, behavioral genetics, nature and nurture, sex and food. My lecture was on sex. Dr. Brownell came and spoke to us about food. Today, morality. Next week, social thought and social behavior, mysteries; basically, a series of topics that don't fit anywhere in the course and really make psychologists scratch their heads. These topics are sleep, laughter, and religion, mental illness, two lectures on madness, what can go wrong in your minds, and a last lecture on happiness. And then you're just done. You know a lot of psychology and a lot of stuff and you're well prepared for your ultimate major in psychology, ultimately graduate training at a good school. How many people here are either psych majors or expect to become psych majors or cognitive science as though you could raise your hand to? Okay. Good. It's nowhere near enough [laughter] and so I'll ask the question again. Once you deal with happiness and then mysteries, you're really not going to want to--What is there? Chemistry? Anthropology? [laughter] Pre-med? Give me a break. [laughter] Okay. We're going to deal with three facets of morality. I'm going to talk about moral feelings, moral judgments, and then moral action with particular focus on why good people do bad things, which will lead us to review and discuss the Milgram study, which was presented in the movie on Monday. Now, moral feeling is what we'll start off with and we've already discussed this in a different context. The question is, 'How could moral feelings evolve?" So, moral feelings we could view as feelings of condemnation, shame, emotions like that--shame, condemnation, pride, righteous anger, but also simple affection, caring for other people, wanting to do well by them, being upset if an injustice is to be done by them. And you might think that the existence of these feelings is a mystery from an evolutionary point of view. If evolution is survival of the fittest, nature red in tooth and claw, how could animals evolve moral feelings? But in fact, we know the answer to this. And there are two answers to this. One answer is kin selection. So, evolution works at a level of the genes and because of that it could give rise to animals that are themselves altruistic. And they're altruistic because they act to preserve other animals that share the same genes. And so, I'm not going to spend any time on this because we've discussed it in detail, but we know from previous lectures that people will be generous to others. And there's an evolutionary explanation for your generosity towards kin. It could be mathematically worked out. Your caring, your moral feelings towards other creatures to the extent of the proportion of genes that you share with them. The most altruistic behavior of all, giving your life to help another, can be explained in cold-blooded evolutionary terms. Animals that are altruistic even to the point of dying to help another, those genes will, under some circumstances, be preserved over the genes of people who are less caring. And that is one force towards kindness. A second force towards kindness is cooperation. Even if animals are unrelated, they are nice to one another. Animals will give warning cries, they will groom one another, they will exchange food, and the reason for this is that animals have evolved, our minds have evolved, to enter into sort of cooperative situations with other people and to surmount prisoner's dilemmas, to surmount deception and cheating. This gives rise to some emotion including emotions that could be viewed as moral emotions, like guilt and anger, and again, grounds altruistic behavior in an evolutionary perspective. This is all by means of review but the question you can now ask is, "Fine. That's why moral feelings might evolve, but what do we know as psychologists about the emergence in nature of moral feelings in individuals? What's the psychology of moral feeling?" And this is an issue I'm going to talk about now but I'm going to return to next week when we deal with issues such as liking and disliking, racial prejudice and other things. But I want to deal now with a couple of interesting case studies about moral feelings from a psychological point of view. The first one I want to deal with is empathy. And empathy has different definitions but we can simply view it as the feeling that your pain matters to me. If you are hurt, that is, in some sense, painful for me. If you are sad, that affects my own mood. I am not a selfish creature. I am built, I am hard wired, to be attuned to your pain. This is an old observation. Adam Smith, who is often falsely viewed as a proponent of selfishness and hardheadedness, was quite explicit about the pull this has. He notes: When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or arm and when it does fall we feel it in some measure and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer. If you see somebody being kicked in the groin in a movie, you might yourself tense up. If you see somebody bang their thumb with a hammer, you might cringe. Here is a good illustration of somebody in anticipatory pain. [laughter] Now--It's a very British face actually. [laughter] Now, we know certain things about this empathy, some which might be surprising. The pain of others is aversive even for babies. We know this because if babies hear other babies crying they will get upset. The crying of babies is aversive to babies. Now, some of you may be sufficiently cynical to say, "That could be explained in other ways. For one thing, one theory is that babies hear other babies cry, because babies are so stupid they think they themselves are crying; if they're crying they must be in some sort of pain so they cry some more." But clever psychologists have ruled this out. What they did was a study where they exposed babies to tape-recorded sounds of other babies crying and tape recorded sounds of themselves crying. Babies cry more to this pain of other babies than they do to their own pain, suggesting that their response is to some extent a response to the "otherness" of the characters. We know pain is--of others is aversive for chimpanzees and we know this in certain ways. But we know this, in particular, from a series of studies that would be unethical if they were to be done today. In these studies, they put a chimpanzee in a room and there's a lever. And when the chimpanzee slaps the lever, it gets some food. Trivial, smart animal, piece of cake. But the room has a window leading to another room. And in the other room another chimpanzee is placed. This second chimpanzee is not a relative of the first chimpanzee and they've never seen each other before. Now, when the first chimpanzee hits the lever the second chimpanzee gets a painful electric shock, putting the first chimpanzee in a horrible dilemma. In order to feed himself, he has to torture another animal. Chimpanzees do not starve themselves to death. It's very unlikely any of you would either but they go a long time without food, suggesting they do not want to cause this other chimpanzee pain. It only works within species. So, in another experiment they put a rabbit in the other room and the chimpanzee would slap the lever repeatedly to make the rabbit scream in pain [laughter] and jump. Now, we've known for a long time that empathetic feeling is not logically linked to morality. This is a point made by Aristotle. I could see you writhing in pain. That could cause me pain but it doesn't mean I'm going to be nice to you. I could run away from you. I could turn my head or I could blame you for causing me this misery. But it does happen that emotional--that this sort of empathy does lead to moral concern and action. If we do an experiment and we induce you to feel empathetic to somebody, we get you to feel what they're feeling, you're more likely to be nice to them. And people differ in the extent to which they feel empathy. People differ to the extent it will hurt them to watch me slam my thumb with a hammer. If you are high empathy, you're more likely to be a nice person than if you're low empathy, suggesting there is some connection between empathetic feeling and liking. Now, empathetic feeling, like any other human capacity, differs across people. Some of us have a lot of it. Some of us don't have much of it. There is some reason to believe that in the population known as "psychopaths," a population we'll return to later on when we discuss mental illness, this sort of instinctive empathy is broken and the pain of others just doesn't bother them very much. I have some illustrative quotes here. In Damon's book, a wonderful book on psychopathy, he talks about a thirteen-year-old mugger who specialized in mugging blind people. And when asked about the pain he caused his victims he responded, "What do I care? I'm not her," which is logically correct but, in a sense, inhuman. The fact that it's another person should make you care. The serial killer Gary Gilmore basically said the pain of others gratified him and caused him no unhappiness at all. "I was always capable of murder. I can become totally devoid of feelings of others, unemotional. I know I'm doing something grossly--" and here is a very bad word "--wrong. I can still go ahead and do it." And Ted Bundy, when interviewed at one point, said he was astonished that people made such a fuss about all of his murders because he said, "I mean, there are so many people." And if any of you here are nodding in agreement at these sentiments, [laughter] that's not such a good sign. These are particularly callous and cold-blooded statements suggesting that this instinctive empathy, this aspect of moral thought, is not--is present in most of us but not in all of us. The second case study of moral feeling is "in-group" and "out-group." In our affections, in our caring, who we like, who we feel close to, whose pain bothers us, we are not indiscriminate. I care a lot more about my children than I do about my friends and I care more about my friends than I care about strangers. We're all like that. We also favor our group over others in every possible way. You are a member of many groups. You are men. You are women. You're Yale students. You're young. You're white, you're black, you're Asian. You're a member of these groups and, as we will discuss repeatedly when we talk about social cognition and social behavior, this membership matters a lot to you. What's particularly interesting is even groups that are formed, that you were not born with, that are formed on the fly, exert a huge amount of control over your moral feelings and moral attitudes. And the best example of this is discussed in detail in the textbook. And this is the Robber's Cave study. And this Robber's Cave study serves as a nice illustration of morality in everyday life. The study was, eleven- and 12-year-old boys at a camping program. These were well-adjusted, pretty rich kids, racially homogeneous, and they were put into separate cabins. And the cabins were given leaders and they gave themselves names. Being unimaginative boys, they called themselves "The Eagles" and "The Rattlers" but as--what happened was, being separated they developed distinctive cultures. And when these groups were set in competition against each other, the Eagles versus the Rattlers, the within-group intensity grew. The Eaglers began--Eagles began to care a lot more about other Eagles than about anybody else. So, there's within-group solidarity. And then there were negative stereotypes. So, these groups developed different cultures. It was a randomly cut apart--kind of like Yale College is actually, where you get a random assortment of people. But despite the fact that the assortment is random, the division is random, cultures begin to emerge. The Eagles prided themselves on being clean living, not using cuss words and treating each other with respect. They viewed the Rattlers as dirty and tough and kind of slovenly slobs. The Rattlers viewed the Eagles as goody-goody kids. It's cruel. Finally, [laughter] it all evolved into hostilities, raids and violence. The Eagles burnt a Rattlers banner, cuss words were occasionally used, and so Sherif, the psychologist designing all of this, went, "Excellent," [laughter] and then the problem--He then says, "Now we've created two different warring cultures. That was fun. [laughter] What do we do to make them friends again? And then we figure out how to--now we've done that and this'll solve all sorts of problems." So they started off. They wanted to have--They set up peace talks where a representative of the Eagle and a representative of the Rattler were set to meet and plan ways so that they could disarm and stop using cuss words and everything like that. This failed. The kids who engaged in the peace talks were ostracized by their own groups as treasonists. That failed. They decided to set up individual competitions like the Olympics where they--where people wouldn't compete as Eagles or Rattlers but rather they would compete as individuals. That failed too. Like the Olympics, people--the teams took their--they took their individual accomplishments as reflecting on the group and it evolved into Eagles versus The Rattlers. They shared meals, they turned--which turned into food fights and more cuss words. They shared movies, more fights, more cuss words. They shared fun with firecrackers, [laughter] which was a disastrous thing which nearly brought the experiment to an end. [laughter] They brought in a religious figure to give them sermons on brotherly love. [laughter] The sermons were entirely unsuccessful. What's interesting is they--the Eagle--they took them to heart. These were good kids. They were respectful of religious authority but the lessons they took from them is "I should learn to love my neighbor." If I'm a Rattler, I should learn to love my fellow Rattler and appreciate him as a fellow, as a person. "I love him. It's love, not like those scummy Eagles." [laughter] They all failed. Here's what worked. Sherif told the kids--all of the kids--that the water line to the camp was cut and they all had to defend the camp. What this did was it established a super ordinate goal, that is a goal that everybody shared, and perhaps more important a common enemy. This is where the solution, by the way, to bringing together--and you could write this down--to bringing together all the warring countries and religions of this planet is an alien attack. [laughter] By the logic of the Sherif it will bring us all together as a group. A different question is, there in that experiment the "groupiness" was established in a very powerful way. They lived separately, they interacted with each other, they had their own names. The psychologist Tajfel after World War II was interested in the question of what could make a group. In other words, what do I have to do to you to put you in a different group from him? What do I have to do to this class--this side of the class to put you in a different group from this side and different from that side? And what would I have to do for those groups to matter such that, for instance, if I separate you in one group and you're in another group and I give you a hundred dollars will you give the money more to him or to him, will you give it more to your own group or to another group? And what he found was you don't need much. In one experiment he showed people pictures of modern art and based on their responses he described them as Klee lovers or Kandinsky lovers. Now, this is all made up. They were just random assignments but the Klee lovers viewed themselves as more similar to other Klee lovers. They thought the Klee lovers tended to be smarter than the Kandinsky lovers and the Klee lovers would devote more resources to themselves than to others. This is why it's called "minimal groups." You don't need much to make you into a group. And in fact, later experiments just flipped a coin. So the lot--the experiment goes like this. I ask everybody in this class to take out a coin. You all flip it. Everyone who has heads, you're one group. Everyone who has tails, you're the other group. Then I ask people in the heads group, "Which group do you--Putting yourself aside, which group on average do you think is smarter?" You'd say, "Well, you know, it kind of works out that the heads group is kind of really--heads, smart." Which group--"Here is some money. You have to distribute it." You're more likely--It's a subtle effect when you make the groups so minimal but you're more likely to give it to your own group than to others and this suggests that moral feelings are exquisitely attuned not necessarily only to individuals but also to the psychology of groups. Any questions at this point about moral feelings? Yes. Student: How you formed the groups--How is that morality? Professor Paul Bloom: It's morality--It bears on morality because it bears on--So, the question is, "How does group membership, how does that relate to the topic of morality?" And the answer is the moral feelings we're talking about are feelings like empathy and caring. For me to have a moral feeling towards you means you matter to me. If you were to be harmed, I would view it as wrong. And the group experiment suggests that the extent to which these moral feelings operate are partially determined by the groups to which we belong to. If I'm American and you're from another country, I will view myself--this is a very--kind of obvious finding--my obligations to you will be seen as less than if you were another American. If I'm a Klee lover and you're a Kandinsky lover, I don't think you quite deserve as much as me. Moral judgment is an area that is tremendously exciting and there's a lot of recent research on this. By moral judgment I mean not empathetic feelings, not feelings of caring and love or approval and disapproval, so they're not feelings of caring and love and empathy, but notions like something is good or bad, something--like something is fair or unfair. So, there are three hallmarks for moral judgments. So, suppose I say I don't like strawberry ice cream. That's an evaluation. That's a judgment but it's not a moral judgment. Why not? Because I don't think it carries a sense of obligation. I don't think anybody's obliged to eat or not to eat strawberry ice cream. And it doesn't carry a notion of sanctions, meaning I don't think anybody should be punished for eating strawberry ice cream. On the other hand, if I say I don't like baby killers, that actually is a moral judgment in my case. So [inaudible] I say, "Well, I don't like baby killers. You like to kill babies. I actually think we are obliged not to kill babies." If you disagree with me, you're wrong and you should stop killing those babies. [laughter] Should you fail to stop killing those babies, I think you should be punished for killing babies." And that's what my judgment about "no killing babies" makes it a moral judgment. Now, some people attempted to look at this the wrong way and say, "Look. What a weird topic, morality. I don't believe in morality. I believe in Nietzsche. I don't believe in ethics," but I don't believe you if you were to say that because morality isn't--morality as we talk about it in this context isn't just regarding your position on big questions like political issues or big moral questions like abortion or capital punishment. Rather, some sort of moral judgment happens all the time, often unconsciously. So, as you live your life you have to answer questions like what should you eat? Any moral vegetarians here? I'm just raising my hand to encourage people. [laughter] Okay. Anybody give to charity? Anybody not give to charity? Good. [laughter] Different from the moral vegetarians I noticed. Who do you socialize with? There's homeless people around Yale and New Haven. What do you give to them? Do you avoid their eyes? Do you--What do you want to do with your life? Who do you have sex with? Under what context or conditions? These are moral questions. My favorite moral dilemma is as I'm walking down the street and I see somebody I sort of know, do I avoid eye so we don't have a conversation [laughter] or do I say, "Hey. How are you doing?" or do I kind of do the nod hoping that there won't be more than this nod? [laughter] And then after I leave and I say, "Oh, I should have made eye contact with that person. I'm such a jerk. [laughter] There is a homeless person" [laughter] and--but these are day-to-day moral questions we struggle with all the time and so there's a centrality in the study of how we do moral reasoning. So, what do we know about moral reasoning? Well, we know that there are some universals. There are some aspects of moral reasoning that show up everywhere on earth. And there is some evidence, though it's not particularly strong at this point, that these same intuitions show up in young children and in nonhuman primates like chimpanzees, capuchins, macaques and so on. And these are things like anger at cheaters, gratitude toward sharers, the sort of things you'd expect to come out in a prisoner's dilemma, feelings that some things are right and some things are wrong. These are foundational. But at the same time the study of moral reasoning is a fascinated--fascinating issue for those of us interested in cross-cultural psychology because there are plain differences across cultures. So, the anthropologist Richard Shweder gives a list here of human differences: People have found it quite natural to be spontaneously appalled, outraged, indignant, proud, disgusted, guilty and ashamed by all sorts of things. Then there's a long list: "masturbation, homosexuality, sexual abstinence, polygamy, abortion, circumcision, corporal punishment, capital punishment, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, capitalism, democracy, flag burning, miniskirts, long hair, no hair, blah blah, parents and children sleeping in the same bed, parents and children not sleeping in the same bed, women being allowed to work, women not being allowed to work. If I put it down in a list and got people to tick it off, what you all thought, there would be some differences. Some of you think meat eating is okay. Some of you do not. Some of you--You might have different views about divorce. Most of you believe women should be allowed to work. Most of you will be in favor or not morally scolding of homosexuality. You'll be lukewarm about polygamy. Nobody would like abstinence and so on. [laughter] But if we gave that same list to people in a different culture, they'd tick off entirely different things. These are ways in which people vary. I don't think people vary in their feelings about baby killing. I don't think people vary about the feelings of I do something for you and then you don't do something for me. I think that's gut-level, hard-wired, evolved to solve prisoner's dilemmas. But these are important issues and these vary a lot from culture to culture and a good theory of psychology has to explain how these differences arise. And Shweder has a theory which is quite interesting. Shweder argues that there are three styles of thought, three different frameworks of moral thought, three different ethics. There's an ethics of autonomy. This is what moral philosophers within our culture view as morality, notions of rights, of equality, of freedom. But many cultures focus on an ethics of community, bringing together duty, status, hierarchy, and interdependence. Other cultures focused more on an ethics of divinity where notions such as purity, sanctity, pollution and sin are relevant. So for example, when we're talking about the rights of men and women and what they should be allowed to do, many people in our society following an ethics of autonomy will argue that they should have equal rights in all domains of behavior. Since they are sentient, free creatures, they should have a right to do whatever they want unless there is a compelling argument against it and a compelling argument would have to involve some infringement of the freedom of other people. On the other hand, if you're in an ethics of community you might argue that men and women have different rights and different responsibilities. They may be born to perform certain things and as such they're duty bound to follow them. If you're from an ethics of divinity, you may appeal to religious injunctions against certain actions and behaviors and these may differentially restrict the behavior of men and women. You might believe for instance, that women should not prepare food when menstruating because it would contaminate the food. You may believe that there's--there are severe restrictions about who could have sex with one another that don't have to do with human rights and human freedom. It has to do with the way things should be because of issues of pollution and sin. Now, Western cultures, as I've said, are highly invested in an ethics of autonomy and so debates we have in our culture tend to be framed in terms of an ethics of autonomy. If we have a debate about abortion in this class, people--some people might say, "Look. The fetus is a sentient being and as such it has a right to survive and shouldn't be killed by its mother." Other people would argue, "No. A woman has full freedom over her own body and as long as a fetus is within the body they--she has a right to control it." If we're arguing about hate speech, we could talk about the balance between the rights of the freedom of speech versus the right to a certain quality of education free of harassment and humiliation. Those are the ways we frame things but one of the more interesting discoveries in this field is that although people think that they're governed by the ethics of autonomy, even people within our culture, even highly educated people within our culture, even people like you show moral judgments that are not quite as simple. So, this is the work of Jonathan Haidt at University of Virginia. And Haidt finds if you ask people, they believe in our culture that they hold to an ethics of autonomy. If it doesn't harm anyone, it's okay. So, if I was to ask you your attitudes about sex, most of you--not all of you, you come from different cultures, you have different attitudes--but most of you would say sex between consenting adults is okay as long as nobody gets hurt, as long as nobody gets hurt people's rights are respected. So, gay marriage, for instance, or gay sex would be okay with you because it is--nobody is harmed and these are consenting adults. Haidt points out that there are certain problems with this argument and he illustrates this problem--these problems with stories like this: Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least, it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills but Mark uses a condom too just to be safe. They both enjoy making love but they decide not to do it again. They keep that night a special secret which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that? Was it okay for them to make love? Who says yes? Good. I know that some people would say yes, shoot up their hands, and they look around in astonishment that no one else is with them. [laughter] Who says no? Okay. Who is not sure? You're not sure. That's the weirdest of all. [laughter] Haidt finds that the distribution even among this--If you--Look. If you go home and you ask your parents, they say, "Ew. What is--What are you learning at Yale?" [laughter] This is a very unusual culture and where some people will say it's okay. What Haidt finds is most people say it doesn't and then he simply asks them, being a good psychologist, "Okay. What's wrong with it?" And this is the brother/sister case. And the responses are interesting. Because people view themselves as committed to an ethics of autonomy, they can't just say it's disgusting. So, they exhibit what Haidt describes as "moral dumbfounding," meaning that they struggle to find an explanation. They say it's terrible because they'll have a kid and the kid'll grow up freaky [laughter] and then the experimenter--it's an interview situation--says, "Well, no. Remember they're both using a lot of birth control." "Maybe she's under age." "No, not under age." And finally, "Well, it's just wrong." Similarly, another one of the scenarios--[laughter] This isn't as bad as you might expect. [laughter] The family dog is playing outside and gets hit by a car. [laughter] They bring it in and they say, "Oh, Fido's dead, Fido's dead, but what's for dinner?" So, they cook it and eat it. Who says it's okay? Good. [laughter] Who says it's not okay? Okay. Then they notice that their toilet is kind of dirty. "But whoa, there is an American flag." [laughter] They then use the toilet to clean the flag. Who says that's okay? [laughter] Anybody think it's not okay? And just keep in mind we're getting sort of even responses here. On all of these, the majority of people who are not college students in elite universities say, "Oh, that's so wrong." Finally, there is this one. And this one really is as bad as one might expect. [laughter] A guy is lonely so he purchases a frozen chicken from the supermarket, brings it home and has relations with it. [laughter] Then he cooks it and eats it. [laughter] Look. This is a scientific paper in the Psych Review. [laughter] Okay. Who says that's okay? [laughter] Good. And I notice there is consistency among people. The people who think it's okay have every right to say that they believe, if they really, sincerely believe it's okay, they are committed to an ethics of autonomy. Those of you who think it's not okay, none of these, should ask yourself why and should then scrutinize your reasons. People are very smart and they could present--easily present reasons why. They could say, "Oh, disease," but these reasons tend not to be sincere. If you take away the considerations that the reaction stays. And these are then interesting case studies of how our moral judgment is governed by factors that we might not be conscious of. Our moral intuitions can surprise us. The motivation for Milgram's work, and this is the final thing we'll talk about in the context of morality--The motivation for Milgram's work was the Holocaust and he was interested in exploring why such a thing could happen. I should note by the way--you know from the movie that Milgram was a Yale professor. He left Yale when he didn't get tenure, moved to Harvard, didn't get tenure there too. He was--He had a reputation by then as a mad doctor. He ended up at City University of New York, became a full professor at age thirty three, died in his early '50s, did not lead a good life but had extraordinary discoveries. Another discovery which we'll talk about next week is--Has anybody heard the phrase "six degrees of separation?" Milgram, and we'll talk about that later. Milgram had a powerful imagination. Okay. So we know--This is all review. There is the guy. How many of you laughed when you saw the movie ? Interesting question why and we'll talk about that in a little while. Shocks, "slight shock" to "XXX." There is--This is just repeating what you've seen. The learner protests as he's being shocked more and more but the experimenter continues to request obedience. For those of you who haven't seen the movie, again, the setup is someone is a subject. They don't know--They think that they're teaching somebody in a memory game but actually the person who is being shocked is a confederate who is trained to react in certain ways as he's being increasingly shocked. And the finding is that the majority of people will deliver fatal shocks to this person who they had never met based on the instructions of another person. Now, there are some immediate bad explanations for this. One explanation is these are really strange people. "These are an abnormal group of psychopaths." But we know that's not true. It's been replicated with many subjects. There's no reason to believe that the subjects in Milgram's original study were in any way unusual. It's also a misreading to say that people are, in general, sadistic. You remember from the movie nobody got pleasure from giving the shocks. They felt acutely uncomfortable, embarrassed, conflicted, under a huge amount of stress. They weren't liking doing this. There were follow-up studies. This is the original study. If you take it away from Yale, some of the authority goes away, and similarly, the extent to which there are fatal shocks goes down. As the teacher is with the learner next to him, it goes down. If you have to put the guy's hand on it, you're less likely to kill him. If the experimenter gives you instructions by phone, you're less likely to do it. If an ordinary man, not the guy in a white lab coat but an ordinary guy, says, "Hey, keep shocking him, that's okay," you're less likely to do it, and if there is a rebellion, if somebody else rebels and says, "I won't do it," you are much more likely not to do it yourself. There are some--Oh, sorry. Yeah, and if you could get to choose your own shock level, you could keep--then very, very few people go all the way. So, these are an important list of factors as to the factors that can make somebody less likely to bring it up to the killing level. And as a result we can look at those factors and think about what is the perfect situation for making somebody do something like this and the perfect situation not to. Some more serious critiques of Milgram: Milgram's experiment is why we have human-subjects committees. This is a terribly stressful experiment to do to people and, as I say now about a lot of studies that I describe in this class, it would not today be done. People did say they were happy to have participated and only 2% said that they were sorry, but still serious damage could have been done and perhaps was done. These people left the lab having learnt about themselves that they'll kill another person if someone tells them to, and as psychologists I don't think we have any right to do that to people. I think people can learn this--these things about themselves. We have no right to put you in a circumstance where you believe you killed somebody and then tell you it was just pretend--we just made you kill somebody. And that's a serious ethical criticism. Historians and sociologists have brought in things back to the questions that Milgram was interested in and argue--and this is controversial--the extent to which obedience really is a good model for acts of genocide. So, just to take one example among many, Goldhagen argued that the participants in Nazi Germany and in the Holocaust were actually not people who were obediently following orders but rather were enthusiastic, people who volunteered to do it. Still Milgram's work is interesting in many--for many reasons, in large part because he provides an illustration of the perfect situation for getting somebody to do a terrible thing and the perfect situation has certain ingredients. It includes authority, in this case the authority of Yale and the authority of science. "This is an experiment that must go on." The notion of a self-assured experimenter--The results would be very different if the experimenter himself seemed nervous, unwilling to proceed, confused, but he was confident and he kept saying that he will take responsibility. There was distance between the learner and the experimenter. Recall you get less of an effect if you have to touch the guy but distance makes it easier for you to kill him. And finally, there's a new situation and no model of how to behave. One of the reasons why the Milgram experiment is so nice to know is that if this ever happens to you, not as an experiment but in real life, it will no longer be new to you. You'll know what sort of thing this is and you'll be able to examine it in that light. I want to end this lecture summing up, drawing a lot upon Milgram and some other work, and talk first about two forces for evil and then to end by talking about two forces for good. The first force for evil is deindividuation of self. And what this means is--one reason why people are so bad in groups is because you could diffuse your responsibility. If I'm running through the street alone with a baseball bat smashing through windows, it's me and I know it's me. If I'm with twenty other people, it's not me anymore. It's part of the group and I don't feel as bad. Responsibility becomes diffuse. One of the powers of a group then is it diminishes responsibility. You could diminish responsibility in other ways. Another way of diminishing responsibility is you could accept orders. It's not me. I'm just an instrument of somebody else telling me what to do. And yet another way of diminishing responsibility is anonymity. Here's a question. In so many violent acts and so many people go to war, what they do is they paint their faces or they put on masks. Why? Well, there's anonymity from others. If I'm wearing a mask as I do my terrible stuff, nobody will know it's me, but there's also a psychologically liberating effect. If I'm anonymous, it's not me and I could do terrible things without feeling the same moral responsibility. This analysis has explained why people don't always help others in need. If there's a group, responsibility to help decreases and this is captured in different ways but the main idea is we all think someone else will help so we don't. There's a diffusion. This just summarizes some studies--some famous studies supporting this. And the classic example, which is discussed in detail in the textbook, is the Kitty Genovese case where somebody was murdered in the common lot that apartment buildings surrounded while dozens of people watched, dozens of good, normal people watched and did nothing. If there's some advice I've heard on this, which is pretty good advice: If you're ever in a predicament on a city street, you have a heart attack, you broke your leg, you're being mugged and everything, and there's--this is based on the research, screaming "Help" is often not very successful because if I'm with ten people and there's somebody screaming "Help," I look at the other nine people. They're not doing anything. They're looking at me. I'm not doing anything. We keep walking. What is useful is point to somebody and say, "You in the green sweater, call the police," and the psychological evidence is if you--if somebody's--if I am wearing the green sweater and somebody asks me to call the police I will call the police. I'm a good guy. I wouldn't sit aside when somebody's being harmed. On the other hand, if somebody says, "Somebody call the police," well, I got things to do and so diffusion of responsibility explains both when we're willing to do terrible things and also when we're willing to help people who are in trouble. Denigration of others. There's a lot of ways to make other people matter less. So, this is the flip side. The way to do terrible things--One way to do terrible things is to lose yourself so you're not an individual anymore but another way to do terrible things is so that the person you're doing it to isn't an individual. How do you do that? Well, you have psychological distance or physical distance. I'm more likely to kill you if you're very far away than if you're close. I don't--I could describe you and start to think about you not as a person and language can be used for this. Instead of people you could use terms like "cargo," instead of murder, extermination. Humor is very powerful in denigrating and demoting people. When you start laughing at somebody you think of them as less of a person and we'll get to that a little bit more when we talk about laughter. You could take away their names. One of the more interesting things in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights is a very interesting right. It says, "Every person has a right to a name." And you might think what a strange right but there's a cleverness to it. When you take away somebody's name they matter less. People have names. People have distinct, individual names that mark them as people and once you know somebody's name you are less likely to do bad things to them. And another option which I'm interested in from the standpoint of my own research is you could see them as disgusting. Disgust is what Paul Rozin has called "the body and soul emotion." And we know certain things about disgust. It is a human universal. It is a basic emotion with a characteristic facial expression. Remember Paul Ekman's work on the basic emotions, the universals of emotional expression? Disgust is one of them and it is universally elicited by certain things like this list. Wherever you go, feces, urine, blood, vomit, rotten flesh and most meat will be disgusting. Now, if that was all we had to say about disgust, it wouldn't affect morality very much but we know that people can be seen as disgusting. And Charles Darwin actually, who was an astute observer of human behavior, tells a nice story to illustrate this: how "a native touched with his finger some cold preserved meat and plainly showed disgust at its softness whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage though his hands did not appear dirty." People can be disgusting and if people are seen as disgusting they matter less. The philosopher and legal scholar Martha Nussbaum nicely summarizes this: "Thus, throughout history certain disgust properties have repeatedly and monotonously been associated with Jews, women, homosexuals, untouchables, lower class people. All of those are imagined as tainted by the dirt of the body." Any--I won't read this but this is a typical bit of Nazi propaganda. Any genocidal movement that has left behind a written record has been shown to use the mechanism of disgust to dehumanize people and make them easier to kill. I'll skip that. I want to end though on a positive note. And the positive note are forces for good. So, forces for bad are to lose yourself as an individual, lose yourself in a crowd, lose yourself because there is some authority using you as an instrument, lose yourself because you're anonymous, plus treat others not as people, as numbers, as objects, as disgusting things, but there are some forces for good. These include "contact" and "interdependence." What this often--What this can be viewed as, as an extended version of selfish gene theory, which is that to the extent you're interconnected with other people you care about them more for purely selfish reasons. Robert Wright presented this in a very blunt way, but I think his quote is quite moving: "One of the many reasons I don't want to bomb the Japanese is that they built my minivan." And the idea is he has economic codependence with these people. They're a different group. He might want to kill them under normal circumstances but the interdependence gives rise to a moral connection. Thomas Friedman proposed the "Golden Arches Theory of Human Conflict," which said that no two countries which each have a McDonald's will ever go to war because McDonald's forces global interdependence. This was falsified in the NATO bombing of, I think, Sarajevo but still his heart's in the right place, the idea that interconnection makes you more likely to get along with other people. More generally, there's what's been called "The Contact Hypothesis." So, interdependence is one thing but what's maybe more interesting is that simple contact with other people. Particularly if you're of equal status, you have a common goal, and you have social support makes you like people more. There are now dozens, probably hundreds, of studies that show that people who would otherwise show animosity towards one another, like blacks and whites in the United States, like each other more if they're brought together. And there's a lot of social psychology research as to the conditions in which you have to bring them together. The Robber's Cave study talked about before is a nice example. It was not easy to bring them together but when they had a common goal that brought them--that caused the interconnection and then the contact led to moral feeling. The military is a superb example. The military in the United States was a situation which brought together people who wouldn't otherwise have any contact and they liked each other. There has been study after study showing that people in the military who were otherwise, for instance, racists after working with people of different races liked them more because you had all of the right ingredients. You had--They had--They worked together for a common goal, the military supported bringing these people together, and they were brought together on an equal and fair footing. There is, of course, a lot of debate about universities like Yale to the extent in which they promote interdependence--sorry, they promote positive contact between groups. And you could think of yourself as an exercise. If these are the conditions for contact, to what extent are they met in the university setting between, say blacks and whites, people from the American South versus people from the American North, people from other countries versus people from the United States? And I know there's debate on campus about the extent to which there is segregation within the Yale community. And you could ask yourself the--about the extent of that segregation and how that reflects--what role that should play with regard to the Contact Hypothesis. Finally, and this is the last thing I'll say: If you take another person's perspective, you'll care more about them. This is the final force for good from a moral perspective. JFK, when making the plea for equal rights, didn't produce an abstract philosophical argument but rather tried to invite his listeners who were white to engage in perspective taking. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public--[and so on and so on and so on], then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would be content with the counsels of patience and delay? Again, Nussbaum goes on and talks about how in Greek dramas--Greek dramas invited people to take the perspectives of those who they would never imaginably be or even be in contact with and argue that this gave--led to an empathetic expansion. I think one of the greatest circles for moral good is storytelling where you're invited to take the perspective of another and see the world as they do. Finally, there are direct ways. You can ask people--and this is a way which we talk to our children when we try to get our children to expand their moral concern of compassion. We say, "Try to see it from their point of view. How would you feel if--"Then there's indirect ways. You can, for instance, use the power of metaphor. There could be familiar things that you are close to and you could bring in together new things as falling under the rubric of these familiar things. So, if I wanted to cause you to feel moral concern for a fetus, I would do well to describe it as a pre-born child. If I wanted you to care about an animal, I would do well to describe it as if it were human. If I wanted to think about all of you and get--and establish more of a connection with you, I would not describe you as unrelated strangers. Rather, you are my brothers and my sisters. And of course, any political movement that tries to bring us together--people together says--uses a family metaphor. Finally, when Steven Spielberg tried to get us to entertain the notion that computers and robots are sentient moral beings he did not show us one that looked like this . He showed us one that looked like that . Okay. The reading response for next week is a simple one. I know I've been giving difficult reading responses. This is simple. You could write it up very short and that will be a passing grade if you just write it up very short. You could also write it up a bit longer. Suppose the Milgram experiment had never been done and it was being done for the first time here. What would you do? What do you think everyone else would do? Okay. I'll see you next week.
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Introduction_to_Psychology_with_Paul_Bloom
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20_The_Good_Life_Happiness.txt
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This lecture will be a some slightly shorter lecture than usual. What I first want to do is finish off the discussion of clinical psychology from last lecture and then have a little brief discussion about some very interesting research on happiness. We talked--we ended last lecture with a discussion of some early--some of the history of treating mental illness and we saw that it was rather gruesome, unsuccessful, and arbitrary. For the most part, we do better now, and Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema reviewed some of the therapies with focus on therapies for depression. The textbook talks in detail about therapies for different disorders including schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, and so on. The question which everyone is interested in is, "Does therapy work?" And this proves to be surprisingly difficult to tell. Part of the problem is if you ask people who go into therapy, "Did you get better after therapy?" for the most part they'll tell you that they did but the problem is this could be a statistical byproduct of what's called "regression to the mean." So, the idea looks like this. This line plots how you feel from great through okay to awful and it goes up and down and in fact in everyday life you're going to--some days are going to be average, some days will be better than average, some days worse than average. You could plot your semester. You could do a plot every morning when you wake up or every night before you go to bed. You could put yourself on a graph and it'll come out to some sort of wiggly thing. Statistically, if something is above average or below average it's going to trend towards average just because that's a statistical inevitability. When do people go to therapy? Well, they go to therapy when they're feeling really crappy. They go to therapy when they're feeling unusually bad. Even if therapy then has no effect at all, if it's true that people's moods tend to go up and down after you feel really bad you'll probably improve rather than get worse. And so this could happen--the normal flow could happen just even if therapy has no effect at all. And so, simply getting better after therapy doesn't tell you anything. On the worst day of your life you could do naked jumping jacks on the roof of your college for ten minutes. I guarantee you your next day would probably be better. That doesn't mean naked jumping jacks are helping you. Rather, it just means that the day after the worst day of your life usually is not as bad as the worst day of your life. It can get worse, but usually it just trends to average. What you've got to do then is you have to take people at the same point who would get treatment and compare them to people who do not get treatment or what we call a "control group." And this is an example of this. So, this is for people who are depressed. This is statistically equal. They start off pre-therapy. They all go for therapy but because in this example there's a limited number of therapists, some of them are put on a waiting list and others get a therapist. It's arbitrary. It's random, which is--which--making it a very good experiment. And in this example, you could see those who received cognitive training were better off. They had lower depression scores than those that received no therapy at all. In general, in fact, we could make some general conclusions about therapy. Therapy by and large works. People in treatment do better than those who are not in treatment and that's not merely because they choose to go into treatment. Rather, it's people who are in desperate straits who seek out help. Those who get help are likely to be better off than those that don't get help. Therapy for the most part works. We can't cure a lot of things but we can often make them better. Different sorts of therapy works best for different problems, and again, depression proves to be an illustrative example. If you have everyday unipolar depression, that is, you feel very sad and you show other symptoms associated with depression, an excellent treatment for you is some combination of cognitive behavioral therapy and possibly antidepressant medications like SSRIs. If you have bipolar depression, the cognitive behavioral therapy is useless but medication is your best bet and so on for all of the other disorders. Each disorder has some sort of optimal mode of treatment. If you suffer from an anxiety disorder, cognitive behavioral therapy can be of help. If you're a schizophrenic it's probably not going to be of much help at all. And so, different disorders go best with different sorts of therapies. Finally, some therapists do better than others. So, for reasons that nobody fully understands, there are good therapists and then there are better therapists and there are bad therapists. And there's great individual differences in the efficacy of an individual therapist. Finally, putting aside then the difference in therapies and the difference in therapists, does it make sense to say that therapy, in general, works? And the answer is "yes." And this is in large part because of what clinical psychologists describe as "nonspecific factors." And what this just is a term meaning properties that all therapies, or virtually all therapies, share and I've listed two of them here. One of them is "support." No matter what sort of therapy you're getting involved in, be it a psychoanalyst or a behavior therapist or a cognitive therapist or a psychiatrist who prescribes you medication or someone who makes you go through different exercises or keeps a journal, you have some sense of support, some acceptance, empathy, encouragement, guidance. You have a human touch. You have somebody who for at least some of the day really cares about you and wants you to be better and that could make a huge difference. Also you have hope. Typically, there's an enthusiasm behind therapy. There's a sense that this might really make me get better and that hope could be powerful. Sometimes this is viewed under the rubric of a placebo effect, which is that maybe the benefits you get from therapy aren't due to anything in particular the therapist does to you but rather to the belief that things are going to get better, something is being done that will help you. And this belief can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. "Placebo effect" is often used sort of in a dismissive way, "Oh, it's just a placebo," but placebos can be powerful and even if it's useless from a real point--from a psychological theory point of view, even if the therapist runs around and dances while you – I have dancing on my mind now – while you sit in the chair and watch him dance; if you believe the dancing is going to make you better, it may well help. Okay. That's all I'm going to say about therapy. Any questions about therapy? Yes. Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: Fair enough. The question is the assumption of regression to the mean seems sort of arbitrary because it depends what the mean is. Always after the fact you can apply an average to it and say, "Look. This is the average," but how do you know beforehand? It's a good point. When you talk about regression to the mean, it adopts certain assumptions. The assumption is there really is an average throughout much of your life and things go up and down within that average and for the most part that's true for things like mood. For most of us, we have an average mood and we have bad days and we have good days. It's always possible that you have a bad day and then from there on in it's just going to go down and down and down but statistically the best bet is if you have a bad day you're going to go back up to the mean. It's--in some way you don't even have to see it from a clinical point of view. You could map it out yourself. Map out your moods and the days where you're most depressed sooner or later you're likely to go up. Similarly, on the happiest day of your life odds are the next day you're going to go down and there's nothing magical about this. This is just because under the assumption that there really is an average in--built into one--each of us. If human behavior was arbitrary, it would be like a random walk but it's not. We seem to have sort of set points and aspects of us that we fall back to that make the idea of a mean a psychologically plausible claim. Yes. Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: That's a good question. Yes. In that study it's a perfectly good hypothesis that the sort of anxiety of being told, "I see you've come here for help. We can't give it to you. Congratulations. You're a control group" [laughs] causes anxiety. In other studies the control group doesn't know they are the control group. So sometimes you can do an intervention where you say, "Congratulations, everybody in Intro Psych who did very low on the depression inventory," which many of you filled out, "We're going to do something to you." And then the rest of the people don't even know that they haven't been chosen. So, you're right. It's a perfectly good point. Knowing you're not chosen could have a deleterious effect and the way to respond to that is you have other studies that don't use that same method. Okay. I want to end with happiness and it's a strange thing to talk about in psychology. Most of psychology focuses on human misery, most of clinical psychology. There is the psychology we spoke about through most of the semester on vision and language and social behavior, but typically when people think about interventions what they think about is people having problems and then we figure out how to make them better. They are schizophrenic, they are depressed or anxious, they are just not making it in life, and psychologists try to figure out how to make things improve. And in fact, a lot of the information I gave you at the beginning of the lecture last class where I reviewed all of the disorders is in this wonderful book called DSM-IV, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. If you ever really want to get--If you really [laughs] want to diagnose people and come to have a belief in your own mental instability, browsing through that book is a treat. Everything that can go wrong in mental life from Aspergers syndrome to fetishes to paranoid schizophrenia is all in that wonderful book and--but a lot of psychologists have been disturbed by the focus of our field on taking bad people, people who are broken, people who are sad, and bringing them up to normal. And they've started to ask can psychology give us any insight into human flourishing, how to take people who are--who--how to study people who are psychological successes, how to take people who are psychologically okay and make them better. And this is the movement known as "positive psychology." And it has its own handbook now, The Handbook of Positive Psychology, listing psychological strengths, listing virtues, ways--what psychology tells us about how we can be at our best. Some of this work in positive psychology is, in my mind, real crap. A lot of it is some combination of new age banalities by people who are striving to get more grant funds and end up on Time magazine. On the other hand--and so, some of it is really bad. You could imagine this attracts every self-help huckster you could imagine. On the other hand, a lot of this work is quite neat, quite interesting and quite promising. And what I want to do is tell you what I think is the most interesting research from this movement concerning happiness. Now, there are a lot of good books on this and I'm going to recommend books, which I haven't been doing much in this class. Marty Seligman is the pioneer of positive psychology and he's written an excellent book called Authentic Happiness. Jonathan Haidt is a brilliant young scholar who's done--also done a lot of work on disgust and morality. He did the "sex with dead chicken study" we discussed earlier. This is one of my favorite books by – Happiness by Nettle, because it's smart, it's beautifully written and it's extremely short. And Dan Gilbert's book, Stumbling on Happiness, is a very, very funny book and very smart book and is now on The New York Times bestseller list. So, there's no shortage of books on happiness. So, the starting point is--And a lot of research on happiness starts with a basic question: How happy are you? And we're psychologists so tell us on a scale of one to ten where five is average, ten is super-duper. The most common answers, interestingly enough, are high. They're seven or eight. How many people in this room would give themselves a seven or an eight? Okay. How many a nine or a ten? All right. How many a ten? Good, good, maxed out on happiness. It turns out that most people think that they're pretty happy. There's a Lake Wobegon effect with happiness. Most people think they're very happy. In fact, most people think they're happier than most people, which shouldn't really happen. This question, "How happy are you from one to ten?" has been asked all over the world. So--and it turns out there are slight differences depending on how old you are. There are slight differences depending on your place within a country, California versus New York. There are slight, subtle differences between men and women at different points, somewhat paradoxically. Although women are more vulnerable to depression than men, still on average women are slightly happier than men. The country-by-country data is quite interesting. In one study they looked at forty-two countries. The happiest--well, let me see. The happiest people on earth--well, first, no country believed they were unhappy, the people in no country of these forty-two countries. I mean, you're thinking there are some really bad countries to live in and I don't know if they were tested but of these forty-two everybody seemed--said they were above average. The happiest people on earth? The Swiss. [laughter] They think--they're just like--they're just so happy. I was talking to people about this last night and they suggested chocolate. [laughter] The saddest people on this--on the sample? The sad Bulgarians. [laughter] You are wondering what about Americans. Americans are actually pretty happy, 7.71. We are a happy country full of happy people. Now, I'm going to talk about a lot of research that's based on the data you get when you ask people how happy they are from a scale of one to ten. But I'm going to be honest and tell you there are reasons to be cautious about these numbers. And the reasons come from a couple of experiments. In one experiment they asked people inside a psychology department where there was a photocopy machine. They went up to people--the people were going up to the photocopy machine to make copies and when they were done making copies they asked them, "How happy are you with your entire life?" There were two groups. Group A, they put a dime on top of the photocopy machine so people walked over there, "I'm going to [inaudible]. Oh, a dime. Well." The other group, no dime. It turned out that when asked "How good is your whole life?" [laughter] group A reported [laughter] greater life satisfaction overall in their entire lives. Another study asked people how happy you are with your whole life on sunny days like today and people said they were happier on sunny days than rainy days. What's interesting is you could make this effect go away if you ask immediately before "How's the weather?" These were done by phone interviews. And logically, what seems to go on is that if you're asked how's the weather, you're "Oh, it's really sunny outside," and then when people are asked "How happy are you with your whole life?" people then say, "Oh, okay. I'm going to take into account the sunny-ness when I give my answer. Okay. So, what is happiness? What are people rating when they're answering these sort of questions? And this is an extraordinarily difficult question and one could devote a seminar to discussing it, but one simple answer from an evolutionary point of view is that happiness--forget about "what is happiness?" Ask "what's happiness for?" just like we've asked what language is for, or what laughter is for, or what hunger or lust is for. What's happiness for? And one answer is happiness is a goal state that we've evolved to pursue. It's a signal that our needs have been satisfied. Happiness is the carrot we're running towards that makes us take care of our lives. We want to be happy. An example of this is food. You're not very happy if you're starving. You want to be satiated, you want to be satisfied, so you seek out food to fill your belly. Once you've done it, you're happy. Steven Pinker summarizes the keys to happiness in a nicely evocative passage: "We are happier when we are healthy, well-fed, comfortable, safe, prosperous, knowledgeable, respected, non-celibate, in love." How many people here have got all of those right now? Oh, come on. [laughter] Some people. Oddly enough, the person who said he was a ten didn't--does not raise his hand. Okay. [laughter] So this is- And this makes out--you get all your needs satisfied, your belly is full, people love you, you're getting sex regularly, you're smart, you're rich, you're happy, but as Pinker points out it's not that simple. Here's the problem. You, Americans in this century, you are now healthier, better fed and so on than just about anyone in history but you're not happier. That's the puzzle. In particular, these studies asking about happiness have been around for a long time. People in the 1950s did not make as much money, did not eat as well, did not live as long, suffered from more diseases, were more vulnerable in a hundred different ways, yet they were--are as happy as you are now. You are as happy as your parents were and they were as happy as your grandparents. Moreover, in poor countries people don't have the shelter, the knowledge, the protection, the safety, yet, for the most part, there's not a huge effect on how rich a country is and--on how happy the people are. Furthermore, there are great individual differences in happiness among people whose basic needs are met. For the most part, everybody in this room is fed and sheltered and safe. Some of you are prosperous, some of you are knowledgeable, a couple non-celibate, and-- [laughter] but even among that group you vary in your happiness, and that's kind of a puzzle. And to explain the puzzle we need to talk about a few surprising facts about happiness and I'll present three of them. The first is happiness doesn't change as much as you think. In particular, happiness is not as sensitive to what happens--your happiness is not as sensitive to what happens in your environment as you might think it is. Part of the reason for this is that there appears to be a strong heritable basis for happiness. So, just as we talked about the domains of personality and intelligence, there is some genetic determination, not entirely but some, in how happy you are. And some people talk in terms of a genetically determined set point. So, you have a sort of natural happiness level, maybe a range. To put it in extreme form, some people are genetically predisposed to be pretty sour, others to be pretty cheerful. Well, that can't be it. Identical twins are very similar in their happiness but, as with everything else we've discussed, they're not identical. What about life events? Wouldn't life events change your happiness? And here we're entering one of the great discoveries of happiness research. Think for a moment. What's the worst thing that could happen to you? And then ask how much would it change your happiness. Now, think for a moment. What's the best thing that could happen to you? And ask how much would it change your happiness. And the research in happiness suggests that your gut feelings are probably wrong. And here's a couple of case studies. For many people a very bad thing that could happen to you is to be paralyzed from the neck down in an accident. It turns out obviously, common sense, that when this happens it makes people very unhappy. It makes them depressed, they think their life is over, they feel terribly sad, but not for that long. After about a year after being paralyzed from the neck down, people's happiness comes back up pretty much to where it was before, suggesting that there's a temporary effect but not a permanent one. Many people believe that winning many, many millions of dollars in the lottery will make you happier and it does. When you open up that winning ticket and you say, "I won one hundred million dollars," you say, "Woo, hoo!" You are honest to God very happy. You'd say, "Hell, I'm a 10.5, I am very happy." A year later you are not as happy. In fact, lottery winning may be a terrible case where people--where it goes the reverse of what you expect. What happens when you win a lot of money is it often wrenches you away from your family, your work and your friends and leads you to depression and sadness but even mundane events that would make you happy--that you think would make you happy don't seem to last. In some research by Dan Gilbert and others, they've asked young assistant professors who are coming up for tenure, and tenure in a university system is a good thing to get because it gives you lifetime job security, "How happy would you feel if you got tenure? How happy would you feel if you didn't get tenure?" Prior to the last election, they asked people "How happy would you be if it was President Bush? How happy would you be if it was President Kerry?" And it turns out people radically overestimated the effects of these things. Having your favorite candidate win is not such a big deal. Having your favorite candidate lose is not such a big deal either. Getting tenure or not getting tenure are really big when it happens. Six months later and a year later your happiness doesn't seem to be affected. The purchase of consumer goods, an Xbox 360, a nice flat screen TV, those sorts of things make you very happy when you open up the package and set it up but this happiness fades almost immediately. The moral of--A lot of people are shaking their heads. It's true, not for me but--the moral of a lot of this work is we think these things will have big permanent and profound effects but they need not and they often don't. Why not? Why do we overestimate their happiness? And the technical term for this, by the way, is "affective forecasting." Again, this is Dan Gilbert's work and the idea is we are bad at affective forecasting. That is, we are bad at predicting how happy or sad we will be in the future based on what's happening to us. Why? Well, a couple of reasons. One thing is there's often a failure to appreciate the day-to-day irrelevance of certain events. So prior to the election--the election's happening tomorrow and I ask somebody who's a diehard Democrat, "How would you feel if Bush won?" and the person said, "I'll be miserable. It'll be a miserable four years afterwards." But what often isn't appreciated here is that whether or not Bush wins will make you sad or happy after it happens but for the most of your day-to-day life you aren't thinking about who the president is. I'd be very happy if I won a huge prize and I'd be "Whoa, a huge prize," the Nobel prize, a Guggenheim, a MacArthur ‘Genius' or I get them all in the same day. [laughter] "What a day. I am really happy." But then a month later I'm there and I've still got my regular insomnia and there's nothing on TV and the plumber's not coming and my kids don't respect me and I can't--and the fact that "Yeah, but I won the prize," it doesn't matter. A lot of the things in life that'll make you really--that you think will make you really happy don't have this day-to-day effect. Also, there is the logic of the set point. And this comes to a terrible word: We adapt. Right now I'm a guy without a Nobel prize. I'm kind of used to it. If I got a Nobel prize I'd be a guy with a Nobel prize. I'd be happy but then I'd kind of get used to that too. And if I got a second one, "whoa, two!" but then I'd just get used to that too. You get used to things. You get used to bad things. Now, I don't want to overstate this. There are some very interesting exceptions. So for instance, we don't get used to noise. A lot of research suggests that if your environment is noisy, they're doing construction around you, you can't get used to it. Your happiness drops and it doesn't come back up. Your system cannot habituate to continued noise. We adapt to good things, winning the lottery, winning a prize, getting an "A " in a course. We adapt, we get used to it, also with some surprising exceptions. One of the big--one of the other surprises from happiness research is the effects of cosmetic surgery like breast enhancement and breast reduction. One of the big surprises is it makes people happier and then they stay happier. And one explanation for this is how we look is very important. It's very important for how other people see us and how we see ourselves, and you never get used to looking in a certain way. So, if you look better it just makes you happier all the time. So, there are these exceptions but putting aside the exceptions, the problem of adaptation is sometimes called "the hedonic treadmill" and the idea is hedonic for happy. You keep on running but no matter how fast you run you stay where you are, you get used to it. Habituation is like you put--you step into a very hot bath but you get used to it. If it's a cold bath you get used to it. A difficult environment, an easy environment, you get used to it. The story is often illustrated--It's often illustrated with a story from the Bible in Ecclesiastes of a king and this king had it all. He had gardens, parks, vineyards, castles, slaves and concubines and they were both male and female concubines. [laughter] So, he had everything, right, but it didn't make him happy and here's what he says: "I hated life. All this vanity and a chasing after wind and there is nothing to be gained under the sun." Now, in these books I talked about at the beginning these authors give advice on how to deal with the hedonic treadmill. How do you deal with the fact that everything you aspire to, once you get it you'll be used to it and it will lose its value? Well, one answer is that possessions are not the key to happiness. Possessions you very quickly get used to. From there, there are two alternatives. One is endless novelty. So one guy – I forget his name – wrote a book and he says, "Look. There's the hedonic treadmill. The trick is always do something different. Next week have sex with somebody you've never had sex before. Then climb Mount Everest. You get bored with that, become an accountant. Boring. Scuba diving. Boring." He had endless ideas, and that's a possibility. You never--you--if you keep changing what you're doing you'll never get used to anything and you'll always be happy. At least he says that. Then there's the old guy alternative. Step off the treadmill. Give up--give up chasing the whole happiness thing and then seek out more substantial goods that might actually not make you happy in the simple sense of a quick fix of delight, but substantial goods like friends and family and long-term projects. So, the first moral of the science of happiness is that your happiness is actually rather fixed. It's fixed in part genetically and it's fixed in part because what happens in your life you'll get used to, to a large extent. Are you raising your hand? No. Oh, sorry. The second one is happiness is relative. So, there's a lot of research on money, power and happiness, and remember I did say before that it doesn't matter whether you come from a rich country or a poor country. As long as your country--as long as you're not starving to death, it kind of doesn't matter how rich your country is for how happy you are. But that's not the same as saying it doesn't matter how much money you make. In fact, there's a set point or a range but there is some effect on your salary and on your job on your happiness. And if you're desperately poor, no matter where you are, no matter who's around you, you're not going to be happy. But beyond that your happiness depends on your relative circumstance. And this is an old insight. H.L. Mencken wrote, "A wealthy man is one who earns a hundred dollars more than his wife's sister's husband." The idea is what matters isn't how much you make. What matters is how much you make relative to the people around you. And they've asked people this. "What would you rather? Do you want to make seventy thousand dollars if everybody else in your office is making sixty-five thousand or seventy-five thousand dollars if everybody else is making eighty thousand?" Does it matter how much money you bring home or does it matter how much money you make relative to other people? Well, they're both factors but relative salary--and in this example people prefer this. They prefer to be making less if they're making more than the people around them. It turns out that there's research on British social servants and their happiness and their health and the quality of their relationships and how they love their lives doesn't depend on how much money they make. It depends on where they are relative to everybody else. We are very status conscious primates and your role in a hierarchy, your level in the hierarchy plays a--has a significant effect on your level of happiness. This is not really a secret. The opera star Maria Callas and the English professor Stanley Fish had the same negotiating strategy. When Fish got hired into his department, according to urban legend at least, he said, "I don't want to talk salary. I don't have a particular number in mind. I just want to get paid one hundred dollars more than whoever is the top person in this department." And that's a guy who knows about happiness. He walks in and he states, "I'm paid more than everybody else. I don't care how much it is. It's just more." [laughter] And that's relevant to happiness. We're now in a position to give some advice to the king, summing up. First, going back again to Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema's lecture, I think the king is suffering from mild unipolar depression so we should--he should get some SSRIs and cognitive behavior therapy. I think he needs to move his castle to a quiet part of the kingdom. The noise of a busy castle is stressful. And he needs to give up on the concubines. He needs to find a queen. He needs to develop social relationships, join a club, get involved in charity, maybe a hobby. The final finding is a bit of a jump to a different topic but--sorry. You raised--yes. Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: The question is, "Would you become used to changes of social interaction?" An example is solitary confinement or prison. People get used to a lot of things. It could be that in those examples there is a shift in status as well and social relationships and how you think of yourself relative to others so that may be difficult to recover from. If you're popular at Yale and you go to prison you're not going to be very happy your first few days in prison probably. But then suppose you get popular in prison, people like you, you're the head of the book club and everything. [laughter] You'd rather not be in prison--been in prison but you'll probably be a pretty--if you're a cheerful guy here you'll be a cheerful guy in prison. The final case is--involves judgments of the pleasure and pain of past events. And I mentioned the Nobel prize a little while ago as an example but the work I'm going to talk about is actually from the one psychologist who's alive who's won the Nobel prize--sorry, one of the ones who's won the Nobel prize, Daniel Kahneman. And he became interested in happiness. And you remember him from his rationality research and this is some work on happiness. Here's an example. Anybody see the movie Marathon Man? It involves a dental torture scene. Imagine you're going to the dentist and he's torturing you or it's a cleaning but it's really painful and it's terrible. You're sweaty, you're squeezing the thing, and it lasts for an hour and then when it's done the dentist leans over and says, "We're done now. If you want we could stop. But if you want, as a favor to you – I have five minutes – I could top you off with some mild pain." This may seem like a very odd thing to ask. Here's the alternative. What do you want? A dental procedure that's very painful for an hour or a dental procedure that's very painful for an hour--sorry about the "S" there --and then some additional mild pain? Who votes for A? You got to choose one. Who votes for A? Okay. Who votes for B? Okay. Here's the big finding. The big finding is "yes," B involves more pain. It's true. "A" is an hour of pain. "B" is an hour of pain plus a few minutes of more pain. Seems like a no-brainer but when you have A or B and you have to remember it later on you'll have a much nicer memory of B than A. Kahneman's insight is when you think back on events you don't just add up the amount of pleasure or pain you experienced. Rather, your memory is highly skewed to peaks and then to endings. And you could imagine this. In the first case, "A," you leave and say, "Oh, God, that was terrible. Oh." "B," you leave and say, "Oh, that was mildly painful. There was something terrible in the middle there but it ended okay, mild pain." It turns out, in general, endings matter a lot. Kahneman did his research with – both in a laboratory where you could make – give people mild pain by getting them to stick their hand in freezing cold water and with people undergoing extremely painful colonoscopy procedures. And it turns out that if you want to give people a good memory, or a less bad memory, of a horrible event topping them off with some mild pain will do the trick. In the end, endings matter. Both of these examples, a party that's hugely fun for ninety percent, then the last ten percent somebody slaps you in the face and pours dip on you or something-- [laughter] So, ninety percent of good stuff, ten percent bad stuff, versus ninety percent people are slapping you and pouring dip on you [laughter] but then ten percent, whoa, that was a really good--when you think back on it, if you just added it up, "A" would be much better but "B" has this huge pull because of the power of how things end so endings matter. So, I'm going to end things now. I'm first going to do a few things. Before saying anything more, I want to thank the teaching fellows. There's Sunny Bang, Erik Cheries, Jane Erickson, Izzat Jarudi, Greg Laun, and Koleen McCrink. I think they did a superb job. [applause] We've basically reviewed all the psychology. Here is a promissory note we started with at the beginning of this semester. I think you are now in a position to answer or at least consider answers about these topics, about topics such as dreams, testimony, disgust, memory, depression, language, humor, and even a little bit about good and evil. This is an--a broad intro survey class, and the field of psychology is broad and we've just gotten started. If you're interested, this is a great department. There are some amazing scholars here and some amazing teachers and there are courses that go into detail about just about every topic I talked about. If you're interested in memory or social interaction or mental illness, I could point you to some great courses. I'm not taking any sophomore advisees next year because I'm on leave in the fall but you should feel free to come talk to me if you want any specific advice or suggestions. Now, I know not all of you are going to end up majoring in psychology. Some of you will choose cognitive science instead [laughter] but on a more serious note I know for some of you this is the last--maybe the first but the last psychology class you'll ever take. And so I want to close this course by emphasizing two themes. The first one is a bit of humility. There are some very basic questions about the mind – and I've tried to be honest about this throughout the course--There are some very basic questions about the mind that nobody knows the answer to yet. We know the brain is the source of mental life but we don't have any understanding at all about exactly how this happens, about how a physical object, a lump of meat, can give rise to conscious experience. We know that about half of the variants in personality, about half the differences between people, are due to genetic factors but we don't know how to explain where the other half happens. It has to be experienced but we have no real good theories of the sort of experience that makes one person adventurous and another one timid, one bitter and one satisfied. We know a lot about the social influences that can drive people to do terrible things to one another but we don't know the answer to the maybe harder question of why some of us--some people are immune to these influences, why some people do good things, perhaps even heroic things, regardless of the circumstances that they find themselves in. So, there's an enormous amount left to do. It's an exciting field just because there's just so much more we need to understand. The second theme is more optimistic. And this is the idea that we're going to eventually come to answer these questions and many more questions through the sorts of methods we've been discussing this semester, through constructing scientific theories, evolution--evolutionary, neurological, developmental, computational and testing them through experimental and observational methods. This is the idea that, in the end, the most important and intimate aspects of ourselves, our beliefs and emotions, our capacities to make decisions, even our sense of right and wrong can be explained through constructing and testing scientific hypotheses. Now, the reason why I'm optimistic is I think there's been some success stories where we really have learned some surprising and important things about the mind and there's no reason to expect this way of proceeding to fail us in the future. In my very--in the very first class on the brain I ended by talking about people's worries here, and I'll be honest, that some people find it a scary prospect. Some people believe that a scientific approach to the mind takes the "special-ness" away from people, that it diminishes us somehow. And I don't agree. If there's anything I've tried to persuade you through the course, it's that the more you look at the mind and how it works from a serious scientific point of view the more you come to appreciate its complexities, uniqueness, and its beauty. This has been a great course to teach. Thank you for coming and good luck on the Final.
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Introduction_to_Psychology_with_Paul_Bloom
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17_A_Person_in_the_World_of_People_Self_and_Other_Part_II.txt
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Professor Paul Bloom: Just to review, here's where we left off. The discussion from last lecture and for about half of this lecture is going to be social psychology. And so, we started off by talking about certain fundamental biases in how we see ourselves. We then turned to talk about a bias and how we see other people, the fundamental attribution error. And now we're talking a little bit about some aspects of how we see other people. So, we quickly talked about certain aspects of why we like other people including proximity, similarity, and attractiveness, and where we left off was a discussion of the Matthew effect, which is basically that good things tend to compound. If you're rich you'll get a better education, if you're smart people will like you more, if you're attractive and so on. Nobody bring up their papers at this point. They'll collect them at the end of class. What I want to talk to-- [laughter] Okay, except for you. Just hand me it now. [laughter] I'm going to ask the teaching fellows to stop anybody from approaching that area. I want to begin by talking about [laughter] impression formation, how we form impressions of others, and tell you a couple of interesting things about impression formation. The first one is, first impressions matter a lot. They matter a lot for different reasons. They might matter a lot because humans have, in general, a confirmation bias such that once you believe something other information is then encoded along the likes to support what you believe. So, the classic study here was done by Kelley where a guest speaker comes in and some of the students received a bio describing the speaker as very warm, the other as--do not bring your paper up if you're coming in late. Just--at the end of class, yeah. [laughter] Others got a bio saying--thanks, Erik--the speaker was rather cold and then it turned out later on [laughter] when they're asked for their impressions of the speaker people are very much biased by what they first assumed. If I'm described to you as a vivacious and creative person and you see me and I'm all kind of bouncing around and everything, you could then confirm this as, "Look how vivacious and creative he is." If I'm described as somebody who drinks too much, you might think he's an alcoholic. If he's described as somebody who's insecure and nervous, you could interpret my activity as nervous twitches. Your first impression sets a framework from which you interpret everything else. This was the theme of an excellent movie called Being There starring Peter Sellers. And the running joke of the movie "Being There" was that the main character, the character Chauncey Gardner, somehow through accident had the reputation for being a genius but while, in reality, he was actually mildly retarded. But he would go around and people would ask him his opinions on politics and he would say things like "Well, I like being in the garden." And because of his reputation as a genius people said, "Wow. That's very profound. I wonder what he means." And--or people would talk to him and he'd just stare at them and say--and people would say--would be intimidated by his bold and impetuous stare when actually he just totally didn't know anything. So, first impressions can shape subsequent impressions not just when dealing with people. A little while ago there was a sniper, actually a pair of snipers killing people in Washington and the one thing everybody knew about it was there was a white van involved. It turned out there was no white van at all but in the first incident somebody saw a white van, this was reported in all the newspapers, then every other incident people started seeing the white van. So, they started looking for them and they started to attending--attend to them. So, first impressions matter hugely when dealing with people because it sets the stage for how we interpret everything else. A second finding building on the first is that we form impressions very fast, very quickly, and this is a literature known as "thin slices." The idea is you don't have to see much of a person to get an impression of what they are. The first studies done on this were actually done on teachers, on university professors. So, university professors have teaching evaluations and you could use this as a rough and ready approximation of what students think of them. So, what you do then is--the question that these people were interested in, Rosenthal and Ambady, two social psychologists, were how long do you have to look at a professor to guess how popular a teacher he is? So, they showed these clips for a full class. Do you have to see them for a full class? Do you have to see them for two classes? Do you have to see them for a half hour? How long do you have to be around a person to see him, to estimate how good a lecturer that person is? And the answer is five seconds. So, after clips of five seconds people are pretty good at predicting what sort of evaluations that person will have. Remember "The Big Five," how we evaluate people on "The Big Five?" Well, you have a roommate and your roommate you could evaluate on "The Big Five." You've had a lot of experience with him or her. How much time do you need to evaluate somebody on the five dimensions of personality? The answer is, again, not much time at all. After very brief exposures to people, people are very accurate at identifying them on "The Big Five." One of the more surprising findings is--concerns sexual orientation or "gaydar." That's not a scientific term [laughter] but the same psychologists were interested in studying how quickly you can--if at all how long does it take to figure out somebody's sexual orientation? Now, what they did was--they were clever psychologists so they set it up in a study where the people did not know sexual orientation was at issue. So, for instance, they may be people like you who filled in a form, one question along a very long form was your sexual orientation, and then you're sitting down being interviewed by somebody and your interview is being filmed, and then other people are shown--who don't know you are shown the film. And the finding is that people based on thin slices are quite good at detecting sexual orientation. Everybody's good at it, gay people are better at it than straight people, and, again, you don't need much time. You just need about a second. You see somebody for about a second, you could make a guess. You're far from always right. In fact, you're just a bit better than chance but you are better than chance at telling sexual orientation. So, these two facts taken together, thin slices and the power of first impressions, means that just by a brief exposure to somebody it shapes so much of how you're going to think about them in the future. Now, we can look at this from the other direction. We're talking about the perceptions of other people, how we perceive other people, but social psychologists are also interested in the question of what happens to other people as a result of being perceived in a certain way. So, one question is, "What would cause me to perceive somebody as intelligent or stupid, gay or straight, anxious or level-headed?" A second question is, "What are the effects of being judged that way?" And psychologists have coined a term, talk about self-fulfilling prophesies, and the claim here more specifically is what's known as "the Pygmalion effect." And the Pygmalion effect is if I believe you have a certain characteristic this might cause you to behave as if you have that characteristic. The name comes from the play by George Bernard Shaw Pygmalion, and the quote here is "The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves but how she's treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins because he always treats me as a flower girl and always will," made into a better known movie, My Fair Lady. But I think that the same theme is better exemplified in a far better movie, La Femme Nikita, where a cold-blooded killer is treated with respect and affection and then she becomes a much more warm and accessible person, and then she kills a lot of people but that--[laughter] but still it illustrates the point. And this point has tons of empirical validity. The classic experiment was by Rosenthal and Jackson where they told teachers that some of their kids were really smart and other kids were less--were not really smart, they weren't expected to show a huge jump or spurt in their IQ, and this was of course trickery. The children were chosen at random but the children who were described as showing--as expected to show a jump in IQ, in fact, did show a jump in their IQ scores and this isn't magic. It's basically--if I am told that you're a genius and your genius is about to be in full-flower throughout this class and it's a small class as these classes were, I'll focus more on you, I'll give you more of my attention. If I'm told "not so much for you," you'll suffer relative to him. And so the Pygmalion effect shows how our expectations can really matter. This brings us to the final--the issue of expectations and how we judge people is a story that could be told about individuals but it's also a story that could be told about groups. And this is where I want to end this section on social psychology by talking about groups. A lot of social psychology is concerned with the question of how we think about human groups and we've already discussed this in the lecture on morality when we talked about the human dynamic pushing us to think in terms of "us" versus "them" as shown in the Robber's Cave study and also shown in the minimal group research by Tajfel showing that from a motivational, emotional standpoint it's not difficult for us to think in terms of "my group" versus "your group." And this way of thinking has real consequences for our emotional life, our affective life, and how we choose to distribute resources. What I want to talk about here though is a different aspect of how we think about human groups. I want to talk a little bit about stereotypes. Now, "stereotypes" in English often just is a bad word. To have a stereotype is to be--is to have something wrong with you. You might say it's not good to have stereotypes. Psychologists tend to use the term in a broader sense. We tend to use the term to refer to information we have about categories and intuitions we have about the typicality, our frequency of certain features of categories. And it turns out that collecting information about categories is essential to our survival. We see novel things all the time and if we were not capable of learning and making guesses, educated guesses, about these novel things we would not be able to survive. So, when you see this object over here you categorize it as a chair and you recognize that you could probably sit on it. This apple is probably edible, this dog probably barks and has a tail and eat me--eats me and doesn't speak English. These are all stereotypes about chairs and about apples and about dogs. It doesn't mean they're logically true. This could be a vegetarian dog, a poison apple, an explosive chair, but [laughter] they're typically true. And if you were suddenly stripped of your ability to make generalizations, you'd be at a loss. You wouldn't know what to eat, how to interact. So, some sort of ability to record information and make generalizations is absolutely essential to making it through life. What's interesting though is we also categorize types of people. So, we have stereotypes in our heads about men and women, about children, adolescents or adults, whites, blacks, Asians and so on. Now, this is not essentially a bad thing for a couple of reasons. First, some of these stereotypes are positive. You might have positive stereotypes about certain groups. You might believe some groups are unusually creative or intelligent. You might have a particularly positive stereotype about your own group even if your own group is Yale students or your own group is people from France or your own group is people from such and so college. You might have positive stereotypes. More importantly, we collect stereotypes about groups of people through much the same way we collect stereotypes about categories like chairs and apples and dogs. And so they're pretty often accurate. When there are studies which ask people who is more likely to be a lawyer, someone who's Jewish or someone who is Hispanic, who is likely to be taller, somebody from Japan or somebody from Sweden, people can answer these things. They have their stereotypes that guide their answers, and the answers are not arbitrary or random. Their answers are often correct and often possessing stereotypes lets us make reasonable and correct generalizations about the world. That's the sort of good news about stereotypes but there's also bad news. One problem is that they're not always accurate and there's a couple of factors that could lead them away from accuracy. One is what we talked about before regarding first impressions, which is a confirmation bias. If you believe that homosexuals are effeminate, that gay men are effeminate, then this is going to shape how you see future gay men. If you see an effeminate gay man, you'll probably say, "Ah, more evidence for my theory." If you see a man who is not effeminate, you might ignore it or say maybe he's not really gay after all. If you believe black men are criminals, then when you see a black man who is a criminal you'll chalk it down as support but you'll pay less attention to evidence that white men are criminals and some black men are not criminals. You won't look at this as a scientist objectively scanning data. Rather, you'll be biased in certain ways. You'll be biased to put extra weight on the cases that support your theory and diminish cases that refute it. Furthermore, our data is not always reliable. So--oh, and this is actually an example of this at work. It turns out in the world of classical music there's a stereotype of women being simply less proficient than men: they play smaller than men, they don't have the same force and they have smaller techniques, they're more temperamental and so on. If you asked somebody who was a judge, the judge would say, "Look. This is just the way things are. I'm not being biased at all." The test of this then is to have blind auditions where people do their auditions behind a screen so you can't tell whether they're man or a woman, or for that matter, white or black or Asian or whatever. It turns out when you do that women get hired far more suggesting that the stereotype is A, incorrect and B, has a real negative and unfair effect on people getting hired. A second problem is – what I was talking about immediately before this – is some of our data are misleading so we get a lot of the information about the world from the media. The media would include television and movies but would also include plays and books and stories. And to the extent these portray an unrealistic or unfair or biased perception of the world we could construct stereotypes that are faithful to the data we're getting but the data is not representative. And so people, for instance, object to the fact that when there's Italian Americans on TV they're often members of the Sopranos, a mobster family. Throughout history Jews have been upset at the portrayal of Shylock in "Merchant of Venice," not a very nice guy. And often in response people who want to foster more positive views will often try to--will often put in representatives from other groups in unusual ways to make that point. Anybody here ever see the television show Battlestar Galactica? Okay. Who's that? He's the star of "Battlestar Galactica." You don't know because you're too young. In the original "Battlestar"--[laughter] and I hate you. [laughter] In the original "Battlestar Galactica," this was the star. This was the main character known as "Starbuck," who got transformed into a woman in the more recent one, a sort of example of how portrayals are shifting in interesting ways. There's also, of course, moral problems over stereotypes. So, it's fine to judge chairs and apples and dogs based on the stereotypes. It's even fine to judge breeds of dogs. If I told you that I decided to buy a greyhound instead of a pit bull because I wanted a dog of a gentle temperament, nobody would scream that I'm a dog racist [laughter] involving--and--but honestly, it's a stereotype. Greyhounds are supposed to be more passive and gentle than pit bulls. I think it's a true stereotype but it's a stereotype nonetheless. But we have no problems when it comes to things like breeds of dogs with stereotypes. We have serious problems judging people this way. So, for instance, it's a moral principle that some of us would hold to that even if stereotypes are correct it is still immoral to apply them in day to day life. The term for this would be "profiling." Now, it gets complicated because there are some cases where we do allow stereotypes to play a role. When you all go and get driver's licenses or when you did get driver's licenses you have to pay higher auto insurance premiums than I do. I think this is perfectly fair because young people like you get into a lot more accidents with your reefer and your alcohol [laughter] and so it is--now, some of you are saying "that's a stereotype." And it is a stereotype but it's a statistically robust one and nobody lines up to protest this. It's an acceptable stereotype to make a generalization from. On the other hand, what if insurance companies determined that people from Asia got into more accidents than people from Europe? Would people be equally comfortable charging people from Asia higher rates of insurance? Almost certainly not. So, the issues are complicated as to what sort of generalizations we're--are reasonable to make and what aren't. There's also a second problem. Stereotypes have all sorts of effects. Now, some of them are obvious effects. If people--for instance, if people pull you over while you're driving because you're black, this could have a huge effect on how you feel welcome in this society on race relations and so on. But some of the effects are more subtle and more interesting and you might not expect this. And this is some work done by the psychologist Claude Steele and his colleagues at Stanford. And the issue is called "stereotype threat." Imagine you have a math test and this is the front of the math test. Claude Steele made an interesting discovery. Here is how to make black people do worse on this math test. It's very simple. The finding is that if your race or your group has a negative stereotype associated with it in any particular domain, being reminded of it serves as a stereotype threat and hence damages your performance in all sorts of domains. If the stereotype is "your group doesn't do good in this," if I remind you that you're a member of that group immediately before doing it, your performance will drop. Now, you know how to make women do worse on math tests too, like that, and this has a demonstrative effect. So, stereotypes are complicated and morally fraught things. When people study stereotypes they often make certain distinctions between three levels of stereotypes and this is nicely summarized here. There's "public." If I asked you: One of the people running for the Democratic nominee for president is black, another one is female--if I asked people to raise their hands for who thinks that because being black or because being female they should be automatically disqualified for being president, few of you would raise your hands. Those are your public presentations of stereotypes. Even if I was to ask you on a sheet of paper, you might deny it because you might be afraid that it's not anonymous. Then there is private. Private is what you really think but you don't tell people. Some of you--some of the population of the United States are not going to vote for somebody because he or she is black but they won't tell you but they know it to be true. That's common sense. What's more interesting is below even that there may be unconscious associations that work that people don't actually know about but affects their thoughts about race, gender and other social groups. So, here are some data about what people publicly say. This is the proportion of people who say they will vote--they would vote for an African American president. What's interesting is when--around when I was born the answer in the United States was about half. Now, it is as close to one hundred percent as you can get it. Here is another one. This is also public stereotypes of blacks, proportion of white respondents endorsing each trait. Now, it's infinitesimal. These numbers are so low they could be dismissed as people filling in the wrong things or making jokes or just being confused compared to [laughter] stunningly superstitious high rankings. And so, there's been a profound change in public presentations, public views, on race but what about implicit views? This gets more complicated. Here is a simple study. This is the sort of study that you might do here at Yale. What you might do, for instance, is be sitting at a computer screen and you'll be given incomplete words to fill out like "hos-" and you have to fill out this word. What you don't know is that pictures of black faces or pictures of white faces are being flashed on the screen but they're being flashed on the screen subliminally so fast you don't even know you're seeing them. Still this has an effect. When you see black faces subjects are more likely to fill this with words like "hostile" while whites more likely to fill it with words like "hospital." I will now welcome you to participate in an experiment on implicit attitudes. This was developed by Mahzarin Banaji who used to be at Yale and now is in an inferior university in Boston [laughter] and it's called implicit attitudes test and it's the biggest psychology experiment ever done in terms of people. I don't know. A million people have participated in this and you could just go online, implicit.harvard.edu and then you could do it yourself. But we'll do it now as a group. If you did it in the lab or on your computer screen, you would do it by pushing buttons. We'll do it by speaking. And it's very simple. You're going to see things over here and they're either going to be words or they're going to be pictures. If it's an African American or a bad word, a negative word, I want you to shout out "right," this side, "right." If it's a white American or a good word, I want you to shout out "left." People ready. Try to do it as fast as possible without making any mistakes. [laughter] Because of the very loud wrong person we're going to try that again. [laughter] Are you ready? [audience response] Good. That is "congruent," congruent according to a theory that says that people, both African Americans and white Americans, have biases to favor white Americans over African Americans. How do we know by this? Well, we compare it. That's "congruent." Now, it's different. If it's a white American or a bad word, say "right." If it's an African American or a good word, say "left." Okay. For all I could tell, people did equally well but this experiment has been done tens of thousands of times and you could do it yourself on a computer screen. And this is one way of doing it but they'll alternate and they'll give you different ones to shift around and everything. And it turns out that this version people are slower at than the other version suggesting that their associations run one way and not the other. And this work has been extended for all sorts of ways looking at for example at gender, looking at the connection between women and English and men and math, looking at age, attitudes towards people who are obese versus people who are thin, attitudes towards people who are straight versus people who are gay, and you could go online and do these studies and it'll give you some feeling for the sort of implicit attitudes that we have within us. Well, a legitimate question is "Who cares?" I mean, if you do the--If you look at the results for the study, it turns out that there is an association as bias to view white Americans as positive and African Americans as negative but it shows up in half a second difference. Who cares? Well, there's two answers to this. One answer is there are times in your life where half a second can matter a lot. So, studies with police officers using reaction time in split-second choices on who to shoot find that your stereotypical attitudes play a huge role in who you're likely to shoot when they're holding an object in their hand that's unclear. Also, more generally, it could be that these implicit attitudes play a role in judgment calls. In cases where you have a hard decision to make, you know you're not racist. You have no explicit racist attitudes, honestly you really don't, but the argument is that these stereotypes can affect your behavior in all sorts of subtle ways. Here is one example. What they do is they do an experiment where somebody is in trouble. You hear a scream from outside either from a black person or a white person. In one condition you're the only person around. In another condition there's other people around you. Now, we know from the work in the Bystander effect that in general which one are we more likely to help in, when we're the only person or multiple? "Only," exactly. And in fact, when it's the only person just about everybody helps regardless of the color of the person in trouble but when you're with other people there's a big difference. Now, again this isn't--these things are not done with members of the KKK. They're done with the standard university undergraduates like you and these--and if you were in this group you wouldn't say, "Oh. I didn't want to help because the person's black." Rather, what you would say is, "Well, I didn't think it was worth helping. There were other people around. Someone else would help," but we know by looking at it that this difference makes a real difference. A final study, and this was done by my colleague who just got hired here, Jack Dovidio, who's done some wonderful work, looked at how people judge to hire somebody based on their recommendations. This is a little bit of a confusing thing. The green bars are the African Americans. The blue bars are the white Americans. And in some cases these people have strong recommendations. When they have strong recommendations in 1989 you're willing to hire everybody, and this is not a difference at all. But when their recommendations are so-so, when it's a judgment call, the subjects are significantly more likely to hire the white American than the African American. Nineteen eighty-nine was a long time ago but the same results showed up in 1999. The same results also showed up about a year and a half ago. And again, this doesn't show that people are explicit terrible racists. It does show that people possess these stereotypes that make a difference in their real-world behavior. A way to put this all together is in Trish Devine's automaticity theory, which goes something like this. The idea is that everybody holds stereotypes. These are automatically activated when we come into contact with individuals. In order to not act in a stereotyped fashion, we have to consciously push them down, we have to consciously override them, and that's possible, but it takes work. It takes work both at the individual level and it takes work at the group level. Any questions or thoughts about this? Yes. Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: It's a good question. These results are surprising and disturbing and I said there is work to be done at an individual and group level and this young man challenged me to be more explicit about that. Here is one case. We have job searches and sometimes job--senior job searches involve the faculty sitting in--around in a room and tossing out names and we use these names as a basis for further discussion. "Hey, I wonder--What about that person? That person does great work." What we do now in the psychology department is we make a special point of trying to get names from disadvantaged groups, not with an eye towards an affirmative action policy but rather because there's a lot of evidence suggesting that people who are just as qualified don't come to mind unless you make some sort of procedure to do it. Here's another example. A lot of journals do blind reviewing now because of the evidence I talked about before regarding sexual stereotypes, that whether it has a male name or a female name makes a difference. So those are not--those are group level in that they're not saying, "You get rid of your prejudices by trying harder." It's rather, "Let's set up a system so that your prejudices can't work," the blind auditions, for instance, being a beautiful example of that. At an individual level, your question's a harder one and I'm not exactly sure what we could do but I think what we should do is be conscious of these things and know that it's not enough to say, "Well, I'm explicitly not racist so I'll give everybody a fair shake," but to recognize we might have biases and to work hard to overcome them, not by overcorrecting in some random way but trying to--if you're interested for instance in qualifications setting up some system that these qualifications can be observed absent knowledge of race or sex. Yeah, in back. Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: Yes. The question's a good one. How much of this is due to stereotypes and how much of this is due to an own-group bias? So, the fact that--so, the experiments as I have described them are to some extent ambiguous. The fact that white Americans favor white Americans over black Americans might be because of stereotypes but they also might be of in-group favoritism. I think the answer is that both play a role but some of the effects are due to stereotypes above and beyond in-group favoritism. And one reason why we know that is in studies like the IAT, the Implicit Attitudes Test. African Americans show much the same effect as white Americans. So, African Americans also are biased against African Americans and in favor of white Americans, showing it doesn't reduce to group favoritism though that probably plays a big role. Okay. I'm going to shift and spend the rest of this class on a couple of mysteries. Here's a summary. The first one is a minor mystery. I think we have some progress in explaining it. The second one is a total mystery. The first one's sleep. Sleep is a motivation. It is a motivation like food or drink. It is a form of torture. I won't get into definitions of what torture is but it would cause somebody tremendous pain and anguish to keep them from sleeping. When you're really tired sleep is what you want to do like when you're really hungry you want to eat. How many people here on average--from the beginning of the semester until now get on average more than eight hours of sleep a night? That's good. Good. There is a sort of school of sleep macho. A sleep macho used to be "I only get forty-two minutes of sleep a night." Now sleep macho is "I sleep eleven hours." [laughter] Who gets on average more than seven? On average more than six? Who here has been making it since the beginning of the semester on under six hours a night? Okay. Anybody of you that has been getting under five hours a night? Okay. There is big individual differences in how much sleep people need and sleep itself is what we spend a lot of our life on but it's very hard to study and we didn't used to know much of it because you can't ask people what's happening during it because they're sleeping so you need sort of clever methods. One such clever method is an EEG. You bring somebody in the sleep lab, you put electrodes on their scalp and you see what these--what sort of electrical activities you get in the brain. Right now many of you are showing irregular beta waves suggesting intense comprehension and great intellectual focus. [laughter] Some of you are awake but non attentive and your brain's giving you these large, regular alpha waves. Some of you are sound asleep, deep in delta. [laughter] When you sleep you get the following stages. You start off with a transition period when you're falling asleep. We call that stage I. Then you get successively deeper, II through IV, slow, irregular, high amplitude delta waves, and then once you reach stage IV you start going up again, up through stage III and II. Then REM sleep emerges, rapid eye movement sleep. REM sleep is neat because your brain looks like it's wide awake but – and I'm going to talk a little bit more in detail about this later – you're relaxed, your rapid eye movements occur; that's where your--the name comes from and dreams occur and then on a good night's sleep you've got four to five sleep cycles and it looks like this. You start off and you go down, down, down, and then you come up, then you get your first REM cycle, again, again, again, again, again, and then you wake up. So, the general takeaway message here is that there's two types of sleep. There is slow-wave sleep or "quiet sleep." Your eyes drift separately and slowly you're hard to wake up. Then there is REM sleep. Your brain is active as if you were awake, your EEGs are similar to waking, paralyzed except for the eyes, oh, men get erections and you have dreams. One sleep researcher joked that these two are connected because what happens is dreams fly around through the ether and then their erections serve as antennas so you pick them up. [laughter] Don't write that down. [laughter] Why do we sleep and why don't we--why aren't we always awake? There's a couple of answers to this. Probably the best answer is our body is worn out during the day and sleep is necessary to put it back into shape. So, when you sleep growth producing hormone goes through the body, your brain and other organs get restored, there are--you need less food, your immune system seems to be hard at work, and in fact, one answer--people always wonder what happens if you'd stop sleeping and the answer is not one discovered in the laboratory but it's been recorded in different cases. If you stop sleeping you die. You don't die in some dramatic way. You get sick and then you die, suggesting that sleeping is good to keep you healthy. And an analogy I like to think about is that your--when you bring your car in to repair it--for repairs, when you're repairing your car, the first thing you do is you stomp it and shut off the engine. You make it stable and at rest so you can then work on repair. A related view is that sleep emerged to preserve energy and keep you out of trouble at night. And these views are of course not incompatible. This explains why we sleep at all and this probably explains why we sleep at night. There are sleep disorders. I won't go through them. I just list a few of them here. They're sort of bad things that could happen to you when you're asleep. One particularly trendy sleep disorder that's been discovered recently are side effects of sleeping pills such as Ambien. So, one of the bizarre side effects is some people with Ambien while sleeping go downstairs, open up their refrigerator and eat huge amounts of food. [laughter] A more recent side effect of Ambien that's quite serious is some people become--have the compulsion while they're sleeping to go driving, which is not good. [laughter] What we're really interested in though when it comes to sleep is dreams. So, remember Hamlet. People--you've all studied Hamlet, "to be or not to be." That's all I know but basically [laughter] he was deciding--he--I wrote this down though. He was deciding whether or not to kill himself and so he made up two lists. The lists of reasons to kill himself were "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," "a sea of troubles," and "the heartache in the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to." He only had one argument not to kill himself: Nightmares. "To sleep, perchance to dream, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil might give us pause." He was worried about nightmares. Now, dreams have always fascinated people and philosophers. If you take a philosophy course, there'll be a couple of questions about dreams that you will wonder about. One is "Are you dreaming right now?" So, Rene Descartes famously wondered whether the real world doesn't exist. Maybe right now it's just a dream. See also "The Matrix." And can you be immoral in a dream? We do all sorts of things in dreams that are bad. Are these sins? And the great theologians and philosophers like Augustine wondered about this, can you sin in a dream? I will answer both questions. You are not dreaming right now, unless you're asleep but if you're--and you can't usually be immoral in a dream. The exceptions are lucid dreams where you choose what to dream about, and then possibly you could be immoral if you encourage bad habits of thought. What do we know about dreams? Well, first there's a distinction, a distinction between real dreams versus sleep thought. So, real dreams are you're in a submarine wrestling a chicken while your grandmother looks disapprovingly on. Those are real dreams. "Sleep thought" is the sort of thing you get typically before you fall asleep and it's like "did I take the garbage out, where is the garbage, did I take the garbage out?" And so it's really just this kind of rumination and you could do this while you're sleeping. So, if you're woken up during slow-wave sleep you're going to be thinking "Did I take the--yes, while I was dreaming I was thinking about the garbage," but if you're woken up during REM, "But a monkey was eating my grandmother," and that sort of thing. [laughter] So, there is a distinction. What do people dream about? Well, we know some facts about dreams. Everybody dreams. Not everybody remembers their dreams. If you want to remember your dream by the way keep your dreams--keep a dream diary, very useful, but everybody dreams three to four times a night. That depends on how much sleep you get but dreams leave fragile memories. They fade quickly. This is why a dream diary or writing up--writing your dreams as soon as you wake up turns out to be useful. What do people dream about? Well, basically, the way to find that out is you ask people and people have--psychologists and sociologists have collected dream reports. If you go to dreambank.net, a guy named Hill collected 50,000 dream reports; you could make some generalizations. Most dreams are bad. They're not bad, bad, they're not nightmares, but most dreams are from a scale of one to ten with five and a half in the middle they're on the negative side. They report misfortunes. People in tribal societies have dreams with more physical aggression than people in industrialized societies. Men have more aggressive dreams than women. Americans have more aggressive dreams than Europeans. Yeah. [laughter] What do people want to dream about? Well, psychologist--the findings were totally not going to surprise you. Women want to dream about romance and adventure. Men want to dream about sex with strangers. [laughter] Turns out that once you get past the hormonal blast of adolescence about 10% of dreams have explicit sexual content. What's the most common dream? Guesses. Falling. That's a good guess. Falling is among the top dreams but falling is not the winner. Somebody else. Flying? Also close. Public speaking? Good phobic dream but not it. Naked in public, not it. [laughter] Excellent. Being chased. Evolutionary psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists have puzzled over this one. It seems to be sort of a primal dream but the dream about being chased is a biggie. Has anybody here ever dreamt of being chased that you could remember? Yeah. Being chased is the big one. Naked in public? [laughter] Grandmother killed by a monkey? [laughter] No. So, what are dreams for? There are Freudian theories that dreams are disguised with fulfillment and other things. There is not much support for these. One theory which is popular is that dreams are a side effect of memory consolidation so your body, sort of below the neck, rebuilds itself while you're sleeping but also what happens while you're sleeping is your memories get played over and over again to consolidate them into different parts of the brain. Almost--the best analogy here is backing up a computer. Your brain backs itself up. In the course of backing itself up, there are sort of random events flash to consciousness and get put together in a coherent story. From this perspective, dreams serve no adaptive function at all but rather they're epiphenomena. They are the byproducts of another system. Final topic is laughter and this is a true mystery. I got interested in this--well, I got interested in this as a developmental psychologist watching my own children laugh and trying to figure out what it is that made them laugh. This is my son, Zachary, pretty young but [laughter] this is not the youngest record of laughing. I found this on the web. [laughter] It's a huge puzzle. From an evolutionary point of view, people's pursuit of sex and food and drink and sleep are not these huge mysteries, our abilities to understand language and make sense of the visual world and cohere in groups, but the fact that we make this weird noise at bizarre circumstances is a huge puzzle and typical--typically psychologists have failed to explain this puzzle. So, here's something; here's a first guess I read in a neuroscience textbook. "We laugh when there is incongruity between what we expect and what we actually--what actually happens unless the outcome is frightening." [laughter] Now, this is a fair effort. It is about as wrong as anything can be wrong in any possible way. [laughter] The first thing is it doesn't really explain "why?" So, why should a non-frightening incongruity cause people to make a distinctive loud noise consisted of staccato segments of one fifteenth of a second each separated by a fifth of a second? It doesn't explain why we make that loud noise when dealing with incongruity. It's not the case that incongruity causes laughter. If there was a bowl of fruit up there as you walked in, it'd be incongruous but people wouldn't shriek with laughter and point to the fruit. [laughter] It's also--a lot of laughter isn't caused by incongruity so a lot of times when we laugh there's nothing incongruous in any deep sense about it. So, laughter is kind of a puzzle. We don't know why we laugh. We don't know what makes us laugh. Over the last five, ten years there's been some work done on this. A lot of the work is done by Robert Provine who summarizes this in his excellent book Laughter. And Provine decided to do something that nobody in the history of the world has done. He decided to send himself and his students to different places including shopping malls and observe when people laughed and write down what made them laugh. And this is the first descriptive step to developing a theory of laughter. And his big finding is that you could separate people--you could separate the question of laughter from the question of a joke or the question of humor. Most of what people--what made people laugh wasn't in any sense a joke or humorous. So, he had over a thousand laughter-initiated situations and here are some typical comments that initiated laughter, sometimes uproarious laughter, on the parts of people. "I'll see you guys later." "Look. It's Andre." [laughter] "Are you sure?" "I know." "How are you?" "I try to lead a normal life." It's sort of funny. [laughter] It was anyway in a context where it wasn't particularly amusing. "It wasn't you." "We can handle this." Only ten percent of the comments were--could be re-coded later on as people--as actually humorous in any sense. And these included "Poor boy looks just like his father," [laughter] "You smell like you've had a good workout," [laughter] "Did you find that in your nose?", [laughter] a reference to dormitory food, [laughter], "He has a job pulling back skin in the operating room." [laughter] So, Provine suggests we separate the question of laughter and jokes and then ask what do we know about laughter? Well, here are some basic facts that--remember we're trying to think like evolutionary biologists here. Humans have this universal trait. There's no society without laughter. It's early emerging as we saw in those clips. So, what's it for? What does it do? If it's an accident, what's it an accident from? What properties does it have? And there are some properties that are important to know. It's social and communicative. Why do we know that? Because it's loud. Laughter is not like hunger. Hunger can be silent. Hunger is not essentially a message to other people but when humans – when it involves a loud noise – the reason why we've evolved loud noises is to communicate with other people. Laughter could be viewed as a form of involuntary noisemaking and it's contagious. That's another interesting thing about it. One of the great discoveries in television and movies was the invention of the laugh track. The laugh track makes things a lot funnier because people laugh a lot more when they're in groups. The rim shot after a comic remark is an attempt to simulate--sort of a pre-technological attempt to simulate the sound of laughter. Children are particularly influenced by the contagiousness of laughter, but just in general, if you hear somebody laughing, like the kids you saw before, it's the sort of thing that could easily make you laugh. Other primates do it to some extent and then it's interesting when they do it. Monkeys laugh when they attack. When monkeys get together to kill and eat somebody they make a kind of a laughing noise and chimpanzees laugh when they tickle each other. And then you'll see--And what's tickling? Well, a fair definition of tickling is touching parts of the body in a mock attack. You sort of attack somebody and they're laughing but if it's--but if somebody's trying to mug you you're not "Ah, this is so funny." [laughter] You have to realize that this is a mock attack; you're simulating attack. So one theory is--is a signal of mock aggression and collective aggression. It's basically--it's like a sound of some sort of mob attack. It's mock aggression in the sense that when people laugh they're often teasing, kidding around. They're throwing out insults, maybe they're tickling each other, maybe they're making fun of each other, maybe they're making fun of themselves, and there's some aggression to it. Most laughter is inspired by some degree of aggression, but it's attenuated and it's not real. And the laughter is a signal this isn't real. And collective aggression--a lot of mob assaults, executions, lynchings, rapes are accompanied with the sound of laughter. When you're in a group doing something terribly aggressive and you are not--you don't feel like you're at risk you might laugh and laughter is a signal to other members of your group as a signal of solidarity and what you're doing together. A different way of putting it--and none of this is going to come in with a sharp, decisive theory. These are sort of flailing away at different ideas but another way of doing--an older way is proposed by Plato, who viewed laughter as a form of bonding against a common enemy. It's a sound of group cohesion against the common enemy. Comedians have not missed the aggressive nature of laughter. Dave Barry writes: The most important humor truth of all is that to really see the humor in a situation you have to have perspective. Perspective is derived from two ancient Greek words, ‘pers' meaning something bad that happens to someone else and ‘ective' meaning ideally somebody like Donald Trump. [laughter] And the idea is that it's something bad happening but not to you or to somebody you love. Mel Brooks puts it in somewhat sharper terms, distinguishing between comedy and tragedy: "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall in an open sewer and die." [laughter] To sum up, ingredients of humor is there has to be a target who experiences some harm. It could be an enemy. It could be a friend. It could be yourself. The harm shouldn't be so serious that it elicits strong negative emotions like fear, grief or pity. So, if a stranger slips on a banana peel and lands on his butt, I might laugh because I'm not overcome by compassion. If he splits his head open and there's blood everywhere, I'm less likely to laugh unless I don't like him or something. [laughter] And this is why the humor--why the damage is often a certain sort of damage involving things like embarrassment, sex, scatology, a banana peel, pie in the face, your pants fall down or something, where there's no real harm. So, empathy, caring, sympathy don't kick in, but instead there's the aggression unleashed at somebody and there has to be some level of surprise. This is what--this is where the humor for that baby comes in, which is you couldn't predict when the sound was coming and some aspect of that was what made it so funny then, what elicited the laughter. This is--what elicited the laughter for Zachary was watching the classic film Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day where Rabbit climbed on a high bunch of shelves and it all came crashing down on him. But he didn't--he wasn't dead. He was just kind of stunned. [laughter] Final question for anybody interested in laughter is, "Why can't we tickle ourselves?" Now, I've talked about laughter on two separate occasions and on each of the occasions when I talked in front of a large group like this somebody came up to me afterwards and said, "But I can." [laughter] And [laughter] I don't--and they seemed sincere but if people say, "I can tickle myself," how many people here will own up to being able to tickle themselves? One? [laughter] It's a fascinating question why some people can. The general story of why we can't in general is because there's no surprise, there's no mock aggression, and also there may be a general deadening of self-stimulation. I'm going to end with the final reading response. Think of an interesting testable idea about either dreams or laughter. You could go into as much detail as you want. If you want your thing could be one sentence long but it could be longer. I will ask the teaching fellows to each send me their one or two most interesting remarks. I will then judge and then the winner will win some small prize, either of a literary or a food nature. Okay. I'll see you all on Wednesday.
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Introduction_to_Psychology_with_Paul_Bloom
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9_Evolution_Emotion_and_Reason_Love_Guest_Lecture_by.txt
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Professor Paul Bloom: I'm delighted to introduce the first guest lecturer for this Introduction to Psychology course, Dean Peter Salovey. Peter is an old friend and colleague. Many of you--I think everybody here knows of him through his role as Dean of Yale College. I'll just, in this context of this introduction, mention two other things about him. One is prior to being dean and in fact, still as a dean, he's an active scientist and in particular, a social psychologist actively involved in studying health psychology, the proper use of psychological methods to frame health messages, and also is the founder and developer of the idea of emotional intelligence, an idea he's done a huge amount of research on. Secondly, Peter is or was an active and extremely well-known teacher at Yale College. He taught at one point, the largest course ever in Yale College – a course on Psychology in Law which broke every record ever had here. And before that, during that, and after that, he was a legendary Introduction to Psychology teacher. And I think--and he had some reason for why he was so legendary with his lecture today on the topic of love. [applause] Dean Peter Salovey: Thanks very much. Okay. Thank you very much, Professor Bloom. It really is a pleasure to come and lecture to you today on Valentine's Day on the topic of love. My main area of research is human emotion. And love is an emotion. It's not one that I study personally, at least not in the lab, and--but it is fun to talk about. And it is a topic that lends itself to many social psychological phenomena. It's also great to be able to come in and guest lecture. One of the things I very much miss since serving as dean is the opportunity to teach Psychology 110. And although I love being dean, I do miss teaching Introductory Psychology, the feeling of exposing people to ideas that maybe you hadn't heard before. Well, I suspect some of the ideas in this talk you'll have not heard before and for a variety of reasons. A couple of the things you'll notice is that some of the experiments I'll talk about today are not the kinds of experiments that can be done anymore. They're not considered ethically acceptable but they were done in the ‘50s and ‘60s and early ‘70s when ethical standards were different and so we can teach them. We just can't give you the same experiences that some of the college students that we'll talk about today in these studies had. The other thing I will mention is that there is a certain androcentric and heterosexual quality to much of the social psychological research on romantic love. You'll see that in the experiments. Usually, the participants are men and usually the targets are women in these experiments. I'm not endorsing this as the only way to study love. It just happens to be the way these experiments were done and so I mention this caution right from the beginning. We'll have to think about--One of the things you should think about is do you think these experiments generalized to other kinds of dyadic relationships. And that's a question that I think you can ask throughout this lecture. Okay. So let's get started. And to start things off I think what we need to do is consider a definition. I'm going to define what love is but then most of the experiments I'm going to talk about are really focused more on attraction than love--who finds each other of romantic interest that might then develop into a love relationship. But let's start with a definition of love. And I'm going to pick a definition from a former colleague, Robert Sternberg, who is now the dean at Tufts University but was here on our faculty at Yale for nearly thirty years or so. And he has a theory of love that argues that it's made up of three components: intimacy, passion, and commitment, or what is sometimes called decision commitment. And these are relatively straightforward. He argued that you don't have love if you don't have all three of these elements. Intimacy is the feeling of closeness, of connectedness with someone, of bonding. Operationally, you could think of intimacy as you share secrets, you share information with this person that you don't share with anybody else. Okay. That's really what intimacy is, the bond that comes from sharing information that isn't shared with other--with many other people. Second element is passion. Passion is what you think it is. Passion is the--we would say the drive that leads to romance. You can think of it as physical attraction or sex. And Sternberg argues that this is a required component of a love relationship. It is not, however, a required component of taking a shower in Calhoun College. [laughter] The third element of love in Sternberg's theory is what he calls decision or commitment, the decision that one is in a love relationship, the willingness to label it as such, and a commitment to maintain that relationship at least for some period of time. Sternberg would argue it's not love if you don't call it love and if you don't have some desire to maintain the relationship. So if you have all three of these, intimacy, passion and commitment, in Sternberg's theory you have love. Now what's interesting about the theory is what do you have if you only have one out of three or two out of three? What do you have and how is it different if you have a different two out of three? These are--What's interesting about this kind of theorizing is it give--it gives rise to many different permutations that when you break them down and start to look at them carefully can be quite interesting. So what I've done is I've taken Sternberg's three elements of love, intimacy, passion and commitment, and I've listed out the different kinds of relationships one would have if you had zero, one, two or three out of the three elements. And I'm using names or types that Sternberg uses in his theory. These are really from him. Some of these are pretty obvious. If you don't have intimacy, if you don't have passion, if you don't have commitment, you don't have love. Sternberg calls this non-love. That's the technical term. And [laughs] essentially what he's saying is the relationship you now have to the person sitting next to you, presuming that you're sitting next to a random person that you didn't know from your college, is probably non-love. If it's something else, we could talk about it at the end of the lecture or perhaps when I get to it in a moment. Now let's start to add elements. Let's add intimacy. This is sharing secrets, a feeling of closeness, connectedness, bonding. Let's say we have that with someone but we don't have passion, that is, no sexual arousal, and no commitment to maintain the relationship. This is liking. Sternberg calls it liking. And liking is really what is happening in most typical friendships, not your closest friendship but friendships of a casual kind. You feel close, you share certain information with that person that you don't share with other--many other people, but you're not physically attracted and there's no particular commitment to maintaining this for a long period of time. Now, what if you're not intimate, you're not committed, but you're passionate; you feel that sexual arousal. This is what Sternberg would call infatuation. And that term probably works for you too, infatuated love, and this is love at first sight. "I don't know you, we've never shared any secrets because I don't know you, I'm not committed to defining this as anything, I'm not committed to the future. In fact, I'm not thinking about the future. I'm thinking about right now but boy, am I attracted." Right. That's infatuation and that's what Sternberg means by infatuated love. The third kind of one-element relationship is there's no intimacy, right, no bonding, no closeness, no secrets, no physical attraction, no sexual arousal, but by gosh, we are going to maintain this relationship, we are committed to it for all time. Sternberg calls that "empty love." Empty love is kind of interesting. It's often the final stage of long-term relationships that have gone bad. "We don't share information with each other anymore so there's no intimacy. We don't feel physically attracted to each other anymore, there's no passion, but we'd better stay together for the kids, right? Or we've got to stay together for appearance's sake or we'd better stay together because financially it would be a disaster if we don't" or all of the reasons other than intimacy and passion that people might commit to each other. That's what Sternberg calls empty love. Now what's interesting is in societies where marriages are arranged this is often the first stage of a love relationship. These two people who have maybe never seen each other before, who have never shared secrets so there's no intimacy, who have never--don't know if they're physically attracted to each other or on their wedding day revealed to each other and committed legally and sometimes religiously to each other. Right? The commitment is there but at that moment nothing else might be there. What's interesting of course is that such relationships don't seem to have any greater chance of ending in divorce than people who marry for love. But there's a big confound, there's a big problem in studies of those kind of relationships. What might it be? Anybody. What might be the problem in the statement I just made that these kind of relationships are just as likely to survive as people who marry for love? Yes. Student: [inaudible] Dean Peter Salovey: Yeah. So they may occur; they're more likely to occur in societies that frown on divorce. They make it very costly, socially costly, to divorce, so then they stay together for all kinds of reasons, not always such good ones. All right. Now who was it who sang the song "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad"? Was that Meat Loaf? Who was it? It was Meat Loaf. All right. Professor Bloom says it was Meat Loaf. It was Meat Loaf. You're all saying, "there was a singer called Meat Loaf?" Meat Loaf sang the song "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad." Let's see if two out of three ain't bad. What if you have intimacy, "we share secrets, passion, we feel physically attracted to each other but we're not making any commitments here." Sternberg calls that "romantic love." This is physical attraction with close bonding but no commitment, Romeo and Juliet when they first met. This is often the way relationships start: "We like each other, I'm physically attracted to each other, I--to you, I enjoy spending time with you but I'm not making any long-term commitments. So I'm not even willing to use the ‘L' word in describing what it is we have." Right? Many of you might have been in relationships of this sort. That's romance. That's romantic love. Now, what if you have intimacy, "we share secrets with each other, but there's no particular physical attraction but we are really committed to this relationship." This is what Sternberg calls "companionate love." This is your best friend. "We are committed to sharing intimacy, to being friends forever," but physical attraction is not part of the equation here. This is sort of the--maybe the Greek ideal in relationships of some kind. All right. What if we have passion, "I'm sexually attracted to you," but no intimacy. "I don't want to really know that much about you, I don't want to really share anything of me with you, but I am committed to maintaining this physical attraction to you" [laughter] Well, that's what Sternberg calls "fatuous love." It's a whirlwind courtship. It's a Hollywood romance. It might lead to a shotgun wedding. Maybe you find yourself in Las Vegas and you get married for a day and a half and then realize that this wasn't such a good idea. And maybe your name is Britney and you're a singer. [laughter] Well, anyway, you've got the idea. That's fatuous love. "We are basically committed to each other for sex" but it's very hard to make those relationships last a long time because we might not have anything in common, we might not share anything with each other, we might not trust each other, we are not particularly bonded to each other. On the other hand, if you have all three, intimacy, passion, commitment, this is "consummate love" according to Sternberg – complete love. This is how he defines love. Okay. So now you have a definition of love and you can now, as a homework assignment, sit down tonight and make a list of every person you know by the three elements of love and just start putting the check marks in the boxes and tallying up your personal love box score. And we don't want to collect those. We don't even want to see those but you can have fun with that. Then you can ask the other people to do it too and you can compare with each other. [laughter] And if you all survive this exercise you'll be better for it. [laughter] What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. That's the idea behind that exercise. All right. Now the social psychology of love really has been a social psychology of attraction. What makes people find each other attractive? What makes them want to be intimate? What makes them physically desirable to each other? What might lead to a commitment, a decision to make a commitment to make the relationship last? This is just so nice. I'm giving this lecture on love and the two of you are holding hands here in the front row. It's really-- [laughter] And-- [applause] All three elements present, intimacy, passion, and-- [laughter] Yeah. Okay. [laughter] Good. Just checking. [laughter] Okay. So what's interesting about the social psychology of attraction is it has focused on seven variables. And I've divided these into two groups, the big three and the more interesting four. And I call them the big--The big three are three variables that the effects are so powerful that they almost don't need to be discussed in much detail. The more interesting four are the ones I'm going to focus on in this lecture because they're a bit more subtle and they may be things that you've never heard of before. But let's quickly talk about the big three. The way to understand the big three is with the phrase "all other things being equal." All other things being equal, people who find themselves in close spatial proximity to each other, like sharing an armrest in a lecture, will be more likely to be attracted to each other and form a romantic relationship. Okay, all other things being equal. Now this has been tested in lots of interesting ways. Studies have been done in the city of New York where you can--if you live in Manhattan you can actually get a very nice metric of how far apart people live from each other in city blocks. Right? You have a nice grid pattern and you can use a city block metric to add up the number of blocks between people's doors. And people who live more closely together are more likely to end up in romantic relationships with each other. It seems kind of obvious. Right? This even works on college campuses. We can measure in feet the distance between the door to your room and the door to every other room of a student on campus and there will be a correlation between the likelihood of--it's a negative correlation--the likelihood of getting into a romantic relationship with a person and the number of feet between your door and that person's door. The fewer feet, the more likely a romantic relationship, all other things being equal. Now, all other things being equal is a big qualifier. Right? But if we could statistically control for every other variable, all I'd need to do is measure the distance from your door to everybody else's door on campus and I could chart out who's going to fall in love with whom on the Yale campus. Now, this idea in a way is--I don't know. Maybe it's a little counterintuitive. There is a kind of cultural myth around the stranger, the person you don't know, who you will--who you fall in love with. And that is not likely to be the case if it's the person who is nearby. Right? And you'll see as we go through the other big--the other two "big three" that there is a kind of repetition of this theme. It isn't the stranger you fall in love with. All right. Let's continue down. Similarity. You've probably heard the phrase "Birds of a feather flock together" and that's true when it comes to romance. On any dimension that psychologists have measured in these kinds of studies, when people are more similar they are more likely to find each other attractive. This could be obvious things like height or age but it also could be things like attitudes toward capital punishment, preference for the Red Sox over the Yankees. Right? All of these are dimensions of similarity. All things being equal, the more similar the more likely you'll find each other attractive. So, opposites don't really attract. Birds of a feather may flock together but opposites don't really attract each other. Now, usually at this point somebody in the lecture hall raises their hand and says, "Well, my boyfriend or my girlfriend and I are complete opposites and how do you account for that, Professor Salovey?" And I usually look at them and I say, "Good luck." [laughter] And of course all things might not be equal. There may be other variables at play but, all things being equal, similarity does not breed contempt. Similarity breeds attraction. Okay? Isn't it interesting? We have all of these common sayings that contradict each other and then empirically, some of them turn out to have more evidence supporting them than others. So "opposites attract?" Not much evidence. "Similarity breeds contempt?" Not much evidence. "Birds of a feather flock together?" Yeah, there's some evidence for that anyway. Finally, familiarity. Familiarity--We tend to fall in love with people in our environment with whom we are already familiar. The idea that some enchanted evening we will see a stranger--Where are The New Blue when you need them? [laughter] "Some enchanted evening you will see a stranger across a crowded room." Right? What musical is that from? "South Pacific." Very good. You will see a stranger across a crowded room. That's kind of a cultural myth. Of course it happens, but much more common is somebody you already know, somebody you have seen repetitively you suddenly find attraction--attractive and a relationship forms. Okay? So the big three: People who are similar to you, people who are already familiar to you, people who are nearby in space. These are the people, all things being equal, that you will find attractive. Okay? So those are the big three. Those are big main effects. Those are big, easy to observe in various ways in the lab. By the way, the familiarity idea doesn't just work for people. I can show you words in a language that you don't speak and I can flash those words to you very quickly and I can later repeat some of those words and mix in some new ones that you've never seen before and I can say, "I don't know--I know you don't know what any of these words mean. I know you can't read these characters but just, if you had to tell me, which ones do you like and which ones don't you like or how much do you like each one?" The ones you will like are the ones you saw earlier, the ones that you already have familiarity. Even if you don't remember having seen them, even if that familiarity was generated with such quick exposures that you don't remember even having seen anything, you will get that familiarity effect. Okay? Good. The more interesting four. These are more interesting because they're a little bit complicated, a little bit subtle. Let's start with actually the one that is my favorite. This is "competence." Think about other people in your environment. Think about people who are competent. Generally--And think about people who are incompetent. Generally, we are more attracted to people who seem competent to us. Now, that isn't very interesting. And it turns out that's not really the effect. Yes, we're more attracted to people who are competent than people who we think are incompetent but people who are super competent, people who seem competent on all dimensions, they're kind of threatening to us. They don't make us feel so good about ourselves. Right? They make us feel a bit diminished by comparison. So, what we really like--The kind of person we're really attracted to is the competent individual who occasionally blunders. And this is called the Pratfall Effect, that our liking for the competent person grows when they make a mistake, when they do something embarrassing, when they have a failure experience. Okay? You can see this with public figures. Public figures who are viewed as competent but who pratfall, who make a mistake, sometimes they are even more popular after the mistake. Okay? I think of Bill Clinton when he was President. His popularity at the end of his term, despite what everyone would agree, whether you like Bill Clinton or not, was a big mistake with Monica Lewinsky, his popularity didn't suffer very much. A lot of people in the media would describe him, "Well, he's just--It just shows he's human." He makes mistakes like the rest of us, even though that was a pretty big mistake. Right? And you could see this even with smaller pratfalls. Sometimes public figures are liked even more after their pratfall. Now, the classic experiment, the classic pratfall experiment, is just a beautiful one to describe. It's a work of art. So, let me tell you a little bit about it. You're in this experiment. You're brought to the lab and you're listening to a tape recording of interviews with people who are described as possible representatives from your college to appear on a quiz show. The quiz show is called "College Bowl," which I don't think is on anymore but was on when I was in college. And you're listening to interviews with possible contestants from Yale who are going to be on "College Bowl." You have to decide how much--What you're told is you have to decide who should be chosen to be on "College Bowl." And you listen to these interviews. Now what's interesting is there's two types of people, the nearly perfect person and the mediocre person. The nearly perfect person answered 92% of the questions correctly, admitted modestly to being a member of the campus honor society, was the editor of the yearbook, and ran varsity track. That's the nearly perfect person. The mediocre person answers only 30% of the questions correctly, admits that he has only average grades, he worked on the yearbook as a proofreader, and he tried out for the track team but didn't make it. So, you see, they're keeping a lot of the elements consistent but in one case he's kind of an average performer and in the other case nearly perfect. Now, which of these two people do you find more attractive in listening to the tape? So, when they ask you questions about which person should be on the quiz show, people say the more competent person. But they also ask questions like, "How attractive do you find this person?" Now, you're only listening to an audiotape. How attractive do you find this person? And the results are pretty obvious. The competent person is rated as much more attractive, considerably more attractive, than the mediocre person. Okay? If this were the end of the story though, it would be a kind of boring story and it's not the end of the story. Now, what happens is half of the participants in the experiment who have listened to each of these tapes--You only get to listen to one tape. Half of them are assigned to the blunder condition. And what happens in the blunder condition is the tape continues and what you hear is the clattering of dishes, a person saying--the person saying, "Oh, my goodness. I've spilled coffee all over my new suit." Okay? That's the blunder. That's the pratfall. Now you're asked, "Who do you find more attractive?" And look what happens. Your rating of the attractiveness of the competent person grows even higher. The competent person who blunders, this is the person that I love. Unfortunately, the mediocre person who blunders, you now think is even more mediocre. [laughter] Right? This is the sad irony in these experiments. The effect works both ways so the mediocre become even more lowered in your esteem, in your regard. Now, I'll tell you a little personal story about my coming to Yale that relates to this experiment. This is one of the most famous experiments in the history of social psychology. I wouldn't quite put it up there. You'll hear maybe later about, or maybe you've already about Milgram and maybe Asch conformity and maybe Robber's Cave. Those are even better known than this, but this is right up there. This is a top five experiment. What--So--And it was done by Elliot Aronson who has retired now, but for many years taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The name is not one that you need to know. In any case, I came to Yale in 1981 as a graduate student and I was looking for an adviser and I was kind of interviewing with a faculty member at Yale at the time named Judy Rodin. Some of you may know that name because she went on later to become the President of the University of Pennsylvania and now is the President of the Rockefeller Foundation. But I was interviewing with her and set up a meeting. And what I was trying to persuade her in this meeting was to take me on as one of her students, to let--to be my adviser. And it's about my third or fourth week of graduate school and I'm pretty nervous about this. And she could be intimidating to a first-year graduate student. And I remember I was holding this mug of coffee and I was pleading with her, trying to convince her to take me on as her student, and I was saying, "Judy, I'll get a lot done. I'll work really hard. I can analyze data. I can write." And I'm talking about myself and I'm swinging--I'm using my hands as I talk. I'm swinging this cup of coffee around. And fairly soon into the conversation I demonstrated some principle that you've probably learned in your physics class having to do with an object at rest remaining at rest unless acted upon by a force. Well, the object at rest was the coffee in the cup and when I pulled the coffee cup out from under the coffee it landed right on her desk and began--I watched in slow motion as this wave of coffee just moved from my side of the desk to her side of the desk. She jumped up and jumped back and started moving papers around and really was giving me this look like "Why don't you just leave?" So, I was trying to save the moment as best as I could, and I looked at her and I said, "Judy, do you remember that old experiment that Elliot Aronson did [laughter] on attractiveness?" [laughter] She looked at me kind of out of the corner of her eye and I said, "Well, that was my blunder. [laughter] Now you're going to like me even more." [laughter] And she just shook her head and she said, "Peter, Peter, Peter. You know that effect only works if I think you're competent first." [laughter] Anyway, that was my introduction to Yale, graduate school at Yale. [laughter] All right. So blundering. Only blunder if you're competent first and it will make you more attractive. That is the Pratfall Effect. Let's move on and I'm going to move a little bit quickly through all this because I want to leave time for a few questions at the end of the lecture. Let's talk about physical attractiveness as number two of the more interesting four. Now physical attractiveness is one that really bothers us. We don't like to believe that physical attractiveness accounts for much in life. It seems unfair. Except at the margins, there isn't much we can do about physical attractiveness. And when we're not pictured in The Rumpus it can really hurt. [laughter] So, we all like to believe that physical attractiveness matters. And the interesting thing is if you do surveys of college students and you say to them, "Rate how important different characteristics are in relationships that you might be involved in," they will say that warmth is important, sensitivity is important, intelligence is important, compassion is important, a sense of humor is important, and they'll say that looks aren't important. But if you measure all of those things--Let's do it in a different order. If you send everybody out on a blind date and then you look at, after the blind date, how many of those people who are matched up blindly actually go on a second date, actually get together again, what predicts who gets together again? Was it the rating of warmth? No. Sensitivity? No. Intelligence? No. Compassion? No. Sense of humor? No. What was it? Looks. So we believe that looks don't matter and unfortunately they do. Now, the good news in all of this is the studies that looked at physical attractiveness in this way were just looking at what predicts a second date after a first date. Obviously, what predicts a long-term relationship are probably things less superficial than looks, or at least other things in addition to looks. But it is a great predictor of a second date. And college students year after year say, "But it's not important." And it's one of those classic disassociations between what we think is unimportant and what empirically turns out to be more important. Alright well, there are very interesting studies that have been done with physical attractiveness. At the University of Minnesota, a computer algorithm paired people up. It couldn't have been a very complicated algorithm because it basically paired people up randomly on the campus. But the computer--but a lot of data about all the students on campus were--was collected--were collected and people were then randomly paired up and sent to the dance. And then they were tracked over time. And just as in the thought experiment I just gave you, the University of Minnesota students acted in the same way. If the computer--If they rated their partner as attractive, the randomly assigned partner, they were more likely to continue the relationship. Now it's interesting to ask, "why?" And we have to start to look at other experiments to try to get at what is it about physical attractiveness that makes people want to pursue the relationship? And once again Elliot Aronson, the person who did the blunder experiment, the "Pratfall" experiment, he did some nice work on attractiveness as well. And in one experiment, which many people know as the "Frizzy Wig" experiment, he did the following. He invited a confederate, a graduate student who was working with him in his lab--Psychologists--Social psychologists always call people who are in the employ of the experimenter "confederates." It doesn't mean that they grew up south of the Mason-Dixon Line or wave a certain kind of flag or--but the older term for it was "stooge." They would say, "We hired a stooge to act in the following role in the experiment." But I think a certain generation of college students thought stooges were only named Moe, Larry, and Curly and so they started to use the phrase "confederate." Now, they'll usually just say, "We hired an actor." But anyway, the confederate that they hired was a woman who was naturally attractive in most people's view but they made her look either more attractive or less attractive by giving her kind of frumpy clothes, bad make-up, and a frizzy wig. And it was the frizzy wig that everybody remembers from this experiment. And what she does in the experiment is she poses as a graduate student in clinical psychology who is interviewing male participants – only men in this experiment. And at the end of the interview she gives them her own personal clinical evaluation of their personality. Okay? So, that's all it is. They have this interview with this woman. She's either made to look very good or she's made to look kind of ugly with this frizzy wig and they talk to her. She gives them an evaluation of their personality. Half of the subjects receive a favorable personality assessment. Half of them receive a kind of unfavorable evaluation. How do they respond? Well, when she was made to look attractive they were delighted when she gave them positive feedback about themselves. When she was made to--When she gave--When she was made to look attractive but gave them unfavorable information about themselves, they were really upset about it. When she was made to look unattractive they didn't really care what kind of information she gave. It didn't really matter whether it was positive or not. It didn't really make any difference. It was interesting. In the condition where she was made to look attractive but gave you bad feedback about yourself, often the subjects in that condition would look for an opportunity to interact with her in the future, obviously to try to prove that her evaluation was wrong. It mattered that much to them. So there's kind of this idea that attractive people, their feedback to us has more impact. I'm not saying this is fair, I'm not saying it's rational, I'm not endorsing it, but empirically-- excuse me--empirically we can see it, that somehow the attractive--the feedback from the attractive person matters more to us. Okay. Number three of the more interesting four. Gain, loss. This is really a general idea in psychology that we are in a way wired up to be more sensitive to change than to steady states. And you could imagine why that might be true. Change often signals danger or opportunity and if we are especially tuned-in to change, it helps us survive and it helps us pass along our genes. Okay? So we're more sensitive to change. How does that play out in love? Well, in love we are--what is very powerful to us is not just that someone always is positive toward us, "I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love --" Right? It wears out its welcome. What's more powerful is the person who was not that positive to us but over time becomes more positive. The first derivative of their regard for us is positive. Okay? Aronson calls this the "Gain Effect." We are really attracted to people whose regard for us is gaining momentum over time. Okay? And even if over a period of time the average amount of their regard is lower because they started lower and then got higher than someone who was always high, it's the ones who were first lower who then went up that capture our attention. The first derivative is more important than just the position of their regard for us, getting better and better. Now, what's interesting is there is also a loss effect. People who really hurt us are not the people who have always been negative. The person who every time they sees you hates you, says they hate you and accompanies it with an obscene gesture--after a while this person can't hurt you. Right? There's a country song that Ricky Skaggs sings that has the phrase in it "Nothing can hurt you like the person you love." That's what hurts, the person who always was positive who now--whose regard starts to fade. Oh. You can only hurt the one you love. Right? You can only hurt the one you love because you are expecting positive feedback from the one you love. And when that turns negative, it's a blow. It's a blow to the solar plexus. Right? So you can only hurt the one you can love but the one who always loves you sometimes has trouble showing you that they love you. The one who didn't really love you that much but then starts to show you that they love you, that person is a powerful influence on your behavior. Okay. The last--Oops. Come back. The last set of studies--Have you talked about Schacter, Singer's "Emotions"? Okay. So let me describe to you this phenomenon. This is a phenomenon about the misattribution for the causes of arousal. You feel physiologically aroused but you're not completely sure why, and you have to make up an explanation for it. I think what I want to do--And sometimes that explanation is accurate, but the ones that are interesting here are the ones where you misattribute the cause of the arousal--you make a mistake and think it's love when it might be due to something else. So, let's do a thought experiment. I'm a Yale college student, for the purposes of this thought experiment and I live in Pierson because I need to walk a great distance to Chapel Street, to the Starbuck's on Chapel Street. And I have a friend who I don't know that well, somebody who was sitting next to me in class a few weeks in a row. And I said, "Would you like to go see The New Blue in concert and then get coffee after it Friday night?" And she says to me, "Sure. I would do that." And so The New Blue concert takes place in the Pierson-Davenport Theater in the basement there – what used to be a squash court is now a little theater – and we enjoy ourselves at the concert and then I say, "Let's go to Starbuck's and get a coffee." And so, we walk that distance from Pierson College down to the York Street Gate, over to Chapel Street, make the left on Chapel Street, another block down to High, walk into the Starbuck's. And she says to me, "You know, I'd better have a decaf because it's kind of late and I want to be able to sleep." And I say, "That's fine. Whatever you want." She says, "Yeah. So I'll have a decaf double espresso mocha skinny with a--" What? What other dimensions are there? [laughter] Right? "A double espresso mocha skinny frothed." [laughter] And I say, "Okay. Fine. I'll have a coffee." [laughter] And I go up there and I order the drinks. "I'll have a small coffee please and a double espresso mocha skinny frothed" except the barista makes a mistake. Did the word "barista" exist before Starbuck's? [laughter] I don't think so. The barista makes a mistake. The barista uses caffeinated coffee in the drink instead of decaf, doesn't tell anybody, doesn't tell me. I don't see it. I just come back with my black coffee and my double espresso mocha latte skinny frothed, except it isn't espresso. It's got two shots of caffeinated espresso. I'm sorry. It isn't decaffeinated. It's got two shots of caffeinated espresso in it. And I put it down on the table and we're having this nice conversation and we're drinking our beverages and it's about 12:30/1:00 now and Starbuck's is closing and it's time to walk back to Pierson. And we're walking back to Pierson and we leave the Starbuck's, we make a left on Chapel Street, we're walking up to York, I'm getting a little sleepy, but my friend looks at me and says, "Huh. I feel a little funny." What's actually happening? Her heart is beating a little faster, her palms are beginning to sweat, her breath is coming a little shorter than it otherwise would. "I don't know. Is it warm in here?" And she said, "I don't think I've felt this way in a very long time. [laughter] "Gee. It couldn't be the coffee. I ordered decaf. What could this be? What.." And she turns and she looks at me [laughter] and she says, "What a day this has been. What a rare mood I'm in. Why, it's almost like being in love." [laughter] And it is almost like being in love except what it really is is two shots of caffeinated espresso [laughter] causing a rapid heart rate, an increase in respiration, sweaty palms, but I don't realize--she doesn't realize that's what it is. She turns to the most salient--and this is the way social psychologists would say it--turns to the most salient object in her immediate social environment--that would be me--and [laughter] says she's in love. That's the idea of misattribution--aroused due to something else, "don't know what that is." It's best if you don't know what that is or even if you do mistakenly attribute it, misattribute it, to physical attraction, romance, intimacy, passion and commitment, it's love. All right. Now, I don't necessarily recommend that you do this thought experiment in vivo this weekend, although if you're lonely you might want to try it but [laughter] we can go--we can take this idea right--We can actually do research on this. We could take it into the lab. But before I tell you about lab experiments let me tell you about the most famous field experiment on this idea. We call this the "Rickety Bridge" experiment. And there is a bridge at the University of British Columbia that crosses a river that runs through campus and the rickety--There's actually two bridges. The rickety bridge is one that's kind of a rope bridge. It's hundreds of feet above the river. It sways in the breeze. It's only about three feet wide. You kind of hold on to it carefully and you cross the river. It's a pretty scary way to cross that river. Has anybody been--seen this bridge? It's still there. Yes. You know this bridge. Okay. There's another way to cross the river. It's on a low bridge near the water, solid wood planks, nice and wide, hand railings made out of solid wood, and you can cross the bridge that way. So, what two investigators at the University of British Columbia did is they simply positioned, once again, an attractive actor or confederate on one side of the bridge. She was a woman and she met men crossing the bridge. And she would intercept them as they came across the rickety bridge, or the low bridge, and she would ask them a few questions and conclude with, "Can you write me a story? You would help me out with my experiment if you'd just write a little story right now." Then she would collect their story and she would say, "If you have any questions about this experiment, here is my phone number." Actually, this happens when you're in experiments. You get the phone number of the experimenter. What happens? Well, the men, male students, who cross the rickety bridge, they wrote these sexy stories with interesting content, with kind of little bit ribald themes. And the people on the solid bridge, they just wrote pretty boring stories. The people who crossed the rickety bridge were more likely to call her up later and say, "Yeah. I'd like to talk about that experiment I was in. Could we meet at the Starbuck's? [laughter] You drink decaf, don't you?" Right? And the people on the low bridge were much less likely to call her up. Okay? What was going on? Well, this was interpreted as misattributed arousal. On the rickety bridge you're swaying in the breeze hundreds of feet above the water, the bridge seems unstable. Maybe you'll make it. Maybe you won't. Your heart is beating, your palms are sweating, you're breathing harder. You meet this person and she seems more attractive because you're feeling all these things. And you attribute it to the attraction. Now, there's a reason why this study is bad science. There's a major flaw in this study. The clue to the flaw is that you can't even call this study an experiment. What's the flaw? Anybody. Yes. Student: The people who would take the rickety bridge might be more likely to be more [inaudible] Dean Peter Salovey: People who take the rickety bridge might be the kind of people who are more looking for adventure than the people who take the solid bridge. Right. Another way of saying it is there isn't random assignment of the subjects to the two conditions in the study. That's no random assignment; it's not an experiment. You--By not randomly assigning people to these two conditions, you may be capturing just individual differences in the kind of person who, when there's a perfectly stable, safe, low bridge, says, "Huh uh. I won't want to go on that bridge. I want to go on the bridge where I have to risk my life to get to class." [laughter] And then should it surprise us that that's the kind of person who would call a perfect stranger on the telephone and write a sexy story and give it to them? [laughter] Right? We're not so surprised. So what we have to do, of course, is take it in to the lab and do this in a more systematic way with random assignment. And this is how I'll want to finish up today. We have until 2:45,3:45? Okay. Great. I'll take about five more minutes to finish up and that'll give us some time for questions. So how do you do this in the lab? Well, you can bring people in to the lab and I can present you with a confederate who--Let's say you are all in condition one, everybody on this side of the room, and I can say to all of you, "Please wait here. We'll begin the experiment in a moment. While you're waiting please fill out this form." And the form includes how attractive--how attracted you are to the experimenter, to me. I can do the same thing over here. I can give you the form and ask you to rate how attractive you think I am and I can give you the same instruction with a crucial difference: "Please wait here. We will begin the painful shock experiment in a moment. Please fill out these forms while you wait." What happens? The people who got the painful shock instruction are more likely to find the confederate attractive. [laughter] Why? While they're sitting there thinking about painful shock it's making their heart beat faster, it's making their palms sweat, it's making them breathe harder maybe. And even though it's fairly obvious what's doing that, they still misattribute that arousal to "I must be falling in love," even with that obvious a--even with that obvious an instruction. You can do this in other ways. You can bring--Here is one of my favorite ones. You bring people in the lab. We'll make them the control group this time. We bring you in the--to the lab and we say to this group of people, "Please wait here. We'll begin the experiment in a moment. You can fill out these forms in the meantime." The forms ask how attracted you are to the experimenter. You're now in the experimental group and I say, "Please wait here. We'll begin the experiment in a moment. I'm going to ask you to fill out some forms but first, to get ready for this experiment, I'd like you to get on this treadmill and run for ten minutes." So you've run on the treadmill. You've just sat around. The people who've run on the treadmill, even when that arousal is fairly obvious, you've got--you--doing a little bit of aerobic exercise, you still find the experimenter more attractive. Okay? This is why the fourth floor of Payne Whitney Gym is such a dangerous place [laughter] and I urge you as your dean to be very careful there. [laughter] Okay? It's that combination of aerobic exercise and spandex [laughter] that leads to trouble. All right. Now, here's the final experiment and I apologize for this. It is a bit sexist in 2007 context, but let me explain. And we could never do this--and one could never do this experiment today but let me go through it with you and you'll apologize for its--some of its qualities. In this experiment male subjects were brought in to the lab and they were asked to look at centerfolds from Playboy magazine. So, these are essentially photographs of naked women. And they are wearing headphones that amplify their heartbeat and they are asked among other things how attracted are they to the centerfold photograph that they're looking at. So, maybe--I don't remember how many they look at. Maybe it's about 10. So, these slides are coming up. They've got the headphones on. The headphones are amplifying their heartbeat and the slides are moving one after another for a few seconds each slide and they're listening to their heartbeat. Slide one. Slide two. Slide three. Slide four. Slide five. Slide six. And then they're asked which one did you find most attractive, which one are you most attracted to? "Oh, slide five, absolutely. She's the woman I want to marry." [laughter] Right? And what has happened is they're using this bodily cue of their heartbeat to infer that that's who they find more attractive. Now, here is the twist. They're not actually listening to their heartbeat. They're listening to a tape recording of a heartbeat. And the experimenter is back there with the speed knob [laughter] and at random intervals he just speeds up the tape of their heart [laughter] and then slows it down. And it doesn't matter which slide he speeds up the tape of the heartbeat on, that's the one the subject is more likely to think is the person of their dreams, the person they're attracted to. So even you can misattribute real arousal. You can even misattribute phony arousal, arousal that isn't even coming from your body. It's just coming--It's just being played to you randomly. You can even misattribute that. Okay. I think these experiments are cute and I think there's an interesting phenomenon there. And it says something, in a way, about how easily we can be misled as to what things in our environment, even things coming from our own body, mean. But there's also some very serious implications of this kind of work. One of them has to do with domestic violence. So think about domestic violence situations and why people stay in them. Why do people stay in relationships that are violent? Now the number one reason, and we have to acknowledge it up front, is usually economically there's no alternative or people believe there's no alternative. "I can't leave because if I leave I'd be homeless. If I leave I will starve, if my--if I leave my kids will starve or there'll be danger to my kids." And that keeps people trapped in abusive relationships but--And that's number one, but what else might be going on? Sometimes people don't realize that the relationship they're in is abusive--it's psychologically or emotionally abusive. They get into these fights and screaming matches and name-calling and such even if it's not physical violence. And they feel a certain arousal when that happens and they misattribute it. "Well, he wouldn't be yelling and screaming at me if he didn't love me." Right? They misattribute that, what might be anger, what might even be aggression and violence, to an expression of love. I have a friend who's a social psychologist who told me a story once that really made me very nervous, although she's fine. She said, "When I was dating my husband"--this is thirty years ago--"we were having a tough time. We were in many, many arguments--We got into many, many arguments and one time something happened where he came up to my car in a parking lot and he was yelling at me through the window. And I rolled up the window and before you know it he had punched out the window." And yelling at her and punched out the window. He didn't touch her. And he--she said to me, "That's when I knew he really loved me." And I thought that's scary and I--and, all joking aside, that's scary but that's misattributed arousal. "I'm feeling--when he did that I felt something and I assumed it was love. What she was misattributing as love--Well, she was misattributing his aggressive response as love. She was misattributing her own fear as mutual attraction, as "And I must love him." So, although we joke about these kinds of experiments, and they are fun to talk about because they are unusual and cute, there is also some serious implications of this kind of work that one might think about. And you might think about other possible implications as well. Okay. Let me stop there and see what kinds of questions we might have. [applause] Dean Peter Salovey: Thank you. Thanks very much. That's very kind of you. Because we are on tape I'll repeat any questions that come in. Yeah. Student: [inaudible] Dean Peter Salovey: Right. So the question is in experiments like the painful shock experiment if you are told in advance, like you all are, through a consent form or by the experimenter, "This is an experiment involving painful shock," will you still rate the experimenter as more attractive or will you not be able to misattribute the arousal? It is true. The more salient we make the source of the arousal, the less likely you can get the effect. If in my thought experiment I say to my friend, "Well, I know why you're feeling that way. The reason why you're feeling that way is ‘cause the barista made a mistake and gave you caffeinated espresso when you asked for decaf or maybe you just love me." Right. The person is not likely to say, "Oh, I bet it's love." They're more likely to think oh, caffeine, yeah. That's the parsimonious explanation here." So it is true. The more salient you make the cause of the arousal, the less likely you'll get the effect but you can see even in experiments where the cause of the arousal is somewhat obvious, at least to us, you can still get a misattribution effect. Other questions. Yes. Student: [inaudible] Dean Peter Salovey: Yeah. So the question is are any of these factors, particularly the big three, proximity, familiarity, and similarity--Do they affect the maintenance of relationships or just the initial attraction? It's interesting. My guess is they affect both initial and maintenance over time but the literature mostly focuses on initial attraction, much richer data on that initial attraction and those initial stages of the relationship in part because it's a little hard to follow couples over time. Imagine the sort of Heisenberg-esque problems we would get carefully following romantic couples over time and interfering with them to ask questions and make observations. It would be hard to let this couple naturally--this relationship naturally unfold. So, we really get--So, really the focus of many of these experiments is on initial attraction. That's why I always say my lecture is on love, the definition of terms is about love, but the experiments really are much more about attraction than about love. Another question. Yes. Student: Can someone feel consummate love for more than one person? Dean Peter Salovey: Oh. Can someone feel consummate love for more than one person? That's a very good question. It's actually a question that's debated in the literature. I didn't get into it at all in this experiment--in this lecture--but there's an interesting debate going on about love and many other emotions between people who take a kind of evolutionary perspective on these states versus people who take what might be called a more socially constructed perspective. And these aren't necessarily so incompatible but the evolutionary perspective I think would argue that you can feel that kind of love for more than one person or at least it would facilitate the passing on of your genetic material to a larger array of the next generation. So I think the evolutionary explanation is not a problem but we have constructed a world where in most societies, except for very unusual polygamist societies, the belief is that you can't love more than one. Right. And so you've got this tension between what might be evolutionarily wired impulses and the kind of social constraints that say this isn't good, this isn't appropriate, this is taboo. And my guess is the result is yes, you could but you're not going to feel un-conflicted about it and it's because these two are conflicting each other at the same time. How about one more question and then we'll let you go? I'm sorry. I saw him first. Student: Wouldn't natural selection favor the people who learn all these things and then practically try to apply them? Dean Peter Salovey: So he's making the evolutionary argument. Wouldn't natural selection favor the people who take introductory psychology, come to my Valentine's Day lecture, listen carefully to the big three and the more interesting four, and then go out there and put them into practice? It feels a little bit like the--like we're trying to pass on an acquired characteristic, which is a little bit counter to Darwinian theory but if somehow you could design a proclivity for learning this kind of material, evolution might indeed favor it. I can tell you this much. It would make the several thousands social psychologists in this world very happy and proud of their field, if that turned out to be true. Anyway, thank you all very much. Happy Valentine's Day! Thanks!
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Introduction_to_Psychology_with_Paul_Bloom
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16_A_Person_in_the_World_of_People_Self_and_Other_Part_I.txt
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Professor Paul Bloom: This is going to begin a two-lecture sequence on social psychology on how we think about ourselves, how we think about other people, how we think about other groups of people. We've talked a lot about the capacities of the human mind and some of these capacities involve adapting and dealing with the material world. So, we have to choose foods, we have to navigate around the world, we have to recognize objects, we have to be able to understand physical interactions. But probably the most interesting aspect of our evolved minds is our capacity to understand and deal with other people. We are intensely interested in how other people work. The story that was a dominant news story in 2005 was this. And some of you--this--for those of you who aren't seeing the screen, is the separation of Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt. I remember where I was when I first heard about this. [laughter] And it's an interesting sight. Just remember--stepping back. As psychologists we have to question the natural. We have to take things that are commonsense and explore them. And one thing which just happens is, we're fascinated by this stuff. We're fascinated by the lives of celebrities. We're fascinated by the social lives of other people. And it's an interesting question to ask why. And this is one of the questions which I'm going to deal with in the next couple of lectures but before I get to the theory of social psychology I want to talk about an individual difference. So, we devoted a lecture early on--of a couple of weeks ago, to individual differences across people in intelligence and personality. I want to talk a little bit about an individual difference in our social natures and then I want people to do a test that will explore where you stand on a continuum. That test is the piece of paper you have in front of you. Anybody who doesn't have it please raise your hand and one of the teaching fellows will bring it to you. You don't know what to do yet with it so don't worry. The test was developed actually by Malcolm Gladwell who is a science writer--in his wonderful book The Tipping Point. And as he introduces the test, Gladwell recounts another experiment done by Stanley Milgram, of course famous for his obedience work but he did a lot of interesting things. And one classic study he did was he gave a package to 160 people randomly chosen in Omaha, Nebraska and he asked these people to get the package somehow – and this was many years ago before the internet, before e-mail – to get the package to a stockbroker who worked in Boston but lived in Sharon, Massachusetts. What he found was that most people were able to do it. Nobody, of course, knew this man but they knew people who might know people who would know this man. So, most people succeeded. Most people were able to get the packages to this man and it took at maximum six degrees of separation, which is where the famous phrase comes about that we're all separated from another person by six degrees of separation. This is not true in general. This was a very--a single experiment done within the United States, but the idea is appealing, that people are connected to one another via chains of people. But what Milgram found that was particularly interesting was that in about half of the cases these packages went through two people. That is, if you plot the relationships between people--We can take each person in this room, find everybody you know and who knows you and draw a line, but if we were to do this you wouldn't find an even mesh of wires. Rather, you'd find that some people are clusters. Some people are what Gladwell calls "connectors." It's like air traffic. Air traffic used to be everything flew to places local to it but now there's a system of hubs, Chicago O'Hare for instance or Newark where planes fly through. Some people are hubs. Some people are the sort of people who know a lot of people. Some people in this room might be hubs, and it is not impossible to find out. The piece of paper you have here is 250 names chosen randomly from a Manhattan phone book. They capture a range of ethnicities, different parts of the world, different national origins. Here's what I'd like you to do. And I'll give about five minutes for this. Go through these names and circle how many people you know. Now, the rules of this are, to know somebody you have to--they have to know you back. So, if it's a celebrity--Well, here--one of the names here is Johnson. Now, I've heard of Magic Johnson but Magic Johnson has never heard of me, so I cannot circle it. On the other hand, our department chair is Marcia Johnson. She has heard of me, so I could circle it. Go through and circle it. Circle all the people you know who know you. Those are the people you're connected to. If you know more than one person with the same last name, circle it twice. If you don't have this piece of paper and you want to participate, please raise your hand and one of the teaching fellows will bring it to you. I'm going to talk a little bit more about this while people go through this. The issue of connections between people is intellectually interesting for many reasons and might allow us to develop some generalizations about how people interact. The game of Six Degrees of Separation has, of course, turned into a famous movie trivia thing revolving around the actor Kevin Bacon, I think chosen just because it rhymes with "separation." And the game of "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" is played by taking any actor and computing how many steps it would take to get to Kevin Bacon. And some computer scientists have developed this. They've gone through each of the quarter million actors and actresses on the international movie database and computed their "Bacon number." And the Bacon number is the number of steps it takes for them to get to Kevin Bacon. So for instance, Ed Asner was in the movie Change of--;"JFK" with Kevin Bacon. So, Ed Asner has a Bacon number of one. Elvis Presley was in the movie "Change of Habit" with Ed Asner and that's his closest connection to Kevin Bacon. So, Elvis Presley has a Bacon number of two. It turns out that if you look at the 2.5--sorry, the quarter million people on the movie database and compute their Bacon number, the average Bacon number is 2.8. That's how many steps your average person is away from Kevin Bacon. You could then, for any actor or actress, compute the most connected one. So, the most connected one would be the one for whom the quarter million are, on average, the most connected to. And the answer of the most connected actor or actress is reasonably surprising. Does anybody want to guess? I'll start you off with the wrong answer and this, by the way, can be found on this web site. It's not John Wayne. John Wayne has been in many movies, 180 movies, in fact, over sixty years, but he isn't well connected at all because mostly he was in westerns so we saw the same people over and over again. Meryl Streep also isn't it because Meryl Streep has the misfortune of playing only in good movies. [laughter] So, she has no connection with people like Adam Sandler and John-Claude Van Damme. [laughter] Guess. Any guesses? Student: Christopher Walken Student: Nicholas Cage Professor Paul Bloom: Christopher Walken is a good one. We could look it up. I only know a few names here. Christopher Walken is not a finalist. Nicolas Cage is an interesting case. Has Nicolas Cage been in good movies? I don't want to get--I'm going to get more controversial than I want to. Student: A guy who is one step above an extra. He's like a B-list actor at best. The most connected guy, and I think this shows that you're right, is Rod Steiger. He's the most connected actor in the history of acting because it isn't that he's been in more movies than everybody else. Michael Caine has probably been in the most movies of any person on earth, but he's been in all sorts of movies. He was in "On the Waterfront," "In the Heat of the Night," and really bad movies like "Carpool." He's been in dramas and crime serials, thrillers, westerns, horror movies, science fiction, musicals. Now, some people are like Rod Steiger. So, some people in their day-to-day lives have many interactions and I think one of the things we know from interacting with people is we can distinguish them from other people. How many people have finished their things right now? Okay. I know one person in the department who is one of the most connected people I know on earth. If I wanted--If I really had to talk to Rumsfeld, I'd go to this person and say, "Can you get me in touch with Rumsfeld?" If I wanted to get somebody whacked, I'd ask this guy. [laughter] Then I know someone else in the department and, as best I know, I'm the only person she knows. [laughter] So, how many people scores below ten on this? How many between ten and twenty? Between twenty and thirty? Thirty and forty? Between forty and fifty? Fifty and sixty? How many people scored above sixty? Anybody above sixty? Gladwell has done this in a lot of places. The average is twenty-one among a college crowd. Some people score as high as over 100. The older you are, the more--the higher you tend to score, maybe obviously, not--the longer you've been in the country the higher you tend to score. Journalists tend to score reasonably high, academics not so high, and--but what Gladwell points out is some people have the gift. Some people are more social than others and this connects in all sorts of interesting ways. The issue of connection has social factors and it's one answer that sociologists give for why it's good to go to Yale. So, one answer is, well, because of the great intellectual benefits. Put that aside. Let's be more cynical here. Another answer is that you develop powerful friends. And that's closer, but the interesting answer sociologists come to is it's not so much you develop powerful friends; rather, you develop powerful acquaintances. Through Yale you know a lot of people and they don't have to be close friends but they are acquaintances. And sociologists point out that for a lot of aspects of your life, like getting a job, acquaintances matter, connections matter, and the connections you establish by going to a place like Yale hold you in good stead for the rest of your life, above and beyond any intellectual qualities that this place may offer. Here's what we're going to do for the next lecture and a half, two lectures. We're first going to talk about the self. Then we're going to talk about the self and other; basically, differences between how we think of ourselves and how we think about other people. Then we're going to talk exclusively about how we think about other people and then we'll talk about how we think about groups like Harvard students or gay people or black people. I'll start with my favorite finding of all time and this is about the self. And this is about the spotlight effect. So, my mornings are often rushed because I have two kids. So, I get up and sometimes I don't set the alarm and I get up late; I stagger out of bed; I wake the kids; I greet the servants; I get ready; [laughter] I make breakfast. I run out of the house and then usually around 3 o'clock somebody points out, in one case a homeless man, that I have a big glob of shaving cream in my ear or--because I neglected to actually look in the mirror while I shaved. Or I have once been to a party and I found my shirt was misaligned, seriously misaligned, not one button but--Anyway, [laughter] so--and so I feel when this happens I'm very immature. And I basically feel this is the end of the world, this is humiliating and everybody notices. And so the question is, how many people notice when something happens? And the spotlight effect--Well, before talking about my favorite experiment ever, there is an episode of "The Simpsons" that provides a beautiful illustration of the spotlight effect. And then it has a beautiful illustration of psychological testing, so I'll give you them quickly one after the other. So, Tom Gilovich, a social psychologist, was interested in the question of the spotlight effect, which is when we wear a pink shirt to work, shaving cream in our ear or whatever, do we systematically overestimate how much other people notice? He did a series of experiments. And in one experiment what he did was he got in the subjects – standard Intro Psych drill – and said, "I want you to wear a T-shirt for the next day and I want it to have a picture on it," and he got them to wear T-shirts that had pictures on it that were the most embarrassing pictures that they could have on it. It turns out that if you ask people what's the worst picture to have on the T-shirt that you are wearing, the number one answer is Hitler tied with Barry Manilow. [laughter] The best pictures to have on your T-shirt are Martin Luther King Jr. and Jerry Seinfeld. It turns out that people--And then he had them go about their day and asked them, "How many people noticed your T-shirt?" And then the psychologists went around and they asked the people, "How many of you noticed this person's T-shirt?" And it turned out they got it wrong by a factor of about two. They thought, say, 100 noticed, but fifty people noticed. And across study after study after study Gilovich and his colleagues have found support for the spotlight effect, which is that you believe that people are noticing you all the time but they aren't. They're busy noticing themselves. And this is actually a useful thing to know. Gilovich got interested in this because he's interested in the psychology of regret. And it turns out that if you actually ask dying people, or really old people basically, "What do you regret from your life?" they regret the things as a rule that they didn't try. But when you asked them why they didn't try it the answers tended to be "I would look silly." And it turns out, interesting to know, that people just don't care as much as other people think you are. You could take that as good news or bad news but the spotlight is not on us as much as we think it is. There's a second effect Gilovich discovers called "the transparency effect." And the transparency effect is quite interesting. The transparency effect is that we believe that we're more transparent than we are. I need somebody up here who thinks that he or she is a bad liar. Just--I just need you to say three sentences. I'll even tell you what it is ahead of time. I'm going to ask you three questions: "Have you been in London? Do you have a younger sibling?" and "Do you like sushi?" I want you to answer with one of those answers there. I want you to lie about one of them. The task will be for everybody else to recognize and guess which one you're lying about. Do you want to go up? Yeah. And I will even write down which one you should lie on. So, I want you to lie as to that number. Okay? Have you ever been in London? Student: No, I have not been in London. Professor Paul Bloom: Do you have a younger sibling? Student: Yes, I have a younger sibling. Professor Paul Bloom: Do you like sushi? Student: No, I do not like sushi. Professor Paul Bloom: Okay. Let's have a vote. She was lying about one of them. Who votes for one? Who votes for two? Who votes for three? Pretty much of a tie between two and three. You could say which one you were lying. Student: Three. Professor Paul Bloom: The effect--there are two aspects of the effect. One aspect is people are actually quite good at lying. It is a rare person who couldn't stand up there and everybody would figure out what they're lying about, but the transparency effect is we don't feel that way. We often feel like things bleed out of us and so people will systematically overestimate the extent to which other people notice their secrets. And this is actually, in general, why it's sometimes difficult to teach or to tell stories because we constantly overestimate how much other people know. We think of ourselves as more transparent than we are. A second social psychological phenomena is you think you're terrific. If I asked people, "How well are you doing in Intro Psych this semester?" and I asked you to give yourself a percentage rating relative to the rest of the class, then if everybody was accurate, or at least not systematically biased, the number should add up to 50%. Roughly half of you are doing better than average and roughly half of you are doing worse than average. It turns out though that people will systematically and dramatically view themselves as better than average. They will view themselves as better than average when asked how good they are as a student, as a teacher, as a lover, and particularly, as a driver. [laughter] Everybody who drives thinks that he or she is a wonderful driver. This has been called the "Lake Wobegon effect" based on Garrison Keillor's story about a place where all the children are above average. And the Lake Wobegon effect in psychology involves a systematic bias to see ourselves as better than average. What psychologists don't really know is why the Lake Wobegon effect exists, and there are a couple of proposals. One is the nature of the feedback we get. So, for a lot of aspects of your life you only get feedback when you're good, when you do something good. In a normal, productive, healthy, happy environment, people don't scream at you about how bad you're doing but they compliment how good you are and that could lead to an inflated self-esteem on the part of people in certain domains. Another possibility is there's different criteria for goodness. For a driver, for instance, when I ask you to rank how good you are as a driver, what people often do is they think--they say, "I'm better than average," but what they do is they focus on one aspect of their driving. So, some of you might say, "Hey, I'm just a great parallel parker so I'm a great driver." Others might say, "I'm very careful, great driver." Others might say, "I take chances no one else will--great driver," [laughter] but above and beyond that there does seem to be a psychological effect manifested here and manifested elsewhere, which is a motivation to feel good about yourself. You think you're important, which is why the spotlight effect exists. You think your thoughts bleed out, which is why the transparency effect exists. But above and beyond that, in a normal, healthy mind you think you're terrific. And so, this shows up in all sorts of ways. It shows up as well in what's been called "the self-serving bias." Half of you did above average on the Midterm; half of you did below average on the Midterm, but if I went up and asked each of you why the answers would not be symmetrical. People who did well in the Midterm would describe it in terms of their capacities or abilities. They'd say, "It's because I'm smart, hardworking, brilliant." People who did poorly would say, "The Midterm was unfair. I was busy. I have better things to do with my time." Professors as well--When people get papers accepted it is because the papers are brilliant. When they got them rejected it's because there's a conspiracy against them by jealous editors and reviewers. There is this asymmetry all the time. The asymmetry has been found in athletes, in CEOs and in accident reports. And again, this is sort of a positive enhancement technique. You think that you're terrific and because you're terrific the good things that happen to you are due to your terrific-ness; the bad things are due to accident and misfortune. The final aspect of self that I want to talk about is the idea that what you do makes sense. And this is one of the more interesting sub domains of social psychology. The idea was developed by the social psychologist Leon Festinger and it's called "Cognitive Dissonance Theory." And what Festinger was interested in was the idea that what happens when people experience an inconsistency in their heads. And he claimed it causes an unpleasant emotional state, what he described as "dissonance." And he argued that we act so as to reduce dissonance. When there's a contradiction in our heads we're not happy and will take steps to make the contradiction go away. This all sounds very general but there are some striking demonstrations of this and how it could work in everyday life. So, this very simple example is that--is the confirmation bias. Some of you are politically right wing. Some of you are politically left wing. If I asked you what magazines you read, it turns out people who are right wing read right wing magazines, people who are left wing read left wing magazines, because people don't as a rule enjoy getting information that disconfirms what they believe in. They want to have information that confirms what they believe in and that supports it. If you support Bush you're going to be looking for good news about Bush, if you don't support him you'll be looking for bad news. And this manifests itself in all sorts of interesting ways. I'll tell you about a very simple experiment. I'll--It was done by Louisa Egan here at Yale and it illustrates a point which is going to--which--and then I'll talk about real world implications of this. Very simple. You have three M&Ms. You pretest to make sure that the person doesn't like any M&M more than the other. And there are three M&Ms. Who cares? But then you ask them to choose between two of them. So, suppose they choose the red one. You've got to choose one. So, they get to eat the red one. Now, they're offered--You take the red one away and now they're offered a choice between the two remaining ones. It turns out, to a tremendous degree, and you could imagine yourself in that situation, they choose this one, the one that wasn't the one they turned down. And the claim is that when you choose this, in order to justify your decision, you denigrate the one you didn't choose. And so this one you didn't choose is then tainted and you turn and then when compared to a third one you favor that third one. What's particularly interesting is you get this effect easily with undergraduates but you also get it with four-year-olds and with monkeys. So, the same denigration tends to be more general. Well, that's a laboratory effect but there are some more interesting manifestations of cognitive dissonance. One is the insufficient justification effect, which is so famous it had a cartoon based on it. The guys says, "Why should I hire you as my consultant?" The dog--Some dog says, "I use my special--the special process of cognitive dissonance to improve employee morale." "How does it work?" "Well, when people are in an absurd situation their minds rationalize it by inventing a comfortable illusion." Not quite right. When people are--have an internal conflict, when there's something uncomfortable--Well, that's right. So says to this person, "Isn't it strange you have this dead-end job when you're twice as smart as your boss? The hours are long, the pay is mediocre, nobody respects your contribution, yet you freely choose to work here. It's absurd. No. Wait. There must be a reason. I must work here because I love this work, I love this job." [laughter] This actually works. Here is the classic experiment by Festinger. Gave two groups of people a really boring task, paid one of them twenty dollars, which back when this study was done was real money, gave another group of subjects one dollar, which was insultingly small, then asked them later, "What do you think of the task?" It turns out that the group that had--were paid a dollar rated the task as much more fun than the group given twenty dollars. So, think about that for a moment. You might have predicted it the other way around, the twenty dollars, "wow, well, twenty dollars, I must have enjoyed it because I got twenty dollars," but in fact, the logic here is the people with twenty dollars when asked, "What do you think of the task?" could say, "It was boring. I did it for twenty dollars." The people paid one dollar were like the character in the Dilbert cartoon. When paid a dollar they said, "Well, I don't want to be a donkey. I don't want to be some guy who does this boring thing for a dollar. It wasn't that bad really, it was kind of interesting, I learnt a lot," to justify what they did. This has a lot of real world implications. Festinger did a wonderful study with people--a group of people, and he wrote this up in a book called When Prophesy Fails, who were convinced that the world was going to end so they went on a mountain and they waited for the world to end. They had a certain time and date when the world was going to end. He hung out with them and then the time passed and the world didn't end. What people then said, and this is what he was interested in--;So, people's predictions were totally proven wrong and they left their families, they gave away their houses, they gave away all their possessions, they lost all their money, but what Festinger found was they didn't say, "God, I'm such a moron." Rather, they said, "This is fantastic. This is exactly--This shows that us going to the mountain has delayed the ending of the world and this shows that we're doing exactly the right things. I couldn't have been smarter." And in general, when people devote a lot of energy or money or expense to something, they are extraordinarily resistant to having it proven wrong. Now, people have manipulated cognitive dissonance in all sorts of ways and, for instance, hazing. Hazing is cognitive dissonance at work. Fraternities and med schools and other organizations haze people. What they do is when people enter the group they humiliate them, they cause them pain, they cause them various forms of torture and unpleasantness. Why? Well, because it's very successful at getting somebody to like the group. If I join a fraternity--it is also by the way illegal so – but if I were to join a fraternity and they say, "Welcome to the fraternity, Dr. Bloom. Here. Have a mint," and then we have a good time and everything. I'm thinking "okay, sounds like a fun idea." But if I join a fraternity and they pour cow poop on my head and make me stand in the rain for a month wearing pantyhose while they throw rocks at me [laughter] I then think--after it I think "God, I went through a lot of stuff to get into this fraternity. It must be really good." And in fact, hazing through cognitive dissonance draws the inference that this is really, really valuable and this is why it exists. If you are a political--If you are running for office, you will tend to have volunteers and not necessarily pay people. One reason for this is obvious; it's cheaper not to pay people, but the other reason is more interesting. If you don't pay people, they are more committed to the cause. Again, it's cognitive dissonance. If you pay me ten thousand dollars a month to work for you, I'll work for you and I'll think "I'm doing it for ten thousand dollars a month, that makes a lot of sense," but if I do it for nothing then I have to ask myself, "Why am I doing it?" And I will conclude I must think very highly of you. Therapy for free tends to be useless therapy. This is one-- [laughs] Therapists ask for money for all sorts of reasons, including they like money. But one reason why they ask for money is if you don't pay for therapy you don't think it has any value. You have to give up something. So, cognitive dissonance will lead you then to think that what you are giving it up for has some value and then you establish a liking for it. Finally, cognitive dissonance shows up with children. One of the most robust and replicated findings in education or developmental psychology is very simple. You take two groups of kids and you ask them to do something like draw pictures. Half of the kids you reward. Maybe you give them a sticker or a toy. The other half you don't reward. Now, according to sort of a simple-minded view of operant conditioning in behaviorist psychology, the children you reward should do it more. That's how operative conditioning works. In fact though, the children who you reward later on think that this activity has less value and they are less likely to do it when there's no reward present. And the idea, again, is the kids who don't get rewarded say to themselves, "Well, I just spent time doing it, it must have an intrinsic value," while the children who get rewarded say, "I did it for the sticker. I did it for the toy. I don't care much for this." And so, rewarding children has a danger, which is if you give them too much reward and too much a value for what they're doing they will denigrate the activity. Now, we need to be careful here about what's going on. It's not simple inconsistency. So, go back to this insufficient justification effect. So, the dollar group rated a task as more fun than the twenty dollar group. And it's true; each group needed a justification for lying about the task. Each group needed a justification for saying how interesting the task was, but they each had a justification. They were each doing it for money after all. So, cognitive dissonance is a little bit more subtle. It's not just that there's a clash. Rather, we adjust our beliefs to make ourselves look more moral and rational than we are. Go back to hazing. There's a perfectly good reason why I let them do all those things to me. I'm the sort of person who will let people do those things to me. The problem is that's not an answer I could live with. So, cognitive dissonance motivates me to create an answer that's more comfortable for me, an answer such as "This must be a really wonderful group with a wonderful bunch of people." And in other words, we are biased to believe that we are terrific. So, to sum up, there are three main findings about you that come out in social psychology. One is you believe everybody notices you even when they don't. You're the hero of your story. The second one is, you're terrific, you are better than average in every possible way, each one of you. And finally, what you do makes sense. If it doesn't make sense, you'll--If it doesn't make sense or, more to the point, if it's something that you do that's foolish or makes you look manipulative or cheap, you'll distort it in your head so that it does make sense. I want to move now to how we think about self and other, how we think about ourselves relative to how we think about other people. And this brings us to the notion of attribution. So, an attribution is a claim about the cause of somebody's behavior and Heider--;Now, there's all sorts of reasons for somebody's behavior. Suppose you insult me or suppose you're very kind to me. I could say you're a kind person or you're a rude person. I could say "this must be a great day for you" or "you must be a lot of--under a lot of stress or you must want something." There's different sorts of attributions we could make to people but Heider's insight is we tend to attribute other people's actions to their personality characteristics, to long-standing aspects of what they are. And this is known as a person bias. And more generally, people tend to give too much weight to the person and not enough weight to the situation. This is also sometimes known as the fundamental attribution error. The fundamental attribution error, which is one of the core ideas in psychology, is that we tend to over-attribute things to a person's personality or desires or nature and not enough to the situation or the context. There's a lot of demonstrations of this. A lot of the demonstrations have to do with intelligence so, for example, there's actually been studies showing that people tend to overestimate the intelligence of professors. Why? Because I stand up here and I talk about the one or more than one thing I know about and so it's easy to infer that I must know a lot but in fact by the time this semester ends I will have tell you--told you everything I know. [laughter] And if you stood up and started talking about everything you knew you'd look really smart too. The best study to show this is a quiz show study, which is you take two people and you flip a coin. And one of them is the quiz master and the quiz master gets to ask questions, any question he or she wants. And the other person has to answer the questions. And if they play seriously, the quiz master's going to destroy the other person. "What was my dog's name?" [laughter] "Well, I don't know." "What's the capital of the city in which I was born?" "Well, I don't know." And then you'd expect a third person watching this to say, "Who cares? It's just--They're just doing this because of the coin they flipped." But in fact, when the person watching this has to assess their intelligence they give the quiz asker a higher intelligence rating than the other person. After all, "He seemed to know a lot of answers. The other person didn't get much right." We tend to fail to discount the situation. If you were giving a job talk--and this is for people in graduate school particularly--If you were giving a job talk and the slide projector breaks, you're screwed. Nobody is going to say to themselves, "Oh, well, it's not such a good talk because the slide projector broke." They'll say, "It's not such a good talk because of the person." Somebody could give a talk and we could throw smarties at them the whole time and then you could--then the other people would say, "The person looked kind of upset during the whole talk. [laughter] I wonder--They seemed like a nervous type." [laughter] This can be taken to extremes and the biggest extreme is the case of actors, which is if there's ever a case--Anybody know who this is, the actor? [laughter] Have none of you been alive in 1950? [laughter] This is Robert Young. Does anybody know the part he plays? He played an--He played a doctor called Marcus Welby in this famous show "Marcus Welby, M.D.," and Marcus Welby was a wonderful doctor. He was compassionate and kind, he made house calls, he saved lives, he counseled people, and it turned out that Robert Young was then deluged with mail, thousands of pieces of mail, by people asking for his advice on health matters. [laughter] And he then, in a twist, exploited the fundamental attribution error--people confusing the actor for the role--exploited this by going on TV and espousing the benefits of Sanka decaffeinated coffee where he produced the famous line "I am not a doctor but I play one on TV," [laughter] whereupon people heard this and said, "Well, he must have some authority then about medical matters." [laughter] It turns out that the confusion between actors and their roles is extremely common. Many people, for instance, view Sylvester Stallone as either an actual hero during the Vietnam War or sort of a hero during the Vietnam War given all his Rambo stuff but in fact, of course, he played--he was in a Swiss boarding school teaching girls age twelve through fifteen during the Vietnam War. But it doesn't seem that way because the role infects how we think about the person. When this movie came out twenty years ago they needed a character to play a gay man. According to IMDb, where I get all my information, they hit up all the big stars, Harrison Ford, Michael Douglas, and Richard Gere, and they all turned it down because they didn't want to play a gay man because people would think that they were gay. Finally, they got Harry Hamlin to do it, who was kind of a B-list sort of guy. The biggest extreme of the fundamental attribution error, confusing the actor for his role, is Leonard Nimoy who, because he played the emotionless Vulcan, Spock, on Star Trek, was then repeatedly viewed by people who saw him on the street as if he was an actual Vulcan. [laughter] He got sufficiently upset about this to write a book called I Am Not Spock where he described all the ways in which he was not a Vulcan. [laughter] His career, where he attempted many times to play roles that were different from his Vulcan nature, stalled until finally many years later he gave up and wrote another book called I Am Spock [laughter] where he finally conceded to the fundamental attribution error. [laughter] If I gave this lecture ten years ago, I would say that the fundamental attribution error is a human universal, something that we're born with, a fundamental aspect of human nature. This is not entirely true though and we know that through some very interesting cross-cultural research that compares these biases across different countries, in this study between the United States and India. And it turns out that for whatever reason, and it would take another course to talk about the different explanations, but people start off at, say, age eight not committing the fundamental attribution error but in Western cultures, where there's an ideology perhaps that people are in charge of their own destiny, the error occurs and people over-attribute the role to the person. In some Eastern cultures there's more of a view about faith and more attributions to situation. And this has been shown in many ways. For instance, if you look at newspaper reports about murders, in cultures like the United States the report tends to emphasize the personal characteristics of the person accused of the murder. In countries like India, the reports tend to emphasize, to a greater degree, the situation that the person found himself in that might have driven him to commit a murder. So, this is an important reminder that just because we find something in our culture and just because it might well be pervasive doesn't mean necessarily that it's universal. So, to summarize so far, and we're going to look at this a little bit more for the rest of this lecture, we've talked about two morals in social psychology. One is enhancement of the self but the other is what you can call "oversimplification of the other." So, we know ourselves that our behavior is due to a complicated cluster of the situation and our personal natures. When things go badly, in fact, we'll blame the situation. When things go well, the self-serving attribution bias, we'll credit ourselves. We don't do this for other people. For other people we're a lot less forgiving. You do something stupid, that's--you're a stupid person. I do something stupid, it's an off day. And so, you have this difference between how we think about ourselves and how we think about other people. Let's talk a little bit about what we think about other people and start by talking about why we like other people. And here I'm going to some extent to go over material that was raised earlier in the course in Peter Salovey's wonderful lecture. So, some of this, our liking of other people, is obvious and we talked about it in Dean Salovey's lecture, we talked about it when we talked about sexual attractiveness. We like people who are honest, who are kind, who are smart, who are funny, but study after study finds more fundamental processes are also at work and here is a list of three of them. One is proximity. We tend to like people who we're close to physically, who we are physically and spatially close to, who we spend a lot of time with. In one study they looked at a housing project in Manhattan and they asked people where their best friend was and 90% of them said, "My best friend is in the same building as me," and 50% of them says the same floor. Ask yourself who is your best friend at Yale. For how many of you is it somebody in your same college? Okay. How many in a different college? So, call it a tie but then there's a lot more colleges that aren't yours than the one--How many of you would you--say your best friend is somebody your--currently on your same floor? Yeah. If you were going to marry somebody from this class, it is the person you are sitting next to? [laughter] Now, in some sense this is an--a rather trivial finding. Of course you're going to get more involved in people you encounter frequently. How else is it going to work? But it's actually more than that. The more you see something the more you like it and this is sometimes known as "the mere exposure effect." The mere exposure effect is simply seeing something makes it likable perhaps because it becomes comfortable and safe. In one study by James Cutting, Cutting taught an Introduction to Psychology course and before each lecture he'd flash pictures on the screen. He'd have a screen saver showing pictures on the screen, paintings, and didn't say anything about them. People would sit down, look at them while they prepared their notes. At the end of the semester he then asked people to rate different pictures as to how much they liked them, and even though people had no memory of seeing one or--versus the other they tend to like the pictures more that they had seen before. They were somehow familiar and somehow more likable. If I showed you a picture of yourself versus a mirror image of yourself and asked which one you'd like more, the answer is very strong. You'd like your mirror image more because the mirror image is what you tend to see from day to day. If I showed your best friend a picture of you versus a mirror image picture of you, your best friend would say he or she likes the picture more because that corresponds to what he or she sees each day. Familiarity is itself a desire for liking, a force for liking. Similarity--we like people who are similar to us. Friends tend to be highly similar to one another. So do husbands and wives. Now, to some extent, similarity is hard to pull apart from proximity. So, the fact that you are similar to your friends at Yale might just be because you are close to your friends at Yale and people who are at Yale tend to be fairly similar to one another. But there's a lot of evidence that similarity, above and beyond proximity, has an effect on attractiveness and on liking. Similarity predicts the success of a marriage and through a phenomena people aren't exactly sure about, couples become more and more similar over the course of a relationship. Finally, people like good-looking people. People like attractive people. Physically attractive people are thought to be smarter, more competent, more social and nicer. Now, some of you who are very cynical and/or very good looking might wonder "yes, but good-looking people like me actually are smarter, more competent, more social and morally better." This is not a crazy response. It is--it could be, for instance, that the advantages of being good looking make your life run a lot easier. Teachers are more responsive to you, people treat you better, you have more opportunities to make your way through the world, you make more money, you have more access to things, and that could, in turn, cause you to improve your life. This would be what's known in the Bible as a "Matthew effect." A Matthew effect is a developmental psychology phrase for the sort of thing where, well, as Jesus said, "For unto everyone that hath shall be given and he shall have abundance." That means if you're good looking you'll also be smart but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. It's a long version of the rich get richer and the poor even lose what they hath. So, there's a variety of studies suggesting that teachers rate attractive children as smarter and higher achieving. Adults think that when an ugly kid misbehaves it's because they have an ugly soul [laughter] while the attractive kid, "oh, that little scamp, somebody must have been bothering him." When I was in the University of Arizona and we lived next--and all I remember of my neighborhood is we lived next to this little boy and his name was Adonis. [laughter] Cute kid, but come on. [laughter] Also in mock trials judges give longer prison sentences to ugly people. [laughter] That's the Matthew effect, those who hath little get even that taken away and thrown into prison. There is a recent study, which I'll tell you about but I am not comfortable with it as an experiment. The study observed people in a shopping--in a parking lot of a supermarket and found that parents were a lot rougher to the kids if their kids are ugly than if their kids are good looking. And they attribute it to the fact that, for all sorts of reasons, the ugly kid just matters less to the parent. I was watching a poker game once on TV and somebody who lost said, and I quote, "They beat me like an ugly stepchild" [laughter] and the fate of the ugly stepchild is, in fact, not a very good fate but this is not a good study. For one thing, and I don't know how to phrase this in a politically correct way, but the parents of ugly kids are likely to themselves be ugly people [laughter] and maybe what they're finding is just ugly people are more violent than good-looking people. [laughter] This is an excellent time to stop the lecture [laughter] so I'm going to stop the lecture and we're going to continue social psychology on Wednesday.
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Introduction_to_Psychology_with_Paul_Bloom
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5_What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Baby_The_Development_of_Thought.txt
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Professor Paul Bloom: So, most of what we do these days – our methods, our theories, our ideas – are shaped, to some extent, by Piaget's influence. And so, what I want to do is begin this class that's going to talk about cognitive development by talking about his ideas. His idea was that children are active thinkers; they're trying to figure out the world. He often described them as little scientists. And incidentally, to know where he's coming from on this, he had a very dramatic and ambitious goal. He didn't start off because he was interested in children. He started off because he was interested in the emergence of knowledge in general. It was a discipline he described as genetic epistemology – the origins of knowledge. But he studied development of the individual child because he was convinced that this development will tell him about the development of knowledge more generally. There's a very snooty phrase that--I don't know if you ever heard it before. It's a great phrase. It's "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." And the idea of this--What that means is that development of an individual mimics or repeats development of the species. Now, it's entirely not true, but it's a beautiful phrase and Piaget was committed to this. He was very interested in saying, "Look. We'll figure how a kid develops and that will tell us about the development of knowledge more generally." So, Piaget viewed the child as a scientist who developed this understanding, these schemas, these little, miniature theories of the world. And they did this through two sorts of mechanisms: assimilation and accommodation. So, assimilation would be the act of expanding the range of things that you respond to. Piaget's example would be a baby who's used to sucking on a breast might come to suck on a bottle or on a rattle. That's changing the scope of things that you respond to. Accommodation is changing how you do it. A baby will form his mouth differently depending on what he's sucking on. And so, these processes where you take in--I'm giving this in a very physical way, but in a more psychological sense you have a way of looking at the world. You could expand it to encompass new things, assimilation. But you could also change your system of knowledge itself – accommodation. And Piaget argued that these two mechanisms of learning drove the child through different stages. And he had a stage theory, which was quite different from the Freudian stage theory that we have been introduced to. So his methods were to ask children to solve problems and to ask them questions. And his discoveries that--they did them in different ways at different ages led to the emergence of the Stage Theory. So, for Piaget, the first stage is the sensorimotor stage or the sensorimotor period. For here the child is purely a physical creature. The child has no understanding in any real way of the external world. There's no understanding of the past, no understanding of the future, no stability, no differentiation. The child just touches and sees, but doesn't yet reason. And it's through this stage that a child gradually comes to acquire object permanence. Object permanence is the understanding that things exist when you no longer see them. So those of you in front, you're looking at me and I go. It occurred to me it'd be a great magic trick if I then appeared in back. But no, I'm just here. That's object permanence. If I went under here and then the people said, "Where the hell did he go? Class is over," that would show a lack of object permanence. So, adults have object permanence. Piaget's very interesting claim is that kids don't. Before six-month-olds, Piaget observed, you take an object the kid likes like a rattle, you hide it, you put it behind something, it's like it's gone. And he claimed the child really thinks it's just gone. Things don't continue to exist when I'm not looking at them anymore. And so he noticed they--they're surprised by peek-a-boo. And Piaget's claim was one reason why they're surprised at peek-a-boo is you go--you look at a kid, the kid's smiling and go, "Oh, peek-a-boo," and you close--and you cover your face and the kid says, "He's gone." "Peek-a-boo." "Oh, there he is. He's gone." And you really--That's the claim. Piaget also discovered that older children fail at a task that's known as the A-not-B task. And Peter Gray in his psychology textbook refers to it as the "changing hiding places" problem, which is probably a better name for it. And here's the idea. You take a nine-month-old and for Piaget a nine-month-old is just starting to make sense of objects and their permanence. You take an object and you put it here in a cup where the kid can't see it, but it's in the cup. So the kid, if you were the kid, will reach for it. You do it again, reach for it. You do it again, reach for it. That's point A. Then you take--you move it over here. Piaget observed kids would still reach for this. It's like they're not smart enough to figure out that it's not there anymore, even if they see it move. And this was more evidence that they just don't understand objects, and that this thing takes a lot of time and learning to develop. The next stage is the preoperational stage. The child starts off grasping the world only in a physical way, in a sensorimotor way, but when he gets to the preoperational period the capacity to represent the world, to have the world inside your head, comes into being. But it's limited and it's limited in a couple of striking ways. One way in which it's limited is that children are egocentric. Now, egocentrism has a meaning in common English which means to be selfish. Piaget meant it in a more technical way. He claimed that children at this age literally can't understand that others can see the world differently from them. So, one of his demonstrations was the three mountains task. We have three mountains over there. You put a child on one side of the mountains and you ask him to draw it, and a four- or five-year-old can do it easily, but then you ask him to draw it as it would appear from the other side and children find this extraordinarily difficult. They find it very difficult to grasp the world as another person might see it. Another significant finding Piaget had about this phase of development concerns what's called "conservation." The notion of conservation is that there's ways to transform things such that some aspects of them change but others remain the same. So, for instance, if you take a glass of water and you pour it into another glass that's shallow or tall, it won't change the amount of water you have. If you take a bunch of pennies and you spread them out, you don't get more pennies. But kids, according to Piaget, don't know that and this is one of the real cool demonstrations. Any of you who have access to a four- or five-year-old, [laughter] a sibling or something--Do not take one without permission, but if you have access to a four- or five-year-old you can do this yourself. This is what it looks like. The first one has no sound. The second one is going to be sound that's going to come on at the end. But there's two rows of checkers. She asks the kid which one has more. The kid says they're the same. Then she says--Now she asks him which one has more, that or that. So that's really stupid. And it's an amazing finding kids will do that and it's a robust finding. Here's another example. So, they're the same. So, it's a cool finding of that stage, suggesting a limitation in how you deal and make sense of the world. The next phase, concrete operations, from seven to twelve, you can solve the conservation problem, but still you're limited to the extent you're capable of abstract reasoning. So the mathematical notions of infinity or logical notions like logical entailment are beyond a child of this age. The child is able to do a lot, but still it's to some extent stuck in the concrete world. And then finally, at around age twelve, you could get abstract and scientific reasoning. And this is the Piagetian theory in very brief form. Now, Piaget fared a lot better than did Freud or Skinner for several reasons. One reason is these are interesting and falsifiable claims about child development. So claims that--about the failure of conservation in children at different ages could be easily tested and systematically tested, and in fact, there's a lot of support for them. Piaget had a rich theoretical framework, pulling together all sorts of observations in different ways, wrote many, many books and articles and articulated his theory very richly. And most of all, I think, he had some really striking findings. Before Piaget, nobody noticed these conservation findings. Before Piaget, nobody noticed that babies had this problem tracking and understanding objects. At the same time, however, there are limitations in Piaget's theory. Some of these limitations are theoretical. It's an interesting question as to whether he really explains how a child goes from a concrete thinker to an abstract thinker, or how he goes from not having object permanence to understanding object permanence. There's methodological limitations. Piaget was really big into question and answer, but one problem with this is that children aren't very good with language, and this might lead you to underestimate how much they know. And this is particularly a problem the younger you get. Methodology is going to loom heavy in the discussion of any science and that includes psychology. Often 90% of the game is discovering a clever method through which to test your hypotheses. We're going to talk a little bit about that regarding babies. I'll give you another example from a very different domain. There was a set of scientists interested in studying tickling. So, when you tickle somebody, under what circumstances will they laugh? Where do you have to tickle them? Can you tickle yourself? Does it have to be a surprise, and so on? It turns out very difficult to study this in a lab. You're not going to have your experimental credit. You come into the lab and say, "Okay. I'm the graduate student. Ha, ha, ha." And [laughter] in fact, an example of a methodological attempt was done by Henry Gleitman at University of Pennsylvania, who built a tickle machine, which was this box with these two giant hands that went "r-r-r-r." This was a failure because people could not go near the tickle machine without convulsing in laughter. But we will discuss when we have a lecture on laughter a bit of the tickle sciences. And finally there's factual. What do infants and children really know? It's possible that due to the methodological limitations of Piaget, he systematically underestimated what children and babies know. And in fact, I'll present some evidence suggesting that this is in fact--that this is the case. So, I want to introduce you to the modern science of infant cognition. Infant cognition has been something studied for a very long time. And there was a certain view that has had behind it a tremendous philosophical and psychological consensus. And it's summarized in this Onion headline here. And the idea is that babies are stupid, that babies really don't know much about the world. Now, the work that this Onion headline is satirizing is the recent studies, which I'm going to talk about, suggested that on the contrary, babies might be smarter than you think. And to discover the intelligence of babies we have to ourselves be pretty smart in developing different techniques. To study what a baby knows, you can't ask your questions. Babies can't talk. You could look at what it does but babies are not very coordinated or skilled so you need to use clever methods. One clever method is to look at their brain waves [laughter]. This child on the right died during testing. It was a tragic--It was crushed by the weights [laughter] of the electrodes. He's happy though. You could study their brain waves. One of the few things babies can do is they could suck on a pacifier. And you might think, well, how could you learn anything from that? Well, for instance, you could build machines that when babies suck on a pacifier they hear music or they hear language, and then you could look at how much they suck on the pacifier to determine what they like. But undeniably we know most of our--we got most of our knowledge about babies from studies of their looking times. That's one thing babies can do. They can look. And I have up here--This is a picture of Elizabeth Spelke, who is a developmental psychologist who's developed the most research on looking at babies' looking times and what you could learn from them. And I have here two ways you could learn from looking. One is preference. So for instance, suppose you want to know, for whatever reason, do babies like the looks of dogs or cats? Well, you could put a baby down, have a picture of a dog here, a picture of a cat here, and see which one the baby looks at. Babies can move their eyes and that could tell you something. Do babies distinguish pretty faces from ugly faces? Well, put a pretty face here, an ugly face here, see if the baby prefers to look at the pretty one. You could also do habituation and surprise. And much of the studies I'm going to talk about here involve habituation and surprise. Habituation is a fancy word for boredom. What you do is you show a baby something over and over again. Now, remember from behaviorism the baby will learn this isn't very interesting. Then you show the baby something different. If the baby really sees it as different, the baby will look longer, and you could use that as a measure of what babies find different. For instance, suppose you want to know if the baby can tell green from red. Well, you could show the baby a green patch, a green patch, a green patch, a green patch; the baby'll get bored, then a red patch. If they all look the same to the baby, the baby will just continue to tune out, but if the red looks different the baby will perk up. And this is, in fact, one way they study color vision in babies. Surprise is related to this. You could show babies something that shouldn't happen. If babies are like--If babies also think it shouldn't happen, they might look longer, and essentially what happens is scientists do magic tricks to explore this very thing. And to start with some real examples, a lot of this infant research has gone back to the Piagetian question of object permanence, asking, "Is it really true babies don't know that objects remain even when they're out of sight?" So one very simple study by Spelke and Baillargeon: Have babies shown a block with a bar going back and forth like that. So the bar just goes back and forth. Now, there's something you do that's so obvious you probably don't even know you're doing it. When you see a display like that, what you assume is there's a bar there, and what that means is there's something in the middle that you've never seen before. But of course, if you were a simple perceptual creature, you would just see that there'd be a bar on top and a bar on the bottom. You wouldn't expect anything in the middle because you never saw anything in the middle. So, what you do then is you show babies this and then you show them either B or C and if we do this with adults you expect B, C is almost a joke. And, in fact, babies respond the same way. Babies expect there to be an entire, complete bar and are surprised and look longer at the broken bar. Other studies, some of them--Well, here's another study by Rene Baillargeon looking at the same thing in a different way. You show the baby, say a six-month-old, a stage with a block on it. Then a screen rises and obscures the block. Now, if the babies expect the block to still be there, they should think the block should stop the screen. On the other hand, if out of sight out of mind, they should expect the screen to keep going. So, what you do is you set up a couple of displays, one where the block is stopped, the other one where you take this away with a trap door and it keeps going. And, as you see, the baby screams when this happens. That doesn't really happen, but they do look longer. One final example of an object permanence study. Some of this work's been done at Yale in Karen Wynn's lab, where they look at babies' understanding of addition and subtraction. And a lot of it is done with real objects, but there's also animated versions so here is an animated example. Babies are surprised. They expect 2 - 1 = 1 and when 2 - 1 = 2 or 3 or 0, they look longer, indicating surprise. And even six-month-olds are sensitive to these rudimentary facts of arithmetic, telling us something about their mathematical knowledge, but also telling us something about that they expect things to remain when they're out of sight. Now, this research suggests that infants' understanding of the physical world is there from the very start, but at the same time not entirely. We know there are certain things babies don't know. Here's an example. Suppose you show babies this. You have a block here and then you have something above there floating in mid air. Babies find this surprising. Even six-month-olds find this surprising. It violates gravity, but six-month-olds aren't smart enough to know that a block just stuck over here is also surprising. Twelve-month-olds will think that it should fall. Six-month-olds don't, and even 12-month-olds don't find anything weird about this, while adults are sophisticated enough to understand that that's an unstable configuration and should fall over. So, although some things are built in, some things develop. And this raises the question of, "How do we explain development?" How do we explain when babies come to know things that they didn't originally know? Well, one answer is neural maturation, growth of the brain. Most of the neurons you have now in your head, right now, you had when you were in your mother's uterus. What happens in development isn't for the most part the growth of new neurons. It's for the most part pruning, getting rid of neurons. So, the neural structures change radically as babies kind of get rid of excess neurons through development. At the same time though, connections between neurons grow like crazy and they--and this process of synaptic growth where there are the connections across different synapses peaks at about two years. Finally, remember myelination, where you sort of get this fatty sheath over your neuron to make it more effective? That also happens through development, and in fact, it goes through development and even teenagers are not fully myelinated. In particular, they're not fully myelinated in their frontal lobes. Recall that frontal lobes are involved in things like restraint and willpower. And so, it could be the problem is the baby's brain doesn't develop yet. Another possibility is there's problems with inhibition. This is related, again, to the frontal lobes and this comes out with the A, not B error. So, remember the baby reaches, reaches, reaches. It's moved, reach, follow, keeps reaching the same place. And it could be that babies don't know anything about objects. But another possibility is once you do something it's kind of hard to stop. It takes a bit of control to stop. And there's all sorts of independent evidence that babies lack this control. The part of their brain that could control certain behaviors is just not active yet. There's a very nice illustration of inhibitory problems from a "Simpsons" episode that actually sort of covers anything you might want to know about developmental differences. And that basically may sum up much of developmental psychology. That the child essentially--he does A, A, A. It's moved. You go, "doh!" and he keeps going for it. And there's some evidence that's true. Adele Diamond who studies this finds that although kids reach for A, they look for B, as if they know it's there but they can't stop themselves from reaching. And we'll continue this theme a little bit later. Finally, it might be kids don't know things. Some things you've got to learn. And this is true in all sorts of domains – in the social world, in the economic world, in the political world – and it's true as well in the physical world. In fact, there's some things even adults don't know. So, here's a study by Michael McCloskey with college students. Here's the idea. You have a tube, a transparent--a tube--a hollow tube, and at the top of the tube you throw a ball through so it whips through the tube and it comes out. The question is, "What happens to it?" Does it go in the path of A, or does it go in the path of B? Without looking around, who votes for A? Who votes for B? Here's the weird thing. Whenever I do this at Yale everybody gets the damn thing right [laughter]. At Johns Hopkins, 50/50, [laughter] for A and B. I got to get a better demo. But anyway, college students not here, show systematic biases of incorrect physical intuitions. Here's a twist, and if you found people who were less wonderful than you all, and asked them you'd get a lot of people saying the curving thing. But here's a twist. Ask somebody, "What if you took a tube and you squirted water through it? Where would the water go?" Nobody chooses B. Everybody knows the water would continue in a straight line, suggesting that when you have experience that helps you out, but in absence of experience you're kind of lost. We've talked about the physical world. What about the social world? What about the world of people? Well, there's a lot of research on this as well. Babies start off with some social preferences. If you take newborn babies--It's very hard to do research with newborn babies actually because of the consent procedure and everything, so most of this work is done in France [laughter], where they have no laws at all. They just rush in to--Women give birth and they rush in and they say, "We are psychologists," and then we do experiments on the babies, and it's terrific. And this is one of them where they compare babies looking at this versus this. Babies like the one that looks like a face. These are newborns. There are some preferences with humans and with other primates to favor faces. Babies are also social animals too, so they're natural mimics. Andrew Meltzoff, for instance, has found that if you go to a newborn baby, and if you find a newborn baby, this is the first thing you should do. Stick your face right up to the newborn baby and go like this and stick your tongue out. And Meltzoff finds that babies more often than not stick their tongues out back, suggesting some sort of social connection from one person to another, and then later on babies are mimics. Babies more often than not will copy the face next to them. Now, these--the nature of these responses, this preferring faces, this sort of mimicry, is a matter of debate, and there's a lot of research going on asking how smart are babies. Can we see--use some of the same methods that we've looked at for the physical world to look at the social world? And to illustrate one of the studies, I'll tell you about a study that I did with Valerie Kuhlmeier and Karen Wynn. And so, what we tested was nine-month-olds and twelve-month-olds, and we showed them movies. So, they're sitting down and they're seeing a movie where one character's going to help a ball achieve a goal, and another character's going to hinder the ball. And then we're going to see whether they expect the ball to approach the one that helped it versus the one that hindered it. So, this is what a baby would see. This is literally the same movie a baby would see in the experiment. The thing is for these sorts of experiments there is a lot of control, so something that's a square in one movie will be a triangle in another movie; something that's on the top in one movie will be on the bottom in another movie. So, this is an example movie but this is what babies would see. And they'd see this over and over again and the question is would they expect babies--would babies expect the one to approach the one that helped it or approach the one that hindered it? And what we find is, statistically, babies look longer when shown a movie where it approaches the one that hindered it versus helped it. And this we take as preliminary evidence that they have a social interpretation. They see this movie as you see this movie in terms of helping and hindering, and somebody going to somebody that helped it versus hindered it. You could then ask--This makes a prediction that babies should themselves prefer the creature who's the helper versus the hinderer, and to explore this, a graduate student in this department, Kiley Hamlin, has started a series of studies where they show babies three-dimensional scenes and then give them the characters and see which one they reach for. So, here's video so you could see how this experiment is done. Now, the next trial is from a different study. A different thing we use, and the baby is given a choice. One thing to know methodologically is the person giving a choice is blind to the study. And blind here is a technical term meaning she had no idea what the baby saw, and the point about this is to avoid either intentional or unintentional sort of trying to get the answer you want. She couldn't do that because she didn't know what the right answer is. So, here's what the baby would see. So, this suggests that some social understanding may be there from the very start. This evidence is tentative, very controversial. But now, I want to raise a huge developmental puzzle and the puzzle is there are some ways in which babies are--not just babies, but young children are very clueless when it comes to people. And so, I have a film clip here of two very nice studies showing babies' ignorant--sorry, young children's ignorance of other people. I'll show you the studies and then we'll briefly discuss what they mean. Professor Paul Bloom: Before discussing that example in a little bit more detail, any questions? What are your questions? Yes, in back. Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: Typically--I don't know for those particular children, but typically on those tasks three-year-olds and young four-year-olds tend to fail, and around the age of four or five kids tend to succeed. There's sort of a period around the age of four, four and a half, where kids make the transition from failure to success. The question, by the way, was when do children--in that video when were the--what were the ages of the children who failed and who passed? Yes. Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: The question of whether discriminant conditioning has been used with babies to explore what sort of concepts they have. I don't know. Does anybody--It has been-- Graduate Student: --It's not as effective-- Professor Paul Bloom: Koleen answered and said that it's not as effective as other methods. Part of the problem with using operant conditioning with babies is it's difficult to get them to behave in any systematic way. So, the looking-time measures tend to be more subtle. Any other questions? Oh. Yes. Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: Oh. The question of why they chose--the baby--the kids chose the rocket ship one as opposed to the Rafael one. It wasn't what they were interested in in the experiment. And my bet is when they chose the stickers they had a pretty good sense of why, of which ones the boys would prefer in those studies. The question of why a boy might prefer one sort of sticker, and you might get a different response with a girl, is going to come up later when we discuss different theories of sex differences. But that was something I think they were just assuming in the study to get it off the ground. Okay. There's a huge debate over what's going on there. And if you listened at the end to the psychologist summarizing the data, the psychologist had a very good and very clear and strong idea of what was going on. It was that children need to know more about minds. The children don't know about that you can do something with the intent to deceive. They don't understand that somebody could choose what you chose in a malicious way. This is possible. This is one respectable theory, but the alternative is they have the right knowledge, but they suffer from problems with inhibition. So, consider both studies. The first study, the one with the deceptive dolls with the big shoes and little shoes, is actually fairly difficult. And it's possible that children kind of got overwhelmed with it, and when asked what would the mother think, who the mother would think stole the food, responded with who really stole the food. And that there's some pull towards the right answer that makes this task difficult. The second one--the second study illustrates this issue even more clearly. Take the boy who kept failing. He kept pointing to the rocket ship and mean monkey kept taking it away. It's possible that he genuinely didn't know what to do, that he wasn't smart enough to understand that he needed to point to the other one. But it's also possible that it's a Homer Simpson-like effect, where when asked to point to what he wants, he just couldn't help but point to the one he wanted. And that the extra work it takes to lie was beyond him. And, in support of the second alternative, even adults find these tasks involving lying and deception more difficult. They were slower at them. We make more mistakes than tasks that don't involve lying and deception. So, I'm raising this not to solve the problem. You'll read more about it in the Peter Gray textbook and more about it in The Norton readings on development, but just to raise this as an interesting area of debate. Another interesting area of debate is, "What's the relationship between different sorts of development?" So, I started off with Piaget, and Piaget, like Freud, believed in general, across the board changes in how children think. An alternative, though, is that there's separate modules, and this is a view developed, again, by Noam Chomsky, and also by the philosopher of mind Jerry Fodor, who claimed that the whole idea of a child developing as a single story is mistaken. What you get instead is there are separate pre-wired systems for reasoning about the world. These systems have some built-in knowledge, and they have to do some learning, but the learning pattern varies from system to system and there's a separateness to them. Why should we take this view seriously? Well, one reason is that there are developmental disorders that seem to involve damage to one system but not to another. And the classic case of this is a disorder known as autism. And autism is something I've always found a fascinating disorder for many reasons. It's actually why I entered psychology. I started off working with children with autism. And it could be taken as a striking illustration of how the social part of your brain is distinct from other parts of your brain. So, what autism is is a disorder that strikes about one in a thousand people, mostly boys. And the dominant problems concern--consist of a lack of social connectedness, problems with language, problems dealing with people, and more generally, a problem of what the psychologist, Simon Baron-Cohen has described as "mind blindness." In that autistic people show no impairments dealing with the physical world, they show no impairments on--they don't necessarily show any impairments on mathematical skills or spatial skills, but they have a lot of problems with people. Now, many autistic children have no language; they're totally shut off from society. But even some of them who'd learned language and who managed to get some sort of independent life, nevertheless will suffer from a severe social impairment. And this could be shown in all sorts of ways. A simple experiment developed by Simon Baron-Cohen goes like this. You show this to three- and four-year-olds. There's four candies there, and you say, "This is Charlie in the middle. Which chocolate will Charlie take?" For most children and most of you, I hope, the answer's pretty clear: This one. Autistic children will often just shrug, say, "How could I know?" because they don't instinctively appreciate that people's interests and desires tend to be attuned to where they're looking. Another sort of task, which is a task that's been done hundreds, perhaps thousands of times, is known as "the false-belief task" and here's the idea. You show the child the following situation. There's a doll named Maxie and Maxie puts the ball in the cupboard. Maxie leaves and a second doll enters. The second doll takes the ball out of the cupboard and puts it under the bed. Maxie comes back and the question is, "Where will Maxie look for the ball?" Now, this is a question about your understanding about minds. The question of where is the ball really is a question about the physical world. Everyone can solve it, but this question is hard. The right answer is Max will--Maxie will look in the cupboard, even though it's not really there because Maxie has a false belief about the world. Three-year-olds find this difficult. Two-year-olds find this difficult. Four-year-olds and five-year-olds are able to pass this task. Normal adults are able to pass this task. Children with autism have serious problems. And often, people with autism who are otherwise very high functioning will fail this task. They'll say, "Oh, he must think it's not--He'll--He's going to check under the bed." Any questions about autism? Yes. Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: Good question. It isn't. They're both experiments designed to tap an appreciation of false belief. The deception one with the shoes and everything looked at it in the course of deception. Can you understand that the mother might think it's that person even though it's really that person? And our kid failed. This is a sort of stripped-down version without all the fanciness but it tests exactly the same thing. Yes. Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: Nobody knows, but there's a theory which won't answer your question but will put it into a broader context. Simon Baron-Cohen argues that there are certain abilities that tend to be more sequestered for males, and other abilities that are more sequestered, more focused on females. Social abilities, he argues, tend to be more female than male. So, the way Baron puts it, provocatively, is to be a man is to suffer from a very mild form of autism [laughter]. The idea is then that autistic individuals suffer from what he calls extreme male brains, and as such, it stands to reason that they'd be more sampled from the male population than the female population. That's such an interesting issue, that again, when we return to talk about sex differences we'll look at that in a little bit more detail to see if it's supported by the evidence. Yes. Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: I'm sorry. Tell me the--Is the severity of autism… Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: It's an interesting question. The question is, "How do you think about the severity of autism with regard to developmental stages?" And sort of surprisingly, autism can't really be thought of in that way. So, it's not like an adult with autism is like a three-year-old or a two-year-old. In some ways, somebody with autism isn't like any child at all, any normally developing child at all. So, it's not really a developmental delay in the way that it might make sense to think about certain forms of retardation. On the other hand, when we think about how severe autism is we do look at things like how much language does the person have, and in that sense, it is related to development. Yes. Student: What are the chances that someone who's autistic would be able to overcome their deficiencies? Professor Paul Bloom: The majority of people with autism. It's a good question. The question is, "What are the chances that somebody with autism will be able to overcome their deficiencies?" Autism is a funny disorder in that there's a lot of media publication and media presentation. Often the people who are showcased in the media tend to be very exceptional. So, there's a woman, Temple Grandin, who's autistic and--Has anybody here heard of Temple Grandin? She wrote some wonderful books about her experience as an autistic person, but she's very unusual. So a lot depends, to answer your question, how one defines autism, and whether one includes Asperger syndrome, which is a limited, a more mild syndrome, as a form of autism. The answer is that the majority of people with autism have severe problems, and will not, and at this stage, with this level of therapy, will not lead a normal life. Student: More specifically, what I meant was, when you showed the example of Rain Man, ere they exceptional [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: Right. The question is about so-called autistic savants. So, Rain Man, the character played by Dustin Hoffman, had extraordinary mathematical abilities. And some people with autism have extraordinary artistic abilities or mathematical abilities or musical abilities and these are amazing. It's an amazing question why they have it but this is a very small minority. This is a very--It's fascinating that it happens at all, that you have severe damage but compensated with some powerful skill. Now, I know I'm answering your question I think in a better way, but it's actually very rare. Most people with autism do not have any exceptional abilities that go along with it. Another question is if you believe in modules--If there are modules, what are they? And so far when reviewing the developmental data we've talked about two of them: physics and people. An object module and a social module. But other people have argued that there is a special module in your brain for dealing with artifacts, that is, things like tables and chairs and cars and forks. Some people have argued there's a module for sociology, for dealing with human groups, races and classes and so on. Some have even argued that there is an intuitive biology, a common-sense biological understanding of the world that's separate from your understanding of people and physics. And, in fact, the most dominant proponent of the view is our very own Frank Keil, Master of Morse College at Yale, who has strongly defended the notion of an intuitive biological module. Final question, just to raise: I've talked in terms of the modular view but there might also be profound general differences between children and adults, not just specific to how you think about objects or how you think about people or how you think about this or how you think about that, but rather more general. And one claim, which we're going to return to briefly next class when we talk about language, is that there's a very, very big difference between a creature that doesn't have language and a creature that does. And part of the claim is that learning a language, learning to speak, reconfigures the human brain in such a way that is really exceptional. And that has no parallel in any other species. And this is an interesting claim and one we'll talk about. Finally, I want to end with an example from Stephen Jay Gould. Suppose you hate development; you hate developmental psychology; you hate babies; you hate children; they're not cute; they're ugly; you don't want to have them; you don't want to study them; you're annoyed that we have to discuss them. Fine. But there are reasons to study development even if you are not interested in children because sometimes developmental studies and developmental data and developmental science can inform questions about adults. And Stephen Jay Gould has a very nice example of this. He asked the question "Is a zebra a black animal with white stripes or a white animal with black stripes?" Now, you could look at adult zebras all day long and you're never going to figure this out. But if you want to know the answer, and I knew it, but I forget what it is--It doesn't matter. But if you wanted to know it you could. You would look at development and you'd watch the embryological development of a zebra and that's how you would learn the answer to your question. In fact, I'll end with a nice quote. This is by the famous biologist, D'Arcy Thompson, who wrote the book On Growth and Form, and it's sort of the model of many developmental psychologists and many evolutionary psychologists so I'll end with this: "Everything is the way it is because it got that way." Okay. I'll see you next week.
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Professor Paul Bloom: I actually want to begin by going back to Freud and hitting a couple of loose ends. There was a point in my lecture on Wednesday where I skipped over some parts. I said, "We don't have time for this" and I just whipped past it. And I couldn't sleep over the weekend. I've been tormented. I shouldn't have skipped that and I want to hit--Let me tell you why I skipped it. The discussion I skipped was the discussion of why we would have an unconscious at all. So, I was talking about the scientifically respectable ideas of Freud and I want to talk about some new ideas about why there could be an unconscious. Now, the reason why I skipped it is I'm not sure this is the best way to look at the question. As we will learn throughout the course, by far the vast majority of what our brains do, the vast majority of what our minds do, is unconscious and we're unaware of it. So the right question to ask may not be, "Why are some things unconscious?" but rather, why is this tiny subset of mental life--why is this conscious? On the other hand, these claims about the utility of unconsciousness, I think, are provocative and interesting. So I just wanted to quickly share them with you. So, the question is, from an evolutionary standpoint, "Why would an unconscious evolve?" And an answer that some psychologists and biologists have given is deception. So, most animals do some deception. And deception defined broadly is simply to act or be in some way that fools others into believing or thinking or responding to something that's false. There's physical examples of deception. When threatened, chimpanzees--their hair stands up on end and that makes them look bigger to fool others to thinking they're more dangerous than they are. There's an angler fish at the bottom of the ocean that has a rod sticking up from the top of its head with a lure to capture other fish – to fool them in thinking that this is something edible and then to themselves be devoured. But humans, primates in general but particularly humans, are masters of deception. We use our minds and our behaviors and our actions continually to try to trick people into believing what's not true. We try to trick people, for instance, into believing that we're tougher, smarter, sexier, more reliable, more trustworthy and so on, than we really are. And a large part of social psychology concerns the way in which we present ourselves to other people so as to make the maximally positive impression even when that impression isn't true. At the same time, though, we've also evolved very good lie detection mechanisms. So not only is there evolutionary pressure for me to lie to you, for me to persuade you for instance, that if we're going to have a--if you are threatening me don't threaten me, I am not the sort of man you could screw around with. But there's evolutionary pressure for you to look and say, "No. You are the sort of man you could screw around with. I can tell." So how do you become a good liar? And here's where the unconscious comes in. The hypothesis is: the best lies are lies we tell ourselves. You're a better liar, more generally, if you believe the lie that you're telling. This could be illustrated with a story about Alfred Hitchcock. The story goes--He hated working with child actors but he often had to. And the story goes--He was dealing with a child actor who simply could not cry. And, finally frustrated, Hitchcock went to the actor, leaned over, whispered in his ear, "Your parents have left you and they're never coming back." The kid burst into tears. Hitchcock said, "Roll ‘em" and filmed the kid. And the kid, if you were to see him, you'd say, "That's--Boy, he's--he really looks as if he's sad" because he was. If I had a competition where I'd give $100,000 to the person who looks the most as if they are in pain, it is a very good tactic to take a pen and jam it into your groin because you will look extremely persuasively as if you are in pain. If I want to persuade you that I love you, would never leave you, you can trust me with everything, it may be a superb tactic for me to believe it. And so, this account of the evolution of the unconscious is that certain motivations and goals, particularly sinister ones, are better made to be unconscious because if a person doesn't know they have them they will not give them away. And this is something I think we should return to later on when we talk about social interaction and social relationships. One other thing on Freud--just a story of the falsification of Freud. I was taking my younger child home from a play date on Sunday and he asked me out of the blue, "Why can't you marry your mother or your father?" Now, that's actually a difficult question to ask--to answer for a child, but I tried my best to give him an answer. And then I said--then I thought back on the Freud lecture and so I asked him, "If you could marry anybody you want, who would it be?" imagining he'd make explicit the Oedipal complex and name his mother. Instead, he paused for a moment and said, "I would marry a donkey and a big bag of peanuts." [laughter] Both his parents are psychologists and he hates these questions and at times he just screws around with us. [laughter] Okay. Last class I started with Freud and now I want to turn to Skinner. And the story of Skinner and science is somewhat different from the story of Freud. Freud developed and championed the theory of psychoanalysis by himself. It is as close as you could find in science to a solitary invention. Obviously, he drew upon all sorts of sources and predecessors but psychoanalysis is identified as Freud's creation. Behaviorism is different. Behaviorism is a school of thought that was there long before Skinner, championed by psychologists like John Watson, for instance. Skinner came a bit late into this but the reason why we've heard of Skinner and why Skinner is so well known is he packaged these notions. He expanded upon them; he publicized them; he developed them scientifically and presented them both to the scientific community and to the popular community and sociologically in the 1960s and 1970s. In the United States, behaviorism was incredibly well known and so was Skinner. He was the sort of person you would see on talk shows. His books were bestsellers. Now, at the core of behaviorism are three extremely radical and interesting views. The first is a strong emphasis on learning. The strong view of behaviorism is everything you know, everything you are, is the result of experience. There's no real human nature. Rather, people are infinitely malleable. There's a wonderful quote from John Watson and in this quote John Watson is paraphrasing a famous boast by the Jesuits. The Jesuits used to claim, "Give me a child until the age of seven and I'll show you the man," that they would take a child and turn him into anything they wanted. And Watson expanded on this boast, Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed and my own specified world to bring them up and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train them to become any type of specialist I might select--doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant, chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors. Now, you could imagine--You could see in this a tremendous appeal to this view because Watson has an extremely egalitarian view in a sense. If there's no human nature, then there's no sense in which one group of humans by dint of their race or their sex could be better than another group. And Watson was explicit. None of those facts about people will ever make any difference. What matters to what you are is what you learn and how you're treated. And so, Watson claimed he could create anybody in any way simply by treating them in a certain fashion. A second aspect of behaviorism was anti-mentalism. And what I mean by this is the behaviorists were obsessed with the idea of doing science and they felt, largely in reaction to Freud, that claims about internal mental states like desires, wishes, goals, emotions and so on, are unscientific. These invisible, vague things can never form the basis of a serious science. And so, the behaviorist manifesto would then be to develop a science without anything that's unobservable and instead use notions like stimulus and response and reinforcement and punishment and environment that refer to real world and tangible events. Finally, behaviorists believed there were no interesting differences across species. A behaviorist might admit that a human can do things that a rat or pigeon couldn't but a behaviorist might just say, "Look. Those are just general associative powers that differ" or they may even deny it. They might say, "Humans and rats aren't different at all. It's just humans tend to live in a richer environment than rats." From that standpoint, from that theoretical standpoint, comes a methodological approach which is, if they're all the same then you could study human learning by studying nonhuman animals. And that's a lot of what they did. Okay. I'm going to frame my introduction--my discussion of behaviors in terms of the three main learning principles that they argue can explain all of human mental life, all of human behavior. And then, I want to turn to objections to behaviorism but these three principles are powerful and very interesting. The first is habituation. This is the very simplest form of learning. And what this is is technically described as a decline in the tendency to respond to stimuli that are familiar due to repeated exposure. "Hey!" "Hey!" The sudden noise startles but as it--as you hear it a second time it startles less. The third time is just me being goofy. It's just--It's--You get used to things. And this, of course, is common enough in everyday life. We get used to the ticking of a clock or to noise of traffic but it's actually a very important form of learning because imagine life without it. Imagine life where you never got used to anything, where suddenly somebody steps forward and waves their hand and you'd go, "Woah," and then they wave their hand again and you'd go, "Whoah," and you keep--[laughter] And there's the loud ticking of a clock and you say, "Hmmm." And that's not the way animals or humans work. You get used to things. And it's actually critically important to get used to things because it's a useful adaptive mechanism to keep track on new events and objects. It's important to notice something when it's new because then you have to decide whether it's going to harm you, how to deal with it, to attend to it, but you can't keep on noticing it. And, in fact, you should stop noticing it after it's been in the environment for long enough. So, this counts as learning because it happens through experience. It's a way to learn through experience, to change your way of thinking through experience. And also, it's useful because harmful stimuli are noticed but when something has shown itself to be part of the environment you don't notice it anymore. The existence of habituation is important for many reasons. One thing it's important for is clever developmental psychologists have used habituation as a way to study people, creatures who can't talk like nonhuman animals, and young babies. And when I talk on Wednesday about developmental psychology I'll show different ways in which psychologists have used habituation to study the minds of young babies. The second sort of learning is known as classical conditioning. And what this is in a very general sense is the learning of an association between one stimulus and another stimulus, where stimulus is a technical term meaning events in the environment like a certain smell or sound or sight. It was thought up by Pavlov. This is Pavlov's famous dog and it's an example of scientific serendipity. Pavlov, when he started this research, had no interest at all in learning. He was interested in saliva. And to get saliva he had to have dogs. And he had to attach something to dogs so that their saliva would pour out so he could study saliva. No idea why he wanted to study saliva, but he then discovered something. What he would do is he'd put food powder in the dog's mouth to generate saliva. But Pavlov observed that when somebody entered the room who typically gave him the food powder, the dog--the food powder saliva would start to come out. And later on if you--right before or right during you give the dog some food – you ping a bell – the bell will cause the saliva to come forth. And, in fact, this is the apparatus that he used for his research. He developed the theory of classical conditioning by making a distinction between two sorts of conditioning, two sorts of stimulus response relationships. One is unconditioned. An unconditioned is when an unconditioned stimulus gives rise to an unconditioned response. And this is what you start off with. So, if somebody pokes you with a stick and you say, "Ouch," because it hurts, the poking and the "ouch" is an unconditioned stimulus causing an unconditioned response. You didn't have to learn that. When Pavlov put food powder in the dog's mouth and saliva was generated, that's an unconditioned stimulus giving rise to an unconditioned response. But what happens through learning is that another association develops – that between the conditioned stimulus and the conditioned response. So when Pavlov, for instance--Well, when Pavlov, for instance, started before conditioning there was simply an unconditioned stimulus, the food in the mouth, and an unconditioned response, saliva. The bell was nothing. The bell was a neutral stimulus. But over and over again, if you put the bell and the food together, pretty soon the bell will generate saliva. And now the bell--When--You start off with the unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response. When the conditioned stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus are brought together over and over and over again, pretty soon the conditioned stimulus gives rise to the response. And now it's known as the conditioned stimulus giving rise to the conditioned response. This is discussed in detail in the textbook but I also--I'm going to give you--Don't panic if you don't get it quite now. I'm going to give you further and further examples. So, the idea here is, repeated pairings of the unconditioned stimulus and the conditioned stimulus will give rise to the response. And there's a difference between reinforced trials and unreinforced trials. A reinforced trial is when the conditioned stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus go together. You're--and to put it in a crude way, you're teaching the dog that the bell goes with the food. An unreinforced trial is when you get the food without the bell. You're not teaching the dog this. And, in fact, once you teach an animal something, if you stop doing the teaching the response goes away and this is known as extinction. But here's a graph. If you get--They really count the number of cubic centimeters of saliva. The dog is trained so that when the bell comes on--Actually, I misframed it. I'll try again. When the bell comes connected with food, there's a lot of saliva. An unreinforced response is when the bell goes on but there's no food. So, it's--Imagine you're the dog. So, you get food in your mouth, "bell, food, bell, food," and now "bell." But next you get "bell, bell, bell." You give it up. You stop. You stop responding to the bell. A weird thing which is discussed in the textbook is if you wait a while and then you try it again with the bell after a couple of hours, the saliva comes back. This is known as spontaneous recovery. So, this all seems a very technical phenomena related to animals and the like but it's easy to see how it generalizes and how it extends. One interesting notion is that of stimulus generalization. And stimulus generalization is the topic of one of your articles in The Norton Reader, the one by Watson, John Watson, the famous behaviorist, who reported a bizarre experiment with a baby known as Little Albert. And here's the idea. Little Albert originally liked rats. In fact, I'm going to show you a movie of Little Albert originally liking rats. See. He's okay. No problem. Now, Watson did something interesting. As Little Albert was playing with the rat, "Oh, I like rats, oh," Watson went behind the baby--this is the--it's in the chapter--and banged the metal bar right here . The baby, "Aah," screamed, started to sob. Okay. What's the unconditioned stimulus? Somebody. The loud noise, the bar, the bang. What's the unconditioned response? Crying, sadness, misery. And as a result of this, Little Albert grew afraid of the rat. So there--what would be the conditioned stimulus? The rat. What would be the conditioned response? Fear. Excellent. Moreover, this fear extended to other things. So, this is a very weird and unpersuasive clip. But the idea is--the clip is to make the point that the fear will extend to a rabbit, a white rabbit. So, the first part, Little Albert's fine with the white rabbit. The second part is after he's been conditioned and he's kind of freaked out with the white rabbit. The problem is in the second part they're throwing the rabbit at him but now he's okay. [laughter] Is the mic on? Oh. This is fine. This is one of a long list of experiments that we can't do anymore. So, classical conditioning is more than a laboratory phenomena. The findings of classical conditioning have been extended and replicated in all sorts of animals including crabs, fish, cockroaches and so on. And it's been argued to be an extension of--it's argued to underlie certain interesting aspects of human responses. So, I have some examples here. One example is fear. So, the Little Albert idea--The Little Albert experiment, provides an illustration for how phobias could emerge. Some proportion of people in this room have phobias. Imagine you're afraid of dogs. Well, a possible story for the--for why you became afraid of dogs is that one day a dog came up and he was a neutral stimulus. No problem. And all of a sudden he bit you. Now the pain of a bite, being bit, and then the pain and fear of that is an unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response. You're just born with that, "ow." But the presence of the dog there is a conditioned stimulus and so you grew to be afraid of dogs. If you believe this, this also forms the basis for ways for a theory of how you could make phobias go away. How do you make conditioned stimulus, conditioned response things go away? Well, what you do is you extinguish them. How do you extinguish them? Well, you show the thing that would cause you to have the fear without the unconditioned stimulus. Here's an illustration. It's a joke. Sorry. He's simultaneously confronting the fear of heights, snakes, and the dark because he's trapped in that thing and the logic is--the logic of--the logic is not bad. He's stuck in there. Those are all the--his conditioned stimulus. But nothing bad happens so his fear goes away. The problem with this is while he's stuck in there he has this screaming, horrific panic attack and then it makes his fear much worse. So, what they do now though, and we'll talk about this much later in the course when we talk about clinical psychology--but one cure for phobias does draw upon, in a more intelligent way, the behaviorist literature. So, the claim about a phobia is that there's a bad association between, say dog and fear, or between airplanes or snakes and some bad response. So, what they do is what's called, "systematic desensitization," which is they expose you to what causes you the fear but they relax you at the same time so you replace the aversive classical conditioned fear with something more positive. Traditionally, they used to teach people relaxation exercises but that proves too difficult. So nowadays they just pump you full of some drug to get you really happy and so you're really stoned out of your head, you're and this isn't so bad. It's more complicated than that but the notion is you can use these associative tools perhaps to deal with questions about fear, phobias and how they go away. Hunger. We'll spend some time in this course discussing why we eat and when we eat. And one answer to why we eat and when we eat is that there's cues in the environment that are associated with eating. And these cues generate hunger. For those of you who are trying to quit smoking, you'll notice that there's time--or to quit drinking there's times of the day or certain activities that really make you want to smoke or really make you want to drink. And from a behaviorist point of view this is because of the associative history of these things. More speculatively, classical conditioning has been argued to be implicated in the formation of sexual desire, including fetishes. So a behaviorist story about fetishes, for instance, is it's straightforward classical conditioning. Just as your lover's caress brings you to orgasm, your eyes happen to fall upon a shoe. Through the simple tools of classical conditioning then, the shoe becomes a conditioned stimulus giving rise to the conditioned response of sexual pleasure. This almost certainly is not the right story but again, just as in phobias, some ideas of classical conditioning may play some role in determining what we like and what we don't like sexually. And in fact, one treatment for pedophiles and rapists involved controlled fantasies during masturbation to shift the association from domination and violence, for instance, to develop more positive associations with sexual pleasure. So the strong classical conditioning stories about fetishes and fears sound silly and extreme and they probably are but at the same time classical conditioning can be used at least to shape the focus of our desires and of our interests. Final thought actually is--Oh, yeah. Okay. So, what do we think about classical conditioning? We talked about what habituation is for. What's classical conditioning for? Well, the traditional view is it's not for anything. It's just association. So, what happens is the UCS and the CS, the bell and the food, go together because they happen at the same time. And so classical conditioning should be the strongest when these two are simultaneous and the response to one is the same as the response to the other. This is actually no longer the mainstream view. The mainstream view is now a little bit more interesting. It's that what happens in classical conditioning is preparation. What happens is you become sensitive to a cue that an event is about to happen and that allows you to prepare for the event. This makes certain predictions. It predicts that the best timing is when the conditioned stimulus, which is the signal, comes before the unconditioned stimulus, which is what you have to prepare for. And it says the conditioned response may be different from the unconditioned response. So, move away from food. Imagine a child who's being beaten by his father. And when his father raises his hand he flinches. Well, that's classical conditioning. What happened in that case is he has learned that the raising of a hand is a signal that he is about to be hit and so he responds to that signal. His flinch is not the same response that one would give if one's hit. If you're hit, you don't flinch. If you're hit, you might feel pain or bounce back or something. Flinching is preparation for being hit. And, in general, the idea of what goes on in classical conditioning is that the response is sort of a preparation. The conditioned response is a preparation for the unconditioned stimulus. Classical conditioning shows up all over the place. As a final exercise, and I had to think about it--Has anybody here seen the movie "Clockwork Orange"? A lot of you. It's kind of a shocking movie and unpleasant and very violent but at its core one of the main themes is right out of Intro Psych. It's classical conditioning. And a main character, who is a violent murderer and rapist, is brought in by some psychologists for some therapy. And the therapy he gets is classical conditioning. In particular, what happens is he is given a drug that makes him violently ill, extremely nauseous. And then his eyes are propped open and he's shown scenes of violence. As a result of this sort of conditioning, he then – when he experiences real world violence – he responds with nausea and shock; basically, training him to get away from these acts of violence. In this example--Take a moment. Don't say it aloud. Just take a moment. What's the unconditioned stimulus? Okay. Anybody, what's the unconditioned stimulus? Somebody just say it. The drug. What's the unconditioned response? Nausea. What's the conditioned stimulus? Violence. What's the conditioned response? Perfect. The third and final type of learning is known as operant conditioning or instrumental conditioning. And this is the thing, this is the theory championed and developed most extensively by Skinner. What this is is learning the relationships between what you do and how successful or unsuccessful they are, learning what works and what doesn't. It's important. This is very different from classical conditioning and one way to see how this is different is for classical conditioning you don't do anything. You could literally be strapped down and be immobile and these connections are what you appreciate and you make connections in your mind. Instrumental conditioning is voluntary. You choose to do things and by dint of your choices. Some choices become more learned than others. So, the idea itself was developed in the nicest form by Thorndike who explored how animals learn. Remember behaviorists were entirely comfortable studying animals and drawing extrapolations to other animals and to humans. So, he would put a cat in a puzzle box. And the trick to a puzzle box is there's a simple way to get out but you have to kind of pull on something, some special lever, to make it pop open. And Thorndike noted that cats do not solve this problem through insight. They don't sit in the box for a while and mull it over and then figure out how to do it. Instead, what they do is they bounce all around doing different things and gradually get better and better at it. So, what they do is, the first time they might scratch at the bars, push at the ceiling, dig at the floor, howl, etc., etc. And one of their behaviors is pressing the lever. The lever gets them out of the box, but after more and more trials they stopped scratching at the bars, pushing at the ceiling and so on. They just pressed the lever. And if you graph it, they gradually get better and better. They throw out all of these behaviors randomly. Some of them get reinforced and those are the ones that survive and others don't get reinforced and those are the ones that go extinct. And it might occur to some of you that this seems to be an analogy with the Darwinian theory of natural selection where there's a random assortment of random mutations. And sexual selections give rise to a host of organisms, some of which survive and are fit and others which aren't. And in fact, Skinner explicitly made the analogy from the natural selection of species to the natural selection of behavior. So this could be summarized as the law of effect, which is a tendency to perform – an action's increased if rewarded, weakened if it's not. And Skinner extended this more generally. So, to illustrate Skinnerian theory in operant conditioning I'll give an example of training a pig. So here is the idea. You need to train a pig and you need to do so through operant conditioning. So one of the things you want to do is--The pig is going to do some things you like and some things you don't like. And so what you want to do, basically drawing upon the law of effect, is reinforce the pig for doing good things. Suppose you want the pig to walk forward. So, you reinforce the pig for walking forward and you punish the pig for walking backward. And if you do that over the fullness of time, your reinforcement and punishment will give rise to a pig who walks forward. There's two--One technical distinction that people love to put on Intro Psych exams is that the difference between positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. Reinforcement is something that makes the behavior increase. Negative reinforcement is very different from punishment. Negative reinforcement is just a type of reward. The difference is in positive reinforcement you do something; in negative reinforcement you take away something aversive. So, imagine the pig has a heavy collar and to reward the pig for walking forward you might remove the heavy collar. So, these are the basic techniques to train an animal. But it's kind of silly because suppose you want your pig to dance. You don't just want your pig to walk forward. You want your pig to dance. Well, you can't adopt the policy of "I'm going to wait for this pig to dance and when it does I'm going to reinforce it" because it's going to take you a very long time. Similarly, if you're dealing with immature humans and you want your child to get you a beer, you can't just sit, wait for the kid to give you a beer and uncap the bottle and say, "Excellent. Good. Hugs." You've got to work your way to it. And the act of working your way to it is known as shaping. So, here is how to get a pig to dance. You wait for the pig to do something that's halfway close to dancing, like stumbling, and you reward it. Then it does something else that's even closer to dancing and you reward it. And you keep rewarding it as it gets closer to closer. Here's how to get your child to bring you some beer. You say, "Johnny, could you go to the kitchen and get me some beer?" And he walks to the kitchen and then he forgets why he's there and you run out there. "You're such a good kid. Congratulations. Hugs." And then you get him to--and then finally you get him to also open up the refrigerator and get the beer, open the door, get the--and in that way you can train creatures to do complicated things. Skinner had many examples of this. Skinner developed, in World War II, a pigeon guided missile. It was never actually used but it was a great idea. And people, in fact--The history of the military in the United States and other countries includes a lot of attempts to get animals like pigeons or dolphins to do interesting and deadly things through various training. More recreational, Skinner was fond of teaching animals to play Ping-Pong. And again, you don't teach an animal to play Ping-Pong by waiting for it to play Ping-Pong and then rewarding it. Rather, you reward approximations to it. And basically, there are primary reinforcers. There are some things pigs naturally like, food for instance. There are some things pigs actually automatically don't like, like being hit or shocked. But in the real world when dealing with humans, but even when dealing with animals, we don't actually always use primary reinforcers or negative reinforcers. What we often use are things like--for my dog saying, "Good dog." Now, saying "Good dog" is not something your dog has been built, pre-wired, to find pleasurable. But what happens is you can do a two-step process. You can make "Good dog" positive through classical conditioning. You give the dog a treat and say, "Good dog." Now the phrase "good dog" will carry the rewarding quality. And you could use that rewarding quality in order to train it. And through this way behaviorists have developed token economies where they get nonhuman animals to do interesting things for seemingly arbitrary rewards like poker chips. And in this way you can increase the utility and ease of training. Finally, in the examples we're giving, whenever the pig does something you like you reinforce it. But that's not how real life works. Real life for both humans and animals involved cases where the reinforcement doesn't happen all the time but actually happens according to different schedules. And so, there is the distinction between fixed schedules versus ratios – variable schedules and ratio versus interval. And this is something you could print out to look at. I don't need to go over it in detail. The difference between ratio is a reward every certain number of times somebody does something. So, if every tenth time your dog brought you the newspaper you gave it hugs and treats; that's ratio. An interval is over a period of time. So, if your dog gives you--if your dog, I don't know, dances for an hour straight, that would be an interval thing. And fixed versus variable speaks to whether you give a reward on a fixed schedule, every fifth time, or variable, sometimes on the third time, sometimes on the seventh time, and so on. And these are--There are examples here and there's no need to go over them. It's easy enough to think of examples in real life. So, for example, a slot machine is variable ratio. It goes off after it's been hit a certain number of times. It doesn't matter how long it takes you for--to do it. It's the number of times you pull it down. But it's variable because it doesn't always go off on the thousandth time. You don't know. It's unpredictable. The slot machine is a good example of a phenomena known as the partial reinforcement effect. And this is kind of neat. It makes sense when you hear it but it's the sort of finding that's been validated over and over again with animals and nonhumans. Here's the idea. Suppose you want to train somebody to do something and you want the training such that they'll keep on doing it even if you're not training them anymore, which is typically what you want. If you want that, the trick is don't reinforce it all the time. Behaviors last longer if they're reinforced intermittently and this is known as "the partial reinforcement effect." Thinking of this psychologically, it's as if whenever you put something in a slot machine it gave you money, then all of a sudden it stopped. You keep on doing it a few times but then you say, "Fine. It doesn't work," but what if it gave you money one out of every hundred times? Now you keep on trying and because the reinforcement is intermittent you don't expect it as much and so your behavior will persist across often a huge amount of time. Here's a good example. What's the very worst thing to do when your kid cries to go into bed with you and you don't want him to go into bed with you? Well, one--The worst thing to do is for any--Actually, for any form of discipline with a kid is to say, "No, absolutely not. No, no, no, no." "Okay." And then later on the kid's going to say, "I want to do it again" and you say no and the kid keeps asking because you've put it, well, put it as in a psychological way, not the way the behaviorists would put it. The kid knows okay, he's not going to get it right away, he's going to keep on asking. And so typically, what you're doing inadvertently in those situations is you're exploiting the partial reinforcement effect. If I want my kid to do something, I should say yes one out of every ten times. Unfortunately, that's the evolution of nagging. Because you nag, you nag, you nag, the person says, "Fine, okay," and that reinforces it. If Skinner kept the focus on rats and pigeons and dogs, he would not have the impact that he did but he argued that you could extend all of these notions to humans and to human behavior. So for an example, he argued that the prison system needs to be reformed because instead of focusing on notions of justice and retribution what we should do is focus instead on questions of reinforcing good behaviors and punishing bad ones. He argued for the notions of operant conditioning to be extended to everyday life and argued that people's lives would become fuller and more satisfying if they were controlled in a properly behaviorist way. Any questions about behaviorism? What are your questions about behaviorism? [laughter] Yes. Student: [inaudible]--wouldn't there be extinction after a while? [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: Good question. The discussion was over using things like poker chips for reinforcement and the point is exactly right. Since the connection with the poker chips is established through classical conditioning, sooner or later by that logic the poker chips would lose their power to serve as reinforcers. You'd have to sort of start it up again, retrain again. If you have a dog and you say "Good dog" to reward the dog, by your logic, which is right, at some point you might as well give the dog a treat along with the "Good dog." Otherwise, "Good dog" is not going to cut it anymore. Yes. Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: As far as I know, Skinner and Skinnerian psychologists were never directly involved in the creation of prisons. On the other hand, the psychological theory of behaviorism has had a huge impact and I think a lot of people's ways of thinking about criminal justice and criminal law has been shaped by behaviorist principles. So for instance, institutions like mental institutions and some prisons have installed token economies where there's rewards for good behavior, often poker chips of a sort. And then you could cash them in for other things. And, to some extent, these have been shaped by an adherence to behaviorist principles. Okay. So, here are the three general positions of behaviorism. (1) That there is no innate knowledge. All you need is learning. (2) That you could explain human psychology without mental notions like desires and goals. (3) And that these mechanisms apply across all domains and across all species. I think it's fair to say that right now just about everybody agrees all of these three claims are mistaken. First, we know that it's not true that everything is learned. There is considerable evidence for different forms of innate knowledge and innate desires and we'll look--and we'll talk about it in detail when we look at case studies like language learning, the development of sexual preference, the developing understanding of material objects. There's a lot of debate over how much is innate and what the character of the built-in mental systems are but there's nobody who doubts nowadays that a considerable amount for humans and other animals is built-in. Is it true that talking about mental states is unscientific? Nobody believes this anymore either. Science, particularly more advanced sciences like physics or chemistry, are all about unobservables. They're all about things you can't see. And it makes sense to explain complex and intelligent behavior in terms of internal mechanisms and internal representations. Once again, the computer revolution has served as an illustrative case study. If you have a computer that plays chess and you want to explain how the computer plays chess, it's impossible to do so without talking about the programs and mechanisms inside the computer. Is it true that animals need reinforcement and punishment to learn? No, and there's several demonstrations at the time of Skinner suggesting that they don't. This is from a classic study by Tolman where rats were taught to run a maze. And what they found was the rats did fine. They learn to run a maze faster and faster when they're regularly rewarded but they also learn to run a maze faster and faster if they are not rewarded at all. So the reward helps, but the reward is in no sense necessary. And here's a more sophisticated illustration of the same point. Professor Paul Bloom: And this is the sort of finding, an old finding from before most of you were born, that was a huge embarrassment for the Skinnerian theory, as it suggests that rats in fact had mental maps, an internal mechanism that they used to understand the world – entirely contrary to the behaviorist idea everything could be explained in terms of reinforcement and punishment. Finally, is it true that there's no animal-specific constraints for learning? And again, the answer seems to be "no." Animals, for instance, have natural responses. So, you could train a pigeon to peck for food but that's because pecking for food is a very natural response. It's very difficult to train it to peck to escape a situation. You can train it to flap its wings to escape a situation but it's very difficult to get it to flap its wings for food. And the idea is they have sort of natural responses that these learning situations might exploit and might channel, but essentially, they do have certain natural ways of acting towards the world. We know that not all stimuli and responses are created equal. So, the Gray textbook has a very nice discussion of the Garcia effect. And the Garcia effect goes like this. Does anybody here have any food aversions? I don't mean foods you don't like. I mean foods that really make you sick. Often food aversions in humans and other animals can be formed through a form of association. What happens is suppose you have the flu and you get very nauseous and then at the same point you eat some sashimi for the first time. The connection between being nauseous and eating a new food is very potent. And even if you know intellectually full well that the sashimi isn't why you became nauseous, still you'll develop an aversion to this new food. When I was younger – when I was a teenager – I drank this Greek liqueur, ouzo, with beer. I didn't have the flu at the time but I became violently ill. And as a result I cannot abide the smell of that Greek liqueur. Now, thank God it didn't develop into an aversion to beer but-- [laughter] Small miracles. But the smell is very distinctive and for me--was new to me. And so, through the Garcia effect I developed a strong aversion. What's interesting though is the aversion is special so if you take an animal and you give it a new food and then you give it a drug to make it nauseous it will avoid that food. But if you take an animal and you give it a new food and then you shock it very painfully it won't avoid the new food. And the idea is that a connection between what something tastes and getting sick is natural. We are hard wired to say, "Look. If I'm going to eat a new food and I'm going to get nauseous, I'm going to avoid that food." The Garcia effect is that this is special to taste and nausea. It doesn't extend more generally. Finally, I talked about phobias and I'll return to phobias later on in this course. But the claim that people have formed their phobias through classical conditioning is almost always wrong. Instead, it turns out that there are certain phobias that we're specially evolved to have. So, both humans and chimpanzees, for instance, are particularly prone to develop fears of snakes. And when we talk about the emotions later on in the course we'll talk about this in more detail. But what seems likely is the sort of phobias you're likely to have does not have much to do with your personal history but rather it has a lot to do with your evolutionary history. Finally, the other reading you're going to do for this part--section of the course is Chomsky's classic article, his "Review of Verbal Behavior." Chomsky is one of the most prominent intellectuals alive. He's still a professor at MIT, still publishes on language and thought, among other matters. And the excerpt you're going to read is from his "Review of Verbal Behavior." And this is one of the most influential intellectual documents ever written in psychology because it took the entire discipline of behaviorism and, more than everything else, more than any other event, could be said to have destroyed it or ended it as a dominant intellectual endeavor. And Chomsky's argument is complicated and interesting, but the main sort of argument he had to make is--goes like this. When it comes to humans, the notions of reward and punishment and so on that Skinner tried to extend to humans are so vague it's not science anymore. And remember the discussion we had with regard to Freud. What Skinner--What Chomsky is raising here is the concern of unfalsifiablity. So, here's the sort of example he would discuss. Skinner, in his book Verbal Behavior, talks about the question of why do we do things like talk to ourselves, imitate sounds, create art, give bad news to an enemy, fantasize about pleasant situations? And Skinner says that they all involve reinforcement; those are all reinforced behaviors. But Skinner doesn't literally mean that when we talk to ourselves somebody gives us food pellets. He doesn't literally mean even that when we talk to ourselves somebody pats us on the head and says, "Good man. Perfect. I'm very proud." What he means, for instance, in this case is well, talking to yourself is self-reinforcing or giving bad news to an enemy is reinforcing because it makes your enemy feel bad. Well, Chomsky says the problem is not that that's wrong. That's all true. It's just so vague as to be useless. Skinner isn't saying anything more. To say giving bad news to an enemy is reinforcing because it makes the enemy feel bad doesn't say anything different from giving bad news to an enemy feels good because we like to give bad news to an enemy. It's just putting it in more scientific terms. More generally, Chomsky suggests that the law of effect when applied to humans is either trivially true, trivially or uninterestingly true, or scientifically robust and obviously false. So, if you want to expand the notion of reward or reinforcement to anything, then it's true. So why did you come--those of you who are not freshmen--Oh, you--Why did you come? All of you, why did you come to Yale for a second semester? "Well, I repeated my action because the first semester was rewarding." Okay. What do you mean by that? Well, you don't literally mean that somebody rewarded you, gave you pellets and stuff. What you mean is you chose to come there for the second semester. And there's nothing wrong with saying that but we shouldn't confuse it with science. And more generally, the problem is you can talk about what other people do in terms of reinforcement and punishment and operant conditioning and classical conditioning. But in order to do so, you have to use terms like "punishment" and "reward" and "reinforcement" in such a vague way that in the end you're not saying anything scientific. So, behaviorism as a dominant intellectual field has faded, but it still leaves behind an important legacy and it still stands as one of the major contributions of twentieth century psychology. For one thing, it has given us a richer understanding of certain learning mechanisms, particularly with regard to nonhumans. Mechanisms like habituation, classical conditioning and operant conditioning are real; they can be scientifically studied; and they play an important role in the lives of animals and probably an important role in human lives as well. They just don't explain everything. Finally, and this is something I'm going to return to on Wednesday actually, behaviorists have provided powerful techniques for training particularly for nonverbal creatures so this extends to animal trainers. But it also extends to people who want to teach young children and babies and also want to help populations like the severely autistic or the severely retarded. Many of these behaviorist techniques have proven to be quite useful. And in that regard, as well as in other regards, it stands as an important contribution.
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Introduction_to_Psychology_with_Paul_Bloom
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7_Conscious_of_the_Present_Conscious_of_the_Past_Language.txt
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Professor Paul Bloom: Two follow-ups on yesterday's--I'm sorry, on Monday's lecture. One is that somebody came up after class and asked when the preference for your own language emerges in development and fortunately, studies pretty much exactly this sort of infant understanding. She knew the answer. There's been studies looking at newborn babies finding that pretty much the moment they pop out they favor their own language over other language--over other languages. And this suggests that they are listening while in utero, while in the womb, to the rhythms of their language and developing a preference for it. A second issue is, I talked very briefly about a court case in which the person was--said at a moment where someone else was pointing a gun at a police officer, "Let him have it!" and a police officer was killed. And that person was charged with murder but I admitted I didn't actually know how things turned out and was kind enough to do extensive research. Well, he went to Wikipedia and [laughter] found out the answer. The answer is he was tried and found guilty for murder. He was then subsequently pardoned. In fact, he was pardoned in 1988, which is really nice except he was executed in 1957. But they did it into a movie. So, it's a movie. Okay. So, I want to do today, for the first part of the lecture, is continue the language lecture and then move to perception, attention, and memory. And what we had spoken about was--We first talked about universals of language, then moved to some detail about the different aspects of language including phonology, morphology, and syntax. We discussed the ways in which language does the amazing things it does, including the fact that language has used arbitrary science or sounds to convey concepts, and that languages exploit a combinatorial system including recursion to put together these symbols into a virtually limitless set of meaningful sentences. We then talked about development and made some remarks about the developmental time course – talking about the emergence of language from babies to – where babies are really good at learning language to you who are not, whose brains have atrophied, whose language capacities are dead. Final issue is to shift to animals. Now that we know something about language, we could then ask do animals use--possess the same sort of language? And if not, can they learn it? Now, there is absolutely no doubt at all that nonhuman animals possess communication systems. This has been known forever and is not a matter of controversy. And if you want to use the term "language" to mean "communication," then the answer is obviously "yes." Dogs and bees and monkeys have language. If you want to use language though in the more technical, narrow sense as anything that has the properties that we discussed earlier, using English and ASL and Spanish and so on as our background, the answer's almost certainly "no." Animal communication systems fall into sort of one of three categories. Either there is a finite list of calls, so vervet monkeys, for instance, have a small list of calls to convey different warnings like "attack from a snake" or "attack from a leopard." There is a continuous analog signal. So, bee dance, for instance, works on this way. Bee dance communicates the location of food sources but doesn't do it in any syntactically structured way. Rather, the intensity of the dance corresponds to the richness of the food source. And then, you get things like random variation on a theme such as birdsong. But what you don't find in any real sense is phonology, morphology, syntax, combinatorial systems or arbitrary names. Now, this much is not particularly controversial. There gets to be a lot of controversy though. This is the summary about nonhuman communication systems. It gets more controversial when we get to famous cases of primates trained by humans such as Kanzi, Nim Chimpsky, and other famous primates that you may well have seen on the Discovery channel and other venues. And this is fairly controversial. If you read the Gray textbook, while nothing in it is particularly inaccurate, I think Gray is actually a little bit too credulous, too believing in the claims that have been made about the abilities of the animals. So many scientists argue, for instance, that animals like Kanzi, even if they can be said to be learning words at all, learn very few of them. And it takes them extensive years of training to learn, unlike a normally developing child who could learn a word in a day or a word in an hour. The utterances often have order but this order tends to be very limited and lacks the recursive properties. And in fact, the lack of recursion is not controversial. Finally, the utterances of chimpanzees--trained chimpanzees are extremely repetitive so what you often see on TV and in documentaries is sort of a sampling. And the sampling could often be very impressive but if you take just what they say at random it tends to look like this. This is typical chimpanzee utterances just taken at random: "Nim eat, Nim eat. Drink, eat, me Nim. Me gum, me gum. Tickle me, Nim play. Me eat, me eat. Me banana, you banana, me you give. Banana me, me eat. Give orange, me give, eat orange, me eat orange." Lila Gleitman once commented that if any normally developing child spoke like this, his parents would rush him screaming to a neurologist. There's a broader question here, which is, "Why would we ever expect a chimpanzee to learn a human language?" We don't normally expect one species to have the capacities associated with another species. So, bats use echolocation to get around and some birds navigate by the stars, but there's not an active research program seeing if cats can use echolocation or dogs could navigate by the stars. And I think one reason why you might be tempted to think, "well, of course chimps must be able to learn language" is because you might be caught in the grips of some bad ideas about language. So, one idea is you might say, "Look. Chimps should use language because chimps are so smart." But the response to this is, "they are smart but we know that smart isn't enough." We know that the human capacity for language is not totally a result of smartness. There are smart children who, due to some deficit in their language capacity, don't speak or understand a language. So, the smartness of chimpanzees does not in itself demonstrate that they should be able to learn language. You might also point out correctly that chimps are our nearest evolutionary relatives, which is right, so you--one would expect on the face of it--it's not unreasonable to expect us to share a lot of abilities with them. On the other hand, we split from them a long time ago and plainly humans are different from chimps. And there was five million years either way and that's more than enough time for a language capacity to evolve. Now, none of this is to say that the study of nonhuman communication systems isn't interesting. From my own--This is my personal opinion I'll raise here. From my own opinion, the study of the attempts to try to teach chimpanzees, or gibbons, or gorillas, a human language like ASL are misguided. It would be as if a team of monkeys kidnapped a human child and tried to train him how to hoot like a monkey. It might be enjoyable but it does not seem to give us any rich insights. What I think is a lot more interesting is the study of these animal communication systems in the wild. There's a linguistics of human language that has delineated the principles that underlie all human languages. It would be as extraordinarily interesting to attempt the same linguistic program to the other communication systems used in the wild such as the cries of vervet monkeys and bee dance. So, this brings the section on language to a close but I want to tell you a few things we didn't talk about. One of the problems with an Intro Psych course is we have to whip through a lot of topics very fast. So, if you were to take a course that focused directly on language you might learn, for instance, more about language in the brain, something touched about very briefly in the textbook but something that has a large literature associated with it. Similarly, and related to this, there's language disorders, disorders like aphasias and disorders like specific language impairment and dyslexia. There is the study of language perception and production. How is it that we do this amazing feat of understanding and producing words in a fraction of a second? Where does that ability come from? There is the study of reading which is, in many ways, different from the study of a language. Remember when Darwin described language as an instinct. He carefully distinguished it from other things that don't come natural to us including reading. And in fact, reading is difficult. Reading is a cultural invention, not every human has it. And unlike language, reading is acquired with tremendous difficulty over many years. On the other hand, reading plainly intersects with language. It's a new way of conveying language, moving out from speech to writing. And the psychology and neuroscience of reading is thus very interesting. There's bilingualism and multilingualism. The questions people in this room typically are going to be interested in is does it matter for how well you learn language whether you're learning one or two or three or four. How is it that a multilingual encodes all these different languages inside a single brain? And so on. Finally, a very hot issue is that of the relationship between language and thought and I'm actually--A few years ago I taught an entire seminar called "Language and Thought" devoted to precisely this question. And it's a cool question and it could break up into two very general questions. One is, "Is language necessary for abstract thought?" And one way to answer that question is to look at creatures without language like babies and chimpanzees and see how smart they are. It might be that they're not--that they're very smart, in which case it would suggest you don't need language for abstract thought. On the other hand, it might be that they have certain cognitive limitations, which would suggest that language is essential for abstract thought. Then there's the related question. Even once you know a language, does the structural properties of the language that you know affect the way you think? And the claim that the language you know affects how you think is sometimes described as linguistic relativity or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. So for instance, there's a lot of research looking at speakers of different languages such as English versus Korean and seeing whether structural differences in these languages affect how you think. Now, some of this work is discussed in the readings, the book--the Gray textbook, and the selections from The Norton Anthology. And this makes up--again, I've showed this to you on Monday--your reading response where you have to address this question and take your best shot at answering it. What are your questions about language? Yes. Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: The question was raised, "Some people learn languages easier than others and how do we explain this?" And the answer is you could ask the question both with regard to first language learning – so some children learn language very quickly, some are very slow – and also with regard to second language learning. Some of you are breezing through your second language requirement here at Yale. Others are struggling and miserable. And there's considerable variation. There's the story of Einstein who was very slow to learn language and didn't speak at all until he was four. And in fact, he was a--He said his first words when all of a sudden he was having supper with his parents and he put down the spoon and he said, "The soup is too hot." And his parents stared in astonishment and said, "You've never spoken before." And he said, "Well, up to now everything's been fine." [laughter] It's not a true story. [laughter] The question of why and where these differences come from, nobody really knows and it's surprisingly hard. There's a slight advantage for being female. Girls are slightly more advanced in language than boys but it's not a big one and you need a hundred people to just see it statistically. There's a big genetic factor. If your parents learned language quickly and learned other languages quickly, you are more likely to. But an understanding of the brain bases of these differences or the cognitive bases or the social bases is just--is largely an open question. Yes. Student: What happens when parents [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: This is actually more the norm around the world than the situation in the United States where kids are exposed to a single language. What happens is children learn both languages. Children are very good, as adults are, of distinguishing different languages on the basis of their sound system and their rhythms so they don't typically confuse them. And then they just learn more than one language. And that's actually more the average state of affairs around the world. Yes. Student: You said that people who are right-handed learn languages [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: The question is about the hemispheric specialization for language. And I don't have actually much more to say than what I said before, which I agree is deeply unsatisfying. If you're right-handed, language is probably in the left side of your brain. How many people here are left-handed? For you we don't know. It varies. Some of you have it in the left side. Some of you have it in the right side. For some of you it's kind of diffuse. Now, why is this? And in fact, why are some people right-handed and others left-handed in the first place? Those are really good questions. Yes. Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: Yes. I'll--Yes, that's--I'll answer that question. And unfortunately, it's going to be the last one and then I'll go to vision. The question is, "Does learning more than one language cause you to learn them slower than just learning one language?" And it would stand to reason that it would. There's a finite amount of mental resources. If I'm just learning English, I use all of it for English. And if I'm learning English and Spanish I kind of got to split. And you'd expect them to be each learned slower. It's one of the surprises of the study of language development that that common-sense view does not appear to be true. Children learning more than one language seem to show no deficit relative--in each of their languages, relative to a child learning just one language. In other words, if I am just learning English and I'm a kid and you're learning English and Spanish and you're a kid, you'll reach the milestones in English the same time I will. Your extra learning of Spanish doesn't seem to affect you. There doesn't seem to be any detriment for learning multiple languages. Another question which comes up is, "Is there any cognitive deficit?" In other words, some people have argued that learning multiple languages sometimes harms children in certain ways. This is a claim that's been made in Quebec, for instance, over the debate over how children should be taught English and French. It does not appear to be the case. There appears to be, as far as we know, no down side to learning many languages when you're young. Does that answer your question? I want to move now to the topic that will take us through today and through the beginning of next week – perception, attention, and memory. And I'm putting them together instead of treating them as separate lectures because there's a sense in which they're the same story. You see a scene. You see this scene and you're looking at it and you're perceiving it. It's coming through your eyes and you're interpreting it and you see something. You see a man and you see a house. If you were to shut your eyes, you could still hold that scene in memory. And a week later, if I'm to ask you about that, "What season was it?" you would do pretty well. This is the story I want to talk about – how we do this. And in the course of this I want to make a series of claims that go something like this. For perception, I want to first persuade you the problem of perception's hard and that successful perception involves educated and unconscious guesses about the world. For attention, I want to suggest that we attend to some things and not others and we miss a surprising amount of what happens in the world. For memory, there are many types of memory. The key to memory is organization and understanding. And you can't trust some of your memories. How many of you remember where you were at 9/11? Many of you are wrong. And I am never going to persuade you of this because you have certain memories. And you could tell the story. Everybody could tell the story where they were when the towers went down. But clever psychologists on September 12 said, "Let's do a study." And they asked people, "Where were you yesterday when you heard the news?" And they told them. And then they went back to them later, a year later, two years later, and said, "Tell me about what happened September 11." And they said, "I remember totally where I was. I have a very--" And then--And often the story was wrong. There is a lot like that which we're going to talk about. And the biggest moral then--so, I put it really, in really big print--We are often wrong about our experiences, both of the present and of right now. So, let's start with perception. There is a story--I went to graduate school at MIT and there was a story there about Marvin Minsky who is the A.I. guru. He--If you've heard the words--the phrase "artificial intelligence," that was him. And if you heard the claim that people are nothing more than machines made of meat--also him. Well, there's a story where he was doing work on robotics and he was interested in building a robot that could do all sorts of cool things that's like a robot. And the story goes the robot had to among--had to write--had to see the world. It had to be able to pick up things and recognize people and see chairs and navigate its way and Minsky said, "That's a tough problem. It's going to take a graduate student a whole summer to figure it out." And he assigned it to a graduate student for a summer project. Visual psychologists, perception psychologists, love that story because the study of computer vision and robotics vision and the attempts to make machines that can identify and recognize objects has been a profound failure. There is, at this point, no machine on earth that could recognize people and objects and things at the level of a really dumb one-year-old. And the reason why is that it's a much harder problem than anybody could have expected. Well, what makes it such a hard problem? Well, one reason why you might think it's an easy problem is you say, "Okay. We have to figure out the problem of how people see. Well, here's what we do." You're in--You're over there and here's your eye. And somehow it has to get to this television monitor and then you look at it and that'll solve the problem of how you see. So, sometimes people say, "Hey. I hear the eye flips things upside down. I guess this guy is going to have to get used to looking at things upside down. That's an interesting problem." No. That's not the way to look at it because that doesn't answer any questions. That just pushes the question back. Fine. How does "he" see? We're not answering anything. Similarly, although the Terminator's view of the world may correspond to that , that doesn't solve any problem of how he actually sees. So, he has all these numbers shooting out there. Well, he has to read the numbers. He has to see this. This is my iTunes. [laughter] That's inadvertent. Here's the right way to think about perception. You got the eye, which is very ugly and bloody, and then around here you have the retina. And the retina is a bunch of nerve cells. And the nerve cells fire at--for some stimulus and not others. And from this array of firings, "firing… not firing… firing… not firing," you have to figure out what the world is. So, a better view is like this. The firings of the neurons could be viewed as an array of numbers. You have to figure out how to get from the numbers to objects and people, and to actions and events. And that's the problem. It's made particularly a difficult problem because the retina is a two-dimensional surface and you have to infer a 3D world from a two-dimensional surface. And this is, from a mathematical point of view, impossible. And what this means is that there--For any two-dimensional image there is an indefinite number of three-dimensional images that correspond to it. So for instance, suppose you have this on your retina, an array of light shaped like that . What does that correspond to in the world? Well, it could correspond to a thing just like that that you're looking for or it could correspond to a square that's tilted backwards. And so, you have to figure out which is which. And the way we solve this problem is that we have unconscious assumptions about how the world works. Our minds contain certain assumptions about how things should be that enable us to make educated guesses from the two-dimensional array on to the three-dimensional world. And I purposefully did not make the slides available for this class ahead of time because I don't want people to cheat, but there are several points where you could look at the slides and confirm that some of the things I'm going to tell you are actually true. And I want to give you three examples. One is color. And I'm going to conflate here color and brightness. The other is objects. The other is depth. First, the problem of color. How do you tell a lump of coal from a snowball? Well, that's a lump of coal and that's a snowball, and it's from Google images. How do you know which is which? Well, a lump of coal you say is black and a snowball is white. How do you know? Well, maybe you have on your retina--Your retina responds to sort of color that hits it. It's oversimplified, but let's assume that this is true. So, this is black coming out and that's white and that's how you tell. But in fact, that can't be right. It can't be right because objects' color is not merely a matter of what material they're made of but of the amount of light that hits it. So, as I walk across the stage I fall into shadow and light, and none of you screams out, "Professor Bloom is changing colors!" Rather, you automatically factor out the change in illumination as this is happening. And this could actually be quite striking. So, you see this display over here. Take a look at those two blocks. I take it you see this one as lighter than that one. You do. You might imagine this is because this strip is lighter than this but it isn't. They're the same. And you won't believe me until you actually print it out and take a look, but they are in fact the same. I'll show it to you. And you could say I'm tricking you but this is the way it works. There's the close-up. So, remember we're comparing this and this. Now, let's take away other parts of the environment and you'll see they're the same. Now you say, "But hold it. This can't be the same as this" but the answer is--goes like this. We know shadows make surfaces darker. We don't know this like "Here's something I know." Rather, we know this in that it's wired up in our brains. So when we see a surface in shadow we automatically assume that it's lighter than it looks, and we see it as lighter. And you could show this by removing the cues to the shadow. And you see it as it really is. And this is an illustration of how the information to your eyes is just one bit of information; the degree of light coming from a single source is one bit of information that you use to calculate certain assumptions and come to a conclusion. Here's a different kind of example: Objects. You see this and you automatically and intuitively segment it into different objects. You segment it into a man and a house and birds and trees. How do you do this? It turns out, to program a computer to segment a scene into different objects is hugely difficult and the question of how we do it is, to some extent, unknown. But one answer to this question is there are certain cues in the environment that are signals that you're dealing with different objects. And these cues are often described as Gestalt principles. So, one example is "proximity." When you see things that are close to each other, you're more likely than not to assume that they belong to the same thing. There's "similarity." That display could correspond to an indefinite number of objects but you naturally tend to see it as two. You do one with one texture pattern, the other with the other texture pattern. "Closure." The fact that this is a closed square here suggests it's a single object . "Good continuation." If you had to judge, this could just as well be two shapes, one that runs from A to C, the other one that runs from D to B. But you don't tend to see it that way. Rather, you tend to see it as one that runs from A to B, the other one that runs from C to D. "Common movement." If things move together they're a single object. And "good form." You see the object over there . In the absence of any other information, you might be tempted to say that's a single thing, a plus sign maybe. This , because it has lousy form, you're more tempted to say it's two things, one thing lying on top of each other. And these are the sort of cues, expectations; none of them are right. There's cases where they could all fool you. But these are useful cues that guide our parceling of the world, our segmenting of the world into distinct objects. Here they are summarized . And here's a case where they fool you . So you might think, if you're suggestible, that there is a triangle here. And this is a case where there are certain cues driving you to think that there's a triangle here. There is, however, no triangle here. If you cover up these little Pacmen here, the triangle goes away. Similarly, there is no square in the middle . There is no square. It's very Matrix. And these are illusions because these are cues that there should be a square there, the regularity of form. Finally, "depth." You see this and you don't--You see it on one level as a flat thing. Another level you look inside the picture and you see, for instance, the man is in front of the house. You look at me and you see the podium. And if you have a terrible neurological disorder you see this strange creature that's half podium leading on to a chest and up to a head that's sort of--the top of him is wiggling and the podium staying still. If you are neurologically normal, you see a man walking back and forth behind a podium. How do you do that? Well, this is really a problem because, I could give you a technical reason why vision is hard, but crudely, you got a two-dimensional retina and you have to figure out a three-dimensional world. How do you do it? And the answer once again is assumptions or cues. There are certain assumptions the visual system makes that aren't always right and in fact, in cases of visual illusions, can be wrong but will guide you to perceive the world in a correct and accurate way. So for example, there is binocular disparity. This is actually a sort of interesting one. This is the only depth cue that involves two eyes. If I look at you pretty close, the image I get here and the image I get here are somewhat different while--or I have to focus my eyes together to get the same image. If I look at you in back, they're almost identical because the further away, given the two eyes that are static, the closer the images look. And it's not, again, that you say to yourself, "Oh. Back there an orange. It's the same image in my right eye and my left eye. You must be far away." Rather, unconsciously and automatically you make estimations on how far people are in depth based on binocular disparity. There is "interposition." How do you know I'm in front of the podium and the podium's not in front of me? No. How do you know the podium's in front of me? Well, from where I'm standing it's right. How do you know the podium is in front of me? Well, because I'm walking here and then it cuts into me. And unless I'm going through a grotesque metamorphosis, what's happening is it makes sense to say I'm moving behind the podium. Interposition. You take the guy. How do you know the guy is standing in front of the house? Well, because there is--you see all of him and he's blocking a lot of the house. There's relative size. How far away am I? Well, if you looked at me and you had to estimate how far away I am, part of the way you'll figure that out is you know how tall a human's supposed to be. If you thought that I was fifty feet tall, you would assume I'm further away than I am. And so, your judgments on size dictate your judgments about distance. Usually, this cue isn't necessary but if you look at the Empire State Building--If you go into a field and you see a tower and you look, your judgment of how far away the tower's going to be depends on your knowledge of how tall a tower should be. If it's this tall, you say, "Oh. It must be--" And then you'd be surprised. There's texture gradient, which I'll explain in a second, and linear perspective, which I'll also explain in a second. Texture gradient goes like this. Remember the problem we had before. How do you know if that thing is this object or an object in and of itself? Well, the answer is things with textures will show themselves because the textures will get smaller from a distance. Now, logically, this could still be a single thing standing upright with just dots going up smaller. But the natural assumption is the reason why the dots recede in this regular fashion is because it's receding in depth. Classic illusion – the Mueller-Lyer illusion. People will see this as longer than this . It's not. If you don't believe me, print it out and measure it. Related to the Ponzo illusion, once again people see this one as--you get illusions named after you when you discover these--this one as longer than this . Again, it's not. What's going on here? Well, the top line looks longer even though it isn't. And one explanation for why is, these other lines in the scene cause your visual system to make guesses about distance. And then you correct for distance by making assumptions about size. If you have two lines--You'll get--We'll get in more detail in a second, but if you have two lines and they take up the same amount of space on your retina, but you believe that one is 100 feet away and the other's 50 feet away, the one that's 100 feet away you will see as bigger because your brain will say, "Well, if it takes up just this much space but it's further away, it must be bigger than something that's closer and takes up that much space." And that's what goes on here. For the top line, for the Mueller-Lyer illusion, we assume that this is further away and this is closer based on the cues to distance. And the cue is factored in. And because we assume that this is further away, we assume it must be bigger to take up the same space as this which is closer. Similarly for the Ponzo illusion. There's linear perspective. Parallel lines tend to recede in distance. If this top one is further away than this but they take up the same size in your eye, this one must be bigger and you see it as bigger. And the book offers more details on how these illusions work. I'm going to end with an illusion that I'm not even going to bother explaining. I'll just show it to you because you should be able to, based on thinking about these other illusions, figure it out. It was developed by Roger Shepard. Well, you know that. And they are called Shepard tables . And the thing about it is, these look like two tables. If you ask people--You don't frame in terms of here's a lecture on visual perception. You ask people, "Which of these tables would be easier to get through a door if you have a thin door?" People would say the one on the left. This one looks sort of thicker and harder to get through. This one looks longer and leaner. In fact, they're the same size. What I mean by that is that this is exactly the same as this . Now, I'm going to prove it to you by showing you something which took me--on the computer which took me about seven hours to do. And nobody's going to believe it because I could have faked it. But if you want, print it out and do it yourself. You just take a piece of paper, put it on here. Then you move it and the same. I showed it to somebody and they called me a liar. Anyway, you could do it yourself in the privacy of your own home or study. But what I'd really like you to do after you do it is say, "Okay. Fine. Why does this one look longer and thinner than this one?" And the answer is the same answer that will explain the Mueller-Lyer illusion and the Ponzo illusion, having to do with cues to depth and the way your mind corrects the perception of depth. And that's all I have to say at this point about perception. I want to move now to attention and memory and I'm going to treat attention and memory together. We are fascinated with memory and, in particular, it's particularly interesting when memory goes wrong. It's particularly fascinating what happens in cases of amnesia. So for example, I need a volunteer who is willing to do a little bit of acting, a very little bit, an incredibly little bit. Excellent. Okay. So well, you just stay there. So pretend you have amnesia. Okay? What's your name? Student: I don't know. Professor Paul Bloom: Perfect. I'm really glad you said that. That's the wrong answer because you don't have total amnesia. You still remember English. Okay. It's very clever. Okay. So you couldn't have lost all your memories. You have English. You --So we'll do you. What's your name? Oh. He looks puzzled but he still maintains bowel and bladder control so he hasn't forgotten everything. [laughter] Now, I always lose the third volunteer in that demo. So, what I'm saying is that memory is a hugely broad concept. It includes autobiographical memory, which is what we standardly think. That's a perfectly rational response. When I say somebody's losing their memory, "Oh. I have a movie about somebody losing their memory," you don't imagine a person in diapers. You imagine the person walking around, having sex with cool people and saying, "Where am I?" And [laughter] so what you imagine is you imagine them losing their autobiographical memory, their sense of self. But of course, knowing English is part of your memory and knowing how to stand and knowing how to chew and swallow are all things that you've learned, that you've--that have been molded by experience. There's another distinction which is going to come in regarding amnesia, which is there's broadly two types of amnesia. They often run together, but one type of amnesia is you lose your memory of the past. Another type of amnesia--That's the Matt Damon amnesia. Another type of amnesia though is you lose the ability to form new memories. And here's a film of a man who had exactly this problem. He was a world-renowned choir director and he suffered viral encephalitis which led to brain damage which destroyed most of his temporal lobes, his hippocampus, and a lot of his left frontal lobe. It could be--It could have been worse in that he retains the ability to talk. He seems to be--He's not intellectually impaired. He just can't form new memories and so he lives in this perpetual "now" where just nothing affects him and he feels--This has not always happened. There's more than one of these cases and it doesn't always happen like this, but he feels continually reborn at every moment. And we'll return to this and then ask what's going on here. But there's a few themes here. I want to, before getting into detail about memory, I want to review some basic distinctions in memory when we talk about memory. So crudely, you could make a distinction between sensory memory, short-term memory, which is also known as working memory, and long-term memory. Sensory memory is a residue in your senses. There's a flash of lightning. You might see an afterimage. That afterimage is your sensory memory. There's somewhat of a longer echoic memory for sounds. So as somebody is talking to you even if you're not paying attention you'll store a few seconds of what they're saying, which is sometimes, when somebody's talking to you and you're not listening to them and they say, "You're not listening to me." And you say, "No. You were talking about--" and pick up the last couple of seconds from echoic memory. There's short-term memory. Anybody remember what I just said? If you did, that's short-term memory--spans for a few minutes. And then there's long-term memory. Anybody know who Elvis is? Do you know your name? Do you know where you live? Your long-term memory store that you walk around with and you're not going to lose right away. When we think about amnesia in the movie sense, we think of a certain loss of long-term memory associated with autobiographical personal events. There is a distinction between implicit and explicit, which we'll talk about it in more detail. But explicit, crudely, is what you have conscious access to. So, what you had for dinner last night. You could think back and say, "I had this for dinner last night." Implicit is more unconscious. What the word--what certain word--what the word "had" means, how to walk, how to ride a bicycle, that you might not be able to articulate and might not even be conscious of but still have access to. There's a distinction between semantic memory and episodic memory. Semantic memory is basically facts, what a word means, what's the capital of Canada, and so on. Episodic is autobiography, is what happened to you. That Yale is in New Haven is semantic. That you went on vacation away from New Haven last week, it would be episodic. There is encoding stores and retrieval, which refers to different levels of what happens in memory. Encoding is getting the memory in, as when you study for a test or you have an experience. And storage is holding the memory. And retrieval is getting the memory out. Finally, retrieval is often broken, conveniently, into recall versus recognition, where recall is when you just pull it out of memory and recognition is when you recognize what corresponds to something in the past. Anybody remember what color tie I had on two days ago? Oh. Okay. Well, that would be impossible to remember but if I asked you, "Is it purple or is it orange?" that would be much easier. [laughter] Now, you could break up, crudely, the memory into stages. So you start that sensory memory is just the stuff that comes in leading to short-term memory, leading to long-term memory. And this stage theory is something which we'll discuss in more detail. But this leads us to the issue of attention. How do you get memory from your sensations, from what you're hearing? I'm speaking to you. You're hearing me. How does it ever get in to the other systems? What decides what's remembered and what's not? There's all sorts of things happening to you now. The seat of your chair is pressing against your butt. You wouldn't say, "Oh. I want to remember this forever. The seat's pressing against my butt." [laughter] Your neighbor is exuding a certain sort of smell. You're thinking about something. Your eyes follow him. Not everything gets in memory. You'd go mad if you tried to remember everything. You can't. So, what determines what gets into memory? Well, one answer is "attention does." And attention is--could be crudely viewed as a flashlight, a spotlight on experience that willingly zooms in on something and makes it memorable. Attention has certain properties. Some things come from attention--to attention effortlessly and automatically. Here's an example. You're going to see an array of letters here. One of them's going to be green. When you see the green one, please clap. [laughter] No, not this green one. [laughter] There's going to be another slide. Okay. You're ready now. but there's going to be an "o." When you see it clap. Okay. Sometimes it's work. Find the red "o." [laughter] It's harder. Sometimes attention is involuntary. I need a volunteer. And all I want to do is I want to show you colors on the screen and I'd like you to name the colors as they come out. Do you want this? Student 1: I'm colorblind. Professor Paul Bloom: Oh. [laughter] The first one is easy. See. This is--You have to just go down the colors . Anybody? Okay. Student 2: Red, green, blue, black, green, blue, red, blue, black, red. Professor Paul Bloom: Excellent. [applause] Okay. Now these. These will be words but just name--Okay, you. Just name the colors. Student 3: Green, red, blue, black, blue, red, green, black, red, blue. Professor Paul Bloom: Perfect. Now, we'll go back to you, same deal, words. Student 4: Red, blue, green -- Professor Paul Bloom: No, no, no. Huh uh. Don't--I know you can read. The colors. Student 4: Okay. Sorry. Okay. Blue, green, red, green, black, green, blue, black, red, Professor Paul Bloom: Very good actually. [laughter] That's known as the Stroop effect. Being an expert reader, as you are, your knowledge of reading, your attention to what the words meant, subverted your desire to do the task. You couldn't make that go away even if you wanted to. If somebody gave you $1,000 to read this as fast as you read this, and as fast as you read this, you'd be unable to. You can't block it. There is some work--There are some interesting discoveries about attention. I have a demonstration here. I'd like people actually--It's important--Some of you may have seen this before. It's important for you to be silent throughout it. What you're going to see is you're going to see two teams of basketball players. One of them is going to have white T-shirts. The other one will have black T-shirts. They'll be passing balls back and forth. What I'd like you to do is count in your head how many passes the white team does with the ball. [laughter] What number did people get? Okay. Did anybody notice anything unusual? [laughter] Did anybody not notice anything unusual? Okay. Some people did not notice anything unusual. Those who didn't see anything unusual, watch this again and just watch it. [laughter] About 50% of people when counting, who have never seen this before don't notice anything. But then when you're not counting it's kind of obvious what you're missing. [laughter] And this is one demonstration among many of the fact that when you're attending to something you have a very small window of attention and you lose the focus on other things. Here's another different example. I'd like people to watch a movie and pay attention very closely to what happens in the movie and try to remember this. How many of you noticed something odd in that movie? How many of you didn't? Okay. Now, everybody look at the scarf, the color of the plates and the food, among other things. The phenomena, in general, has been called "change blindness." And what it is is we tend to be--when there's a focus of attention focused in a certain way, we tend to be oblivious to other things that go on in the environment. Often it is, in fact, quite difficult when there's a change in scene to notice what changes and what stays the same. So, in this final demo, there's just going to be two pictures flicking. Could you clap when you see what's different between the two pictures? [applause] [laughter] I myself am terrible at these and so I have a lot of sympathy. How many people never saw it? [laughter] Good. That's very impressive. [laughter] One more time with a different one. [applause] Did anybody not see it? Be honest. I'll give you another try. [applause] Okay. I'll put you out of your misery. [laughter] This is work by Dan Simons and it's part of an extraordinarily interesting body of work on what's known as "change blindness." And what this means is, the phenomena is, we have a very narrow focus of attention and huge changes can happen that we are oblivious to. This is why, in movies, there are so many--so much difficulty with continuity changes. Dan Simons is also famous for having brought this outside of the laboratory in some classic experiments and I'm trying to get the film corresponding to them. What he did was that he did this great study in the Cornell campus where he was--where what happened is they would get some unsuspecting person walking through campus and some guy would come over and say, "Excuse me, Sir. I'm lost. Could you help me with directions?" And have a map and then the person would say, "Sure." And then there'd be two construction workers holding a door. And these guys were going to rudely bump between these two characters and then the experimenter gets switched with another guy. So now, when these two guys walk away, the subject is standing there with an entirely different person. [laughter] What's interesting is nobody notices. [laughter] They notice if the person changes sexes. "Didn't you used to be a woman?" [laughter] And they notice if the experimenter changes races, but most other changes they're oblivious to. There's another experiment. I think Brian Scholl did this one but it may have been Dan Simons where what happens is a subject comes in to the lab. They say, "If you're going to do an experiment with us, you need to sign the human subject form." Hands him the form, the experimenter. The subject signs the form. The experimenter takes the form and says, "Thank you. I'll put it down here." Goes down here and then a different person pops up. [laughter] People don't notice. And there's a certain level on which we're oblivious to changes. What's weird is we don't see--we don't think we are. We think we see the world as it is and we don't know--notice that when we're attending to something; everything else gets blanked out. And so about 50% of people who have never seen this demo before, the gorilla demo, they don't notice the gorilla. And there's--you couldn't imagine anything more obvious. The gorilla study was actually done a very long time ago. And it was originally done in a different way but I'll show it to you just because this is the original study and now that you all know what to expect--Oh, not that one. Oops. Nope. That's actually--If you looked at that quickly, it's a current Yale professor. Oh. I'm never going to get my DVD back. Anyway, I'll show you the other demo on--next week. I will. [laughter] Any questions about attention and memory at this point? Yeah. Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: Yeah. Why does it work that way? Why is it--Why do things that become very practiced become automatic and involuntary? It's a good question. I don't know. We know that they do. We know that once you--that you can't not read once you know how to read. You also can't not listen. If I'm talking to you and I'm extremely boring, but I'm talking to you, it's very hard not to listen. You can't shut off your ears. You could put your fingers in them but you can't shut off your--You also can't shut your eyes without actually shutting them. You can't say, "This is a disgusting movie. I'm not going to attend to it." [laughter] So, that's not answering your question. It's just saying that your observation is a right one and a more general one. When you're good at something and you're over-practiced, it becomes involuntary and you cannot stop it. Okay. Well--Oh. One more in back. Yes. Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: What now? Sorry. Over there. Yeah. Student: [inaudible] right before his accident? Professor Paul Bloom: Did he remember things before his accident? Yes. He had some amnesia of events before his accident but he did remember things. He knew his name and he knew other things about his life. Okay. I'll see you next week.
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Introduction_to_Psychology_with_Paul_Bloom
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2_Foundations_This_Is_Your_Brain.txt
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Professor Paul Bloom: We're going to begin the class proper, Introduction to Psychology, with a discussion about the brain. And, in particular, I want to lead off the class with an idea that the Nobel Prize winning biologist, Francis Crick, described as "The Astonishing Hypothesis." And The Astonishing Hypothesis is summarized like this. As he writes, The Astonishing Hypothesis is that: You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it, "you're nothing but a pack of neurons." It is fair to describe this as astonishing. It is an odd and unnatural view and I don't actually expect people to believe it at first. It's an open question whether you'll believe it when this class comes to an end, but I'd be surprised if many of you believe it now. Most people don't. Most people, in fact, hold a different view. Most people are dualists. Now, dualism is a very different doctrine. It's a doctrine that can be found in every religion and in most philosophical systems throughout history. It was very explicit in Plato, for instance. But the most articulate and well-known defender of dualism is the philosopher Rene Descartes, and Rene Descartes explicitly asked a question, "Are humans merely physical machines, merely physical things?" And he answered, "no." He agreed that animals are machines. In fact, he called them "beast machines" and said animals, nonhuman animals are merely robots, but people are different. There's a duality of people. Like animals, we possess physical material bodies, but unlike animals, what we are is not physical. We are immaterial souls that possess physical bodies, that have physical bodies, that reside in physical bodies, that connect to physical bodies. So, this is known as dualism because the claim is, for humans at least, there are two separate things; there's our material bodies and there's our immaterial minds. Now, Descartes made two arguments for dualism. One argument involved observations of a human action. So, Descartes lived in a fairly sophisticated time, and his time did have robots. These were not electrical robots, of course. They were robots powered by hydraulics. So, Descartes would walk around the French Royal Gardens and the French Royal Gardens were set up like a seventeenth-century Disneyland. They had these characters that would operate according to water flow and so if you stepped on a certain panel, a swordsman would jump out with a sword. If you stepped somewhere else, a bathing beauty would cover herself up behind some bushes. And Descartes said, "Boy, these machines respond in certain ways to certain actions so machines can do certain things and, in fact," he says, "our bodies work that way too. If you tap somebody on the knee, your leg will jump out. Well, maybe that's what we are." But Descartes said that can't be because there are things that humans do that no machine could ever do. Humans are not limited to reflexive action. Rather, humans are capable of coordinated, creative, spontaneous things. We can use language, for instance, and sometimes my use of language can be reflexive. Somebody says, "How are you?" And I say, "I am fine. How are you?" But sometimes I could say what I choose to be, "How are you?" "Pretty damn good." I can just choose. And machines, Descartes argued, are incapable of that sort of choice. Hence, we are not mere machines. The second argument is, of course, quite famous and this was the method. This he came to using the method of doubt. So, he started asking himself the question, "What can I be sure of?" And he said, "Well, I believe there's a God, but honestly, I can't be sure there's a God. I believe I live in a rich country but maybe I've been fooled." He even said, "I believe I have had friends and family but maybe I am being tricked. Maybe an evil demon, for instance, has tricked me, has deluded me into thinking I have experiences that aren't real." And, of course, the modern version of this is The Matrix. The idea of The Matrix is explicitly built upon Cartesian--Descartes' worries about an evil demon. Maybe everything you're now experiencing is not real, but rather is the product of some other, perhaps malevolent, creature. Descartes, similarly, could doubt he has a body. In fact, he noticed that madmen sometimes believe they have extra limbs or they believe they're of different sizes and shapes than they really are and Descartes said, "How do I know I'm not crazy? Crazy people don't think they're crazy so the fact that I don't think I'm crazy doesn't mean I'm not crazy. How do I know," Descartes said, "I'm not dreaming right now?" But there is one thing, Descartes concluded, that he cannot doubt, and the answer is he cannot doubt that he is himself thinking. That would be self-refuting. And so, Descartes used the method of doubt to say there's something really different about having a body that's always uncertain from having a mind. And he used this argument as a way to support dualism, as a way to support the idea that bodies and minds are separate. And so he concluded, "I knew that I was a substance, the whole essence or nature of which is to think, and that for its existence, there is no need of any place nor does it depend on any material thing. That is to say, the soul by which I am, when I am, is entirely distinct from body." Now, I said before that this is common sense and I want to illustrate the common sense nature of this in a few ways. One thing is our dualism is enmeshed in our language. So, we have a certain mode of talking about things that we own or things that are close to us – my arm, my heart, my child, my car – but we also extend that to my body and my brain. We talk about owning our brains as if we're somehow separate from them. Our dualism shows up in intuitions about personal identity. And what this means is that common sense tells us that somebody can be the same person even if their body undergoes radical and profound changes. The best examples of this are fictional. So, we have no problem understanding a movie where somebody goes to sleep as a teenager and wakes up as Jennifer Garner, as an older person. Now, nobody says, "Oh, that's a documentary. I believe that thoroughly true" but at the same time nobody, no adult, no teenager, no child ever leaves and says, "I'm totally conceptually confused." Rather, we follow the story. We can also follow stories which involve more profound transformations as when a man dies and is reborn into the body of a child. Now, you might have different views around--People around this room will have different views as to whether reincarnation really exists, but we can imagine it. We could imagine a person dying and then reemerging in another body. This is not Hollywood invention. One of the great short stories of the last century begins with a sentence by Franz Kafka: "As Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect." And again, Kafka invites us to imagine waking up into a body of a cockroach and we can. This is also not modern. Hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, Homer described the fate of the companions of Odysseus who were transformed by a witch into pigs. Actually, that's not quite right. She didn't turn them into pigs. She did something worse. She stuck them in the bodies of pigs. They had the head and voice and bristles and body of swine but their minds remained unchanged as before, so they were penned there weeping. And we are invited to imagine the fate of again finding ourselves in the bodies of other creatures and, if you can imagine this, this is because you are imagining what you are as separate from the body that you reside in. We allow for the notion that many people can occupy one body. This is a mainstay of some slapstick humor including the classic movie, All of Me--Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin – highly recommended. But many people think this sort of thing really happens. One analysis of multiple personality disorder is that you have many people inside a single body fighting it out for control. Now, we will discuss multiple personality disorder towards the end of the semester and it turns out things are a good deal more complicated than this, but still my point isn't about how it really is but how we think about it. Common sense tells us you could have more than one person inside a single body. This shows up in a different context involving exorcisms where many belief systems allow for the idea that people's behavior, particularly their evil or irrational behavior, could be because something else has taken over their bodies. Finally, most people around the world, all religions and most people in most countries at most times, believe that people can survive the destruction of their bodies. Now, cultures differ according to the fate of the body. Some cultures have the body going to--sorry--the fate of the soul. Some cultures have you going to Heaven or descending to Hell. Others have you occupying another body. Still, others have you occupying an amorphous spirit world. But what they share is the idea that what you are is separable from this physical thing you carry around. And the physical thing that you carry around can be destroyed while you live on. These views are particularly common in the United States. In one survey done in Chicago a few years ago, people were asked their religion and then were asked what would happen to them when they died. Most people in the sample were Christian and about 96% of Christians said, "When I die I'm going to go to Heaven." Some of the sample was Jewish. Now, Judaism is actually a religion with a less than clear story about the afterlife. Still, most of the subjects who identified themselves as Jewish said when they die they will go to Heaven. Some of the sampled denied having any religion at all--said they have no religion at all. Still, when these people were asked what would happen when they would die, most of them answered, "I'm going to go to Heaven." So, dualism is emmeshed. A lot rests on it but, as Crick points out; the scientific consensus now is that dualism is wrong. There is no "you" separable or separate from your body. In particular, there is no "you" separable from your brain. To put it the way cognitive scientists and psychologists and neuroscientists like to put it, "the mind is what the brain does." The mind reflects the workings of the brain just like computation reflects the working of a computer. Now, why would you hold such an outrageous view? Why would you reject dualism in favor of this alternative? Well, a few reasons. One reason is dualism has always had its problems. For one thing, it's a profoundly unscientific doctrine. We want to know as curious people how children learn language, what we find attractive or unattractive, and what's the basis for mental illness. And dualism simply says, "it's all nonphysical, it's part of the ether," and hence fails to explain it. More specifically, dualists like Descartes struggle to explain how a physical body connects to an immaterial soul. What's the conduit? How could this connection be made? After all, Descartes knew full well that there is such a connection. Your body obeys your commands. If you bang your toe or stub your toe you feel pain. If you drink alcohol it affects your reasoning, but he could only wave his hands as to how this physical thing in the world could connect to an immaterial mind. Descartes, when he was alive, was reasonable enough concluding that physical objects cannot do certain things. He was reasonable enough in concluding, for instance, as he did, that there's no way a merely physical object could ever play a game of chess because--and that such a capacity is beyond the capacity of the physical world and hence you have to apply--you have to extend the explanation to an immaterial soul but now we know--we have what scientists call an existence proof. We know physical objects can do complicated and interesting things. We know, for instance, machines can play chess. We know machines can manipulate symbols. We know machines have limited capacities to engage in mathematical and logical reasoning, to recognize things, to do various forms of computations, and this makes it at least possible that we are such machines. So you can no longer say, "Look. Physical things just can't do that" because we know physical things can do a lot and this opens up the possibility that humans are physical things, in particular, that humans are brains. Finally, there is strong evidence that the brain is involved in mental life. Somebody who hold a--held a dualist view that said that what we do and what we decide and what we think and what we want are all have nothing to do with the physical world, would be embarrassed by the fact that the brain seems to correspond in intricate and elaborate ways to our mental life. Now, this has been known for a long time. Philosophers and psychologists knew for a long time that getting smacked in the head could change your mental faculties; that diseases like syphilis could make you deranged; that chemicals like caffeine and alcohol can affect how you think. But what's new is we can now in different ways see the direct effects of mental life. Somebody with a severe and profound loss of mental faculties--the deficit will be shown correspondingly in her brain. Studies using imaging techniques like CAT scans, PET, and fMRI, illustrate that different parts of the brain are active during different parts of mental life. For instance, the difference between seeing words, hearing words, reading words and generating words can correspond to different aspects of what part of your brain is active. To some extent, if we put you in an fMRI scanner and observed what you're doing in real time, by looking at the activity patterns in your brain we can tell whether you are thinking about music or thinking about sex. To some extent we can tell whether you're solving a moral dilemma versus something else. And this is no surprise if what we are is the workings of our physical brains, but it is extremely difficult to explain if one is a dualist. Now, so what you have is--the scientific consensus is that all of mental life including consciousness and emotions and choice and morality are the products of brain activities. So, you would expect that when you rip open the skull and look at the brain; you'd see something glorious, you'd see – I don't know – a big, shiny thing with glass tubes and blinding lights and sparks and wonderful colors. And actually though, the brain is just disgusting. It looks like an old meat loaf. It's gray when you take it out of the head. It's called gray matter but that's just because it's out of the head. Inside the head it's bright red because it's pulsing with blood. It doesn't even taste good. Well, has anybody here ever eaten brain? It's good with cream sauce but everything's good with cream sauce. So, the question is, "How can something like this give rise to us?" And you have to have some sympathy for Descartes. There's another argument Descartes could have made that's a lot less subtle than the ones he did make, which is "That thing responsible for free will and love and consciousness? Ridiculous." What I want to do, and what the goal of neuroscience is, is to make it less ridiculous, to try to explain how the brain works, how the brain can give rise to thought, and what I want to do today is take a first stab at this question but it's something we'll continue to discuss throughout the course as we talk about different aspects of mental life. What I want to do though now is provide a big picture. So, what I want to do is start off small, with the smallest interesting part of the brain and then get bigger and bigger and bigger – talk about how the small part of the brain, the neurons, the basic building blocks of thought, combine to other mental structures and into different subparts of the brain and finally to the whole thing. So, one of the discoveries of psychology is that the basic unit of the brain appears to be the neuron. The neuron is a specific sort of cell and the neuron has three major parts, as you could see illustrated here. Neurons actually look quite different from one another but this is a typical one. There are the dendrites – these little tentacles here. And the dendrites get signals from other neurons. Now, these signals can be either excitatory, which is that they raise the likelihood the neuron will fire, or inhibitory in that they lower the likelihood that the neuron will fire. The cell body sums it up and you could view it arithmetically. The excitatory signals are pluses, the inhibitory ones are minuses. And then if you get a certain number, plus 60 or something, the neuron will fire and it fires along the axon, the thing to the right. The axon is much longer than the dendrites and, in fact, some axons are many feet long. There's an axon leading from your spinal cord to your big toe for instance. It is so shocking the lights go out. Surrounded--Surrounding--To complete a mechanical metaphor that would have led Descartes to despair-- Thank you, Koleen. Surrounding the axon is a myelin sheath, which is actually just insulation. It helps the firing work quicker. So, here are some facts about neurons. There are a lot of them – about one thousand billion of them – and each neuron can be connected to around thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, other neurons. So, it's an extraordinarily complicated computing device. Neurons come in three flavors. There are sensory neurons, which take information from the world so as you see me, for instance, there are neurons firing from your retina sending signals to your brain. There are motor neurons. If you decide to raise your hand, those are motor neurons telling the muscles what to do. And there are interneurons which connect the two. And basically, the interneurons do the thinking. They make the connection between sensation and action. It used to be believed, and it's the sort of thing I would--when I taught this course many years ago I would lecture on--that neurons do not grow back once you lose them. You never get them back. This is actually not true. There are parts of the brain in which neurons can re-grow. One interesting thing about neurons is a neuron is like a gun. It either fires or it doesn't. It's all or nothing. If you squeeze the trigger of a gun really hard and really fast, it doesn't fire any faster or harder than if you just squeezed it gently. Now, this seems to be strange. How could neurons be all or nothing when sensation is very graded? If somebody next to you pushed on your hand--the degree of pushing--you'd be able to notice it. It's not either pushing or not pushing. You can--Degrees of pushing, degrees of heat, degrees of brightness. And the answer is, although neurons are all or nothing, there are ways to code intensity. So, one simple way to code intensity is the number of neurons firing; the more neurons the more intense. Another way to increase intensity is the frequency of firing. So, I'll just use those two. The first one is the number of neurons firing. The second one is the frequency of firing in that something is more intense if it's "bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang" then "bang, bang, bang" and these are two ways through which neurons encode intensity. Now, neurons are connected and they talk to one another and it used to be thought they were tied to one another like a computer, like you take wires and you connect wires to each other, you wrap them around and connect them. It turns out this isn't the case. It turns out that neurons relate to one another chemically in a kind of interesting way. Between any neurons, between the axon of one neuron and the dendrite of another, there's a tiny gap. The gap could be about one ten-thousandths of a millimeter wide. This infinitesimal gap--and this gap is known as a synapse--and what happens is when a neuron fires, an axon sends chemicals shooting through the gap. These chemicals are known as neurotransmitters and they affect the dendrites. So, neurons communicate to one another chemically. These--Again, the chemicals could excite the other neuron (excitatory) bring up the chances it will fire, or inhibit the other neuron (inhibitory). Now, neurotransmitters become interesting because a lot of psychopharmacology, both of the medical sort and the recreational sort, consists of fiddling with neurotransmitters and so you could see this through some examples. There are two sorts of ways you could fiddle with neurotransmitters, and correspondingly two sorts of drugs. There are agonists. And what an agonist does is increases the effect of neurotransmitters, either by making more neurotransmitters or stopping the cleanup of neurotransmitters, or in some cases by faking a neurotransmitter, by mimicking its effects. Then, there are antagonists that slow down the amount of neurotransmitters, either because they destroy neurotransmitters or they make it hard to create more. Or in some cases they go to the dendrite of the neuron and they kind of put a paste over it so that the neurotransmitters can't connect. And it's through these clever ways that neurons can affect your mental life. So, for instance, there is a drug known as Curare and Curare is an antagonist. It's a very particular sort of antagonist. It blocks motor neurons from affecting muscle fibers. What this does then is it paralyzes you because your motor neurons--You send the command to your arm to stand, to lift up. It doesn't work. You send the command to your leg to move. It doesn't work. The motor neurons are deactivated and then, because the way you breathe is through motor neurons, you then die. There's alcohol. Alcohol is inhibitory. Now, this may be puzzling to people. It's mildly paradoxical because you may be thinking, "alcohol is not inhibitory. On the contrary, when I drink a lot of alcohol I lose my inhibitions and become a more fun person. I become more aggressive and more sexually vibrant and simply more beautiful. And so in what way is alcohol inhibitory?" Well, the answer is it inhibits the inhibitory parts of your brain. So, you have parts of your brain that are basically telling you now, largely in the frontal lobes, that are--"Okay. Keep your pants on. Don't hit me, buddy. Don't use bad words." Alcohol relaxes, shuts down those parts of the brain. If you take enough alcohol, it then goes down to inhibit the excitatory parts of your brain and then you fall on the floor and pass out. Amphetamines increase the amount of arousal. In particular, they increase the amount of norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter that's responsible for just general arousal. And so, amphetamines include drugs like "speed" and "coke." There are--Prozac works on serotonin. When we discuss clinical psychology and depression we'll learn the extent to which neurotransmitter disorders are implicated in certain disorders like depression. And one problem is that – for depression – is that there's too little of a neurotransmitter known as serotonin. Prozac makes serotonin more prevalent and so in some extent might help alleviate depression. Parkinson's disease is a disease involving destruction of motor control and loss of motor control, difficulty moving. And one factor in Parkinson's is too little of a neurotransmitter known as dopamine. The drug L-DOPA increases the supply of dopamine and so there is something to alleviate, at least temporarily, the symptoms of Parkinson's. So, you have neurons and they're clustered together and they fire and they communicate to one another. So, how does this all work to give rise to creatures who could do interesting things like talk and think? Well, again, it used to be believed that the brain is wired up like a computer, like a PC or a Mac or something like that, but we know this can't be true. It can't be true because there's two ways in which the brain is better than a computer. For one thing, the brain is highly resistant to damage. If you have a laptop and I persuade you to open it up for me and I take the pliers and kind of snip just about anywhere, your laptop will be destroyed but the brain is actually more resilient. You can take a lot of brain damage and still preserve some mental functioning. To some interesting sense, there's some sort of damage resistance built in to the brain that allows different parts of the brain to take over if some parts are damaged. A second consideration is the brain is extremely fast. Your computer works on wires and electricity but your brain uses tissue and tissue is extremely slow. The paradox then is how do you create such a fast computer with such slow stuff? And you can't. If the brain was wired up like a personal computer, it would take you four hours to recognize a face but, in fact, we could do things extremely quickly. So, the question then is how is the brain wired up? And the answer is, unlike manys, unlike commercially generated computers, the brain works through parallel processing, massively parallel distributed processing. There's a whole lot of research and this is research, some of which takes place outside psychology departments and in engineering departments and computer science departments, trying to figure out how a computer can do the same things brains can do. And one way people do this is they take a hint from nature and they try to construct massively distributed networks to do aspects of reasoning. So, there's a very simple computational network. That is interesting because it kind of looks to some extent like the way neurons look and this is often known as neural networks. And people who study this often claim to be studying neural network modeling to try to build smart machines by modeling them after brains. And in the last 20 years or so, this has been a huge and vibrant area of study where people are trying to wire up machines that can do brain-like things from components that look a lot like neurons and are wired up together as neurons are. One consideration in all of this is that this is a very young field and nobody knows how to do it yet. There is no machine yet that can recognize faces or understand sentences at the level of a two-year-old human. There is no machine yet that can do just about anything people can do in an interesting way. And this is, in part, because the human brain is wired up in an extraordinarily more complicated way than any sort of simple neural network. This is a sort of schematic diagram – you're not responsible for this – of parts of the visual cortex, and the thing to realize about this is it's extraordinarily simplified. So, the brain is a complicated system. Now, so, we've talked a little bit about the basic building blocks of the brain – neurons. We've then talked about how neurons can communicate to one another; then, turned to how neurons are wired up together. Now let's talk a little bit about different parts of the brain. Now, there's some things you don't actually need your brain to do. The study of what you don't need your brain to do has often drawn upon this weird methodology where--This was actually done in France a lot where they would decapitate people and when--After they decapitated people, psychologists would rush to the body of the headless person and sort of just test out reflexes and stuff like that. It's kind of gruesome but we know there are some things you don't need your brain for. You don't need your brain for newborn sucking, limb flexation in withdrawal from pain. Your limbs will pull back even if your head is gone. Erection of the penis can be done without a brain. Vomiting also is done without a brain. Oh. I need a volunteer. Very simple. This will not involve any of--excellent--any of the above. Could you stand up just--Okay. This is a new shirt so I want to stay away. Just--No. This is--If you'll hold out your hand and--one hand flat. Excellent. That's the textbook, 5th edition. Now. Perfect. What you'll notice is--Thank you very much. What you'll notice is this hit and this hand went back up. This is something automatic, instinctive, and does not require your brain. So your brain isn't needed for everything. What does your brain do? Well, some things that your brain does involve very low-level internal structures. And these are called subcortical structures because they're below the cortex. They're underneath the cortex. So, for instance, what we have here is a diagram of the brain. The way to read this diagram is it's as if it were my brain and I am facing this way. My head gets cut in half down here and then you could see the brain. So, this is the front over here. That's the back. Some key parts are illustrated here. The medulla, for instance, is responsible for heart rate and respiration. It's very deep within the brain and if it gets damaged you could--you are likely to die. The cerebellum is responsible for body balance and muscular coordination. And to give you, again, a feeling for the complexity of these systems, the cerebellum contains approximately 30 billion neurons. The hypothalamus is responsible here for feeding, hunger, thirst, and to some extent sleep. And here is the same brain parts in close-up. Now, all of these parts of the brains are essential and many of them are implicated in interesting psychological processes but where the action is is the cortex. Isn't this beautiful? The cortex is the outer layer and the outer layer is all crumpled up. Do you ever wonder why your brain looks wrinkled? That's because it's all crumpled. If you took out somebody's cortex and flattened it out, it would be two feet square, sort of like a nice--like a rug. And the cortex is where all the neat stuff takes place. Fish don't have any of that, so no offense to fish but it's--fish don't have much of a mental life. Reptiles and birds have a little bit about it--of it--and primates have a lot and humans have a real lot. Eighty percent of the volume of our brain, about, is cortex. And the cortex can be broken up into different parts or lobes. There is the--And, again, this is facing in profile forward. There is the frontal lobe, easy to remember. This part in front, the parietal lobe, the occipital lobe, and the temporal lobe. And one theme we're going to return to is--this is half the brain. This is, in fact, the left half of the brain. On the other half, the right half, everything's duplicated with some slight and subtle differences. What's really weird--One really weird finding about these lobes is that they include topological maps. They include maps of your body. There is a cartoon which actually illustrates a classic experiment by some physiologists who for some reason had a dog's brain opened up and started shocking different parts of the brain. You could do brain surgery while fully conscious because the brain itself has no sense organs to it. And it turns out that the dog--When they zapped part of its brain, its leg would kick up. And it took Dr. Penfield at McGill University to do the same thing with people. So, they were doing some brain surgery. He had a little electrical thing just on--I don't know how he thought to do this. He started zapping it and "boom." The person--Parts of their body would move. More than that, when he zapped other parts of the brain, people would claim to see colors. And he zapped other parts of the brain; people would claim to hear sounds; and other parts of the brain, people would claim to experience touch. And through his research and other research, it was found that there are maps in the brain of the body. There is a map in the motor part of the brain, the motor cortex, of the sort up on the left and the sensory cortex of the sort that you could see on the right and if you--and you could tell what's what by opening up the brain and shocking different parts and those parts would correspond to the parts of the body shown in the diagram there. Now, two things to notice about these maps. The first is they're topographical and what this means is that if two parts of the--two parts are close together on the body, they'll be close together on the brain. So, your tongue is closer to your jaw than it is to your hip in the body; so too in both the motor cortex and the somatosensory cortex. Also, you'll notice that the size of the body part represented in the brain does not correspond to the size of the body part in the real world. Rather, what determines the size in the brain is the extent to which either they have motor command over it or sensory control. So, there's a whole lot of sensory organs, for instance, focused along your tongue, and that's why that's so big, and an enormous amount on your face but your shoulder isn't even--doesn't even make it on there because, although your shoulder might be bigger than your tongue, there's not much going on. In fact, if you draw a diagram of a person, what their body is corresponding to the amount of somatosensory cortex, you get something like that. That's your sensory body. Now, so, you have these maps in your head but the thing to realize is--And these maps are part of your cortex, but the things to realize is that's an important part of what goes on in your brain but less than one quarter of the cortex contains these maps or projection areas. The rest is involved in language and reasoning and moral thought and so on. And, in fact, the proportion as you go from rat, cat, and monkey, humans--less and less of it is devoted to projection and there is more and more to other things. So, how do we figure out what the other parts of the brain do? Well, there's all sorts of methods. Typically, these are recent imaging methods like CAT scan and PET scan and fMRI which, as I said before, show parts of your brain at work. If you want to know which part of your brain is responsible for language, you could put somebody into a scanner and have them exposed to language or do a linguistic task or talk or something and then see what parts of their brain are active. Another way to explore what the brain does is to consider what happens to people when very bad things happen to their brain. And these bad things could happen through lesions, through tumors, through strokes, through injury. For the most part, neuropsychologists don't like helmet laws. Neuropsychologists love when motorcyclists drive without helmets because through their horrible accidents we gain great insights into how the brain works. And the logic is if you find somebody--Crudely, if you find somebody with damage to this part of the brain right here and that person can't recognize faces for instance, there's some reason to believe that this part of the brain is related to face recognition. And so, from the study of brain damage and the study of--we can gain some understanding of what different parts of the brain do. And so, people study brain damages--brain damage that implicates motor control such as apraxia. And what's interesting about apraxia is it's not paralysis. Somebody with apraxia can move, do simple movements just fine but they can't coordinate their movements. They can't do something like wave goodbye or light a cigarette. There is agnosia and agnosia is a disorder which isn't blindness because the person could still see perfectly well. Their eyes are intact but rather what happens in agnosia is they lose the ability to recognize certain things. Sometimes this is described as psychic blindness. And so, they may get visual agnosia and lose the ability to recognize objects. They may get prosopagnosia and lose the ability to recognize faces. There are disorders of sensory neglect, some famous disorders. Again, it's not paralysis, it's not blindness, but due to certain parts of your--of damaged parts of your brain, you might lose, for instance, the idea that there's a left side of your body or a left side of the world. And these cases are so interesting I want to devote some chunk to a class in the next few weeks to discussing them. There are disorders of language like aphasia. The classic case was discovered by Paul Broca in 1861. A patient who had damage to part of his brain and can only say one word, "tan," and the person would say, "tan, tan, tan, tan," and everything else was gone. There's other disorders of language such as receptive aphasia where the person could speak very fluently but the words don't make any sense and they can't understand anybody else. Other disorders that we'll discuss later on include acquired psychopathy, where damage to parts of your brain, particularly related to the frontal lobes, rob you of the ability to tell right from wrong. The final--I want to end--We're talking about neurons, connection between neurons, how neurons are wired up, the parts of the brain, what the different parts do. I want to end by talking about the two halves of the brain and ask the question, "How many minds do you have?" Now, if you look at the brain--If you took the brain out and held it up, it would look pretty symmetrical, but it actually is not. There are actual differences between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere. How many people here are right-handed? How many people here are left-handed? How many people here are sort of complicated, ambidextrous, don't know, "bit of the right, bit of left" people? Okay. Those of you who are right-handed, which comprises about nine out of ten people, have language in your left hemisphere. And, in fact, we're going to be talking about right-handed people for the most part, making generalizations in what I'll talk about now. Those of you who are left-handed are more complicated. Some of you have language in your right hemisphere, some in your left hemisphere, some God knows where. It's complicated. Now, the idea is that some things are duplicated. So, if you were to lose half your brain, the other half can actually do a lot but some things are more prevalent and more powerful in one part of the brain than the other. And I want to show you a brief film clip from "Scientific American" that illustrates the differences between the hemispheres, but before doing that, I want to provide some introductory facts. Some functions are lateralized. So, typically, language in the left. Again, this is a right-handed centric thing but if you're right-handed – language on the left, math and music on the right. There is a crossover and this is important when we think about the studies that will follow but the crossover is that everything you see in the left visual field goes to the right side of your brain; everything in the right visual field goes to the left side of the brain, and similarly, there's a crossover in action. So, your right hemisphere controls the left side of the body. Your left hemisphere controls the right side of the body. Now, finally, the two halves are connected. They're connected by this huge web called the corpus callosum. And I'm just going to skip this because the movie illustration will go through some of this. This illustrates certain themes that are discussed in detail in the Gray book, concerning the lateralization of different parts of different mental capacities, some in the left hemisphere, some in the right hemisphere. But it also serves as a useful methodological development, which is a nice illustration as to how looking at people who are incredibly unusual, such as this man who had his brain bisected so his left hemisphere and his right hemisphere don't communicate with one another--how looking at such people, such extreme cases, can provide us with some understanding of how we normally do things. And this, again, is a theme we'll return to throughout the course. This is generally the general introduction of the brain that I wanted to provide, giving the framework for what I'll be talking about later on throughout the course so that I might later on make reference to neurons or neurotransmitters or the cortex or the left hemisphere and you'll sort of have the background to understand what I'm talking about. But I want to end this first real class with a bit of humility as to what psychologists know and don't know. So, the idea behind a lot of psychology – particularly a lot of neuroscience and cognitive psychology – is to treat the mind as an information processor, as an elaborate computer. And so, we study different problems like recognizing faces or language or motor control or logic. The strategy then often is to figure out how, what sort of program can solve these problems and then we go on to ask, "How could this program be instantiated in the physical brain?" So, we would solve--We study people much as we'd study a computer from an alien planet or something. And I think--This strategy is one I'm very enthusiastic about but there still remains what's sometimes called the "hard problem" of consciousness and this involves subjective experience. What's it like? So, my computer can play chess. My computer can recognize numbers. It can do math. And maybe it does it kind of the same way that I do it but my computer doesn't have feelings in the same sense. These are two classic illustrations. This is from a very old "Star Trek" episode. It illustrates angst. I think a starship's about to go into the sun or something. And that's my older kid, Max, who's happy. And so the question is, "How does a thing like that give rise to consciousness and subjective experience?" And this is a deep puzzle. And although some psychologists and philosophers think they've solved it, most of us are a lot more skeptical. Most of us think we have so far to go before we can answer questions like Huxley's question. Huxley points out, "How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djinn…" – of the genie – "…when Aladdin rubs his lamp." It seems like magic that a fleshy lump of gray, disgusting meat can give rise to these feelings. The second bit of humility we'll end the class on is I am presenting here, and I'll be presenting throughout this semester, what you can call a mechanistic conception of mental life. I'm not going to be talking about how beautiful it is and how wonderful it is and how mysterious it is. Rather, I'm going to be trying to explain it. I'm going to be trying to explain fundamental aspects of ourselves including questions like how do we make decisions, why do we love our children, what happens when we fall in love, and so on. Now, you might find this sort of project in the end to be repellant. You might worry about how this, well, this meshes with humanist values. For instance, when we deal with one another in a legal and a moral setting, we think in terms of free will and responsibility. If we're driving and you cut me off, you chose to do that. It reflects badly on you. If you save a life at risk to your own, you're--you deserve praise. You did something wonderful. It might be hard to mesh this with the conception in which all actions are the result of neurochemical physical processes. It might also be hard to mesh a notion such as the purported intrinsic value of people. And finally, it might be hard to mesh the mechanistic notion of the mind with the idea that people have spiritual value. Faced with this tension, there are three possibilities. You might choose to reject the scientific conception of the mind. Many people do. You may choose to embrace dualism, reject the idea that the brain is responsible for mental life, and reject the promise of a scientific psychology. Alternatively, you might choose to embrace the scientific worldview and reject all these humanist values. And there are some philosophers and psychologists who do just that, who claim that free will and responsibility and spiritual value and intrinsic value are all illusions; they're pre-scientific notions that get washed away in modern science or you could try to reconcile them. You could try to figure out how to mesh your scientific view of the mind with these humanist values you might want to preserve. And this is an issue which we're going to return to throughout the course. Okay. I'll see you on Wednesday.
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Introduction_to_Psychology_with_Paul_Bloom
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13_Why_Are_People_Different_Differences.txt
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Professor Paul Bloom: What we've been talking about so far in the course are human universals, what everybody shares. So, we've been talking about language, about rationality, about perception, about the emotions, about universals of development, and we've been talking about what people share. But honestly, what a lot of us are very interested in is why we're different and the nature of these differences and the explanation for them. And that's what we'll turn to today. So first, we'll discuss how are people different, different theories about what makes you different in a psychological way from the person sitting next to you, and then we'll review different theories about why people are different. And this is the class which is going to bother the most people. It's not dualism. It's not evolution. It's this because the scientific findings on human psychological differences are, to many of us, shocking and unbelievable. And I will just try to persuade you to take them seriously. Okay. So, how are people different? Well, there's all sorts of ways. Your sexual identity--It is at the core of your being for almost all of us whether you're male or female. How we refer to you in language, what pronoun we use, is indexed on how we--on your--on how--whether you're male or female and related to that though imperfectly is your sexual orientation, who you're attracted to. The question of why some of us think of ourselves as males and others as females, and the question of why some of us would ideally want to have sex with males, others with females, others with both, and then a few others who have harder to define desires, is such a good question that we're going to talk about it after spring break while all the sexual desire has been spent and you could focus on [laughter] on a scientific discussion of this--not that I recommend you do that on spring break. How happy are you? This is also such a good topic it's going to get its own class. The very last class of the semester is devoted to happiness and the question of what makes people happy, what makes people unhappy, and what makes people differ in their happiness. If I asked you to rank how happy you are from a scale of 1 to 10, the numbers would differ across this room. And there's different theories as to why. Your success and failure in life--This is somewhat interesting because you could study this in more or less objective ways. We don't have to ask people. We could look at your relationships, how they begin, how they end, your job satisfaction. We could look at your criminal records. Some of you are going to see time. Most will not. Some of you will get into little troubles all through your life. Some of you already have seen the inside of a police station, possibly a lineup. Others couldn't go near such a thing. What determines that? And at the root of all human differences are two main factors. And so, I want to talk about the two main interesting factors. One is personality. The other is intelligence. And this is what--These are the differences I'll talk about today first from the standpoint of how do we characterize them, how do we explain them, and then from the standpoint of why these differences exist in the first place. One way to characterize personality is in terms of people's style with dealing with--in dealing with the world and particularly their style with dealing--in dealing with other people. So, you take a simple character you know of and you could talk about that person's personality. You could talk about it in terms of being impulsive, irresponsible, sometimes lazy, good-hearted. You could compare that person's personality with other people's personalities such as my colleague who gave a talk last class. He's wonderful. He's responsible and reliable and very kind [laughter] and different from Homer. And so, this difference is a difference in personality. Now, when we talk about personality we're talking about something else as well. We're talking about a stable trait across situations and time. So, if all of a sudden the person next to you kind of smacks you in the head, you might be angry but we wouldn't call that "personality" because that's something that's a result of a situation. We'd all feel that way in that situation. It's "personality" if you walk around all the time angry. That'd be a stable trait. That'd be something you carry around with you and that's what we mean by personality. Now, how do we scientifically characterize differences in personality? And it's a deep question. There's been a lot of attempts to do so. Any assessment has--Any good assessment has to satisfy two conditions. And these are terms which are going to show up all over psychological research but it's particularly relevant for this sort of measure. One is "reliability." Reliability means there is not measurement error. And one crude way to think about reliability is, a test is reliable if you test the same person at different times and you get the same result. My bathroom scale is reliable if whenever I stand on it, it gives me more or less the same number. It's not reliable if it's off by ten pounds in the course of a day. Similarly, if I give you a personality test now and it says that you're anxious and defensive, well--and then give it to you tomorrow and it says you're calm and open minded, it's not a reliable test. So, reliable is something you could trust over time. "Validity" is something different. Validity is that your test measures what it's supposed to measure. So, validity means it's sort of a good test. Forget about how reliable it is. Does it tap what you're interested in? So, for example, suppose I determine your intelligence by the date of your birth. I figure out what day you were born and I have a theory that, from that, predicts how smart you are. That's my intelligence test, the date of your birth. Maybe people born in January are the dumbest, people born in December are the smartest. Is that--I was born on Christmas Eve. [laughter] Is that a reliable test? Yes, it's a wonderfully reliable test. I'll test you today; I'll test you tomorrow; I'll test you next year; I'll test you the day you die; I'll get the same IQ score. Is it a valid test? It's a joke. It's absolutely not a valid test. It has nothing to do with intelligence. But you noticed these are two different things. Something can be reliable but not valid and something can be valid and not reliable. Now, there are no shortage of personality tests. You could get them all over the place including on the web. So, I took one recently. I took "which super hero are you?" [laughter] And it's a series of questions determining what super hero you are. You could take this yourself if you want to. The same web page, by the way, offers you a test in whether you're "hot" or not. We'll discuss that later. And when I did this [laughter] it told me I was Batman [laughter] and "you are dark, love gadgets, and have vowed to help the innocent not suffer the pain you have endured." Now, the honest-- [laughter] Now, to be honest though, it's neither reliable nor valid. When I first did the test I came up as "The Incredible Hulk." I then changed my answers a bit and was "Wonder Woman." [laughter] And finally, out of frustration, I carefully tailored my answers so I would be Batman. But the fact that I can do that, well, raises questions about both the reliability of this measure and its validity. Here is an example – a real world example. This is, in black and white form, a version of the Rorschach test, the Rorschach inkblot test. How many people have heard of the Rorschach test? Okay. Is there anybody here who has actually, in any sort of situation, taken a Rorschach test? Some people scattered in the room have taken them. It was originally used only for psychiatric cases but then became extremely common. About eighty percent of clinical psychologists claim to use it and most graduate programs in the American Psychological Association who are accredited teach it. Catholic seminaries use it for people who want to join the seminary. It was invented by a guy named Herman Rorschach. He devoted his entire life to the inkblot test. His nickname when he was a teenager – I am not kidding you – was "Inkblot." [laughter] And the idea is by looking at these inkblots and then seeing what somebody says you get great insights into the nature of their personality, into what they are. Anybody want to try it? Come on. Yes. What do you see? Student: I see two people holding hands pressed together. Professor Paul Bloom: Two people holding hands pressed together. Very good. Anybody have a different reading? Yes, in back. Yes. Yes. Student: Dancing bears. Professor Paul Bloom: Dancing bears. Okay. Good.[laughter] Good. Okay. I got to write your name down-- [laughs][laughter] report you to health-- No. Dancing bears, very good. Anybody else? One other. Yes. Student: A man in a ski mask. Professor Paul Bloom: A man in a ski mask. Well, it turns out that there are right answers and wrong answers to the Rorschach test. According to the test, and this is from a real Rorschach test, "it is important to see the blot as two human figures, usually females or clowns." Good work over there. "If you don't, it's seen as a sign you have problems relating to people." [laughter] If you want to go for "a cave entrance" or "butterfly" or "vagina," that's also okay. [laughter] Now, the Rorschach test is transcendently useless. It has been studied and explored and it is as useless as throwing dice. It is as useless as tea leaves. Nonetheless, people love it and it's used all over the place. It is used for example in child custody cases. If you have broken up with your partner and you guys are quarreling over who gets to keep the kids, you might find yourself in a shrink's office looking at this. And in fact, this is why they end up on the web. There are services. There are people who have been kind enough to put on the web these inkblots, including the right answers to them. But they are worthless as psychological measures. Can we do better? Well, we probably can. Gordon Allport did a study where he went through the dictionary and took all of the traits that he believed to be related to personality and he got eighteen thousand of them. But what was interesting was they weren't necessarily independent traits. So, the traits like "friendly, sociable, welcoming, warm-hearted" seemed to all tap the same thing. So, Cattell and many others tried to narrow it down, tried to ask the question, "In how many ways are people's personalities different from one another?" How many parameters of difference do you need? How many numbers can I give you that would narrow you in and say what personality you are? One approach was from Eysenck, who claimed there were just two. You could be somewhere on the scale of introverted-extroverted, and somewhere on the scale of neurotic and stable. And since there's basically two types of traits with two settings for each, there are basically four types of people. Later on he added another trait which he described as "psychoticism versus non-psychoticism" that crudely meant whether you're aggressive or empathetic. And then you have three traits with two settings each giving you eight types of people. Later on Cattell dropped it down into sixteen factors. So, these sixteen personality factors are sixteen ways people would differ. And so, if I asked you to describe your roommate along these sixteen dimensions, you should be able to do so. More recently, people have come to the conclusion that two or three is too few, but sixteen might be too many. And there's a psychological consensus on what's been known as "The Big Five." And "The Big Five" personality factors are these, and what this means is when we talk about each other and use adjectives, the claim is we could do so in thousands of different ways, but deep down we're talking about one of these five dimensions. This means that when a psychological test measures something about somebody, about their personality, if it's a good test it's measuring one of these five things. And it means that, as people interacting with one another in the world, these are the five things that we're interested in. So, one of them is "neurotic versus stable." Is somebody sort of nutty and worrying or are they calm? "Extrovert versus introvert." "Open to experience versus closed to experience." "Agreeable," which is courteous, friendly versus non agreeable, rude, selfish. And "conscientious versus not conscientious," careful versus careless, reliable versus undependable. A good way to think about these things is in terms of the word "ocean," o-c-e-a-n. The first letter captures openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. And the claim is those are the four--the five fundamental ways in which people differ from one another. Well, why should we believe this? Why should we take this theory seriously? Well, there's actually some evidence for it. It seems to have some reliability in that it's stable over time. So, if you test people over years--If I test your personality now on the five traits and test you five years from now, it will not have changed much. And once you pass the age of thirty, it's very stable indeed. If you think about your parents and then give Mom and Dad a mental test on where they stand on each of the five traits, ten years from now Mom and Dad will still be there. It also seems to get agreement across multiple observers. So, if I ask for each of their five traits--If I ask your roommate what he or she thinks of you, then I ask your professor what he or she thinks of you and your mom what he or--what she thinks of you, [laughter] how would--back to gender--How would they match up? They tend to overlap a lot. You walk around and you leave--and your personality leaves a trail in the minds of people around you. And this trail is characterized in terms of these five dimensions. Finally, it seems to be--predict real-world behavior. If this didn't have anything to do with the real world, you wouldn't be very happy calling it valid, you wouldn't take it seriously as a test, but it does. So, conscientiousness--how you score on a conscientious scale, relates to how faithful you are to your spouse. How openness--open you are on a psychological personality test relates to how likely you are to change your job. "Extroverts" look people in the eye more and have more sexual partners because they're extroverts. So, these are real scales. The "Batman, Hulk, Wonder Woman" doesn't correspond to anything in the real world, but where you stand on each of these five dimensions does seem to capture it. As an example of the agreement, by the way, somebody did a study of several of the characters on the television show "The Simpsons" because they wanted to find characters which everybody knew. And they had thirteen subjects judge these Simpson characters on each of the five dimensions. These is "openness, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and extroversion" and they found considerable agreement. And this isn't actually--What I've covered up is the "agreeableness." So, for those of you who have never seen the television show, this is all going to be confusing, but those of you who have, can you guess which characters would be particularly agreeable? Anybody guess. Yeah. Student: Flanders Professor Paul Bloom: Flanders. You are right. The most agreeable people are Flanders and Marge. Who would not so agreeable? Student: Krusty Professor Paul Bloom: Krusty is actually--Krusty is a complicated case [laughter] but Mr. Burns--but also--Where is he? Oh, he's not--Nelson, where's Nelson? Anyway, there's Nelson. You get strong consensus that Ned Flanders and Marge Simpson are highly agreeable people, 6.27 and 5.46, while Mr. Burns and Nelson are very low. Nelson's the little kid that when trouble happens he goes, "Ha ha." And that's a psychological sign for low agreeability. [laughter] Okay. That's all I want to say at this point about personality and how we measure it and, again, we're going to get back to it later when we talk about differences in personality. Now, I want to deal with the second big difference. The second big difference is intelligence. Now, how do you define intelligence? There's no easy definition. Like personality, it's kind of difficult to get your fingers on what we're talking about here. In one survey they asked 1,000 experts to define intelligence. And some answers showed up over and over again. So, just about everybody said intelligence involves abstract reasoning, problem solving, and the capacity to acquire knowledge. That's at the core of being smart. Other people mentioned things like memory, mental speed, language, math, mental speed again, knowledge, and creativity also as hallmarks for intelligence. And again, it might be difficult to define it but you have a gut feeling about what it is. So, you know Homer is actually--and this is part of the show--is actually of limited intelligence. My colleague is of very high intelligence, a wonderful fellow, [laughter] but he's probably not as smart as that guy who is really, really smart. And this guy, Ralph Wiggum, is particularly stupid. [laughter] And so you have a range. And it's important to figure out how to characterize it; this is what research does, but there's a gut feeling that there are some people who are smart and other people who are very smart and some people who are dumb and others who are very dumb. What you want to do, from a scientific standpoint, is characterize this in a more robust and interesting fashion. And the textbook has a nice review of the history of attempts to define and measure intelligence, but there is a couple of ideas I want to focus on. One is an idea developed by Spearman, which is there's two types of intelligence. There is "G" and there is "S." "S" is your ability on specific tests. So, if there is ten tests that you're given as part of an IQ test, ten subtests, you'll get a different score on each of the subtests. There'll be a math test and a reading test and a spatial test and you'll get different scores. "G" refers to a general intelligence. And the general intelligence is something you bring to each of the tests in common. So, this is diagrammed here. You have these six tests. For each of them there is an "S" and then above that there is a "G." Now, "G" is a very important notion. The term "G" is used by psychologists a lot even in casual conversation. People say, "So, what do you think of him?" "I think he is high 'G.'" And what you mean is he's a smart guy. Why do you need "G?" Well, you wouldn't need "G" if your performance on each of these tests had nothing to do with each other. If the tests were genuinely separate, there'd be no general intelligence. But what people find over and over again is that when it comes to explaining people's performance on multiple intellectual tasks, there's two things going on. There's how good there is--they are on the specific task, but then there's also a sort of general correlation that people bring to the tasks. And I could express this with an athletic analogy. Imagine I'm running a gym and we have all of these different athletic tests. So, we have a running test, we have a basketball shooting test, a swimming test, fencing, a list of ten of them. Now, each of you go through each of the tests and then you'll each get ten scores. But what we'll discover is that the scores are not independent of one another. People who are good at one athletic thing tend to be good at another. If there's somebody who's really good at running and swimming, odds are they're probably pretty good at climbing. And the same thing holds for IQ, which is above and beyond how good people are at specific things there seems to be a factor as to how well they are in general. And this factor is known as "G." Now, there's, again, an extensive history of modern intelligence tests and what's really interesting is the tests now. What you need to know about the modern tests, the Wechsler test for both adults and children, is how they're scored. The way they are scored is that 100 is average. So, it's just automatic. Whatever the average is is 100. It's as if I did the Midterm--graded the Midterm, computed the average, gave everybody who got the average 100, said your score is 100. It's just the average. It works on the normal curve and what this means is that it works so that the majority, 68%, get between 85 and 115 on their IQ test. The vast majority, 95%, get between 70 and 130. If you are, say, above 145 IQ, which I imagine some people in the room are, you belong to 0.13% of the population. That's the way IQ tests work. Now, this is about IQ tests. We could now ask about their reliability and their validity. What do they mean? Well, this has turned out to be a matter of extreme debate. This just reiterates what I just said. A lot of the debate was spawned by the book by Herrnstein and Murray about--called The Bell Curve. And in The Bell Curve these authors made the argument that IQ matters immensely for everyday life and that people's status in society – how rich they are and how successful they are – follows from their IQ as measured in standard IQ tests. Now, this book made a lot of claims and it's probably before many of you--many of your time, but spawned huge controversy. And as a result of this controversy some interesting papers came out. One response to the Herrnstein and Murray book was by the American Psychological Association, which put together a group of fifty leading researchers in intelligence to write a report on what they thought about intelligence--what they thought about, "Does IQ matter? How does IQ relate to intelligence? How does--what's the different--why are people different in intelligence? Why do different human groups differ in intelligence?" and so on. At the same time, there was also another group of IQ researchers, not quite the same as the first group, got together and wrote another report. And if you're interested in this, the links to the reports are on the Power Point slide. Well, what did they conclude? The conclusions were slightly different but here's the broad consensus by the experts regarding the importance of IQ tests. And the claim is IQ is strongly related more so--probably more so than any other single measurable human trait to many important educational, occupational, economic, and social outcomes. In some cases, the correlation is very strong such as success in school and success in military training. In other cases, it's moderate but robust such as "social competence." And in other cases it's smaller but consistent, "law abidingness," and they conclude whatever IQ test measure it is of great practical and social importance. So, IQ matters. More particularly, IQ matters for "social achievement," for "prestigious positions," and for "on the job performance" and other work-related variables. If I know your IQ score, I know something about you that matters. It's not irrelevant just as if I know your score on a personality test of The Big Five I would know something about you that actually would tell me something interesting about you in the real world. On the other hand, there's a lot of controversy about why this connection exists. So, to some extent, people have worried that the effectiveness of IQ is a self-fulfilling prophecy. And here is why. If society takes IQ tests important--seriously, they become important. So, it's true that your IQ is very related to your success in getting into a good school like Yale. But the reason for this, in large extent, is because to get to Yale they give you an IQ test, the SAT. So, the same for graduate school. There is the GRE, which is yet another IQ test. So, to some extent, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I could make--Society could choose to make how tall you are extremely important for educational success. They could say nobody under six feet tall gets into Yale. And then some psych professor would stand up and say, "Of course, height is profoundly related to educational accomplishment," and it would be because people made it so. So, to some extent, the society that draws highly on IQ tests regarding promotion and educational achievement and military status and so on--it's just going to follow that IQ then becomes important. At the same time, however, the role of IQ is pretty clearly not entirely a social construction. There is some evidence that your IQ score relates to intelligence in an interesting sense including domains like mental speed and memory span. So, your score on an IQ test, for instance, is to some extent related to how fast you could think and your memory abilities. Now, I want to shift to the second half of the class and talk about why. So, we talked about two differences, one in "personality", one "intelligence." I want to talk about why people differ but before I do, do people have any questions? Yes. Student: About personality--This morning I took a test--The way the test was, they asked you 100 questions and [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: It's a good question. The question is this young man took--just took a personality test. He was accepted into Slytherin, which is a Hogwarts reference. I'm hip to that [laughter] and--but the question is a good one. You're a clever man, high "G," and you wanted to be in Slytherin. How do we know you didn't work the test? You're going to get these personality tests all the time and the personality tests--You're applying for a business and one of the tests says "I like to steal from my bosses." Well, I don't think so. No. That's a little IQ test right there. So, the question is how do you avoid that problem? The test constructors have done so in certain clever ways. For instance, there are often catch questions designed to catch a liar. Some of these questions pose very unrealistic phenomena so you might have a question in there saying "I have never done anything I am ashamed of." Now, some people will say, "Yes, that's true of me," but they tend to be liars. And so, unrealistic questions tend to catch liars. Also, you get the same question asked in different ways across the one hundred items and they could use the correlations to figure these things out. Again, the proof is sort of in the pudding. The reliability and validity of a test is determined, in part, by just how well it does at predicting your future performance on the test and your real world performance. And a test that is easily fooled--easily tricked by smart people wouldn't survive long as a personality test. So, we know the test you got is a pretty good test because it seems to work for most people. Yes. Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: It's a good question. The question was about "Emotional IQ," which is something I'm actually going to touch upon a little bit later in the course, but people have talked about different forms of intelligence. And emotional intelligence, social intelligence, is arguably a candidate for success across different domains. The evidence for its predictive power is not as strong as for regular IQ tests so you might be right. It might turn out to be a much better predictor but one, it's not clear that we know that yet. Peter Salovey has actually done some very interesting research on this and is continuing work along those lines. The second thing is emotional intelligence is actually related to good, old-fashioned intelligence. They kind of pull together a lot. So, it's not entirely separate but that's a good point and I'd like to return to it a little bit later on in the course. Yes. Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: Good question. How do you determine when--what a good test is? And again, it's a real art going through the details of how to do that but the broad answers involve reliability and validity. It's a good test if I test you today and I test you tomorrow and I get the same score. It's a really good test if your score on that test predicts your grades or, if it's a personality test, predicts how many girlfriends you have or predicts whether people think you're a nice guy. So, you have to see both the replicability of the test over time but also its relationship to real world phenomena. And that's important, again. Why do we know the Batman, Wonder Woman, Hulk test is a bad one? Well, one answer is because what I--how I score on that test isn't going to tell you anything about me. It's not going to relate to my grades. It's not going to relate to how well I'm liked. How do we know the SAT is useful? Well, it actually corresponds with other things like grades. Yes, in back. Student: [inaudible] Professor Paul Bloom: Absolutely. The question is--When I'm talking about personality I'm defining it in terms of something which is stable over time. And your question, which is a good one, is, "How do we know it's stable over time?" Can't it change? And the answer is "yeah." A lot of personality does change over time. A personality test you give to a ten-year-old will relate but not so strongly with that individual when he's fifty. On the other hand, we know that the psychological claim that there exists such a thing as personality and it is stable over time. It's supported by the fact that if you're an extrovert now you'll likely be an extrovert twenty years from now. Not perfectly, so you're right. You could change. You could become an introvert, you could become more of an extrovert, but wherever you stand now is significantly related to where you'll be in the future. And that justifies talking about it as a stable trait. Same with IQ. Your IQ might change. It might go up, it might go down, but it won't go up and go down that much and this is why it makes sense to talk about intelligence as a more or less stable trait. Okay. Why are we different? Well, you're different because of two things: Your genes and your environment, your nature and your nurture, your heredity and your experience. And this doesn't say anything. This is just defining the question. But the question of the role of genes and the role of environment in explaining human differences is an interesting one and it could be explored in different ways. But before talking about it I have to clear up a common misconception. I'm going to talk about the effects of genes and I'm going to talk about heredity but I want to be clear. I am talking about the role of genes and also the role of environment in explaining human differences, not in explaining human characteristics. So, the distinction is we're interested in the amount of variation due to genetic differences, not the proportion of an individual's trait that's due to genes. So for instance, you could pull these apart. The question of--When we ask what's the role of genes, what's the role of heredity in how tall people are, the question is not asking for you--what is the role of your genes in determining how tall you are? It's not clear that's even a sensible question. The question is there's a height difference between you and me and him and her. How do we explain that difference? And I could illustrate why heredity doesn't mean the same thing as the contribution of the genes. Height is reasonably heritable, meaning the differences between people in the population and how tall they are is due in large part, not entirely, but in large part to their genes. What about the number of legs people have? Well, the number of legs people have from zero, one or two, is actually not very heritable at all because almost everybody has two legs and people who have fewer than two legs typically have lost one or both legs in an accident. It's not due to their genes. So, of course, whether or not you have legs is a very genetic matter but the differences in number of legs is not usually genetic. And so, heredity is a claim about differences, not a claim about the origin of any specific trait. Well, now we--That's what heredity, which is genetic--Now, we could talk about environment. And we could break up environment into two sorts of environment. One is shared environment. And shared environment is the extent to which the differences are caused by things--by phenomena that people raised in the same household share. So if one--Suppose some of you are neurotic. And suppose we want to say part of that's due to your environment. Well, suppose you're neurotic because you have lousy parents. That would be part of your shared environment because presumably siblings raised in the same household would have the same lousy parents. This is contrasted with non-shared environment, which is everything else. Suppose I think you're neurotic because when you were five years old somebody threw a snowball at you and it bounced off your head. That's non-shared environment. Suppose you're neurotic because you won the lottery when you were twenty-one and all the money messed you up. That'd be non-shared environment. So, what you have here is heredity, shared environment and non-shared environment, and this equals one. That's everything. Non-shared environment is a sort of garbage can category that includes everything that's not heredity and not shared environment. Suppose you think you're neurotic because aliens from the planet Pluto are zapping your brain. Suppose you're right. Well, that would be non-shared environment because they're, presumably, not necessarily zapping your siblings' brains. Everything else is non-shared environment. It becomes interesting to ask, for all of these differences, the physical differences like height, but psychological differences like personality and intelligence, how do we parcel it out into what's genetic and what's environmental? This proves to be really difficult in the real world because in the real world it's hard to pull apart genes and environments. So, you and me will have different personalities. Why? Well, we were raised by different parents and we have different genes. We can't tell--My brother and me might share all sorts of things in common but we have the same parents and the same genes, fifty percent of the same genes. So how do we tell what's causing us to be alike? So to do--to pull these things apart you need to be clever. You need to use the tools of behavioral genetics. And to use these tools you have to exploit certain regularities about genes and about environment. One thing is this. Some people are clones. Monozygotic twins are genetic duplicates. They share one hundred percent of the same genes. That's kind of interesting. Dizygotic twins are not clones. They share fifty/fifty. They are just like regular siblings. And adopted siblings have no special genetic overlap. That's zero percent above and beyond randomness. Those three groups then become rather interesting particularly when we keep in mind that by definition two people raised in the same house by the same parents have one hundred percent the same shared environment. So now, we can start to answer these questions. Suppose you find that monozygotic twins are much more similar than dizygotic twins. Well, that would suggest that there's a large role of genes in those traits that you're interested in. It would not cinch the matter because there are other factors at work. For instance, monozygotic twins look more alike than dizygotic twins and maybe they have different and--they have more similar environments because of this similarity in appearance. Are monozygotic twins just as similar as dizygotic twins? If so, then it would show that that extra overlap in genes doesn't really matter. And so, it would suggest a low role of heredity. Are adopted children highly similar to their brothers and sisters? If so, then there's a high role of shared environment. Suppose the Bloom children, and there are seven of them, all have an IQ of 104 and we adopt three kids and then at the end of the day those three kids each have an IQ of 104. That would suggest that--And we do this over and over again across different families. That would suggest that there's something about the Bloom family being raised by me that gives you an IQ of 104. On the other hand, if the IQ of the adopted kids had no relationship to those of the biological Bloom children, it would suggest that being raised by me has no effects really on your IQ. It's sort of separate. A separate--A second--A final contrast, which is the thing that psychologists love, is identical twins reared apart. That's the gold standard because you have these people who are clones but they're raised in different families. And to the extent that they are similar this suggests it's a similarity of their genes. And in fact, one of the most surprising findings in behavioral genetics--The caption here is "Separated at Birth, the Mallifert Twins Meet Accidentally." ended up at a patent office with the same device. One of the hugely surprising findings from behavioral genetics is how alike identical twins reared apart are. They seem to have similar attitudes to the death penalty, to religion and to modern music. They have similar rates of behavior in crime, gambling and divorce. They often have been found to have bizarre similarities. They meet after being separated at birth and they meet at age thirty and then it turns out that they both get in to a lot of trouble because they pretend to sneeze in elevators. There was one pair of twins studied by behavioral genetics who were known as the "Giggle Twins" because they were--both would always giggle, they'd burst into giggles at every moment even though it couldn't be environment because they weren't raised together. More objectively, the brain scans of identical twins reared apart show that their brains are so similar in many cases you can't tell whose brain is who. I could tell your brain from my brain from a brain scan and my brother's brain from my brain from a brain scan. But if I were to have an identical twin it would be very difficult to tell whose brain is whose even if we had no environment in common. So, this leads to two surprising findings of behavioral genetics. This is the first one. There is high heritability for almost everything. For intelligence, for personality, for how happy you are, for how religious you are, for your political orientation, there--for your sexual orientation, there is high heritability. There's a high effect of genes for just about everything. Now, that's actually not the controversial thing I'm going to tell you. But before getting to the more controversial thing I want to raise another issue which often gets discussed and has a good treatment in the textbook. This suggests that individual differences within this--within a group have genetic causes. Does that mean that group differences are largely the result of genetic causes? So, we know that there are clear differences in IQ scores among American racial groups, between whites and Asians, African Americans, Ashkenazi Jews. There's clear and reliable IQ differences as well as some other differences. Now, to some extent, these groups are partially socially constructed. And what this means is that whether or not you fall into a group it's not entirely determined by your genetic makeup. It's often determined by social decisions. So, whether or not you count as a Jew, for instance, depends not entirely on genetic factors but also on factors such as whether you're reform or orthodox and whether you--so whether you would accept that a child of a Jewish man and a non-Jewish woman is Jewish. Similarly, categories like African American and white and Asian often overlap broad genetic categories and they don't make fully coherent genetic sense. At the same time though, there is plainly some genetic differences across human groups and say with regard to vulnerability to disease. Ashkenazi Jews for instance are vulnerable to Tay-Sachs. And the fact that you could have this sort of genetic vulnerability suggests that there is some sort of reality to these groups. So, you have to ask the question now, to what extent does the high heritability in individuals mean that there has to be a heritable explanation across groups? And the answer is "not at all." I'm not saying that this means that there's no genetic explanation for human group differences. All I'm saying is the question of the phenomena of--within-group genetic differences does not mean that there is across-group genetic--sorry, between-group genetic differences. There is a nice example by Richard Lewontin, the geneticist, where he imagines two plots of--what are you--some sort of wheat, yeah, two plots of land and each one has a set of seeds and--Oh, no. They're over there. No. Anyway, one of them you fertilize a lot. The other one you fertilize a little. Now, within each plot how much the seed grows is actually largely determined by the genetics of the seed. And so, you'd find high heritability for growth in the seeds. But the difference between groups has no genetic cause at all. It's caused by which groups you fertilize more than others. Here's another way to do the logic. Suppose from the middle down here, you guys, I hate you, I really hate all of you, and I like you, so I make up two Midterms. You probably didn't notice but there were two Midterms. This Midterm was fiercely hard, savagely hard. It took many of you until the end of class to do it. This Midterm was, "Which is bigger, a dog or an elephant?" [laughter] because I like you and I want you all to succeed. So, you have two different groups, you guys and you guys. Within each group some people are going to do better than others. The explanation for that might actually have to do with your genes. It might have to do with your environment, how much you study, but all sorts of reasons for that. Within each group some of you will do better on the hard test than others on the hard test, some better on the easy test than others on the easy test. But how do we explain the group difference? Well, it has nothing to do with genes. The group difference, the fact that you will do much worse than you, has to do with the exams I give. My point, again, is that there is a logical difference between a within-group difference, within this half of the class, and a difference between groups, within--between this group and this group. What do we know about--;So, that just shows they're not the same thing but what's the fact of the matter? What do we know about human differences between different human groups? Again, the textbook has a good discussion of this but I'm going to give two reasons from the textbook that at least group differences are at least to a large extent due to environmental and not genetic causes. One is that the differences we find in IQ seem to correspond better to socially defined groups than genetically defined groups. They seem to correspond to groups defined in terms of how people treat you and how people think about you as opposed to your DNA. And to the extent that turns out to be true that would mean that a genetic explanation is not reasonable for those differences. A second factor is that we know IQ can differ radically without any genetic differences at all. And the most dramatic evidence of that is the Flynn effect. The Flynn effect is one of the freakier findings. The Flynn effect is the finding that people have been getting smarter. You are much smarter on average than your parents if--and the IQ tests hide that. Here is why they hide that. They hide that because they always make 100 the average. So, you come home and you say, "Dad, Dad, I just did an IQ test. I got 120." And your father says, "Good work, Son. I got 122 when I was your age," but what neither of you acknowledge is your test was much harder. As people got better, they had to make the test harder and harder. And this is plotted by the Flynn effect. One of these lines is American and one is Dutch. I don't know which is which but the gist of it is that somebody who would have--that if you in 1980 would take the 1950 test, your average person in 1980 would score 120 on the 1950 test. What this means is if you take your person who's average now and push him back through time twenty years, thirty years, he would do much better than average. Nobody knows why people are getting smarter and there's different theories of this. And in fact, well, wait until you see your reading response. But what this illustrates is that IQ can change dramatically over the span of a few decades without any corresponding genetic change. And that leaves open the possibility, in fact, maybe the likelihood, that the differences we find in human groups, existing human groups, are caused by the same environmental effects that have led to the Flynn effect. Okay. This is not the surprising claim though, the high heritability for almost everything. This is the surprising claim. Almost everything that's not genetic is due to non-shared environments. The behavioral genetic analyses suggest that shared environment counts for little or nothing. When it comes to personality or intelligence then, an adopted child is no more similar to his siblings than he or she is to a stranger. To put it a different way, the IQ correlation in genetically unrelated adults who are raised in the same family is about zero. Suppose the Bloom family all has an IQ of 104 and we adopt a kid. What will this kid's--We adopt him as a baby. We raise him to be a twenty-year-old. What's his IQ? Answer? We have no idea because the IQ of the Bloom family who are unrelated to him has no effect at all. Now, if you think about the implications of it, it becomes controversial and Newsweek, I think, caught the big issue when they put in their title the question "do parents matter?" And the question--And the issue is parents are shared environment. To say shared environment does not affect your intelligence or your personality suggests that how your parents raised you does not affect your gene--your intelligence or your personality. This isn't to say your parents didn't have a big effect on your intelligence and personality. Your parents had a huge effect on your intelligence and your personality, around 0.5 actually. They had this effect at the moment of conception. From then on in, they played very little role in shaping you--what you are. The case for this which generated the Newsweek cover came up in a controversial book by Judith Harris called The Nurture Assumption which has a very long subtitle, "Why Parents Turn--Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, Parents Matter Less than You Think and Peers Matter More." Judith Harris has had an interesting history. She was kicked out of graduate school at Harvard and told that she wouldn't amount to much. The person who wrote the letter saying that she was not going to amount to much was the department chair, George Miller. In 1997, she won the George Miller award for her astounding accomplishments. And when she wrote the book she took as a starting point, her point of disagreement, a famous poem by the poet Philip Larkin and many of you have probably heard this. The poem goes like this: They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra just for you. The last line of the poem, the last bit of the poem, ends: "Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can and don't have any kids yourself." It's beautiful. [laughter] Harris wrote a rebuttal: "How sharper than a serpent's tooth to hear your child make such a fuss. It isn't fair. It's not the truth. He's fucked up, yes, but not by us." [laughter] Just to show that academic debates never end, a British psychoanalyst named Oliver James, outraged by Judith Harris' book The Nurture Assumption, wrote another book in response called They Fuck You Up. [laughter] Now, how do you tell your grandparents, "I wrote a book." "What's it called?" "Can't tell you." [laughter] Anyway, look. If you're paying attention, this has to sound wrong. You must be thinking of course there must be an effect of shared environment. Of course parents have an effect. After all, good kids have good parents. There is no doubt at all that this is true. There is a high correlation between parent and child for everything. If your parents read a lot and there's a lot of books in your house, you will become a reader. If your parents are religious, you will be religious. If you're raised by Bonnie and Clyde, you will be a young thug. [laughter] If your parents are poor, you're likely to be poor. If your parents are brilliant, you're likely to be brilliant. No doubt at all. It is an extremely robust correlation. But the problem is this correlation could be explained in different ways. Everybody thinks it's because parents do something that affects their kids. Your parents are bookish, they read to their kids, so their kids become bookish, but another possibility, which we know is true, that almost always parents share their genes with their kids. Another possibility is it's the parents who are affecting--sorry, it's the child who is affecting the parents, not vice versa, and to illustrate this, these different possibilities, I want to tell you a little bit about a study. And I really find this a fascinating study. It was reported last year and it was a study shown that--suggesting that family meals help teens avoid smoking, alcohol, drugs. It involved a phone questionnaire where they phoned up teenagers and their parents and said, "Hey, teenager. Do you do a lot of drugs?" "Yes." "Do you have dinner with your parents?" "No." And they take it off--and then they ask other people and they find that the kids who are the good kids have meals with their parents, suggesting this headline. I like this study because I have read--I must have read in my career a thousand studies and this is the worst study ever done [laughter] in the history of science. And it's almost--We could devote a week to discussing what's wrong with this study. Let's just--But here's the idea. It is possible that they are right. It is actually possible--there's no--I have no evidence against it – that having meals with your kids makes them into good, drug-free, non-promiscuous, non-drinking kids. Of course, it's equally possible it's the other way around. If little Johnny is kind of--is out there smoking pot and cavorting with prostitutes and stuff like that, he's not going to come home for the family meal. It's the other way around. While if he's a good kid, he might be more likely to have a family meal. So, the direction--It might actually be not family meals make good kids but rather good kids stick around to have--if they have nothing better to do and have meals with Mom and Dad. [laughter] Another possibility is there's good families and bad families. A good family is likely to have drug-free kids and a family meal. A bad family is likely to have stoned kids and no family meal. [laughter] So, there--maybe there's an effect of that. The parents had nothing to do with the family meal. Here's the even weirder part. They didn't factor out age so think about this. Their sample included children ranging from twelve to seventeen but let me tell you something about twelve-year-olds. Twelve-year-olds don't use a lot of drugs and are likely to eat with their family. Seventeen-year-olds are stoned all the time and they don't eat with their family. [laughter] I've just begun on this study but the point is when you hear something like--So now, take something which you may be more likely to believe. Maybe you believe that having parents who read to their kids, that's good for their kids. Well, maybe it is but most of these criticisms apply to that study too. A bookish kid is more likely to get his parents to read to him. A good family--Parents who are good parents in general are more likely to do all sorts of good things to their kids and have good kids besides. Take another case, the so-called cycle of violence. Yes, it's true. Parents who smack their kids tend to have statistically more violent kids. But maybe the causality goes the other way around. Maybe if you have a kid who is a troublemaker you're more likely to smack him. Maybe, which seems to be entirely likely, the propensity for violence is to some extent heritable. And so, even if the kid was not raised by the smacking parent, whatever properties of that parent caused him--led to that violence got inherited by the kid. Now, again, this isn't going to sit right for you and I've had--I put this down because last year when I gave this talk people ran up to me and told me this. They said, "Look. I know my mom and dad had a huge role in my life. That's why I'm so happy and successful," then other people said, "That's why I'm so miserable and screwed up," but either way blame it on Mom and Dad or thank Mom and Dad. And you might think you know. When you become famous and you stand up and you get your awards maybe you'll thank your mom and dad. When you go to your therapist and explain why you're so screwed up maybe you'll blame Dad. "He never took me to a baseball game." Well, maybe, [laughter] but you don't know. Were you adopted? If you weren't adopted, you can't even begin to have the conversation about how your parents messed you up because if you're a lot like your parents you might be a lot like your parents because you share their genes. Of course, you resemble your parents. Moreover, how do you figure out which is the cause and which is the effect? "Mom smacked me a lot and that's why I turned out to be such a rotten person." Well, maybe she smacked you because you were rotten. [laughter] I don't want to get personal but it's very difficult to pull these things apart. A final point on this. One response to Harris' book is this. "Look. Even if this is true, you shouldn't let this get out because if parents don't mold their children's personalities maybe why should they treat their kids nicely?" And you might be wondering this. You might be thinking, well, gee, if you don't have any effect on how your kids turn out, why be nice to them, but there are answers. You might want to be nice to them because you love them. You might want to be nice to them because you want them to be happy. You might want to be nice to them because you want to have good relationships with them. And I have a little bit more but I'm going to skip it and I'm going to move right to your reading response, which is very, very simple, easy to answer, easy to grade: Explain the Flynn effect. It's a toughie so just explain that. Okay. Have a wonderful spring break and I'll see you when you get back.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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PS22_Worked_Example_Stacked_Blocks_Choosing_the_System_of_2_Blocks_Together.txt
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When we analyze the problem about putting two blocks along a frictionless surface and pushing one and asking, what is the maximum force such that block 2 does not slip? We have three different systems. And now I want to focus a little bit on what would happen if we just naively chose our systems as both blocks together. So let's try to look at the types of issues that come up when we do that. So once again, let's draw free body diagrams. Now, we begin. We're pushing block 1 with a force. Gravitation is the sum of these two forces, because our system here is block 1 and block 2. What about normal forces? Well, the ground is acting on block 1. And now, here's the significant thing. What about all of those forces between blocks 1 and 2? Well, the forces between blocks 1 and 2 are internal forces. And we saw that they were friction forces, f12 and f21. This was the friction force between the two blocks, on block 2 due to 1 and the friction force on block 1 due to 2. There were normal forces between these two blocks, but these are interaction pairs. And the sum of them are 0. And so we see that all internal forces form Newton's third law interaction pairs and the vector sum of them are 0. And that's why I don't need those internal forces on my free body diagram. If I were to draw them, I would have different arrows. For instance, I would have that arrow f21 and I would have the arrow f12. And you can see that the sum of those cancel. I would have the arrow n21 and I would have the arrow n12. Arrows in opposite directions. The interaction pairs sum to 0, because they are internal forces. And again, this enables us now to just draw f equals m1 plus m2 times the acceleration of the system. And so we have our i hat and our j hat directions. Let's pick i hat and j hat. And now, we didn't include the kinetic friction force of the ground in that system. So let's make sure that that's there. And what we have is f minus f kinetic equals m1 plus m2 times a. And in the vertical direction, we have n ground 1 minus m1 plus m2 g equals 0. That gave us our same result before. Notice that f equals fk plus m1 plus m2 g. We know this is mu km1 plus m2 g plus m1 plus m2 g a. So we have the acceleration of the system depends on the force, mu k m1 plus m2g divided by m1 m2. But notice because our static friction is an internal force in this system, it never shows up in Newton's second law, so we were never able to apply the condition that f static max was mu static n, what we call the normal force between the blocks. And so we were unable to figure out what is the maximum force. All we can say is if I push f, that's the acceleration. But I cannot determine what maximum force will cause block 2 to slip with respect to block 1. So when you pick your system like this, it's very quick to calculate a. No problem about that. But I am not able to answer any questions that require some type of information about the internal forces. So the art to choosing systems and free body diagrams is to think about the types of questions you're asking. If you have a question that involves something about a maximum condition on static friction, then you want to make sure that static friction is an external force to your system. If it's an internal force, like in this case, you will not be able to apply that condition.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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120_Week_4_Introduction.txt
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This week, we will examine some more advanced topics in the application of Newton's laws of motion. First, we will look at more examples of constrained motion, where the motion is forced to obey some particular condition in addition to Newton's laws of motion. These conditions usually specify some particular relationship between coordinates of objects and the system we are studying. Specifically, we will re-examine the case of objects suspended with pulleys and ropes, but with more complex systems than we have discussed previously. The fact that the ropes have fixed length will provide a constraint condition relating the coordinates of our various masses. Second, we will examine the case of forces acting on a continuous, extended mass distribution as opposed to acting on discrete point masses. This will allow us to introduce a powerful differential analysis technique from calculus where we model continuous mass distributions as made up of lots of small, discrete mass elements and then examine the limiting case of infinitesimally small elements to obtain the continuous behavior. This is a technique that you will see applied over and over again in physics and engineering. And in fact, we will return to it again later in this course. Our specific example will be to study how tension varies in a long, massive rope. This is in contrast to the light, effectively massless ropes that we discussed previously. Finally, we will discuss velocity-dependent forces-- that is, forces whose strength depends on the velocity or some function of the velocity of the mass being acted on. The most common example of this is resistive forces or drag forces, which are caused by motion of a solid object through a fluid, like air or water. That is the example we will discuss this week. Another example you may be aware of is the magnetic force that acts on a charged particle, which depends upon the velocity of the charged particle. In all three of these cases, we will simply be applying Newton's three laws of motion, but the situations will require a more sophisticated treatment to what has come before.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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182_Set_up_a_Recoil_Problem.txt
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We would like to now apply the momentum principle to examples of recoil. So recall that the momentum principle is that the external force causes the momentum of the system to change. Now, this is a vector equation. So for example, if the external force in the x direction is 0, then the momentum of the system in the x direction, let's say, the final momentum will be equal to the initial momentum. I would like to now apply the momentum principle to an example of recoil. In our recoil example, we have a person jumping off a cart. So let's just look at how this example can work if we draw momentum diagrams. So suppose we choose a ground frame. And in that ground frame, we have a cart and a person. A person is standing on the cart. And this is t initial. And here, they are at rest. Now, the person we're going to assume to jump horizontally off the cart, and the cart will recoil in the opposite direction. So after the jump, we can describe this picture. The person is moving with the velocity, v. The cart is moving with vc. And the person has jumped with the velocity vp. Now, suppose I choose a different reference frame. That instead of choosing a ground frame, as a reference frame moving with the velocity vc. You can imagine that maybe I have a car here and you're inside that car moving with velocity vc, and you're looking at this picture. Then, what would our momentum diagrams look like? Well, if I'm moving in a car this way and in the ground frame the initial picture is the person in the cart is at rest. Then, in my moving frame, it actually looks as if the cart and the person are moving in the opposite direction. So let's write that this way. Here's the initial picture, t initial. And in this frame, the person and the cart are moving with vc minus vc. I put an arrow here to indicate that it's opposite the direction of vc there. But their velocity is minus the velocity of the reference frame. After the jump-- so here's the person now. The cart is at rest, why? Because we're in the reference frame moving with vc. So if you're in a car and you're moving at the same speed that the cart has with the ground frame, then in your frame, this cart looks like it's at rest. What about the person jumping off? Well, let's write it this way. So this is the velocity. I'm going to use a symbol, u. Now, u-- this is what do we mean by that. This is the velocity of the person in the moving frame that's moving with velocity vc-- that's the velocity of the person as seen by a car. Sometimes we call this the velocity of the person relative to the cart. What does that word relative to the cart mean? Well, you can see in this picture. In this moving frame, the cart is at rest, and the person jumps with the speed u velocity u relative to the cart. So these are momentum diagrams for a ground frame in which the person in the cart started at rest, the person jumps off. I can put an arrow here, but it's really information is in that vector. The cart is moving. In a frame moving with the velocity of the cart, then what does my picture looks like? Well, the cart and the person initially are moving opposite directions. Again, you're moving this way. The cart looks like it's moving that way if you're inside the car. And the final state, person, cart is at rest and the person is jumping with the velocity u relative to the cart. Now, our question now is how do we relate these two velocities, u and vp? What are u and vp? vp is the velocity of the person in the ground frame. And u is the velocity of the person in the moving frame. Well, we've already seen our equation for how to get velocities in different frames. We have that vp equals the relative velocity of the two frames plus the velocity in the moving frame. So what we have is, this is the velocity of the person-- let me just clean that up-- of the person in the ground frame. v is the relative velocity of the two frames. So here we have that v is the velocity of the cart, because you're in a frame moving with vc with respect to the ground. And u is the velocity of the person in the moving frame. So this is how we can show the same type of interaction in two different reference frames. Next, we'll figure out what these velocities are.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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151_Momentum_and_Impulse.txt
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So suppose we have a point mass particle of mass m moving with a velocity vector, v. We can introduce a quantity we call the momentum of that particle. I'll label it with the symbol p. And it's equal to the product of the mass times the velocity. This is something you've undoubtedly seen before. Now, let's think about the dimensions of momentum for a moment. So dimensionally, momentum has units of mass times the velocity. And so that's in SI units, the units of mass are kilograms and then the units of velocity are meters per second. You can also express momentum dimensionally as a product of a force times time. And so, again in SI units, units force are the Newton and the units of time is the second. So these are the SI units for momentum, two different ways of writing the same dimensions. Now, we've seen that for a single particle, we can write Newton's second law as the force is equal to the mass times the acceleration. Or equivalently, we can write that as the mass times the time derivative of the acceleration, dv/dt. Now, if m is a constant, then I can rewrite this as F is equal to the time derivative of the mass times the velocity, or equivalently as the time derivative of the momentum, since mv is just equal to p. So I actually want to stress this much-- I'm going to put it in a box because it's very important that I can write Newton's second law, instead of F equals ma, as F equals the time derivative of the momentum. And this is absolutely where we'll see the momentum becomes very useful. Because it turns out that this form of Newton's second law is actually the most general form of the equation because it's applicable not just to a single point mass, but also to a more complicated system. A system consisting of many masses or a system where the masses changing or the masses flowing, as in a fluid. In all of those cases, this form of Newton's second law is correct. F equals ma, which is probably more familiar to you, is actually a special case of this law for the case of a single point mass. So this is where we'll see that momentum is quite a useful concept, especially as we start considering more complicated systems, as we'll get to a little later in the course. What I want to do now though, is to take a closer look at this equation, force is equal to the time derivative of the momentum. Whenever we have a relation involving a derivative like this, we can always also rewrite it in an equivalent integral form, which can be very useful and give us a different way of looking at the same information. So let's take a look at that. So if I take this equation and integrate both sides with respect to time, then I can write that as the integral of F with respect to time is equal to the integral of the right-hand side, dp/dt with respect to time. Now, let's make this a definite integral. I'll go from time t1 to time t2 on both sides here. Now, this right-hand side is just-- so the integral of dp/dt with respect to time is just p at time2 minus p at time1. And that is just the change in the momentum vector going from time1 to time2. Now, this integral on the left-hand side, we give a special name. We call this the impulse. This name, impulse, calls to mind a short, sharp, shock of some sort. But it can also refer to a weak force acting over a long interval. And notice here the function F, the force F, is in general a function of time. So this doesn't necessarily mean a constant f. This could mean a force that's varying in time. And what this equation tells us is that the change in the momentum of the system doesn't depend on the detailed time dependence of F, but rather just on the integral of F. And so suppose I were to graph the force as a function of time going from time0 to a time delta t. And suppose I had some complicated function that looked like that. The impulse is just the area under this curve. It's the integral of this function. That's the impulse. And the change in the momentum depends only on the area under this curve and not on the detailed shape of the curve. So what that means is that I can define an average force by choosing a constant force that has the same area as this example on the left. So suppose I calculated that. And there is some constant force here. I'll call this F average. Going over the same time interval. The average force is that constant force which has the same area as the area under my F of t. So in other words, F average times delta t, which is the area on the right-hand side here, is equal to the integral of F of t dt integrated from 0 to delta t, which is the area under this right-hand curve. And so my average force is just that integral, F of t dt, divided by delta t. And this is integrated from 0 to delta t. So that's my average force.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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PS31_Worked_Example_Orbital_Circular_Motion_Radius.txt
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The little prince's asteroid B612 is being orbited by a small body. It has a mass m. And it goes around this asteroid B612 that has a mass m1. We should add a coordinate system. We always know about r-hat goes radially outward. And we know from the universal law of gravitation that we have mutual attraction between these bodies. And actually, that's going to point inward. And because we're having orbital motion here, so circular motion, the acceleration, the radial component of the acceleration will also point inward. We need to consider all of that for our f equals ma analysis that we are going to do now, because the little prince wants to know how far this little body is away from his asteroid. So we have the gravitational universal law here, minus Gmm1 over the distance squared. So the distance here between the two planets, r, which is what we want to calculate. And then we have over here for circular motion, the description of mr omega squared. Now, the little prince can't measure omega. But the little prince has a little time clock. So what he can measure is the period from here until he sees the body again. And that is 2pi over omega. So we can add that in here. mr 4pi squared over T squared. And this m here will cancel out. And we have to solve this for r. What we're going to see-- Oh and of course, we have a minus sign here because in the life of the little prince, of course gravitational acceleration is not going outwards. It's going inward, so we better give this a minus here and here as well. And we will actually see that that then cancels out against this one. And we're going to solve this for r. So we get r cubed, actually. And then we have Gm1 over 4pi squared. And here, we have T squared. And you can also just write that as Gm1 or pi squared T squared. And then we have third root. So you might have seen this equation here. This is actually Kepler's law. It describes the motion of the planets around the sun. Well, it really only does it if the motions are fairly circular. For elliptical orbits, it is not such a good approximation, although Kepler derived it like that quite a while ago. And that was really an astonishing result. So here, we have this again that the cube of the distance between two objects is proportional to the square of the period of the orbiting time.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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171_Definition_of_the_Center_of_Mass.txt
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Today we'd like to explore the idea of the center of mass, or the center of gravity, of a rigid object. For instance, take this rod. And if I try to balance it on my finger at a certain point in that rod, I'm balancing it via the gravitational force. And this point is often referred to as the center of gravity of the rod. Now, if we were in empty space with no gravitational field, then center of gravity doesn't make any sense. But this point still coincides with what we call the center of mass of the object. And now I'd like to define center of mass. So let's consider our rigid body. And we'll just describe it as some object-- we'll make it idealized-- and that there's going to be trying to find some point in this object. And we'll identify that point as the center of mass. Now, let's imagine that this rigid body is made up of a bunch of little pieces. So we have m, j. And this j piece is located from the center of mass, a vector rcm. Now how we want to define this particular point is that when we make the sum from j equals 1 to n over every single point in this body, then that will be 0. And this will be the definition of the center of mass, that when you add up the position vector with respect to this point weighted by the mass, and you add up all of those vectors, you'll get 0. Now, if you don't know where the center of mass is then this is difficult to calculate. So let's find a way where you choose an arbitrary point, and that's write that arbitrary point, say, over here. We'll write it like this-- s. And we'll treat that as our origin. And I'll draw a vector, rsj. And here, I'll draw the vector Rcm. And now what we have from our vector relationship is that the vector rsj equals the vector Rcm-- and that's what I want to find-- plus the vector rcmj. And now let's add up-- multiply each of these by the mass and make a sum. So we have mj rsj equals the sum of mj. Now, the vector Rcm, this vector, no matter where we picked a point in this object, the vector's always the same. And that's why I pulled it out of the sum. And over here, I have the sum from j goes from 1 to n, j 1 to n, of mj rcmj. Now, recall, this is precisely how we define the center of mass point, that this is 0. And so we can now conclude that the center of mass-- so you pick an arbitrary point, and if you want to find that vector to the center of mass, what you do is you make the sum from j goes from 1 to n of mj rsj, and you divide that by j goes from 1 to n, mj. And this is what we call the center of mass. So conceptually, the center of mass is the point in the object where, if you take a vector to any of the little mass elements, and you weight it by the mass element, and you add them up, you get 0. If you wanted to calculate the center of mass about any point, you choose a point, s, you draw the vector from s to the object. You sum up those vectors. We see by our vector triangle rule that we can now calculate that center of mass vector by this equation. And now let's just rewrite this because this is the total mass. And what we see is that the Rcm equals j goes from 1 to n, mj rsj divided by the total mass.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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PS31_Worked_Example_Orbital_Circular_Motion_Period.txt
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The little prince has really come to like this little body that's orbiting him. He knows at what distance it orbits and knows how fast it goes. And I think the little prince fell in love with that little body. And now he wants to see it all the time as it goes around the asteroid. But the little prince just wants to keep sitting there. He doesn't want to move. So how fast does the asteroid need to rotate so that the little prince will always see the body as it rotates around him? Well, for that, we need to simply consider that the period of the little body going around the asteroid needs to be the same as the asteroid rotation period. So we're going to call that Ta for asteroid. And well, if we want to know at what distance that works out, then we're going to use Kepler's laws here again. And we're going to have that the radius between the body and the asteroid will be Gm1 over 4 pi squared. And now we have Ta squared in here and the third of that. So all of these wonderful quantities make the little prince really happy.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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61_Contact_Forces.txt
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Let's consider what happens when we have an object that's moving on a horizontal surface. So here's our object, and here's our surface. Now, we want to look at a special case where we're applying a force F to the object, and the object is moving at a constant speed. Then what we see here is that there has to be some type of force that's opposing this object, the interaction between the object and the surface, that's distributed over the surface. For this, I'll write an arrow here to express that force. That's the tangential component of the force. The object is also pressing down on the surface. The surface is pressing up on the object. And so there's another perpendicular force to the surface, which is referred to as the normal force. And the total vector sum of these two forces-- the perpendicular part, the normal force, and the tangential part-- is referred to as the contact force. This is what we'll call kinetic friction. Now, when the object is moving at a constant speed, we know that, from experiment, that the kinetic friction, the magnitude, is proportional to the magnitude of the normal force. And the constant of proportionality is called the coefficient of kinetic friction. Now, this law is telling us something very interesting, that key properties are, one, that it's independent of the contact area. Now, what do we mean by that? So let's look at the following picture. Suppose we have two objects of the same mass. On the surface, we're applying a force F and the contact area here, A1. And we have a similar object, the same mass, on the same surface. And both objects are moving at a constant speed. Now, these objects have different areas of contact, A1 and A2. But the force necessary to move the object at the constant speed is the same. And because of that, the kinetic friction is the same. And that indicates that it's independent of the contact area. And the other key property here, which we'll write over here, is that it's independent of the speed of the object. So we'll write that as independent of the velocity. And these three properties of kinetic friction are crucial for understanding the motion of objects across a surface. But we still don't have a very good theoretical model for explaining this, although today, there is a lot of contemporary research which has made a lot of progress in understanding this interaction.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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83_Angular_Velocity.txt
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Now we'd like to talk about angular velocity. So for a particle traveling in a circle, we've seen that the velocity can be written as r d theta dt. In the theta hat direction. And we've also seen that d theta dt can be positive, in which case, theta is increasing. And so the particle is traveling around the circle in this direction. You can call that the counterclockwise direction. We've also seen that d theta dt can be negative, in which case the angle is decreasing, so the particle's traveling around the circle in this direction, which we could call clockwise. Let's now look at rotation in an arbitrary plane. So if I have a plane like this and I have some particle traveling in a circle like this. And I have some observer that's above the plane looking down on this plane, then it will see this rotation as being in the counterclockwise direction. Whereas if I have another observer down here and they're looking up at this plane, they'll see the motion as being clock wise. And so you can see we have a need for the more formal definition for the rotation of this. And so what we're going to do is use the right hand rule to define a direction that tells you both the direction it defines the plane and it also tells you what the positive direction of rotation is for that plane. So the way we'll do this right hand rule is we'll take our right hand, we'll curl our fingers in the direction of the rotation. And our thumb will point in the direction of the positive direction that we're defining. So in this case, I'm going to have an arrow like this. I'll call it n hat to indicate that it's the normal unit vector to that plane. All right. Let's come back to this example now, where the plane of the motion is this plane of the board. And let's look at our two cases again. So in the case of d theta dt positive, our circle looks something like this. And you can see that if I use my right hand rule, the plane, the vector that I've defined, is out of the board. And I'm going to use this symbol, a circle with a dot, to indicate this direction of out of the board. In our other case, for d theta dt less than zero, our particle is traveling in this direction. And so you can see by my right hand rule that now the direction that I've defined is into the board. And for that, I'm going to draw this as an x in the circle. So these are symbols that you'll see throughout the rest of the course, the out of the board and into the board symbols. And so now, let's look back at our coordinate system that we've defined. We have r hat direction and a theta hat direction. And in this coordinate system, there's a third direction that's defined, which is the k hat direction, which you can see is out of the board. And so now, I'm going to define what we actually call the angular velocity as omega. And I'm going to write that as d theta dt. Now, in the k hat direction, in this case, it could be in an arbitrary n hat direction, depending on what you're playing of motion is. In this case, I'm going to call it in the k hat direction, and now you can see that these signs are going to line up with these directions. So omega, as d theta dt k hat, when d theta d t is positive, k hat is in the same direction as this unit normal that we've defined that defines both the plane of the motion and the direction of the motion. And when d theta dt is negative, I have that omega is in the negative k hat direction, which is exactly this direction here that we've defined as being the motion for this plane. And so this is how we define angular velocity. So we can define d theta dt to be the component of the angular velocity omega z, because it's in the k hat direction. And we can also define the angular speed, which is just omega as being the absolute value of this angular velocity omega. So that is, in other words, it's just the absolute value of the d theta dt. So when a particle's undergoing circular motion, it has a velocity that you can describe, which is the tangential motion around the circle. And it also has an angular velocity, which we define as being in a direction that's perpendicular to that direction of rotation. And it's defined by the right hand rule. And now that we have defined this omega z, the component of the angular velocity, we can rewrite the velocity as just being equal to r times omega z still in that theta hat direction. And so this is another way that we can write the velocity and connect it back to the angular velocity.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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17_Worked_Example_Derivatives_in_Kinematics.txt
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Let's consider a one dimensional motion that has a non-uniform acceleration. What we'd like to do is explore how do you differentiate position functions, to get velocity functions, to get acceleration functions. So what we're going to consider is a rocket. So I'm going to choose a coordinate system y. And here's my rocket. And I have a function y of t. And I'll have a j-hat direction, but this will be a one dimensional motion. Now I want to express while the rocket is thrusting upwards and the engine is burning, we can describe a function y of t to be equal to 1/2 a constant a naught minus the gravitational acceleration, times t squared. And we're going to have a separate term here, which is minus 1 over 30. And you'll see where this 30 comes in as we start to differentiate. The same constant a naught, t to the 1/6 over t naught to the 1/4. Now in this expression, a naught is bigger than g. And also, this is only true, this holds for the time interval 0 less than or equal to t, less than t naught. And at time t equals to t naught, the engine shuts off. And at that moment, our expectation will be that the y component of the acceleration should just be minus g, for t greater than t naught. So now let's calculate the acceleration as the velocity and the position as functions of time. So the velocity-- in each case, we're going to use the polynomial rule. So the y component of the velocity is just the derivative of t squared, which is just 2t. And so we get a naught minus g times t. And when we differentiate t at the 1/6, the 6 over 30 gives us factor 1 over 5. So we have minus 1 over 5 times a naught, t to the 1/5 over t naught to the 1/4. And this is a combination of a linear term and a term that is decreasing by this t to the 1/5 factor. And finally, we now take the next derivative, ay of t, which is d dy dt. I'll just keep functions of t, but we don't really need that. And when we differentiate here, we get a naught minus g. Now you see the 5s are canceling, and we have minus a naught t to the 1/4 over t naught to the 1/4. Now at time t equals t naught, what do we have? Well, ay at t equals t naught. This is just a factor minus a naught. Those cancel, and we get minus g, which is what we expected. Now this is a complicated motion. And let's see if we can make a graphical analysis of this motion. So let's plot y as a function of t. Now notice we have a quadratic term and a factor t to the 1/6 with the minus sign. So for small values of t, the quadratic term will dominate. But as t gets larger, then the t to of the 1/5 term will dominate. That's t squared. And let's call t equal to t naught. Now we have to be a little bit careful. Because when the engine turns off, the rocket is still moving upwards. So even though it starts to grow like this, it will start to still fall off a little bit, due to this t to the 1/6 term. It has a slope that is always positive. So we're claiming that our velocity term is positive. And then somewhere, if the engine completely didn't turn off, this term would still-- where is the point where the velocity, the vertical velocity is 0, because gravity will-- this term will eventually dominate. And that, we can see, is going to occur at some later time, even though that's not part of our problem. Now in fact, if we want to define, just to double check that, where the y of t equals 0, then we have a naught minus g over t equals 1/5 a naught t to the 1/5 over t naught to the 1/4. And so we have the quadratic-- we have this equation, a naught minus g times t naught to the 1/4 equals t to the 1/4. Or t equals 5 times a naught minus g, a quantity bigger than 1, times t naught. This quantity is larger than 1. And so we see that when given this motion, the place where the velocity reaches-- the position reaches its maximum would occur after t equals t naught. So this graph looks reasonable. And that would be the plot of the position function of the rocket as a function of time. As an exercise, you may want to plot the velocity as a function of t 2, to see how that looks. That would correspond to making a plot of the slope of the position function.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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PS22_Worked_Example_Stacked_Blocks_Solve_for_the_Maximum_Force.txt
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And now I'm in position to talk about what is the maximum force. If I push F harder, as if I push F and the blocks go together, the accelerations are the same. I push F harder. Accelerations are the same. I push F harder, and I push F so hard, that the static friction no longer reaches its maximum value. And if I push F harder than that, I will not have-- the static friction can't get bigger, and the blocks 1 and 2 will start to slip relative to each other. So my no slipping condition is that I want two things. a1 equals a2. We'll call that a. And the maximum force condition is that F static is equal to maximum value. Now, what is the normal force between that we refer to in our fiction law? There's two normal forces-- the ground and the normal force between the surfaces. But the static friction that we're talking about is between the surfaces. So that's why we use N here and not N ground. And now I can solve for this F max. By the way, we also have the condition that fk is mu k. What normal force are we talking about? N, which we've called N ground 1. And now I look at my equations, and my goal is to solve for F. I know Ng1 from this equation. It's just equal to M1g plus N. I Know N from that equation. So Ng1 is just the sum of the masses times g. So I know this. I have f, which is m2a. And I can now apply my result. So what we'll do is we'll solve for the a's, a1 equals a2, in terms of F max. So over here we have that a is f over m2. That's from this equation. And now I'll substitute a1 is equal to that. I'll substitute that there. And I get that F Max is going to be equal to fk plus f static max. That's that one. Plus m1 times a1, which is f static max divided by m2. And so I get that F max equals-- now I'm going to substitute in all of these values. It's going to look a little complicated. And so I'd like to have a little space here for that, to get everything in here. And we'll see that it's equal to mu k m1 plus m2g, fk, mu k, plus m1 2mg plus f static max times 1 plus and m1 over m2. But f static max is mu N, and N is m2g. So I get m2g times 1 plus m1 over m2. And there is, if I push any harder than that, block 2 will slip with respect to block 1. Again, all of our terms have the dimensions of acceleration. This is dimensionless-- 1, dimensions of acceleration. And we did miss one little thing. We missed the coefficient of static friction. And there we have it, a tricky problem.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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133_Differential_Elements.txt
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In many problems throughout this class, we will find it useful to consider how the mass of an object is distributed throughout the object. To do this, we will define a small piece of that object and then consider the mass that's contained within that small piece. For an object in one dimension, the differential element of length is delta l. And that length contains a certain amount of mass, delta m. We could also have a linear object in the shape of an arc or just an arbitrary path. For an object in two dimensions, we have an area element, delta A, that contains a mass delta m. For our volume, we have a volume element, delta V, which contains a certain amount of mass. In this case, we can write the volume element delta V as the area A times this delta x.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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02_Vector_Operators.txt
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We begin with multiplication of a vector by a scalar. When you multiply a vector, A, by a scalar, this multiplicative factor just rescales the magnitude or the length of the vector. Let us look at the vector 2 times A. This is in the same direction as the vector A, but is twice as long. This is vector B. A vector is defined by its magnitude and direction. So this vector B is the same anywhere in space, including at the origin. If I want minus 0.5 times B, this vector is in the opposite direction of B and is half the length. Now let's look at vector addition. Here's a vector A. Here is B. How do we add them graphically? We slide the tail of B to the head of A. And their sum is a vector drawn from the tail of A to the head of B. I could have also added A to B by sliding the tail of A to the head of B. You can see that this makes a parallelogram, and the sum, vector C, is just the diagonal of this parallelogram. Subtraction can be thought of as just multiplication and addition. If I have C is equal to A minus B, I just need to add A to the vector minus B. Minus B is negative 1 times B, which is this vector here. Now I only have to add A to minus B. Let's do another example. Here are my vectors A and B do not start at the origin. But since vectors are the same anywhere in space, I can go through the process here. I want A minus B. So I first multiply B by minus 1 to find minus B. And then I move the tail of minus B to the head of A and add the two like this.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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111_Newtons_2nd_Law_and_Circular_Motion.txt
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Let's examine again an object that's undergoing circular motion. And we'll choose our polar coordinates r hat, theta hat. We'll make it cylindrical with a k hat. Now that we've completed our kinematic description of the motion, now let's see how we apply Newton's second law to circular motion. Well, when we write Newton's second law as F equals ma, that-- remember, we can divide these two sides. This side, the how, is a geometric description of the motion. And this side is the why, and this is the dynamics of the motion. And the dynamics come from analyzing the forces that are acting on this object. So when we're applying this mathematically to circular motion, F equals ma-- this is a vector equation. And so what we need to do is think about each component separately. Sometimes I can just distinguish the components that I'm talking about over here. And so we have that the radial component of the forces-- and that comes from an analysis of the dynamics, the physics of the problem-- and this side is mass times the radial component of the acceleration, ar. Now these are very different things. And it's by the second law that we're equating in quantity these two components. Now if we wrote that equation-- this side out in a little bit more detail-- we'll save ourselves a little space when we handle the tangential direction-- the forces come from analysis of free body force diagrams. And over here, we know the acceleration is always inward. And I'll choose to write this as r omega squared. And so this will be our starting point for analyzing the radial motion for an object that's undergoing circular motion. Now remember, there could be a tangential motion, too. And in the tangential direction, the tangential forces are equal to ma tangential. And as we saw, this is again the second law, equating two different things. We have that we can write the tangential force as r d squared theta dt squared. And sometimes we've been writing that as r alpha z. But this equation here is what we're going to apply for the tangential forces. If the tangential forces are 0, then there's no angular-- there's no tangential acceleration. We know that for circular motion, the radial force can never be zero, because this term is always non-zero and points radially inward. And now we'll look at a variety of examples applying Newton's second law to circular motion.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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11_Coordinate_Systems_and_Unit_Vectors_in_1D.txt
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We will now like to begin our analysis of motion. And we'll start with one dimensional motion. Let's just consider a person running along a road. And so here's our runner, and here's our road. And what we want to do is be able to describe the position, the velocity, the acceleration of this runner. In order to do that, we need our first mathematical tool, which is a coordinate system. What is a coordinate system? Well, the first thing that we want to choose is an origin. We can pick the origin anywhere we want. That's a degree of freedom. So let's choose a point along our road as our origin. The next thing to do is to choose an axis. Well, the road is naturally defining an axis for our problem. And so we'll call this the x-axis. Now, along with that axis, we want to divide that up into some type of units so we might divide our axis like this. And what's important here is to introduce a positive coordinate direction. And so the way I'll do that, is I'll call this the plus x, and on this side of the origin x is negative. Now, the third most important thing is that we're going to talk about vectors and physics. So we want a choice of unit vector. Now, because it's only one dimensional motion, we only need one unit vector. So what that means is a choice of unit vector at every point. Let's just consider a point here, P1. So our unit vector I'll call it i hat 1. Now, let's pick another point here. We'll call this the point P2. And over here we'll choose a unit vector, i hat 2. So every single point in space has a unit vector. Now, what's unique about this one dimensional linear Cartesian coordinate system is the following, these unit vectors have the same magnitude-- a unit vector by definition has magnitude 1-- and they're pointing in the same direction. So if two vectors have the same magnitude and point in the same direction, they are equal. So what makes this coordinate system unique, this Cartesian coordinate system, that every single point, no matter where we are, the unit vectors point in the positive direction because they have the same magnitude and direction. All of these unit vectors are equal. And we call that i hat. So symbolically, we may draw a picture and indicate our unit vector in the positive x direction. And this is our coordinate system. And we can next begin to describe the position and the velocity of our object as it's moving along this x direction.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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123_Virtual_Displacement.txt
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When we did our analytic analysis of the constraint conditions between the accelerations of objects 1 and 2, we came up with the condition that a1 was equal to minus 2 a2. Now let's do something which we call a virtual displacement argument. Suppose that b and 2 move down a certain amount. Let's imagine-- and I'm going to draw in a different color, too-- so we have object 2, and pulley 2 has moved down. Now, this object has displaced by distance delta y 2, which is also equal to delta y b because they're connected. Now, what happens when the system does that, is our rope has to extend downwards around this pulley and come back up. And that means that the rope that object 1 has been foreshortened by not just delta y2, but on both sides, delta y2 and delta y2, object 1 has displaced up by that amount. So we'll just make this so we can draw it in a reasonable way. So what we see here is that delta y1 is equal to-- now notice, if 2 goes down, by delta y2, then delta y1-- which is this whole distance-- is a negative quantity. And it's going upwards. And so we see that that's minus 2 delta y2. And if we took two derivatives-- or displacement and then look at the change in displacement-- we would see that this implies that the acceleration of 1 is minus 2 a2. But let's come back to our two conditions for length and see the same thing here. Because delta l2 is 0, this tells us that delta y2 is equal to delta y d. So we'll write minus equals 0. And that was our condition that the block and 2 were moving together. And up here, we see that, because delta l1 is also 0, this implies-- and now I'll make that substitution that delta y b is equal to delta y2-- that 2 delta y2 here and here plus delta y1 has to be 0 coming from that piece. And so we see that delta y1 is minus 2 delta y2. Which is what our virtual displacement argument showed us. And again, if you take two derivatives here, we have that recall that, in the simplest way, that the velocity is dy1 dt. And the acceleration, a1, is d squared y1 dt squared. Then, this same proportionality is maintained under the two derivatives. And that's another way of thinking about how to get the relationship between the accelerations. But you have to be extremely careful about that sign because this 2 goes in the positive direction, 1 will go in the negative direction.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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P14_Sketch_the_Motion.txt
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Let's consider a kinematics problem. And in this problem, we want to focus on special conditions-- how to think about that. So what I'm going to consider is some charged plates, and I have a charged particle, and it enters into this region of charged plates. And in this problem, there's two types of forces that are going to act on this particle. There's a gravitational force down. And we're going to talk about some constant force upwards, whose magnitude is changing in time. And what I'd like to do is know what type of-- how strong does this force have to be-- this b is a constant-- in order for the particle to not hit the bottom? Now, let's think about a little-- when we get started on a problem like this, there's a number of different issues that we have to think about. The first issue is that how do we even sketch what we think will happen here? Well, a particle enters at time t equals 0. So this force is initially zero when the particle enters. So the particle is experiencing gravitational force. And we should expect it to move-- start to accelerate downwards. But then this force is increasing in time. And so at a certain point, these two forces will balance and the particle will have no net force up. And gradually, this force will increase so the particle will experience a force up. So we would expect some type of motion where the particle starts to go down. But now, it's starting to feel that force upwards and it starts to maybe move upwards like that. So what I've done here is I've sketched a trajectory of the motion to help me think about the problem.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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131_Rope_Hanging_Between_Trees.txt
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OK. Well, I like to lay in the hammock in the summer. And this is our version of that hammock. So we're having one rope, or perhaps two ropes, hanging between two trees here. And they span an angle theta on each side here. And we want to know what is the tension in this rope at the midpoint and here, right where it is attached to the tree. And here we already have the free-body diagram. I just drew this piece of the rope here that's hanging on this tree here. And we made an imaginary cut. We just cut it in the middle, which means gravity is obviously acting on it. It's hanging through. But it does so with m/2 here for our half rope. We know that there is a tension here at the midpoint, Tmid. And up here, we have a tension at that end point that goes under this angle here. I just use an ordinary Cartesian coordinate system with the i-hat direction going in the x direction and j-hat going in the y direction. So all we need to do is we need to apply Newton's second law and do an F equals ma analysis to figure out what these tensions are. So let's apply Newton's second law, the F equals ma analysis, to figure out what the tensions are at the midpoint and at the end over there. So we have F equals ma. And we'll have to very carefully separate the components here. Let's start with i-hat. We have Tmid minus Tend, but of course we have only the projection of Tend, so this is Tend sine theta. And since this rope is just hanging there, the acceleration is 0. In the j-hat direction, we have minus m/2 g and then plus Tend. And here we have the cos theta component, and that is also 0. So we see from here pretty much immediately that Tend equals m/2 g over cos theta. And we can stick this one here into the i-hat equation. So we'll get Tmid equals m/2 cos theta g sine theta. And that's nothing else but mg/2 over 2 tangent theta.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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172_Worked_Example_Center_of_Mass_of_3_Objects.txt
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The little prince is sitting on his little planet, and he's watching the planets go by. And so suddenly, he's seeing three of them. One, two, three. And he wonders, hmm, what would the center of mass of these three planets be? So let's calculate it. We have one planet here that's three times the mass of this guy. And then this one has half of m1. And I've written this up there already. And the center of mass, when we want to determine its coordinate-- it is a coordinate that depends on this coordinate system, and this origin here-- then we need to have the total mass of the system, because it's a mass-weighted coordinate. And so the total mass is going to be 4.5 m1. And if we want to calculate this position function of the center of mass, Rcm, that is the mass weight here. And then we need the sum of all of our masses times our distances. We're going to sum here over j from 1 to n. And what that means is we need to now write out the sum for our three planets. And we need to give this a radius here, so the r1 would be going from here to here. r2 goes from here to there. And r3 from here to here. You need to write them out in the i hat direction and in the j hat direction. Let's add that here. And then sum it all up and calculate our r. So let's write this out. We have m1, and we're going to have 35 and 10. 35 i hat plus 10 j hat plus m2. It's going to be 5 and 20. 5 and 20. And then m3, we have 40 and 30. And what we can do-- oh, and of course that has to be divided by my system mass. And what we can do is we can concentrate first on the x component, and then on the y component. Maybe we'll just continue here. So we're going to have-- and we can plug it in all the m's. We'll do it for the x component first. We're going to have m1, and then we have 35 i hat plus here we're going to have 1/2 m2. That is 3m1 5 plus-- and for m3, we have 0.5 m1 40. that's in the i hat direction. And we'll have to divide that over our system mass. And then we do the same for the y component. So m1, 10 plus 3. m1, 20 plus 0.5 m1 30 j hat. And again, we have to divide this over our system mass. So this boils down to-- hang on. Let me redo this again. Let me actually look at the answer first. What do I have here? 70 and 85, OK. So this boils to m1 over the system mass. And we have 70 in the i hat plus 85 in the j hat direction. So the 70 comes from this term, the 80 comes from this. And I put it back together, and now we need to plug in this one here. And so we will get in the end of that Rcm equals m over 4.5 m. So the m goes away, and we have a factor of 1/4.5 here. We'll divide this through, and we're going to have 15.5 in the i hat direction, and 18.9 in the j hat direction. All right, so let's see where this fits on our graph here. So 15 in the i hat is somewhere here. And 19 is almost 20, so it's going to be here, so about there. So this is my Rcm, and this here is my center of mass of the system of these three little planets. Of course, we used approximate math here for all the planets. But if we look at the real numbers, imagine that this would be Earth, and it has one Earth mass. And if this were Saturn, it would have something like 318 Earth masses. And if this is Pluto, it would have 0.0025 Earth masses. You will see that Saturn really holds all the weight. And if we were to do this calculation with these numbers here, then our Rcm would-- and keeping this coordinate system in the arrangement of the planets, then it would go right into-- if here's the center, it would go right next to the center right over here, because Saturn just weighs so, so, so much more than Pluto and Earth together.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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74_Hookes_Law.txt
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We now would like to analyze the force law on an idealized spring, a force law called Hooke's law. Let's begin by drawing a ideal spring connected to an object on a frictionless surface. So we'll draw our object. We'll draw our idealized spring. This surface here is going to be frictionless. And this is a wall, and we'll draw it like that. And now what we'd like to do is to introduce the force law for a spring, a force law, which will be called Hooke's law. So the way we'd like to analyze this is by drawing two pictures. Our first picture will have the spring at an equilibrium picture. So let's draw the wall again and let's draw the spring and our object. And this is called the equilibrium picture, so I'll write equilibrium picture. And now what we like to do is draw a picture, a dynamic picture at some arbitrary time t so here we have a dynamic picture at time t. And I'll draw it in a second. So we draw the same object, and now we're going to move our object to some arbitrary position. In this case, the spring has been stretched, wall, frictionless surface. And now, I'm in position to choose a coordinate system. So what I'll do is I'll choose my origin at the edge right here, this is called x equal 0. I'll show it in the dynamic picture. And my coordinate function for the object here, I'm going to refer to that as x sub t. Now, notice that this coordinate function is also an indication of how much the spring has been displaced. As far as directions go, we'll have an axis. And this is our plus x direction, so usually we indicate that with the unit vector i hat. And now Hooke's law is the statement that the force on the spring, that the force on the object F is proportional to how much the object has displaced, which represents either the stretching or the compressing of the spring. So it's equal to minus kx I hat. Now, what does this minus sign mean? Well, this is an example of what we call a restoring force. And let's look at just a couple of examples. When x is positive, that means that the object has been pulled out from the equilibrium position. The spring is undergoing tension, it's being stretched apart. The molecules in the spring that constitute the spring are being pulled apart, and there's a restoring force inside the spring. This is an atomic force in nature that's pulling the spring backwards, hence exerting a restoring force on the object. So this forces in the minus i hat direction. It's restoring in that direction. I'll draw the force like that. Now, suppose we drew another picture where the object is pushed in, compressing the spring. So let's draw once again a diagram. And let's show the spring under compression from our equilibrium position. Now here, we have, again, that x of t. But in this case, x of t is negative. So this is extension, so we'll call that case A. And case B, when x is less than 0, it's under compression. And then we see that with x negative and the additional minus sign, the force is in the positive direction. And so in both instances, the force is a restoring force back to equilibrium. So the restoring force, whether you're under extension or compression, is pointing, let's just call it, is the direction of the force is towards the equilibrium position. And this example of a restoring force is also only proportional to x. And so in that case, we can add the word linear, because it's just to the single power x. And this is an example of a linear restoring force. And this is a model for an ideal spring. Now, this constant k is called the spring constant. And the units of the spring constant, if you divide the units of force by the units of distance-- so we have SI units are Newton over meters, and that's the measure of the spring constant. Now, what we'll show next is an experiment in which we can figure out how to actually measure that spring constant k.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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155_Force_on_a_System_of_Particles.txt
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Now we'd like to analyze in more depth our result that for a system of particles-- so let's indicate our system. We had particle 1. We have our jth particle. And we have a particle N. So here's our system of particles where the total force caused the momentum of the system of particles to change. Now, I'd like to examine that concept of the total force. Before we said that our total force on the jth particle-- we just wrote it like this. And I'm going to put a little t up here for the moment. Because when we examine what force we mean here-- and I also want to put a little boundary around our system. And let's now consider another particle internal to the system. And let's try to identify the types of forces on the jth particle. We can really have two types of forces here. Our first force can be an interaction between these two particles. So what I'll write is the force on the jth particle due to the interaction between the k and the jth particle. And I'm going to put a little sign up here. I'm going to write this internal. What do I mean by internal? This is a force strictly between the internal particles in the system. Now, of course, we know that there must be a force on the kth particle due to the interaction between the jth and the kth particle. And we can call that internal. So what we have here is that we can divide-- there can still be other forces acting on the jth particle. And we'll do a decomposition like this. We'll say that the total force on the jth particle can come from some external forces. There could be an object outside our system. If these were interacting gravitationally, there could be a planet outside here. And this could be a moon. And our system is just the moons. That would be an external gravitational force, plus the total internal forces. So I'm going to keep this same color. Internal on the jth particle. Now how do we write this total internal force? Well, we're interested in the force on the jth particle. But the internal forces can come from all of the other particles in the system. So what we're looking at here is for a sum over all of the possible interactions where the other particles, k, go from 1 to N. And we have to be very careful here that in this sum k cannot be equal to j. Now this sum-- again, because it's a little bit tricky to understand-- is the internal force on the jth particle. Here's the kth one. But this could be a sum. I'll just draw one here. This is the internal force on the jth particle due to particle number 1. And so we're adding as k goes from 1 to N all of these internal forces. But we're excluding the case when k equals j, because that would be a force of an object on itself. And this quantity here, we can write as the total internal force on the jth particle. So in summary, we see that the total force on the jth particle is equal to the total external forces. I didn't say total there. I'm assuming there could be many different types of internal forces plus the total internal force. A little bit later on, we can drop the T's for simplicity of notation. But this is our big idea, that a force on the jth particle, external plus internal. And now when we look at this sum, and we want to now apply our main idea, we have that the force, which we're writing as-- let's explore this. Our total force is the sum of the forces on the jth particle. And we've now done this decomposition. I'm going to drop total. So it's the sum of the external forces on the jth particle. j goes from 1 to N. And here, we have a sum of the internal forces. So we have our sum j. It goes from 1 to N of the internal forces on the jth particle. Now we want to apply Newton's second law. And the concept is very straightforward. But the mathematical expression can be a little bit messy. We know by Newton's second law that the sum of a pair of internal forces is zero-- third law, by Newton's third law. So what we're saying here is, as an example, for Newton's third law-- let's just focus on this particular pair-- that F internal kj plus F internal jk is zero. So this is the statement that internal forces cancel in pairs. And so when I look at this total internal force, which is the sum of all of these pairs of internal forces, I can see that the total internal force has to be zero. So internal force cancel in pairs. Now here, we can see it another way if we want to look at this notation. We took the sum. j goes from 1 to N of F internal j. Now we use our definition for F internal. This where things get a little bit messy. k goes from 1 to N. k not equal to j. j goes from 1 to N. F internal kj. This looks terribly messy. But what we're saying is this sum is just a sum of pairs. And every single pair in this adds to 0. So what we have for our statement now is that the total force is the sum of the external forces, plus the sum of the internal forces which we've now said that cancels in pairs. So let's rewrite that as the total force-- now instead of writing this sum, let's write it as the sum of the external forces. And the internal forces cancel in pairs. And so this is now our force on our system. It's only the external force. And now we can recast our Newton's second law for a system of particles with the following statement that the external force causes the momentum of the system to change. And this becomes our expression for Newton's second law when we apply it to a system of particles where the beauty of this idea is that no matter how complicated the interaction is inside the system, all of those interactive pairs sum to zero. And so only thing that matters is the external force in terms of changing the momentum of the system. And now we'll look at some applications of that.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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134_Density.txt
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We want to relate the small length, area, or volume element to delta m, the amount of mass contained within. In one dimension, this relation is called the linear density, lambda, which is delta m over delta l. For a uniform rod of length L and total mass M, lambda is equal to M over L. In two dimensions, the area element contains an amount of mass sigma times delta A, where sigma has units of mass over area. Finally, in three dimensions, the volume density rho connects the small mass, delta m, to the volume, delta V.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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102_Angular_Acceleration.txt
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Now we'd like to discuss angular acceleration for circular motion. So suppose we have our angle theta, radius r, and r hat and theta hat. Recall that we described the angular velocity as the derivative of d theta dt, and we made this perpendicular to our right-handed coordinate system, direction k hat. Now let's differentiate that to get our concept of angular acceleration. So alpha is the second derivative d theta dt squared k hat. And this quantity is what we call angular acceleration. Now we'll describe the component alpha z as d squared theta dt squared. So it's the second derivative of the angle. And also if we wrote this as omega z k hat, we can write that as the derivative of d omega z dt, as well. So this is the component. And now in circular motion, the quantities of omega and alpha z are very much like the linear quantities of the x component of the velocity and the x component of the acceleration. And again, when we've chosen a reference frame, let's look at what various components mean. Let's begin with the case 1 where omega z is positive. So when omega z is positive, that tells us that the angle d theta dt is increasing. And that corresponds to counterclockwise motion. Now given that case, let's look at what happens when alpha z is positive. Remember, that's the statement that d omega dt is positive, that omega z is increasing. So if an object is moving with a positive component of omega z and the angular acceleration component is positive, that corresponds to increasing. The linear example, if you had one dimensional motion, i hat, you had vx positive and a x positive, corresponds to an object increasing in its speed in the x direction. That's our first case. Now let's look at the second example when alpha z is less than 0. So now the derivative of d omega z dt is negative. What that corresponds to-- remember, omega z is the z component of the angular speed. And if that's slowing down, then, with alpha z less than 0, the object is slowing down. So in our linear case, if we had a x less than 0, this is the classic example of breaking. The object is moving in the x direction and slowing down. Now let's look at case 2. This is always a little bit complicated for circular motion where omega z is less than 0. In that case, the object is moving in the clockwise direction because the angle theta is decreasing, corresponding to clockwise motion. So in that case, once again, let's consider the two examples. Well, the first example is a positive component of angular acceleration. Now this is the one that can be a little bit confusing. The object is moving clockwise but it has a positive alpha z, which will correspond to slowing the object down. And if the alpha z remains positive, it will actually come to rest and then reverse its motion and start to speed up. So this is the case where d omega dz is increasing. And that's our first case. So something like that could correspond to, if we plotted omega z and we had an object that starts off with a negative omega z and increases. Notice that the slope here, which is alpha z positive, corresponds to a positive angular acceleration component. And the object slows down as omega gets closer to 0, stops, and now has a positive omega z, corresponding to motion in a counterclockwise direction. For our linear case, this corresponds to, again, with i hat, our object moving to the left, vx negative, and if a x is positive, it breaks in this direction, which means it's slowing down. And then eventually if alpha x, ax, stays positive, it continues in that direction. Now our final case, and I'll put it down here, b, this is again where omega z negative and alpha z negative. It's always helpful to see this immediately with the graph. Omega z is negative. Here, alpha z, which is the slope, is also negative. This corresponds to an object moving in the clockwise direction. And actually its speed is increasing because alpha z is negative. So it's going faster and faster in the clockwise direction, even though alpha z is negative. And for our linear case, again, this corresponds to an object moving in the negative x direction. And a x is negative, it's moving faster in the negative x direction. And so these are the cases of how we analyze the various cases for angular acceleration and angular velocity.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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51_Universal_Law_of_Gravitation.txt
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The motion of objects in space is governed by the universal law of gravity. So let's consider how this works. We have two objects here, object one and two. And that could be two planets or two asteroids or two white dwarfs, black holes, any kind of objects you can imagine. And they are mutually attracted by each other due to gravitation. So we have a gravitational force and we label this as F. And this is the force on object one due to the interaction between the bodies one and two. And here we have a force on object two due to the interaction between objects one and two. And the objects are separated by a distance r1, 2. Now, we want to derive the universal law of gravitation. How are we going to go about that? Well, Newton figured out a while ago that it is proportional to the masses of objects one and two. So this one has a mass m2 and this one has m1. And it is also proportional to the square of the distance between the two objects. Now, we need to do one more consideration and then we can derive this. We need to actually-- well, first, we need to pick some kind of origin from where we are considering these two objects to be. And this object here goes from the origin to there and we call this r1. And then we have here r2, which also means that the distance here between object one and two is r1, 2. And actually, we know from vector decomposition that r1, 2 equals r2 minus r1. So just this minus this gives us this distance here. Now, if we want to write down the universal law of gravitation, there's a magnitude component to it and we also need a direction. And we haven't yet chosen a coordinate system. We could, of course, choose our usual way of placing the i-hat direction in the x-direction and the j-hat coordinate in the y-direction. But when we deal with the universal law of gravitation, it's actually better to adopt a slightly different coordinate system. Everything in space usually orbits one another so it's much better to think in a radial direction rather than just normal Cartesian coordinates. And so in this case, we're going to choose an r-hat vector which gives us a radial direction and we're going to do this here. So this is going to be our r-hat direction on object two. And here, we have an r-hat direction 2, 1. One And we're going to come back to the r-hat unit vectors later. For now, we can just write here quickly down the definition for a unit factor. So our r-hat 1,2 is, of course, the vector itself, r1, 2, divided over the magnitude of the vector. We can write it like this. And now we can write down the gravitational law. So the force on object-- we're going to look at object two. The force on object two due to the interaction between objects one and two is proportional to the mass of the two objects-- we already said that in the beginning-- and the square of the distance between the two objects. But what about the direction? The direction here, we're looking at object two. We placed our r-hat unit vector to point down but the force is going in the opposite direction-- so in the negative r1, 2 hat direction. So we have to add a minus here and then our 1, 2 r-hat. And as it is the case with most of these laws, it has a proportionality constant and Newton called this capital G. And G, as we know it today from experiment, is 6.67 10 to the minus 11. And then in terms of units, we have Newton. Force goes in Newton. We have mass. This is kilogram squared and we have meter squared. So those are the units. And if you plug those in, then the units of the whole equation will work out. So let's quickly consider the force in object one to see what's happening over there. So we have F2, 1 equals minus G m1 m2 over r1, 2 squared. And in terms of the unit vector, we now have r2, 1 hat here going. So again, this minus goes with this unit factor and that one is pointing here in the opposite direction than our force. So that's all good. But what we see from this one here-- and actually from our diagram already-- that r1, 2 equals minus r2, 1. And so we see from this then that actually, Newton's third law, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, is true for this little setup here, as well, because the forces are of opposite direction and of equal magnitude.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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153_Worked_Example_Bouncing_Ball.txt
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Let's consider a ball that is dropped from a certain height, h i, above the ground and this ball is falling. It hits the ground and it bounces up until it reaches some final height, h final. Now when the ball is colliding with the ground, there are collision forces. And in this problem what we like to do is figure out what the average force of the ground is on the ball. And that will be the normal force, the average normal force, on the ball during the collision. Now if we look at this ball dropping, it's going to lose a little bit of energy, because it's getting compressed at the collision. Let's look at an example of the actual ball dropping. As you can see in this high speed video, as the ball falls down, it collides with the ground. When it collides with the ground, it's compressed. And then as it rebounds upwards, the ball expands back to its original shape, but it doesn't quite get to the same height-- that's because when the ball is compressed, there's some deformation in the rubber structure of the ball, and it's not a completely elastic deformation. And so some of the energy is transformed into, first, molecular motions, which turn into thermal energy that's radiative into the environment. Let's look in particular at the details of the collision. If we look at it in slow motion what we have here-- and I'll draw a picture-- as the ball is colliding with the ground, ball compresses, expands as it goes upwards. And so we can draw a free body diagram of the ball with a normal force and a gravitational force. Now let's choose our positive direction up. So now what we'd like to do is apply the momentum principle to analyze the average normal force. And our momentum principle, remember is impulse. The force integrated over some time during the collision is equal to the change in momentum. So what we'd like to do is identify the states that are relevant. So it will have a state before, so what we'll do is we'll call this the before state, and that's right before the ball is hitting the ground. And we have an after state, and in the after state, the ball has now finished colliding with the ground, and it's now moving up with speed up. Now again, we're going to choose a positive up. Here on representing things as it speeds. One of the things, we need some times here, so let's say that t initial is zero, this is our final time. We'll call this time the before time, we'll just call this t before, and this is t after. And then our integral is going from before to after the momentum. And we can now apply the momentum principle. Well, this is a vector equation and we've chosen unit vectors up, so what we have here is the integral of from t before to t after of N minus mg, integrated over dt, and that's equal to the momentum at the y component of the momentum at t after, minus the y component of the momentum. We don't have a vector here anymore. The y component of the vector, t before. And so this is our expression of the momentum principle. Impulse causes momentum to change. Now we're assuming that the normal force just averaging it and so this intregral simply becomes N average minus ng, times the time of collision, is equal to-- now in here we can put the mass of the ball, we have the velocity. Now here's where we have to be a little bit careful, because we're looking at the y component. We chose speed downwards, that's in the negative y direction, so we have minus-- sorry, we're looking at after. We have plus V after, because this is going in the positive j direction. And over here we have a negative mass, but it's going in the minus direction, so we have a minus mV before, and so we get mass times V after plus V before. So our first result is that the normal force average. Let's bring the divide through by delta t, and bring the Ng term over, so we have m Va plus Vb, divided by delta t, plus mg. So we see that if the collision time is very short, then this average force is a little bit bigger. A long collision time, the average force a little bit smaller. Now from kinematics, we already have worked out the problem that the speed for an object that rises to a height, h final, this is the velocity afterwards, is just square root of 2g h final. And in a similar way, if an object is falling height h i, the speed when it gets to the bottom is 2ghi. And so now we can conclude with these substitutions that the average force equals m times square root of 2g h final, plus the square root of 2g h initial, over the collision time, plus and mg. And of course the collision time, we're saying is t after minus t before. And so that's how we can use the momentum principle to get an average expression for the normal force.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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181_Relative_Velocity.txt
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We will practice going between reference frames to look at relative velocities in one dimension. Let's say that an observer is standing on the sidewalk and that observer sees a car drive past to the right at a speed of v car. The observer also sees a bike that's riding to the left at a slower speed, v bike. Now, I'm interested in what the car looks like from the perspective of the bike. The bike sees itself as stationary and sees the world around it moving to the right. To the bike, the observer on the sidewalk appears to be moving to the right with the speed of v bike. The car was moving to the right relative to the reference frame of the observer standing on the sidewalk. So to the bike, the car looks like it's going even faster to the right with a total speed of v car plus v bike. Let's say, later on the biker throws an apple in the direction of her movement and sees this apple travel to the left with the speed of v apple. Now I want to know what an observer sees in the stationary frame on the sidewalk. The apple appears to be traveling a speed v apple faster than the biker all to the left. So the observer on the sidewalk will see the apple move to the left with a total speed of v apple plus v bike. Now let's say the person throws the apple forward at a speed v apple. What does the car see? To the car the apple is going to the left at the speed of v car minus v apple. How about the bike? To the bike, the apple is going at a speed of v apple plus v bike to the right.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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33_Instantaneous_Acceleration_in_2D.txt
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Let's now consider two dimensional motion, and let's try to analyze how to describe the change in velocity. So again, let's choose a coordinate system. We have an origin plus y plus x. And let's draw the trajectory of our object. And now let's draw the object at two different times. So for instance, if I call this the location at time t1, and a little bit later here, this is the location of the object at time t2. We'll call our unit vectors i hat and j hat. We know that the direction of the velocity is tangent to this curve. So if we draw v at time t1-- and over here, notice the direction has changed v at time t2. And what we'd like to do now is describe, just as before, that our acceleration a of t is the derivative of the velocity as a function of time. What that means is the limit as delta t goes to 0 of delta v over delta t. Now, it's much harder to visualize the delta v in this drawing. And partly, the reason for that is these velocity vectors are located at two different points. And right now, the backs of these vectors have different places in space. But remember that delta v is just v, in this case, at time t2 minus v at time t1. And our principle for subtracting two vectors at different locations in space is to draw the vectors where we put the tails at the same location. So here's a tail at this vector. We're just going to translate that vector in space. That is still v at time t1. These vectors are equal. They have the same length, and they have the same direction. And so delta v is just the vector that connects here to there. That's what we mean by delta v. And so you can see in this particular case that it's not obvious from looking at the orbit what the delta v is. So what we need to do is just trust our calculus. And so when we write the velocity as dx dt i hat plus dy dy j hat, and we're now treating each direction independently. We call this vx i hat plus vy j hat. So that's our velocity vector. Then our acceleration is just the derivative of the velocity. We take each direction separately, so we have dv x dt i hat plus dv y dt j hat. Now, again, notice that velocity v of x is already the first derivative of the position of the exponent function. So what we really have here is the second derivative of the position function in the i hat direction and the second derivative of the component function in the y direction. And that is what we call the instantaneous acceleration. Now, again, this is sometimes awkward to draw, but you always must remember that this x component of the acceleration by definition is the second derivative of the component function or the first derivative of the component function for the velocity. And likewise, the y component of the acceleration ay is the second derivative of the component function for position. And that's also equal, by definition, to the first derivative of the component of the velocity vector. And that's how we describe the acceleration. As before, we can talk about the magnitude of a vector. And the magnitude of a we'll just write as a. It's the components squared, added together, taken square root. And that's our magnitude. And so now we've described all of our kinematic quantities in two dimensions-- the position, the velocity as the derivative of the position, and the acceleration as the derivative of the velocity where each direction is treated independently.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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161_Cases_of_Constant_Momentum.txt
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Let's examine when the momentum of a system is constant, and apply that to solving problems. First, we'll revisit the impulse equation. On the left, we have the impulse, the integral of the total external force acting on a system between some initial and final times. And on the right, we have the change in the total momentum of the system, between those initial and final times. In a situation where the impulse is 0, we have that the change in the momentum is 0. P initial is equal to p final. In other words, the momentum of the system is constant between some initial and final time. This is a vector equation. But in many problems, we can set up our coordinate system so we only have to consider one dimension. Here's a simple example of one block moving along a horizontal surface with some initial velocity, colliding with a block at rest. And then the two blocks stick together and move. Is momentum constant during this collision? To answer that question, we need to think about what our system is. Let's look at the system of both blocks together. We can see the external forces, gravity and the normal force, add up to 0. So our total external force is 0. During the collision, each block exerts a force on the other. But that is an internal force if both blocks are included in our system. You can see that if our system was just one of the two blocks, we would need to know the collision force in order to solve for the final speed. Therefore, we will choose our system to be the two blocks together. We then need to set up a coordinate system. We'll pick the origin here, and this direction to be positive x. Now we need to identify the initial and final states. Our initial state will be just before the blocks collide. The momentum of the system is the sum of the momentum of each block individually. We have m1 times v1 initial x times i-hat plus m2 times v2 initial x times i-hat. This second term is 0, since block 2 starts at rest. The final state is right after the collision when the two blocks are moving together. They have the same velocity, so the final momentum is m1 plus m2 times v final x times i-hat. This gives us an equation that will allow us to solve for whatever quantity we are not given. Now let's look at a similar collision, one that's happening in two dimensions. If we have one block coming up from the bottom, hitting one that's coming in from the side, I'll choose my unit vectors to be like this, my origin here. The momentum equation gives us two equations, one along the x direction and the other along the y direction. Once again I'll choose the initial state to be just before the collision and the final state to be just after the collision. The momentum in the initial state is again the sum of the momentum of each block individually. And the momentum in the final state is the mass of the two blocks added together times the velocity of the two blocks. Notice that this velocity has a component in both the x and the y directions. Again the total external force on the system is 0. So the impulse is 0 in both the x and y directions, and therefore, momentum is conserved for both the x and y components. So I can write my two momentum equations like this. The impulse equation is a vector equation. So generically, in two dimensions, we will have two equations. We always need to check that the momentum is conserved in each direction separately. And it is possible to have a case where momentum is conserved in one direction but not the other, if we have some net external force in one direction. What would happen if, in our 1d collision example, the blocks now experienced friction along the surface? Can we still assume that the momentum is conserved? In fact, if we pick a point in time right before the collision and compare that to a point in time right after the collision, we can see that the impulse from friction is over such a short period of time, that the impulse is really small. And we can say that the momentum is approximately constant. If we consider times later, after the collision is over, then momentum is certainly not conserved, which is what you would expect. You'll see the two blocks slow down due to friction. So even if there are other forces acting on the system, like friction or gravity, we can still calculate the result of a collision as if the momentum is constant during the collision by picking times only a very small delta t apart.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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143_Resistive_forces_high_speed_case.txt
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Now we're going to analyze a more complicated example of drag forces, where we have an object falling in a gravitational field with gravity. We have a resistive force. And this is an object in air. And so our model will be for the resistive force that it's going to be proportional to the velocity squared. Now to get its direction right, opposing the motion, j hat. So this will turn out to be a more complicated analysis. But first again, let's think about the units of our coefficient beta. It has the units of force divided by velocity squared. So we write the units of force, kilogram meters per second squared, and the units of velocity squared, meter squared per second squared. And so we see that we have units of kilogram per meter for our coefficient beta. Now, we'll apply as usual Newton's second law, F equals m a, to get our equation of motion. We're looking at the j direction. And our forces are gravity minus the velocity squared resistive drag force. And that's equal to the derivative of the velocity dv/dt. In this example, it's a one dimensional motion. So I'm dropping any mention of y direction for simplicity. Now we can rewrite this equation as dv/dt. Let's divide through by m is g minus beta over m v square. And this is a linear-- it's a first order differential equation, dv/dt. It's a non-linear equation because the velocity term appears here as a square and there's a constant term. But we can still apply our technique of separation of variables. And so when we write this equation as dv/dt we'll separate out dv's and t's, so we have d d times g minus beta over and m v squared is equal to dt. Now, I'm going to do two things just to clean this up for algebra a little bit later. I'm going to multiply both sides by a minus sign. And I'm going to pull the g out. So I have 1 minus beta over m g v squared. And on the other side, I have minus dt. And now I can get this equation in the form that I'd like to integrate, which is minus dv times 1 minus beta over m g v squared equals minus gdt. Now, the trouble here is this integral is a little bit complicated. So I'd like to make a change of variable. And my change of variable will be u equals the square root of beta m g times v. And that implies that du is beta m g dv. And the limits, if we start our object at rest, so if u0 equals 0, then because v0 equal 0, that's our first limit. Now we have to be a little bit careful because if we drop this object at rest, initially it will be moving very slowly. And so our resistive model doesn't actually apply. However, we're going to neglect that effect even though if we were to do a more complicated analysis, we would have to change our model as the object is following, so it would be a multi-stage motion. First, at the beginning with our only velocity dependent resistant. And then as it gets some initial speed and it's going faster, we change our model. That's why the actual problem can be quite complicated. But we're just trying to keep things simple here. And then u of t is square root of beta mg d of t. And then with this change of variable, my integration, remember I have a dv, so I have to multiply the left side by mg over beta. And I'm integrating with a minus sign du times 1 minus u squared from 0 to this final value u of t And over here I'm just integrating minus g dt. Now again, for simplicity, I'm going to bring this term, the beta over mg over to the other side. So I'll use the magic of our light board by just erasing that and bringing it to the other side, which makes my life a little easier. And now, this interval can be done by the method of integration by parts. It's a nice problem in calculus. And you can verify for yourself that the result is one half natural log of 1 plus u over 1 minus u evaluated at our limits. And over here I have minus g square root of beta over mg. Now, once again, for a little bit of simplicity, I'm going to bring the 2 over to the other side. And now, I evaluate my limits. Now recall that when you have a minus log, we're flipping, because log of b over a equals minus log over ab, so when I put out my limits in, I have natural log of-- now remember, what are our limits? We have 1-- I'm flipping-- minus u is beta mg times v of t. And I have the 1 plus beta mg v of t. And that's equal to minus as 2g square root of beta mg. Now, again, we'll use the fact that e to log of x is x. And so if I exponentiate both sides, I end up with 1 minus the square root of beta mg d of t over 1 plus square root of beta mg v of t is equal to exponential minus 2g beta mg times t. And we'll just move that. OK, now this is a little bit of algebra. I want to solve for v of t. If I bring this side over to there, I'll just do that to make the first step a little simpler to see. So we have 1 minus square root of beta mg v of t equals 1 plus square root of beta over mg v of t times e to the minus this factor 2g square root of beta mg t. Now this is a lot of stuff to carry around. I'd like to introduce a constant here, tao, which I'm going to find to be square root of mg beta 1 over 2g. And so this whole term is going to just be e to the minus tao. It's a nice example for you to work out that the units of tao are the units of seconds. And that's a little exercise to work out. Now, I just have to collect my terms. And what I'll do is I'll collect the T terms on the right and the terms that don't have vt on the left. So I have 1 minus e to the minus t over tao on the left is equal to 1 plus e to the minus t over tao on the right times beta mg v of t. And so I get my solution, v of t equals the square root of mg over beta times 1 minus e to the minus t over tau over 1 plus e to the minus t over tao. Well, it's not a simple solution at all. But let's examine when you have a case like this-- again, it would be a nice exercise to graph this out. But right now we're going to consider the limit as t goes to infinity. And remember that e minus t over t goes to 0 when t goes to infinity. So we just have 1 over 1. And what we get as t goes to infinity is the quantity mg over beta. And this is what we call the terminal velocity. Now what does terminal velocity mean? Well, when object is falling and there's a resistive force, as the object falls faster and faster, the resistive force gets greater and greater until if we go back to Newton's second law and look at it, as v gets faster and faster, eventually these two terms are equal. And when these two terms are equal, that's the statement that the right-hand side has to be zero. So what we mean by terminal velocity is it's the velocity is no longer changing in time. And then we can immediately check our work by going to Newton's second law and see what that case is if we set this quantity equal to zero. In other words, when we set mg minus beta v squared terminal equal to 0 we can solve for v terminal, and we get a square root of mg divided by beta. And that agrees with our lengthy calculation. So we think we're on the right track.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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44_Noninertial_Reference_Frames.txt
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Now that we've seen how coordinates are related between two inertial frames, I want to consider a slightly more advanced example for a moment, which is supposed that capital V, the vector velocity of frame S prime relative to inertial frame S, is not a constant. So in this case, suppose that frame S prime has an acceleration, capital A, relative to S. We now say that as prime is a non-inertial frame, because it is accelerated relative to frame S. Now we saw that in inertial frames, one always measures the same acceleration for the same object, even though you'll measure different velocities in different positions in general. That's not going to true in a non-inertial frame. In a non-inertial frame, the acceleration, A prime, is equal to the acceleration of frame S minus capital A, the acceleration of frame S prime relative to S. Remember, capital A is 0 for S prime being an inertial frame, when capital V is a constant. But if capital V is not a constant, then capital A is not 0. So you will measure different accelerations in these different frames. Now what that tells us is that Newton's laws are going to look a little different. And let's see how that works. So now, the force measured in frame S prime-- I'll call that F prime-- we expect that from Newton's second law to be the mass times the acceleration A prime. But that is the mass times the acceleration measured in frame S minus m capital A, the acceleration of frame S prime relative to frame S. Now I can rewrite this as two terms. One I'll call F physical, which represents the physical forces acting on the object. And the second term, I'm going to call F fictitious for reasons that we'll see in a moment. So what this means is the following is that an observer in frame S prime in order to explain the motion of the object using Newton's laws will have to invoke not just the physical forces interacting on the object, which might be due to gravity or rope pulling or an engine pushing or a hand acting on something, but will also have to both an apparent force, which I'll call F fictitious, that acts on everything. And in this case, F fictitious is equal to minus m capital A. But that force will not be associated, will not be identifiable with any actual, real physical interaction. It's an artifact of the choice of coordinate system. It's an artifact of the non-inertial coordinate system that frame S prime is in. For that reason, we call it a fictitious force. And it's to be distinguished from real, physical forces of the type that we've been talking about up until now. So you may have seen earlier that for the motion of an object in a circle around some center point implies the presence of an inward acceleration toward the center of the circle. So as a consequence of that, a rotating reference frame, for example, a reference frame that rotates with the Earth's rotation, is accelerated relative to an inertial frame. This results in a fictitious force that has two terms, a centrifugal term and a Coriolis term. You may have come across this Coriolis force and centrifugal force before. These are examples of fictitious forces because they arise from the choice of coordinate system. They're an artificial force. They don't correspond to actual, physical interactions, but are an artifact of the rotating, non-inertial coordinate system. Now, in this course we will confine ourselves to inertial reference frames. And therefore, we'll only be considering real, physical forces and interactions. However, there are advanced applications where the use of a non-inertial frame has certain advantages. And you may encounter those as you go to more advanced courses.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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PS31_Worked_Example_Orbital_Circular_Motion_Velocity.txt
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Now the little prince wants to know how fast this little body is going around. And well, we can just do f equals ma analysis again, but use a different option here for the description of the circle of motion. So we are going to get minus Gm m1 over r squared equals minus mv squared over r. And here one r cancels, and this m cancels. And that goes to plus. If we solve this for v, we get v equals Gm1 over r and the square root of that. And so now the little prince knows how fast this object is going, given the radius here that we've calculated over there with Kepler's laws.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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P15_Worked_Example_Pedestrian_and_Bike_at_Intersection.txt
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You're standing at a traffic intersection. And you start to accelerate when the light turns green. Suppose that your acceleration as a function of time is a constant for some time interval t less than t one. And after that, it's zero for a time after t one less than t less than some time t two. At the exact same instant the light turns green, a bicyclist is coming through the intersection. And the bicyclist has some initial speed and is braking with an acceleration of minus b two for the entire time interval t two. And at time t two, the bicyclist comes to rest exactly where you are located. And we also know some initial conditions. So our initial conditions in this problem are that you're accelerating b one at a rate two meters per second squared. And you do this for time t one equals one second. And the bicyclist comes into the intersection. We'll call that b two naught. That's the initial speed of the bicyclist at three meters per second. And the question is, what is the rate of deceleration of the bicyclist b two? Now this can be quite a complicated problem. So the first thing we want to do is just make a sketch and think about what's involved. This problem involves two objects. You and the bicyclist. The person-- that's you-- has two stages of motion. And the bicyclist only has one stage of motion. So to get started, it always helps to choose a coordinate system and to make some sketches of the problem. So let's say we choose a-- it's all one dimensional motion. Two objects. One dimensional motion. And so we'll pick an origin at the light at the one side of the intersection. And we have two objects which we'll talk about. You, x one. And the bicycle is x two. Actually we don't know yet who's in front of the other. The bicyclist will be first in front of you. So now how do we sketch the motion of these two stages of motion? So let's make a sketch. And let's start with the person. Well, the person-- if we plotted their position as a function of time-- this would be position in general. I'll just draw the person function. They're accelerating to time t one. And then they're moving at a constant speed at time t two. Now the bicyclist is a little more complicated. Because initially the bicyclist has a-- this at time t, person one. Initially the bicyclist has a non-zero slope. And they're decelerating. And they reach you with a zero slope. So this graph, this is the x two. That is the bicyclist. And right here we have the person. x one. So now to build a strategy, we can even look at our graph and see that from our initial conditions, we have some special conditions that the-- our strategy will be to-- one-- figure out what this time is. And we know that the bicyclist at time t two has come to a stop. So that's one condition. And we also know that the bicyclist comes to stop exactly at the same position as the person. x one of t two equals x two of t two. So those are two conditions that we can deduce from all of this given information. And now we comply our kinematic relationships for both the bicyclist and the person and try to see if these conditions will enable us to deduce what b two is. So let's begin with the bicyclist. So the velocity of the bicyclist as a function of time is simply the integration of that bicyclist b t prime from zero to t two. This is one stage of motion. The acceleration is minus b two. So this is a very straightforward interval. This is just b of two t two. b two. This is minus the initial speed equals that. b of t two minus V of the initial is that. And because we want this to be zero, we have the condition that t two equals V two naught divided by b two. So that's our first condition for the bicyclist. Now we have to separately solve for the bicyclist's position. That's easy. x two of t is the integral of V two t prime dt prime from zero to t two. And that's just minus one half. We want to make sure that we get the displacement. But x two naught is zero. So we have x two at t two equals the integral of the velocity function, which is V two naught minus b two of t prime, d t prime from zero to t two. And so we get b two naught t two minus one half b two t two squared. And when we input this condition in for t two, this becomes very simply V two naught squared over two b two. Substituting t two into each of these expressions gives us that relationship. So that's the position of the cyclist at time t two. Now this is a little bit trickier to get the position of the person. So in order to do that, we first find the velocity of the person function. It's a two stage motion. So for the first stage of motion, the velocity two-- the velocity of person one-- minus their initial velocity, which is zero minus one zero. That's zero. Equals the integral of b one dt prime from zero to t one, which is just b one t one. And this velocity remains constant throughout the next interval. So we can write the velocity function in the following way. V one t equals b one t for zero less than t less than t one. And afterwards, a constant velocity. Now this is the function that we need to integrate to get the displacement. So let's get ourselves a little room here and integrate that. And we have x of t is two integrals. First from zero to t one, the velocity function during that time interval. And then for the second time interval dt two, the velocity function is constant b-- this is b one. b one t one, dt prime. Notice this is not a variable. But it is the time at the end of the interval. And when we make these two intervals, we get one half b one t one squared. Let's make this the velocity at time t. This first integral goes from zero to t one. And the second interval, we're going to make this the position at time t two. And we get plus V one times t one times t two minus t one. We have a common term, t one squared, b, one half b one t one squared. b one minus b one, t one squared. So this reduces to one half b one t one squared plus b one, t one, t two. And that's how we find the position of the person for our interval. Let's just review that to make sure. Because we had to get the velocity function first. And then we integrated the velocity in each time interval correctly in order to get the position function. Now we can apply our conditions. Notice we already know t two here. And we can now apply the second condition which says that the position of the bicyclist at time t two, which we found to be d naught squared over two b two is equal to the position of the person at that same time. So that's minus one half b one t one squared plus b one t one. Now let's make that substitution for time t two. So that's V two naught over b two. And now our problem is to solve for this time b two. And we're given b one. We're given t one. We're given V two naught. And the only variable here is b two. It's a little bit of algebra to rearrange terms. What I'll do is I'll bring this term over to here. So now we'll just do a little bit of algebra. We have to a b two we can pull out. I have a minus b one t one b two naught. And that's equal to minus one half b one t one squared. And now I can solve for b two. And so I get b two is equal to Vt naught squared minus b one t one b two naught over minus one half b one t one squared. Now let's just do a quick dimensional check. b times t has the dimensions of velocity. So this is velocity squared, velocity squared. That's OK upstairs. b times t squared is dimensions of position. So what we have is meters squared per second squared divided by meters. That gives us meters per second squared. So we're pretty confident that we at least didn't make an algebraic mistake. And now our last step is to substitute in the numbers. And what we get is, if we put in the three meters a second squared minus b one times t one times three, we get upstairs is minus 3/2. And downstairs is two times one second. Two's cancel. So we get to 3/2 meters per second squared when we put in the numbers. If we wanted to check our result, we can then see what time we get. t two is is three meters per second divided by our b two which is 3/2 meters per second squared. So that's 2 seconds. And now the last check would be to see that the position functions correspond to that. Let's see if we can just do that quickly in our heads. Our position function for the person is V naught squared over two b two. So that's 9 meters per second. 9 meters squared seconds squared over two times 3/2 meters second squared. And that comes out to x two of t. This is a check, is 3 meters. And the x one of t. We left out the one there. We should have had it. It's a little more complicated to put in here. But we'll just run the numbers quickly through. Two times one seconds minus. That's a minus one. Two times one times two. That's two times two. So this is also three meters. And we actually have the right answer here.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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PS11_Three_Questions_Before_Starting.txt
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I'd like to talk to you about solving these kinematics problems. So we're going to actually start by asking ourselves three separate questions anytime we start one of these kinematics problems and this will help us really figure out what's happening in the motion. So the first question that we want to ask is, how many objects are moving? So do we care about more than one object, and if we do, we need to make sure to label each one distinctively. We also want to know how many dimensions we need to care about for each object. The second question that we want to ask ourselves is, how many stages of motion does each object have? So for an example, if you're told that a bicycle is initially accelerating and then, at a certain time, it stops accelerating, then you know that that initial acceleration is going to have different equations of motion than the point in time where it now has an acceleration equal to zero. The final thing that we want to think about, we want to figure out what special conditions there are. So for example, you might be told that the cart is initially at rest. So what does that mean in reality? It means that you can write down something like, v of 0 is equal to 0, that's what it means for the cart to initially be at rest. v cart is-- v at time 0 is equal to 0. So those are the kinds of special conditions that you need to pay attention for in the problem and that will help you figure out-- get all of the numbers or the variables that you need to solve your equation. Once you're done thinking through these different steps, the final thing you should always do before starting a problem is draw out your problem, properly label your system, and then of course draw your origin, your axes, and your unit vectors. And this way, it will be easy for you to organize all of the different information that you have.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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52_Worked_Example_Gravity_Superposition.txt
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The little prince lives on his asteroid B-612. And he really likes to watch the stars. And what he really wishes for is to watch the stars while floating, to have the best possible view and to just immerse himself in the stars. And so the little prince has to think if there is a position in space with respect to other celestial bodies where the gravitational force would just cancel, so that he can float. Let's look at that. So there is the planet of the businessman. We're going to give it the mass m1. And there is also the small planet from the lamplighter floating around with a mass m2. And we know that gravitational forces act radially. So we can already see here that if we put the asteroid B-612 somewhere here, then maybe we find a constellation where gravitational forces cancel. So let's start by placing the little asteroid over here. And what is this body experiencing in terms of gravitational forces? Well, it's going to experience a gravitational force of object 1. So we have object 1 or F1m, due to the interaction between object 1-- so the businessman planet and our little asteroid here. And then we also, of course, have the same direction here due to the interaction of object 2 and our little asteroid, so that would be F2m. And you can clearly see that if we tally up these forces, they're not going to add to 0. So this is not a good location for the little prince's asteroid to be. The same would be true if we put it out here. It will experience those same forces again. What do we have here-- 1m and 2m just going in the opposite direction. But you have guessed it already. We can find a spot here in the middle where one force goes in this direction. So this is F2m. And actually we should give those forces direction. And the other body exerts a force going in the other direction. And so we can see that we now just need to find that exact position here, in between these two objects with two different masses, where the little prince can free float while watching the stars. We can say already that if these two masses were the same, it would obviously be in the middle. But because they are not the same, we have to calculate what that distance is. And so we're going to label this distance here x. And we're going to say that the two bodies here are a distance d apart. All right. How are we going to go about this? Well, we have to apply the universal law of gravitation in our F equals ma analysis. Well, before we started with our F equals ma analysis, we actually have to pick a coordinate origin and a unit vector. And so let's place the coordinate origin in here. And let's have i hat go in this direction. And we're going to label this position A, and position B, and position C. These are our three options for asteroid placement. And well, let's look at position B. And well, we have the universal law of gravitation between the mass of the object here. And we'll have to describe both components. So first this one F1m and then F2m. And if we start with F1m, that goes in the negative i hat direction. So minus Gmm1 on the distances x squared in the i hat direction. And then the other one goes in the plus i hat direction. And we have Gmm2. And now we have d minus x gives us this portion-- d minus x squared also in the i hat direction. And that needs to add up to 0, because that is what we want, right? If it adds up to 0, then we have no gravitational forces acting on the asteroid. So now we need to solve this for x here. And in the first step, you see that actually G and m will fall out here. And then we're left with m1 over x squared minus plus m2 over d minus x squared. And we can write that as m2 x squared minus m2 d minus x squared. And what you see here is that this will turn into a quadratic equation. And if we do a few steps of arithmetic, and then write down the general solution to this quadratic equation, we will find this here. x equals 2dm1 plus minus 2dm1 squared minus 4m1 minus m2m1d squared, and then the square root of that over m1 minus m2. And actually we need two of those. So we have this quadratic equation here-- well, the solution. And we now need to consider one more thing-- namely, this equation here is only valid if-- well, can I write this here-- if x is between 0 and d. Right? In position C, my x is larger than d, which means this-- sorry, this force here flips sign, and then this would be different. So this plus here refers to x being less than d. And we have to decide which of the two signs here gives us the correct, which will fulfills this requirement here. So this simplifies to x equals dm1 plus minus m1m2 and here we have the square root. And then here, we have another bracket over m1 minus m2. And we need to get this term here smaller than 1, which will be smaller than 1 if the x is between 0 and d. And as it turns out, that is indeed true if we use the minus sign here.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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141_Intro_to_resistive_forces.txt
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We would now like to discuss drag forces in a fluid. Now remember that fluids can be both a liquid or air. And drag forces are actually quite complicated depending on a lot of factors. If we had an object falling in a fluid, the drag forces can depend on both the properties of the object-- and in that case, it might be the speed or the size or the shape of the object-- and it also can depend on the properties of the fluid. It can depend on the density of the fluid. It can depend on a property that measures the resistance of a fluid, something which we'll refer to as viscosity, and also a property about the compressibility of a fluid. So in general, this is quite complicated. And this is done empirically. There's a few very special cases that we'll discuss that can be solved exactly. Now let's begin our modeling by considering what we call air drag. Now in air drag, objects that are moving-- and we'll consider objects that are moving rapidly. So our objects are moving very fast. Now in that case, we can model-- make a rough model of the air drag as follows. The magnitude of this force is going to be proportional to the speed squared. There'll be a factor where it's the cross-sectional area that the object presents in the motion, perpendicular to the plane of motion. It can depend on the density of the air. And traditionally there are a couple of coefficients in here that are dimensionless that are empirically determined by the shape of the object. And that's called the drag coefficient. And in fact, there's also a factor 1/2 in the way this law is traditionally written. So what we have here is a resistive force which is proportional to the speed squared and depends on the properties of the air, the density of the air, and some physical parameters-- properties of the object itself. Now this drag coefficient-- we can have a table that can represent that. And you can see here that for a variety of different shapes, the drag coefficient is somewhere on the order of 1. So this is an example of what we refer to as air drag. When we drop objects in a fluid at very slow speeds, we have a different effect than what we talked about air drag. For example, if we drop a marble in molasses and drop the same marble in water, we see a very different motion. And that depends on a property of the fluid which we'll refer to as viscosity. Now we'll denote a coefficient of viscosity by the symbol n, eta. Now when we drop an object in a fluid, that the drag force in magnitude will be proportional to both viscosity-- will be proportional to the speed and it will be proportional to the viscosity. And now, for various special cases, so for the special case which is a sphere of radius r, if you study fluid dynamics, we can get an exact solution for this drag force. And we'll describe that as-- it's going to be opposite the direction of the velocity, so there's a minus sign. There turns out to be some coefficients-- 6 pi times the viscosity of the fluid times the radius of the sphere. And this particular law, which we'll known as Stokes' law, is exactly applicable to the motion of a sphere. Now in fact, by experimental measurement, this is a method for determining eta experimentally by dropping objects-- spheres-- in various different media with different viscosities. So we can use this to experimentally determine the viscosity of the medium. And what's important to realize, too, is that this is applicable to many different examples.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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31_Coordinate_System_and_Position_Vector_in_2D.txt
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Let's consider a two dimensional motion. Suppose we have something like projectile motion. And we have an object moving. Let's now describe how we can describe this motion with vectors. So the first thing we always want to do, and let's remind ourselves of the steps, is we want to choose a coordinate system. Now what does a coordinate system consist of? It consists of an origin. It consists of two axes. In this case, we'll identify the positive direction for each axis as plus x and plus y. And at every single point in space-- so if we had any arbitrary point P here-- let's call this P1. We have a choice of unit vectors, i-hat 1 and j-hat 1. Now, what makes Cartesian coordinates unique is that no matter what point we're at, the unit vectors are all the same. So we could erase all these indices for that particular point and just have an abstract set of unit vectors, i-hat and j-hat. Now normally what we'll do is we'll just put those off to the side. So in our Cartesian coordinates, we now want to define the position vector. And the position vector is a vector from the origin to where the object is. So we'll write that position vector. We'll denote it by r of t. Because as this object moves along its trajectory that position vector is changing. And we'll write down r of t in terms of two coordinate functions, x of t and y of t. And so our vector-- position vector of the object r of t is equal to x of t, i-hat plus y of t, j-hat. And one of our main goals is to figure out what these position functions are for the motion of objects. So this is how we describe an object in a Cartesian coordinate system, undergoing two dimensional motion. What we want to analyze next is what is the velocity of that object.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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41_Newtons_First_and_Second_Laws.txt
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Newton's first law tells us about the motion of isolated bodies. By an "isolated body," we mean one on which the net force is 0, one that's isolated from all interactions to as great a degree as possible. Newton's first law states that an isolated body moves in a straight line at constant velocity and will continue to do so as long as it remains undisturbed. Note that that constant velocity might be 0. So for example, a body at rest-- an isolated body at rest will remain at rest if left undisturbed. An isolated body moving at constant velocity will continue to move at a constant velocity as long as it remains undisturbed. It turns out that it's always possible to define a coordinate system in which an isolated body moves at constant velocity, perhaps 0. Such a coordinate system is called an "inertial coordinate system." So another way of stating Newton's first law is that inertial coordinate systems exist. Now, it's worth pointing out that not all useful coordinate systems are inertial. The ones that aren't we call "non-inertial coordinate systems." As an example, imagine that I am standing in an elevator that's accelerating upward. If we defined a coordinate system that moves with the elevator, that coordinate system is accelerated with respect to an observer who is at rest. In that accelerated coordinate system, an isolated body would not move at a constant velocity. So there are applications where using non-inertial coordinate systems is convenient. However, in this course, we will concentrate on inertial coordinate systems in which isolated bodies move at a constant velocity. What if the body is not isolated? If a force acts on a body, then it will accelerate in proportion to that force. In particular, for a point like constant mass, Newton's second law tells us that the vector force is equal to the mass times the vector acceleration. So in other words, the acceleration caused by a force is proportional to that force and the constant of proportionality is the mass. And there are two important points I want to make about Newton's second law. The first is that forces always involved real physical interactions. Something must be acting on the object. If nothing is acting on the object, if the object is isolated, then we know-- from Newton's first law-- that an isolated body never accelerates in an inertial frame. It moves at constant velocity. So the only way to have an object move with a velocity that's changing-- that is, to have an acceleration-- is to have a force acting on it. And Newton's second law tells us exactly how that works. The second point I want to make is that this statement of Newton's second law, F equals ma, is actually a special case. It's for the special case of a constant point like mass. More generally, Newton's second law is written as the force is equal to the time derivative of the momentum, p. Now, we'll talk about momentum later in this course in more detail, but I'll just tell you that the momentum, for a point like mass, is defined as the mass times the velocity. Now, for a point mass that's constant, these two equations are exactly identical. If you take the derivative of m times v where m is a constant, you just get m times the vector a. And you get the first equation back. So it's just a fancier way of writing the same thing. It doesn't convey any new information. So why do we talk about this as being the more general form? It's because this second form of Newton's second law can be generalized to a system of particles or a system where mass is flowing and the mass of something is changing. You can't describe that by F equals ma, but it's always true that, for a given system, F equals dp/dt. And we'll see how that works in more complicated mass flow problems later in the course.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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24_Integration.txt
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If we know the position x of t of an object as a function of time, we can use differentiation to calculate its velocity and its acceleration at later times. Essentially, by taking the derivatives of the position, we know everything there is to know about the motion. Sometimes, however, we'll want to go in the other direction. We'll have the acceleration as a function of time and we'll want to find the velocity as a function of time, or the position as a function of time. We'll use a technique called integration, and let's see how that works. To begin with, suppose we have a constant acceleration. So our acceleration a of t is some constant a 0. In that case, we know that this constant acceleration can be written as the change in velocity delta v over some time interval delta t, and therefore that the change in velocity delta v over some time interval delta t can just be written as a 0 acceleration, the constant acceleration, times the elapsed time delta t. And we can see this graphically if I plot acceleration versus time. Here is my constant acceleration a 0. Let's say this is time 0 and here is the time delta t, the change in velocity, a 0 times delta t, is just the area of this box, that box being defined by the time interval 0 to delta t, and it's the area under the curve, a 0. So if we know the velocity at time 0 and we know the constant acceleration a 0, we can calculate the velocity at any later time in this way, because the change in velocity from that initial velocity is given by a 0 times delta t. Now let's consider a slightly more complicated example. Suppose the acceleration isn't constant but is changing linearly. So for a linearly changing acceleration, I can draw this graphically as well. Here's acceleration. This is time equals 0. Suppose the acceleration is increasing linearly, and I'll call this time delta t. This is a of t. Note that we can define an average acceleration over the interval from 0 to delta t. The average acceleration is the change in velocity over the elapsed time. That average acceleration will look something like that. And so then the change in velocity, delta v, is equal to the average acceleration times the elapsed time. And this time, notice from the diagram this product is actually the area of this trapezoid that's basically the area under the a of t function going from 0 to delta t. We've calculated it sort of as a rectangular area involving the average acceleration, but that's also equal to the area under the time changing acceleration function. So this is, again, the area under a of t over the time interval delta t. Now let's consider a more generally changing acceleration as a function of time. So let me plot this. So suppose we have just some general function-- I'll draw it like this-- which is our acceleration as a function of time. The change in velocity will still be the area under the curve a of t over the time interval we're interested in. So let's suppose we want to go from this time here-- I'll call it t sub a-- and my ending time will be t sub b. So we're interested in figuring out what the area under this curve is over the interval from t sub a to t sub b. We can estimate this by breaking up the interval into a bunch of little rectangle. Suppose I break this up into n rectangles just under this curve. And so this is 1, 2, 3, 4, et cetera, up to n. And with each one, because this is a curved graph, I can't get the rectangle to fit exactly so a little bit of it will stick out at the top of each one. I'm not going to go through that for all of these, but you get the idea. I'll fit these rectangles as well as I can. The narrower I make the rectangles, the more easily I can fit them under the curve. For each strip, for each rectangular strip, let's say from over box 1 from here to here, the change in velocity is equal to the average velocity over that time interval times the width of that rectangle, delta t. So that's the area of the strip. Essentially what we're saying is that if we make the rectangles narrow enough, we can treat the acceleration, the curve of the acceleration, as roughly constant over that interval. And we can make n as big as we need to to make those rectangles very, very narrow. So in that case, we can estimate the total change in velocity from time t sub a to time t sub b by adding up the area of all of these rectangular strips. So in that case, we write that. The change in velocity-- so I'll say v sub b minus v sub a-- that's the change of velocity going from time a to time b-- is equal to the sum, as j goes from 1 to n, of the area of each of these strips. And so we want the acceleration at the i-th rectangle, so that's a of t sub j times the width of the strip. Each strip has the same width. We'll just call that delta t. And that's the area of n strips. Now for a finite-- I really should write this as approximately equal to-- because for a finite number of rectangular strips, this is just an approximation, because as I mentioned, the rectangles don't exactly fit under the curve. They can't because the rectangle doesn't have a curved top, but the function is curved. But the narrower I make the rectangles, or equivalently, the larger I make n, the better the approximation will be. So what I want to do is go to the limit of an infinite number of rectangles, or equivalently, the limit of infinitesimally narrow strips. I want delta t to go to 0. So to make this exact, what I would write is that the change in velocity from time a to time b is equal to the limit of the sum from j equals 1 to n of the acceleration at time t sub j subject times delta t. And we want to evaluate that limit as delta t goes to 0, or equivalently, as n, the number of rectangles, goes to infinity. Now this is a very important expression, and we have a special way of writing it. We can also write it as an integral. So we write it as the integral of the function a of t dt evaluated from time equals t sub a to time equals t sub b. And this is the area under the a of t curve, the exact area-- not the approximate area, but the exact area under the a of t curve over the interval from t of a to t of b. This limiting sum that we've written this way on the right-hand side is called the definite integral of a of t. And it's related to the process of integration that you've learned about in calculus, which is the inverse of taking the derivative, the inverse of differentiation. I want to take a moment to summarize the basic principles of integration from calculus. Let's begin by considering a function g of x with some derivative. So consider a function g of x. And let's assume it's a well-behaved function, by which I mean that it's continuous and differentiable over the interval that we're interested in. So consider g of x with a derivative. So dg dx equal to another function, which I'll call f of x. Now note that if I add a constant to g of x, I'll still get the same derivative. So note that the derivative with respect to x of g of x plus a constant is still equal to the same function f of x. And this is because of the derivative of a constant is equal to 0. Now, suppose I want to invert this process. Then I can write that the antiderivative of f of x, the antiderivative of f of x, which I'll write as the integral of f of x, dx, is equal to g of x plus a constant. The left-hand side of this we call an indefinite integral. And so we see that if the derivative of g of x is f of x plus a concert, the antiderivative of f of x is g of x plus a constant. And that can be any arbitrary constant. Now in calculus, one learns how to calculate the indefinite integral of various functions, polynomials, trigonometric functions, logarithmic functions, et cetera. Calculus also shows us how to compute the definite integral. So the definite integral, the integral of f of x, dx, evaluated from x equals a to x equals b. So this is the definite integral computed over some interval that is equal to the antiderivative at x equals b minus the antiderivative evaluated at x equals a. And this turns out to be the area under the curve f of x in the interval between x equals a and x equals b. Now notice that there is no arbitrary constant in the definite integral. In the indefinite integral, we have an arbitrary constant, but in the definite integral, that arbitrary constant is determined by setting the integration limits. So there's no arbitrary constant. We just have this difference. And so just to see this graphically, if I plot my function f of x and suppose this is x equals a and this is x equals b, this definite integral represents the area under the curve f of x in the interval from x equals a to x equals b. So calculus tells us how to solve this area problem, how to compute a definite integral, from the antiderivative that you get from indefinite integration. And so this same technique tells us how to determine the velocity from the acceleration, since we saw that that was equivalent to an area under the curve problem. So to come back to the motion of objects, we've shown that the change in velocity of an object can be written as the definite integral of the acceleration. So just to write that a little bit more formally first with a plot, if this is my acceleration as a function of time, we know that the time derivative of the velocity is equal to the acceleration as a function of time. I can rewrite that as the differential dv is equal to a of t times the differential dt. And so then I can integrate both sides of this equation by writing the integral over dv is equal to the integral of the acceleration of a of t dt. And I can go from time equals some initial time t 0 to time equal to some later time t sub 1 on the right-hand side to make a definite integral. And then on the left-hand side the corresponding limits are the velocity at time 0-- I'll call that v 0-- and the velocity at time 1, which I'll call v1. So just to be clear, I'm assuming here that v 0 is equal to the velocity at time t 0, and v1 is equal to the velocity at time t sub 1. So this is the integral of a constant over an interval of v. This is an interval of the acceleration over the time interval in t. And so the left-hand side-- this is just v1 minus v 0. And the right-hand side, without specifying a of t, I can't actually evaluate this integral. I can't specify what the antiderivative of a of t is unless I tell you what the function a of t is. So we'll just have to leave it in terms of an integral. And so that's just the integral of a of t dt from t equals t 0 to t equals t sub 1. So again, this shows us that the change in the velocity from time t 0 to a later time t1 is equal to the definite integral of a of t over that integral. I can rewrite this in terms of what the velocity is at some later time, t1, by writing the velocity at t1 is equal to v 0 plus the integral of a of t dt from t equals t 0 to t equals t1. Note that T1 is just any later time after time t 0, where we have the initial velocity. So a more convenient way of writing this function might be to write the velocity as a function of some later time t. So suppose I were to do that. I'll just rewrite this equation replacing t1 with an arbitrary time t. So I have that v of t is equal to v 0 plus the integral of a of t dt from t equals t0 to t equals t. Now there is something funny here, because I have t in the integration variable here. But I have t as one of my limits here as well, whereas if I look at this expression here, there's a difference between the t in the integration variable and the limit t1. They actually represent different things. So to keep track of that, the notation that we generally use in physics is to call this integration variable t prime and so we write this acceleration of t prime, dt prime, with the time t prime going from t 0 to some later time t. Now one has to be cautious here. In some fields that prime on a variable is used to denote a derivative, a differentiation. That's not what it means here. I'm writing t prime just to distinguish it from the specific later time t that I want to calculate the velocity at. And it's worth thinking about what this expression means. This equation is identical to this earlier equation that we derived except for a change in notation. And so let's think about what that notation means. t prime here is the integration variable. It's a placeholder. Remember, the integral here, the definite integral, represents an infinite sum, an infinite sum of rectangles between a time t 0 and a later time t. And that variable t prime-- actually, what I should do now is I should call this t prime. This variable t prime is taking every value from t 0 to t. So t prime is representing the running time variable for all of our strips that we're adding up over this definite integral. So it's a placeholder variable. We sometimes call it a dummy variable. It's just a placeholder to represent time, whereas t, the t in the limit here without the prime, represents a specific choice of later time, some later time t where we want to calculate the velocity. So we know the velocity at some initial time t 0. We'd like to know the velocity at some specific later time t. And to compute that, we have to integrate over all times running from t 0 to t. And that running integration variable we represent as t prime just to distinguish it from the specific time t that we are trying to compute the velocity for. So now in just the same way that we've obtained the velocity by integrating the acceleration, we can integrate again. We can integrate the velocity to calculate the position. So given v of t, we can show that the position at time t is equal to the position at time t 0 plus the integral of the velocity as a function of time-- I'll write this as t prime-- dt prime going from t prime equals t 0 to t prime equals t. So this is exactly analogous to how we computed velocity from acceleration. By integrating a second time, we can go from velocity to position. So once we know the acceleration a of t, we can use integration to compute the velocity v of t if we know the velocity at some initial time t 0. And we can also compute the position x of t if we know the initial position at time t 0, x 0. So we see that given the acceleration, we can recover the velocity and the position. And as it happens, from Newton's Second Law, if we know the forces acting on an object, that gives us the ability to compute what the acceleration is. And then given the acceleration, we can use integration to find the velocity and the position.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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173_Center_of_Mass_of_a_Continuous_System.txt
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Let's try to find the center of mass of a uniform object like a uniform rod. And let's assume this rod is length L, and we want to find the center of mass. Now, before I begin this calculation, you can probably already guess that it's going to be exactly in the middle, and we'll verify that, but let's first define what we mean by our center of mass for discrete particles. Recall that this was a sum over all the particles in the system. So we'll take a label J goes from 1 to N, and it was the mass of that jth particle times the position vector that jth particle with respect to some origin, and we're dividing that by j equals from 1 to N of the total mass in the system. Now, how do we translate this equation for a continuous system? And let me just again show that we had chosen an origin. Here was our jth particle of mass mj and rj. So what we want to do is draw the analogy, and here's how it works-- that for each discrete particle, we're going to look at that as some mass element delta mj. Our vector rj will go to a vector for this mass element. I'll just write it delta m. And our sum from j goes from 1 to N is actually going to go to an integral over the body. So let's see how that looks. So first, we'll do it with the total mass, m-- here we're summing over j-- from 1 to N of mj. That goes to the integral over the body. Now, the delta m, when we take limits, because that's when an integral goes, we'll write that as dm. So that becomes a limit over the body. And likewise, our sum j goes from 1 to N of mj rj goes to an integral over the body of dm vector r going to that element. So we can say in the limit that this becomes r going to that element. Now, that means that our continuous expression for the continuous object is an integral over the body of dm r to that element dm divided by an integral over the body of dm.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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PS23_Window_Washer_Solution.txt
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So now that we've combined pulley A, string 2, platform, and washer as our system, we can now address our question. If we measure the acceleration of the person, what is the force that the person pulls the rope down with? Well, of course, that will just be the tension in the string. And with this simple system, we can now apply Newton's second law, F equals ma. But recall, we need some directions. So suppose we expect that the acceleration of the platform and person is up. So we'll choose a unit vector j hat in the positive direction. And now the problem becomes tension one, three different tensions, 3T1, and gravitational force minus mp plus mw times g. Now, what is the mass that we have to consider? Again, what is the mass of our system? Well, the platform and the person, and we assume the pulley and the string, too, were massless. So we have simply mp plus mw a. And so we can now solve for the tension in the string, which is equal to mp plus mw times g plus a divided by 3. And recall that this tension, that the string is pulling, this is what we called the force that the person [? of ?] the string on the person. And by Newton's third law, that's also, on the washer, that's also the force that the washer applies to string 1. So this was our goal. It's the force that the washer applies to string 1 by the third law. And so by thinking about how to choose a system, what could be a very complicated problem, with lots of equations, is simply one equation.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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Newtons_3rd_Law_Pairs.txt
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Where do forces come from? All forces arise from the interaction of two objects with each other. In this example, we have two objects, One and Two, interacting with each other in this case because their surfaces are in contact with each other-- one sitting on top of the other. And the interaction between the two objects gives rise to a pair of forces. I have one force that's acting from object two down on object one, and the other force that's acting from object one back up onto object two. And these forces, following Newton's third law, are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction. What if we now push these blocks horizontally in opposite directions? At their interface, there is a frictional interaction. This interaction gives rise to a pair of frictional forces that are parallel to the interface. The friction force on the top block from the bottom block is opposite in direction but equal in magnitude to the friction from the bottom block due to the top block. Let's look at some of the common misconceptions about forces. First of all, motion is not a force. If I have a block that's moving at a constant velocity along a frictionless plane, then there's no horizontal force that's acting on this block. Because there is no interaction that would give rise to a horizontal force. The fact that it has a velocity does not necessarily mean that there is a force acting on it. Another common mistake is to think that forces transfer through objects. For example, if I'm pushing a book against a wall, it might seem like the force from my hand is being transferred to the wall. But what is really happening is that there are two independent interactions. The interaction of my hand with the book. And the interaction of the book with the wall. And these are separate interactions. The forces might happen to have the same magnitude in some cases. But it's not because the force from my hand is being transferred. Forces arise between pairs of objects. And those forces can only act on those two objects. Let's look more closely at Newton's third law. So Newton's third law says that when there are two objects that are interacting, there will be two forces that arise from that interaction. And these two forces are always equal in magnitude and opposite in direction. These two forces, this Newton's third law pair of forces, never act on the same object. But instead one force acts on the first object and one on the second. Because these forces arise out of the same interaction, they have to be the same type of force. So they could be gravitational forces, frictional forces, normal forces, et cetera. Let's look at an example of a book sitting on a table. It's being pulled down by the gravitational force. And it's being held up by the normal force. Are these two forces a Newton's third law pair? The book is not accelerating. So these forces are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction. But they cannot be a Newton's third law for two different reasons. First of all, they both act on the same object-- the book. And second of all, they arise from different interactions. The normal force on the book is part of a Newton's third law pair that comes from the interaction between the book and the table. What's the Newton's third law pair of the gravitational force on the book? Well, because the gravitational force arises from the interaction between the book and the earth, the other force in the Newton's third law pair is actually the force that the book exerts on the earth. You might not think about the book acting on the earth. But the force is actually equal and opposite to the earth's force on the book. It's just that the earth is so much more massive, the force has no detectable influence on the Earth's behavior at all.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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91_Uniform_Circular_Motion.txt
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When we analyzed how the position vector changed, we know that the velocity for circular motion is given by the radius times the rate that the angle is changing. And it points tangential to the circle. So let's draw a few characteristic arrows to show that. At this point, we'll draw these pictures with d theta dt positive. So the velocity points like that. It points like this. It points like that. And these are all the velocity vectors at different times. Notice that if we make-- consider the special case in which d theta dt is a constant, in that instance, the magnitude of the velocity, v, is given by r magnitude of d theta dt. And that is also a constant. But the velocity vector is changing direction. And we know by definition that the acceleration is the derivative of velocity. And so what we see here is where we have a vector that's constant in magnitude but changing direction. And we now want to calculate the derivative in this special case. We refer to this case as uniform circular motion. So this special case is often called uniform circular motion. OK. How do we calculate the derivative of the velocity? Well, recall that the velocity vector, r d theta dt-- those are all constants-- because it's in the theta hat direction, once again, will decompose theta hat into its Cartesian components. You see it has a minus i hat component and a plus j hat component. The i hat component is opposite the angle. So we have minus sine theta of t i hat plus cosine theta of t j hat. So when I differentiate the velocity in time, this piece is constant, so I'm only again applying the chain rule to these two functions. So I have r, d theta dt. And I differentiate sine. I get cosine with a minus sign. So I have minus cosine theta. I'll keep the function of t, just so that you can see that-- d theta dt i hat. Over here, the derivative of cosine is minus sine d theta dt. That's the chain rule-- sign of theta dt, d theta dt, j hat. And now I have this common d theta dt term, and I can pull it out. And I'll square it. Now whether do you think that dt is positive or negative, the square is always positive, so this quantity is always positive. And inside I have-- I'm also going to pull the minus sign out. And I have cosine theta of t i hat plus sine theta of t j hat. Now what we have here is the unit vector r hat t. r hat has a cosine adjacent in the i hat direction and a sine component in the H Hut direction. So our acceleration--
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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124_Solve_the_System_of_Equations.txt
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We are now in position to find the accelerations a1, a2, and the tension, because we have Newton's second law and our constraint condition for the acceleration. Let's recall the equations that we found. We had m1g minus t was m1a1. And we had m2g minus 2t was equal to m2a2. And we also had the condition-- constraint condition between the accelerations that a1 was minus 2a2. So now we have a system of three equations. And we can find-- we can solve for any of these quantities that we want. So one way to do it is to identify an equation and to identify a quantity that we would like to solve for. So for instance, let's identify that we want to solve for a1 first. So how are we going to develop a strategy for that? Well, I'll choose equation 1 as my backbone equation. And I have an unknown t. But in equation 2, that unknown t is appearing there, but it's expressed in terms of a2. And a2 , though, from equation 3 is expressed in terms of a1. So my first step is to write equation-- rewrite equation 2 as m2g minus 2t equals m2. Now here I'm going to make the substitution, which is minus a1 over 2, so we'll call that 2a. And now I have equation 1 and equation 2a, two unknowns t, and a1. And what I can do is I can solve for either equation. And I can make a choice what's easiest. When I look at these equations, it's easiest for me to identify what t is in terms of a1. So I'll write m1g minus m1a1 is equal to t. I'll call that equation 1a. And now I can substitute that value of t into equation 2a. And I get m2g minus 2 times m1g minus m1a1. And that's equal to minus m2 over 2 times a1. And now I'd like to collect my a1 terms. And what I have over here-- let's bring all the a1 terms to this side. And I get m2g minus 2m1g. I have a plus, so I'm going to bring that over to this side. And I get equal to-- that's plus plus, so I'll have two minus signs, and I'll have 2m1 plus m2 over 2 a1. And now I can solve for a1. And what I get is I get 2m1g minus m2g. And I want to divide through by this denominator. And what I have downstairs is 2m1 plus m2 divided by 2. And that's my expression for a1. Once I have that expression for a1, I can easily come back and find out what a2 is. Or I can substitute it into the equation here for a1 and find out what the tension is. And so I can now easily find my expressions for a2 and t. But I'll leave that as an exercise.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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162_Momentum_Diagrams.txt
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We would like to now introduce a new methodological tool for analyzing problems that involve momentum transfers. And we call that tool momentum diagrams. Now, what we'd like to do is look at our fundamental idea, which was, for discrete objects, we have that-- involved in a collision-- we have that the external force integrated with respect to time-- in poles-- is equal to the change in momentum between two different states. So this is the momentum of the final state, and this is the momentum of the initial state. So when we want to analyze problems, how can we methodologically introduce a picture representation of our problems? So let's look at what we need to do first. We always need to choose a system that we're referring to. And with respect to the choice of that system, we need to also choose a reference frame. Now, once we've done that, we can now represent a collision with respect to this system. For instance, let's consider two objects-- as our system Object 1 and Object 2. They're moving on a frictionless, horizontal surface. And we're choosing as a reference frame, the ground frame. Now, what we'd like to do is identify two states. So for our initial state, we'll have-- if we're given some initial conditions-- what we'd like to do is represent each object with a velocity vector. So here, we'll write the 1 initial, and let's suppose this object is coming at it with the 2 initial as an example. And once we've represented the velocities of the objects, we can write down their momentum in the initial state. Similarly, if these two objects collide and they're moving, we actually don't know which way those objects will end up moving. And so what we'd again like to do in our final state, after this collision, is to represent the velocities by, again, vectors. So this is V1 final and this is V2 final. And then, we can represent the change in momentum. So our momentum principle now becomes-- in this case, let's just assume that the external force here sums to zero-- we're assuming no friction. And then our momentum principle says that 0 equals P final minus P initial. And now, we can read off those momentums as vectors on the diagram, and so what we have is that the final momentum will be equal to the initial momentum. So we can write down M1 final plus M2 V2 final is equal to M1 V1 initial plus M2 V2 initial. And that's how we can represent a collision where there is no external forces and use our momentum principle to get an vector equation. Now, in many problems, you're given information. You might be given information about the speeds and magnitudes of the objects. And in order to then take this equation and represent it in speeds and directions or even components, we need to choose some coordinate system. So if we choose a coordinate system-- and that's the third step-- so suppose we choose a coordinate system, then we can start to look at two different representations for our problem. For instance, let's just choose this to be the i hat direction. Now, given that choice, we could describe the velocities in terms of components. Now this gets awkward-- V1i x component i hat. And similarly, we can write down all the velocities-- V2i-- as V2ix i hat, et cetera, for all the velocities. And our momentum equation in components then becomes, in the i hat direction, M1 V1ix plus-- well, here we have the final state, so let's make this consistent-- the final plus M2 V2 final x equals M1 V1 initial x plus M2 V2 initial x. And that's the same equation that we have as vectors, now expressed in terms of components. And recall that components can be positive or negative.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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PS23_Window_Washer_Free_Body_Diagrams.txt
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Let's consider what we call the window washer problem. What we have is suspended from some ceiling. We have a pulley. And the pulley is suspended by a rope, which we're going to call this string 3. And we have a rope that is wrapping around this pulley. And then it wraps around another pulley. So this rope is going around another pulley. And it's fixed to the ceiling. And this is what we're going to call string 1. And then this string, there's another string that comes down to a platform. And this one we're going to call string 2. And sitting on the platform is a person. So we have a person sitting on the platform. And that person is pulling the rope down. Now this is a very complicated problem. And it's a classic example of how do we choose systems so that we can apply Newton's second law. Now, one of the important things we're going to do is learn to see when we choose a system what forces are internal and external. And that will enable us to pick a very nice system, which will make the analysis easy. The way we'll do this is will approach it in stages. We'll first focus on the person, the platform, and this pulley. By the way, this is pulley A. And this one is pulley B. And let's use a symbol P for the platform. And we'll call this a washer person. And we're going to use the symbol W for the person. So what makes this problem complicated is all these different elements. Now the first stage is that what we're going to do is we're going to separately look at the person, the platform, and then combine them into a system of person and platform. But notice, the rope is connected to the platform. So the next stages will also consider a system consisting of pulley A, person, and the platform, and the washer. Now let's draw the free body diagram. Let's begin by drawing the free body diagram on the washer. So what do we have on the washer? The first thing to think about is the string. The washer is pulling the string down. So the string is pulling the washer up. So that's a force of string 1 on the washer. Now, there's also the gravitational force m washer g. And what we also have to consider the fact is that the person is sitting on the platform. So the platform is pushing the person up. And we'll call that a normal force on the washer due to the platform. And those are the free body diagram for the body diagram on the washer. Now let's focus on the platform. So here, we'll draw the platform. And now let's look at the forces on the platform. Let's begin by looking for the internal forces, the Newton's third law pairs. The platform is pushing the person up. The person is pushing the platform down. So we'll write that force as N on the platform due to the washer. And immediately, let's just circle this third law pair. Now, string 2 is pulling the platform up. So let's draw that force. We'll call that a tension force in the string. It's on the platform due to string 2. And finally, we have the gravitational force on the platform. And that's our free body diagram on the platform. Now, you may have said, well, why should I separate these out? Why didn't I just use the person and the platform? So let's draw that picture. So now imagine underneath this is a system consisting of the person and the platform. And I'll just draw that system like that. So what we're doing is we're taking these two separate free body diagrams and we're going to combine them here. And by Newton's third law, all internal forces should cancel in pairs. So now let's separately think about the forces and see that that's the case. Well, we have the gravitational force on the system, which is the mass of the platform plus the mass of the washer times g. We still have the string pulling the person up because the person is pulling the string down. So we still have the force F1 on the washer. That's string 1 on the washer. And we still have the pulley, the tension in string 2, pulling it up. So we still have the force T2 on the platform. Now, when you look at this, what we're doing is we're adding these two free body diagrams together. The internal forces now are the normal force. They're equal in magnitude, opposite in direction. So when you add them together, they cancel. And we're just left with that, with that, with that, and with that. And so this is now the combined system. Now you might ask, why did we not include the pulley? Well, let's take a look at that. So I'm going to draw the free body diagram just on pulley A. So let's draw pulley A. Now what we have here is the string on both sides is pulling pulley A up. And that's the tension in string 1. So what we have is-- I'm going to call that tension in string 1, tension in string 1. And just to alert you that keep in mind that this force here is the force of the string on the person and this too is also tension in the string, because this is our assumption of a massless string. So notice that everywhere in the string, the tension is uniform. So I'm just going to simplify that by calling it T1. What are the other forces on the pulley? Well, we're assuming that these pulleys are massless. And so there's no gravitational force on the pulley. And the only thing we have is the string pulling-- is the tension in the string. So now this is a little bit different. This is a force on the pulley too. So at the moment, let's do something a little bit different. Let's consider our system to be the string. So it's pulley A. We call that string 2. That's our system. So I modified that a little bit. I just didn't consider the pulley separately. I considered the pulley and the string as the system. Then here the string is pulling the platform up. The platform therefore is pulling the string down. And once again, we have a third law pair. And so if I added these two together, then what I now have-- and this is why this problem is kind of complex-- we have pulley A, string 2, platform P and washer person. And if we now add these two systems together, we have this complicated system. But what are the forces in this system? Well, the rope is pulling it up. The person was-- remember we had this force, W1, was the force of string 1 on the washer. That also was the tension everywhere in the string. So we have another T1 up. These two forces now cancel in pairs, the internal forces there. And so down, we just have mass platform plus mass of a washer times g. And so you see in this problem, if we tried to treat everything separate-- and I could have even had the string separate-- I have a lot of free body diagram. But when I think about what's internal and what's external, I can take these two pieces, combine them here, internal forces cancel in pairs. I can draw these two separate systems, again, combine them. Internal forces cancel in pair. And now I have this pulley A. Now I can write down Newton's second law. So what I'll do next is I'll introduce-- I still have to consider pulley B. I'll use this as my system. And I'll write down Newton's second law. And we'll be able to solve this problem.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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14_Average_Velocity_in_1D.txt
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Now that we've described the displacement of our object-- remember that our displacement vector delta r in this time interval was x(t) plus t minus x(t) i hat, which we denoted as delta x i hat. Now, let's just remind ourselves that this distance here, that's delta x, and this whole distance from here over to there-- that's what we mean by x(t) plus delta t. And now what we'd like to do is describe what we call average velocity. And our average velocity depends on our time intervals. So this is for the time interval t to t plus delta t while the person has displaced a certain amount of vector delta r. And our definition for v average-- it's a vector quantity, so we'll write v average-- will use three bars to indicate a definition. It is the displacement during a time interval delta t. So, as a vector, we have delta x over delta t i hat. And this component here is what we call the component of the average velocity. So this is the component of the average velocity. And, again as before, this component can be positive, zero, or negative depending on the sine of delta x. And the key point here is that average velocity depends on whatever time interval you're referring to. So that's our definition of average velocity. And now what we want to do is consider what happens in the limit as delta t becomes smaller and smaller and smaller. And that will enable us to introduce our concept of instantaneous velocity.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Introduction.txt
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Welcome to Physics 8.01, MIT's introductory course in classical mechanics for first year undergraduates. Im Deepto Chakrabarty. And I'm Peter Dourmashkin. We're the faculty members in charge of this course. The science of classical mechanics establishes an important principle of cause and effect, wherein the changes in a bodys motion arise from the application of physical forces. Newton's Laws of Motion established the scientific principle of analyzing observed phenomenon through the use of clearly articulated mathematical models rather than through intuition. These concepts are so important to the modern branches of science and engineering that we require all of our undergraduates at MIT to take classical mechanics regardless of whatever course they intend to specialize in. In many high school level physics courses, mechanics is taught as a set of formulas to memorize for a series of standard situations. Our course is different. Here, you will learn a set of fundamental principles that you can use to apply to unfamiliar situations and analyze them rather than just situations that you studied previously. 8.01 assumes a strong background in high school level physics and mathematics. We introduce and make extensive use of calculus as needed, so a previous course in calculus is not a prerequisite. However, it is a rigorous and technically challenging course aimed at MIT undergraduates. 8.01's OpenCourseWare site contains a coherent set of lessons that will take you through all the basic concepts of classical mechanics as well as a set of advanced topics including mass flow, simple harmonic motion, and precessional motion. In each of these lessons, you will find a series of short lightboard videos that will help you understand concepts, mathematical derivations, and problems solving techniques. In addition, you will find many other useful resources including an online textbook, many worked example problems, and MIT level problem sets. Developing a command of mechanics is a powerful tool for understanding the world around us. Welcome to 8.01.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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06_Going_Between_Representations.txt
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Let's look at going between representations. We'll start in i, j, k representation going to the magnitude and angle representation. So if we have our vector, the arbitrary vector could be written as Ax i hat plus Ay j hat. In this particular case, we're given a vector minus 2i hat plus 3 hat. And we'd like to go to the magnitude and angle representation. So, first of all, let's draw it out on our grid like this. And let's find the magnitude. So the magnitude we can find through the Pythagorean theorem. It's just the square root of the x-component squared plus the y-component squared. And now we can find the angle. The angle, the tangent of the angle, is just equal to the y-component divided by the x-component like this. And so in this way, we can solve for the angle. Now, let's practice going back the other way. If we're given a vector whose magnitude is 2 and whose angle from the x-axis is 30 degrees, like this one here, then the x-component is just the magnitude times the cosine of the angle, so 2 times the cosine of 30. And the y-component is just the magnitude times the sine of the angle, so 2 times the sine of 30.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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42_Newtons_Third_Law.txt
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Newton's third law states that forces always come in equal and opposite pairs. One way we can write that is if you imagine two objects, object one and object two, the force exerted by object one on object two is equal and opposite to the force exerted by object two on object one. This makes explicit that real forces always arise from a physical interaction. For any force in a problem, you should always be able to identify the other member of the interaction pair. Newton's third law is the most subtle and sometimes the most confusing of his three laws of motion so I'd like to do an example that will help clarify how to think about it. So I'm going to pick a very extreme example. Let's imagine the collision between a marble moving this way and a train moving that way. And so we'll say that the mass of the train-- I'll write that as "m sub train"-- and the mass of the marble is m sub marble. And obviously, the mass of the train is much larger-- I'm going to write that as several greater-than signs-- much, much larger than the mass of the marble. And so the question I want to consider is, at the instant that these two objects collide, which experiences the greater force? So think about that yourself for a moment. In terms of outcomes, clearly, the marble will be smashed by the train whereas the train will not be noticeably affected by the marble. So your intuition might therefore suggest that it's the marble that feels the greater force. But that's incorrect because Newton's third law tells us that forces come in equal and opposite pairs. And what that tells us is that each object will exert an equal but oppositely directed force on the other. Now I chose a very extreme example to capture your attention. But that might seem like a surprising result but Newton's third law tells us that the forces on each object are going to be equal and opposite. But just because the forces are equal doesn't mean that the motion will be equal. The accelerations of the two objects are vastly different because of their different masses. And the accelerations and the forces are related by Newton's second law, F equals m a. So if I write that in terms of the acceleration, the acceleration of the marble, "a marble," is equal to the force divided by the mass of the marble whereas the acceleration of the train is equal to-- so since I wrote "F" for the force acting on a marble, I'm going to write minus F for the force acting on the train. So that's minus F divided by the mass of the train. And so if I want to look at the ratio, how big is the acceleration of the marble divided by the acceleration of the train? And let's take the absolute value so we're just talking about magnitudes here. That's going to be equal to the mass of the train divided by the mass of the marble. But the mass of the train is much, much, much larger than the mass of the marble so the right-hand side here is a very, very big number. And that tells us that relative to the acceleration of the train, the acceleration of the marble is going to be enormous. Even though the force experienced by each object is identical, because of their different masses, their accelerations will be very different. So that gives us an example of what we mean by Newton's third law, in terms of the interaction pair and equal and opposite forces acting. I want to reiterate that for any force in a problem, you should always be able to identify the other member of the interaction pair. So forces always come in pairs. It's important to keep in mind that these force pairs don't both act on the same object. They never act on the same object. The interaction pair always involves a pair of objects, two different objects. And let me just make that explicit with an example. The example I'll consider is, imagine a person standing on the ground. What are the forces acting on this person? I'll draw the force diagram here, say. There's gravity, mg, acting downwards and there's a normal force upward exerted by the ground. And those two balance to give a net force of zero, which is why the person is standing on the ground and not sinking down into the ground, for example. Now, you might look at gravity and the normal force and wonder if those are an interaction pair. And they're not because notice that these two forces are both acting on the same object, the person. The interaction pair always comes from realizing what is exerting the force on the object. So let's look at each of these in turn. Gravity is exerted by the Earth. So if the Earth-- and this means really the entire Earth-- exerts a force mg on the person, Newton's third law tells us that the person exerts a gravitational force on the entire Earth of mg upwards. Now, that might seem remarkable to you if you're just standing around on the floor that you are exerting a gravitational force on the planet but you are. However, this is like the example we just talked about a moment ago. The masses are extremely different even though the forces are the same. So the acceleration of the Earth due to this person's mass is negligible because the Earth is so much more massive than the person. But Newton's third law tells us that there is a tiny acceleration on the Earth due to the person. That is the third law pair for gravity. mg downward exerted by the Earth on the person is paired with mg upward on the Earth exerted by the person. Now, for the normal force acting on the person, that force is exerted by the ground. So the ground exerts an upward force N on the person. Newton's third law tells us that that means that the person must exert a downward force N on the ground. That is the interaction pair for Newton's third law for the normal force.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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05_Vector_Decomposition_into_components.txt
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Vectors can be represented through their components. If we have a vector A, we can decompose it into its components in the x and y-directions by finding the vectors, one along x and one along y, that add up to the vector A. This is the same thing as finding the projections of the vector A along the x and y-axes. Here is the projection of the vector onto the x-axis, its x-component. And here is the projection onto the y-axis, the y-component. This particular vector could be written as A is equal to minus 2i hat plus minus 2j hat. A generic vector in two dimensions can be written as A is equal to Ax, the x-component of A, times i hat, the unit vector along x, plus Ay, the y-component, times j hat, the unit vector along y. If the vector is in three dimensions, we will also have an Az times k hat. What if we have the vector minus 3i hat plus 2j hat? First we find the vector minus 3 times vector i hat and add this to the vector 2 times j hat. We can draw this vector anywhere. It doesn't have to start at the origin.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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Internal_and_External_Forces.txt
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Newton's second law states that the sum of the forces on an object is equal to the acceleration of that object times the mass. But what if instead this object is actually two objects? Do I now need to consider the forces that are acting between each of these parts? Or what if I consider the object to be made out of even smaller parts? I can take it down to its smallest components and consider the interactions between all of the atoms in the object. This seems like an overwhelming number of forces that I'm going to need to calculate just to find the force on this object. But I never seem to calculate this many forces. Why is that? All of these forces between the atoms in the object cancel out because they are Newton's third law pairs. If both objects are within the system-- since a Newton's third law a pair of forces is equal and opposite-- the total force is just zero. We call these internal forces. That is, forces that are acting between a pair of objects that are both within our system. On the other hand, external forces-- forces that act on an object within the system by an object outside the system-- are what we need to consider for our calculation. We could be more precise about Newton's second law and say that the total external force on the system is equal to the system's acceleration times the system's mass. Let's look at an example of how the selection of a system will affect the forces that we need to consider. I have three blocks. I'll call them one, two, and three, and a force that's pushing block one to the right. We'll first take a minute to look at notation. We will write the forces as F12. And this means that it's the force exerted by an object one acting on an object two. In this example, I have pairs of forces between each block. The interaction between blocks one and two. And the interaction between blocks two and three. Let's look at the internal and external forces on the system if my system is made up of block one and block two. I have this external pushing force-- F external-- that's acting from the external pusher on block one. Blocks one and two are interacting with each other. But these are both within my system. So these are internal forces that I do not need to worry about. And finally block two, which is within my system, is interacting with block 3, which is outside my system. The external force here is the force that is acting from block three on block two. Now we know that the two forces that are relevant to calculating the motion of the system are the external pushing force and F32. If my system is instead made up of blocks one and three, block two is now part of the extremal environment. Can you figure out what the internal and external forces are? In this case, the external forces to the system are the external pushing force F external, F21, and F23.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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154_Momentum_of_a_System_of_Point_Particles.txt
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Let's now extend our concept of momentum to a system of particles. Again, we need to choose a reference frame. So we'll have a ground frame. And let's consider N particles. Now when we have a lot of particles, we need some type of notation. So let's use the symbol j. And it will goes from 1 to N. And then our arbitrary j particle will be moving. This particle will have mass mj. And it will be moving with a velocity vj. Now recall in our system, we have many other particles. We can call that one 1. This is one n. We have lots of different particles in the system. And this just represents an arbitrary particle in that system. And the momentum of the jth particle is just the mass, mj, times the velocity, vj. And again, we're assuming some fixed reference frame. So the total momentum of this system, we now have to add up the momentum of all the particles, all the way up to the nth particle. Now, when we make a sum like this, there is a standard mathematical summation notation, which we'll write like this. We'll do the sum, this capital sigma sin of j goes from 1 to j goes to N of the momentum of the jth particle. And that represents the sum j goes from 1 to n of mj vj. And this is what we call the momentum of the system. This is a vector sum. And now let's see how Newton's second law applies to the momentum of the system. Suppose that acting on our particles-- for instance, here's our jth particle-- we have a force Fj acting on the jth particle. Then we know that from Newton's law that the force will be also the sum of the forces on all of the particles, F1, F2, plus dot, dot, dot, plus FN. So once again, we can write this as a sum j goes from 1 to N of the force on the jth particle. And that's the force on the summing over all the forces on all the particles in the system. But now, we can apply Newton's second law. So Newton's second law is the statement that the force on the jth particle causes the momentum of the jth particle to change. And when we write that now, the total force on the system, j goes from 1 to N, is just the sum of the change in momentum. Because every single term-- let's just look at that. T1 plus dP2/dt plus dot, dot, dot, plus dPN/dt, that's what we mean by the sum. We can rewrite this as d/dt of P1 plus P2 plus P3 plus dot, dot, dot, plus PN. And what we see is that the total force is the derivative of the sum j goes from 1 to N of the momentum. But recall, this sum we've defined as the momentum of the system. So our conclusion is the total force causes the momentum of the system to change. Now so far, all we've done is we've recast Newton's second law in this form. Our next step is to analyze the forces on the individual particles we have and apply Newton's third law. So we'll do that next.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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121_Pulley_Problems.txt
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Let's look at a typical application of Newton's second law for a system of objects. So what I want to consider is a system of pulleys and masses. So I'll have a fixed surface here, a ceiling. And from the ceiling, we'll hang a pulley, which I'm going to call pulley A. And this pulley will have a rope attached to it, wrapped around it. And here we have object 1. And the rope goes around the pulley. And now it's going to go around another pulley B and fixed to the ceiling. So that's fixed. And hanging from pulley B is another mass 2. And our goal in applying Newton's second law is to find the accelerations of objects 1 and 2. Now, how do we approach this? Well, the first thing we have to do is decide if we're going to apply Newton's second law, what is the system that we'll apply it to? And there's many different ways to choose a system. When we look at this problem, we'll have several different systems. So let's consider the ones that we're going to look at. And the first one is very simple. It will be block 1. And the second system that we look at, we'll call that AB is pulley A. Now that brings us to an interesting question about pulley B and block 2, because we could separately look at pulley B, and we could separately consider block 2, or we consider them together. And I want to first consider separately pulley B and block 2. Now in some ways when you're looking at a compound system, and it has four objects, it makes sense to apply Newton's second law to each object separately. But we'll pay careful attention to the fact that object 2 is connected to pulley B. And eventually, we'll see that we can combine these two things. So the next step is once we have identified our object is to draw a free body force diagrams for each of the objects. So in order to do that, let's start with object 1. And we want to consider the forces on object 1. Now that brings us to our first issue about what types of assumptions we're making in our system. For instance, we have a rope that's wrapped around this pulley. And we have two pulleys that in principle could be rotating. But what we'd like to do to simplify our analysis-- so let's keep track of some assumptions here. Our first assumption will be that the mass, MP, of pulley A and the mass of pulley B are approximately zero. Now the reason for that is that we're not going to consider any of the fact that these objects have to be put into rotational motion. Later on in the course, we'll see that this will give us a more complicated analysis. We're also going to assume that our rope is not slipping. So the rope is actually is just slipping on the pulleys. So what that means is it's just the rope is sliding as the objects move. Now again, what this is going to imply is that the tension in the rope-- this rope is also slipping. And the rope is massless as well. It's very light rope. And all of these assumptions we've seen when we analyze ropes tell us that the tension T is uniform in the rope. So that's our first assumption. And we need to think about this before we even begin to think about the forces on the object. And now we can draw our forces. What do we have? We have the gravitational force on object 1. And now we can identify the tension pulling in the string, pulling object 1 up. Now for every time we introduce a free body diagram, recall that we have to choose what we mean by positive directions. And in this case, I'm going to pick a unit vector down, j hat 1 down. So that's my positive direction for force. Now before I write down all of Newton's laws, I'll just write down our various force diagrams. So for pulley A, I have two strings that are pulling it downwards. So I have tension and tension. And this string, I'm going to call that T2, is holding that pulley up. So we have the force diagram. Now I could write MAG, but we've assumed that the pulley is massless. And again, I'll call j hat A down. For object 2, let's do pulley B first. Now what are the forces on pulley B? I have strings on both sides, T. Pulley B is massless, so I'm not putting gravitational force. And this string is pulling B downwards, so that's T3. And again, we'll write j hat B downwards. And finally, I have block 2. So I'll draw that over here. I'll write block 2. In fact, let's say a little space here. We'll have j hat B downwards. Now block 2, what do we have there? We have the string pulling up block 2, which we've identified as T3. And we have the gravitational force on block 2 downward, M2 g. And there we have j had 2. So I've now drawn the free body diagram of the various objects. And that enables me to apply Newton's second law for each of these objects. So let's begin. We'll start with object 1. We have-- remember in all cases, we're going to apply F equals m a. So for object 1, we have m1g positive downward minus T is equal to m1 a1. And that's our F equals m a on object 1. So sometimes we'll distinguish that the forces we're getting from our free body diagram. And A is a mathematical description of the motion. For block 2, we have m2g minus T3 is equal to m2 a2. And now for pulley A, we have 2T pointing downwards minus T2 going upwards. And because pulley A is massless, this is zero even though pulley A may be-- it's actually fixed too. So it's not even accelerating. And what we see here is this equation-- I'm going to quickly note that it tells us that the string holding pulley 2 up, T2, is equal to 2T. So we can think of if, we want to know what T2 is, we need to calculate T. And finally we have B. And what is the forces on B? We have T3 minus 2T. And again pulley B is 0. And so we see that T3 is equal to 2T. Now if you think about what I said before about combining systems, if we combine pulley B in block 2, visually what we're doing is we're just adding these to free body diagram together. When we have a system B and block 2. Let's call this j hat downwards. And when we add these free body diagram together, you see that the T3 is now internal force to the system. It cancels in pair by Newton's second law. And all we have is the two strings going up, so we have T and T. And we have the gravitational force downward. And separately, when we saw that T3 equals 2T and we apply it there, then if we consider a system B2, and look at our free body diagram, we have m2g minus 2T-- and notice we have the same result their 2T equals m2 a2. So in principle now-- and I'll outline our equations. We have equation 1. We have equation 2. And in these two equations, we have three unknowns, T, A1, and A2, but only two equations. And so you might think, what about this missing third equation here? However, in this equation, we have a fourth unknown, T3. And this equation is just relating to T and T3. So in principle, we would have four unknowns and three equations. Or if we restrict our attention to these two equations, we have three unknowns and two equations. Are unknowns T, A1 and A2. These are our unknowns. And now our next step is to try to figure out what is the missing condition that's relating the sum of these unknowns. And that will be a constraint condition that we'll analyze next.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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125_Worked_Example_2_Blocks_and_2_Pulleys.txt
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We want to look at this pulley system. We want to find out what this force here is, for example, with which this block is being pulled. Now we have two massless pulleys here and two moving parts. And one key component of this problem is to derive the acceleration constraint. How are we going to do that? Well, we have to look at this string here. First of all, it's a fixed string length. And that will help us. Ultimately, this is just a distance that connects all of these objects. And if we eventually differentiate that twice, we get to an acceleration. So the first thing we're going to do is to figure out what the string length is to then derive the acceleration condition. Let's begin by first identifying the fixed length in this problem. So we have a little distance here. We call it sb. And we have a distance here that's fixed, sa. And we furthermore know that this block here is fixed to the ground. And we can choose a coordinate system origin. Let's say we do that here. We know that we have the distance d here to this little block. The moving parts, block 1 and block 2-- so we have to assign position functions. And actually this one here is x1. It goes up to here because we want to measure the string length, ultimately, and we know this portion here. So we can subtract it. And then of course we need also x1, so that goes here-- x2. So now we can tally up the length. Let's start with this portion here. That is d minus sa minus x2. d minus sa minus x2. And then we have a half circle here, pi r. And we know actually that there is another half circle that's going to come there, so we can just write 2 pi r immediately. And then we have this part here. That one is x1 minus sb, and then minus sa minus x2. And then finally we have this portion, and that is x1 minus sb minus x2. OK, so the next step is that we need to simplify this a little bit. So we have one x1 and another one here, 2x1 plus x2, x2, x2-- actually 3-- minus 3x2. And then we have all sorts of consonants. We have d, we have sa, sb, the 2 pi r. But, as you will see, if we differentiate this out here, that will actually all fall away. So we're going to make our life easy and just add a constant here. And so we want to now do the second derivative here of our string length with respect to time, because these all position functions. So we can differentiate those. What's important of course here is this string length is not changing with time. So actually we know that that derivative will be 0. And we can just write this up here because x differentiated twice is a. So 2a1 minus 3a2. And we immediately see from that that a1 equals 3/2 a2. So this is our constraint condition that we will need later. For now, we need to continue with setting up free body diagrams of all four objects. Let's start that with object 1. What's acting on object 1? Well, we have F here. Why don't we just write it as magnitude. We have F, and then we have here a tension that goes to the pulley B. That one is different from the tension in the string. So we're going to call this TB. And then we have object 2. Oh, and of course, i hat goes in this direction because it follows the motion of the object. We have here kind of the reverse. Now we have a tension of this string here that's attached to pulley A, but it's different from this string tension-- that's a specific one-- TA. And we also have a T from the string here. So we'll add a T. And then if we look at pulley A, we have two string tensions, T and T. And here we again have a TA. And pulley B, TB, and two T over here. So that means we can write down our equations of motions using Newton's Second Law, F equals ma. And since this is just going in the i hat direction, we can just write down the four equations following the four free body diagrams here. So we have F minus TB equals m1 a1. We have T plus TA equals m2 a2. Then we have 2T minus TA equals 0. That is 0 because we're dealing with two massless pulleys there. That means m is 0 and so our acceleration term is 0. So the m is 0 here. And finally, we have TB minus 2T. No, not 2 pi-- 2T. And that one is also 0 because it is a massless pulley. So here we have our four equations of motion that fully govern this pulley system. And we can use it then, for example, to find this pulling force here. We know what TB is from the equation down here-- so 2T. We know what TA is. It's also 2T. And we can then solve this for F. The only sticky part is that we have this a1 and a2 in here. But for that, we derived this constraint condition here. So with that one, we can fully solve this. Otherwise, we would have one too many unknowns. Alternatively, if one were to be interested in one of these accelerations, then this equation system can also be solved for a1 or a2.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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136_Summary_for_Differential_Analysis.txt
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So let me summarize what the steps that we've taken are to do this differential analysis. So when you're trying to analyze a continuous mass distribution, the first step is to pick some arbitrary mass element, a small but finite size mass element somewhere in the middle of the mass distribution. You don't want to pick one of the endpoints, because the endpoints are special. You want to pick an arbitrary point somewhere in the middle and then pick a small mass element at that point, so a small but finite size. Analyze the forces acting on that mass element. So write down Newton's second law, the equation of motion, for that mass element. That will give you what the forces are on that element. Then go to the limit of an infinitesimally small element. That will give you a differential equation. You can then separate the differential equation and integrate both sides to solve the differential equation. And then finally, you can apply a boundary condition, something you know about one or the other of the endpoints. And that will allow you to solve for the function of interest at any point along your distribution.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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82_Circular_Motion_Position_and_Velocity_Vectors.txt
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When we're looking at polar coordinates, one of the important issues is to understand the unit vectors. Let's describe our coordinate system, again. We have a point where there is an object. And at this point, we have a pair of unit vectors, r hat and theta hat. Now those unit vectors will change, depending on where you are in space. We now want to address the question, how do I compare polar coordinates and Cartesian coordinates. In Cartesian coordinates, at this point here, we would have-- let's say we choose a Cartesian plus x and plus y, then we would have a unit vector i hat and j hat. And how are these vectors related? Remember our angle theta, so we have the angle theta here and the angle theta there. And now I would like to apply a simple vector decomposition to r hat and theta hat and express each of these unit vectors in terms of the unit vectors i hat and j hat. Let's begin with r hat. As you can see in the diagram, r hat has a horizontal component and a vertical component. So what we have is r hat. It's a unit vector, so its length is 1. Its horizontal component is adjacent to the angle, so that's cosine of theta i hat plus sine of theta j hat. The vertical component is opposite the angle. In a similar fashion, theta hat-- well, theta hat has a component in the negative i hat direction, which is opposite the angle. And it has a component in the positive j hat direction, which is adjacent to the angle. So we have minus sine theta i hat plus cosine theta j hat. And that's how we can decompose our unit vectors r hat and theta hat in terms of Cartesian coordinates. Now why is this significant? Because if we're describing the motion of an object, for instance, an object that's going around a circle, then our polar coordinate theta is a function of time. And so these unit vectors are actually changing in direction. You saw that before. Over here, r hat and theta hat point in different directions. So what we actually have as functions of time is r hat of t equals cosine theta of t i hat. Now the unit vectors don't change in Cartesian coordinates. At every single point, you have the same Cartesian unit vectors. And so this vector is time dependent. Now the significance of that is our first important vector in kinematics is the position vector. The position vector is a vector that goes from the origin to where the object is. We'll call that r of t. So this position vector r of t can be expressed as a length r. And its direction is in the r hat direction, which is a function of time. So we have r cosine theta of t i hat plus r sine theta of t j hat. Now we can now define the velocity of this object where the velocity is the derivative of the position vector. When you differentiate, remember, r is a constant, so we get r. Now what is the derivative with respect to time of cosine theta t. Because the argument of theta is a function of t, we need to use the chain rule. So the derivative is minus sine theta of t, d theta dt i hat. And the derivative of the sine is cosine theta of t d theta dt j hat. Now notice that I can pull out the common term d theta dt. So I have r d theta dt. And I have minus sine theta of t i hat plus cosine theta of t j hat. And if you'll notice, this is exactly the unit vector theta hat. So we can write our velocity vector for this object that's moving in a circle as r d theta dt theta hat. When we write a vector like this, it's pointing tangentially, the theta hat direction, and this part is the component. So often we can use a notation v theta theta hat, where v theta is the component r d theta dt. Now this component can be positive or negative or 0. For example, if d theta dt is positive, what does that mean? That means that our angle theta is increasing so the object is moving the way I indicate with my finger. If d theta dt is 0, then the angle is not changing, so the object is at rest. And finally, if d theta dt is negative, then the angle theta is decreasing, and so the object is moving in this direction. So this is our velocity for a circular motion expressed in polar coordinates.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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23_Worked_Example_Acceleration_from_Position.txt
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Let's consider a very simple example of a runner in which our position function x of t is given as a quadratic function in time. It will be a constant b times t squared. Here, b is a constant. Now it's always important in SI units to consider what the units of this constant is. Because a position function is measured in meters and time is measured in seconds, b is a constant and it has units of meters per second squared. And there's an example of a runner-- and let's make a plot of that position function. So we're going to plot x of t as a function of time. b here-- let's make b a positive constant. And so our function looks something like that. Now, the velocity-- component of the velocity-- remember v of t is given by dx dt of this function. And the derivative of a polynomial t squared is very simple. That's just simply 2b times t. Again, let's look at our units. Because b has the units of meters per second squared, and when multiplying that by second, we have the units of velocity in SI units as meters per second. Now let's plot that function. Notice this is a linear function. And so if I plotted underneath here, the velocity as a function of time, it starts off with a zero slope. Remember we're looking-- our velocity at any given time corresponds to the slope of a tangent line to the position function. And you can see that slope is increasing. Now you wouldn't know it from this graph, but if you did plot t squared, it's increasing linearly. And so our velocity function-- the initial slope is 0 at t equal 0, and it's increasing linearly in time. So we'll just draw that as some linear function. And the slope here of this function will be now the acceleration. So a of t is the derivative of the component of the velocity function as a function of time. And this derivative is quite easy. It's just simply 2 b. Now notice those have the units of meters per second squared, which are units for acceleration. When we, again, look at the slope, notice that at every single point, the slope of the velocity as a function of time is a constant. The slope here is just equal to 2b. And so now if we plotted our acceleration function, we have this point 2 b, and every single point has the same value of acceleration. So here the acceleration is an example of constant acceleration. And this is our simplest case. Notice we started with the position function. We differentiate to get the component of the velocity and to get the component of the acceleration. So this is a very simple model for a runner whose increasing speed linearly, accelerating at a constant rate.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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32_Instantaneous_Velocity_in_2D.txt
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Recall, when we were examining the motion an object, in two dimensions, we introduced Cartesian coordinates and a position vector. Now let's suppose the object has moved to a new point, along the orbit. Well, we'll write another vector r of t. And let's say this took a time delta t to the new point. And what we want to define is the displacement of that object. So that's a vector delta r. And recall that a vector of time of t plus delta t is equal to the old vector r of t plus this displacement vector delta r. Now what we want to consider is a limit as delta t goes to 0. And let's just look graphically at what that means. As we move this delta, delta t-- as delta t gets smaller and smaller and our object is getting closer and closer to its position at time t, and the position vector r of t plus delta t is getting closer and closer to r of t delta t, the key fact is that if we do a tangent to the orbit, then the limit of delta r is approaching tangent to the curve. So in the limit, delta r, the direction is tangent to the orbit. So that's our first key property of delta r. Now the second thing we want to express is, if we write delta r, as a displacement in the i-hat direction and a displacement in the j-hat direction, now again, maybe we can just clean this up a little bit, and see what we mean by that. So here's our delta r. And we have a little delta x in this direction, delta y in that direction. Remember delta x or delta y can be positive or negative. That's all right. Now if we want to define our velocity as the limit, as delta t goes to 0 of delta r over delta t, then what we see is we have two pieces, the limit as delta t goes to 0, of delta x over delta t i-hat, plus the limit as delta t goes to 0 of delta y delta t j-hat. And the definition of these limits, we'll write that as the derivative dr, dt. So the velocity is dr, dt. And that's equal to dx, dt, how that coordinate function is changing in time, i-hat plus dy, dt j-hat. Now as far as notation goes, we write this philosophy as an x component of the velocity plus a y component of the velocity, where the x component, the x, is dx, dt. And the y component is dy, dt. Now recall that the direction was tangent to the curve, but the magnitude of the velocity, what we call the speed, is just the sum of the squares of the components, the square root. And so now we've describe what we refer to as the instantaneous velocity. So far we've looked that a trajectory in two dimensions. Let's again consider some type of motion where we choose a positive y-axis, a positive x-axis, an origin, e at vectors, i-hat and j-hat. And I'll have some type of trajectory, where our object is moving like that. We know that at this particular time, the velocity is tangent to this trajectory, at that point. And now, what we'd like to do, is try to describe-- we've described it's two components ex and vy as a vector. So if you did vector decomposition, you would write a vector like this and a vector like that. This is the x component. That's the y component. And now if I define this angle theta, we know that a vector has a direction and a magnitude. We've seen what we call the magnitude the speed. So that's just the sum of these components squared, square root. Speed is always positive. So we always take the positive square root. And now what about the direction of this vector in the xy plane? Well, we can see from our geometry that the tangent theta is given by the y component over the x component. Or one could say that the angle theta, at this given time, is the inverse function of vy over vx. And so now we've described not only the direction of velocity, but the angle that it's making with the horizontal axis. And so we have now completely described the velocity, instantaneous velocity, vector at time t in terms of its two component functions, its speed and the angle that makes at the positive x-axis.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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71_Pushing_Pulling_and_Tension.txt
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Here we have a little block that sits on that surface. And well, what can one do with a block? You can push it, or you can pull it. And that's exactly what we're going to look at now. So I can exert a pushing force onto this block here, F push. But I could also pull it like this, F pull. And the question is, how can we formalize this a little bit more? We can now also look at a small piece of rope or a string. And I could, in the tug of war, I'm going to pull here. And I'm also going to pull here. And we'll see who is going to win. So we have two opposing forces here on either side. In a slightly different scenario, where we're going to put both of these things together, we have a block here sitting on a surface. And we have a little string attached to it. And let's say we have a pulley here, and the string goes around there and has a little mass hanging here. We want to now describe what this force is here that's pulling things. And for that, we have to look at what's going on in that little string. So let's draw another string. And this is our string. And let's take an imaginary cut right through the middle here. And I'm going to draw both pieces here. This is the left part, and here is the right part. And what's happening in this rope here now? Well, there is a force acting on the left object due to the interaction with the right one. And here we have a force on the right one, due to the interaction of the left piece. And that, of course, happens anywhere. I take a cut here along the line. And we can even formalize that a little bit more by just placing our coordinate system here. And let's say x equals 0 here. And so for all x along this line, we always have these pairs of forces. So they are an interaction pair. And if I look at the rope from afar, they will cancel out. But if I look at what's going on inside the rope, then this is what they are. And we know from Newton's third law that F RL equals minus F LR. So they're forces of the same magnitude, but the opposite direction. If they weren't the same, then my rope would get in trouble. But what we want to define now actually is tension, the tension force, that is along, that's happening along, this rope here in our tug of war if someone pulls from the outside. And for that, we first got to look at the magnitude of our interaction pair here, F RL. And that, of course, equals the magnitude of F LR. And we're actually going to define now this magnitude here as the tension force. And that is true for all x along this line here, that we have this, the magnitude, that this is the magnitude of this force here. And from now on, we're going to call-- when we talk about tension in the rope, then we talk about the magnitude of one of these internal forces here.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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180_Week_6_Introduction.txt
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This week, we will use the concept of momentum to analyze some more advanced situations. Namely, systems in which there is a continuous flow of mass rather than just the motion of discrete objects. The classic example of this is the thrust due to exhaust from a rocket engine. Once again, we will appeal to a differential analysis technique. Breaking the flow down into a large number of small elements, analyzing one of the elements in detail, and then generalizing. This is an important example of a situation where the point mass form of Newton's Second Law of Motion-- f equals ma-- is inadequate, and one must instead use the more general form of the law-- f equals dpdt-- or the force is equal to the time derivative of the momentum.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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PS22_Worked_Example_Stacked_Blocks_Free_Body_Diagrams_and_Applying_Newtons_2nd_Law.txt
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One of the big difficulties students have in a problem that involves many objects is to successfully identify third law interaction pairs. So today, I'd like to look at a problem which shows us how to think about that. So what we're going to look at is third law interaction pairs. Now, the problem I'd like to consider is the following. Suppose we have a block one and another block two sitting on block one on a surface and our surface has friction. And I'd like to push block one with a force F. And now I'd like to use Newton's second law to determine what is the maximum force I can push that block two will not slip. So I'm trying to find F max such that block two does not slip. Now, how do we even begin to think about this? Well, the first thing that we have to decide is when we apply Newton's second law, our first question will be, what is the system that we'll choose? And in this problem, there are three separate ways to think about this. Just to show you an example, so system a will be block one, system b will be block two, and system c will be block one and block two. And given these different systems, I can address different questions and we'll see that as we develop this. So let's start with block one and we'll start with breaking our problem down into block one and block two. And let's draw the free-body diagrams on those blocks, trying to identify action-reaction pairs. So let's begin with block one. First off, we know there's gravitational force and the Earth is the other pair there, which we're not drawing. There's friction between the surfaces. So there's a friction between the ground and block one. There is the normal force of the ground on block one. Block two is sitting on block one so there's a normal force of block two on block one. And finally, as you push block one, there's a friction force between block two and block one that's opposing the fact that block one is being pushed forward. So we have a friction force here between blocks two and one. Now, this friction down here is kinetic. But if the blocks are moving together, this friction here is static. So those are the free-body force diagrams on one. I'll choose unit vectors in a moment. Now, what about two? So let's draw two. Well, again, m2 g-- the Earth is the other element of the interaction pair. And now, block one is pushing block two up. So we have block one pushing block two up and notice our indices make it very easy to see that our first Newton's third law interaction pair is the normal force of contact between the two blocks. Now, what else? Here's the subtle thing is that this whole system will move to the right. What's the force that's making block two move to the right? Well, it's static friction. So static friction from block one and block two-- this is the static friction-- is causing block two to move to the right. And now we can see, again our third law interaction pair. So in this problem, we have two third law pairs, this one and I'll connect the line there, and those are the third law pairs. Now, we know by the third law that they're equal and opposite in magnitude. We can identify f. We can call this one N if we wanted just to save ourselves the problem of writing a lot of indices. Once we've done that, we're now ready to apply Newton's second law. We haven't yet figured out what the condition is that it will just slip. We'll get to that. But for the moment, we can now apply vector decomposition. So we need to choose some unit vectors. Because I'm pushing the system this way, it makes sense for me to choose my i-hat to the right. So here, I'm going to choose i-hat 1 and j-hat 1. Now, over here, I could choose the same unit vectors, even though I'm thinking about this as a completely separate problem with its own coordinate system. And I'll choose i-hat 2 and j-hat 2. But because these unit vectors are in the same direction, they're equal. And they're both moving in the positive i directions and so I expect both a1 and a2 to be positive. And now I on block one, I can write down F1 equals m1 a1. And because we have two different directions, I'll separate out. I like to call this my "scorecard." And now I look at the forces. Oh, I missed the pushing force. But that's an interesting exercise. When I looked at this diagram, I saw I had two forces going this way. I had no force acting that way. I went back. I checked my free-body diagram, and recognized that I forgot to put F in there-- always a good exercise to double-check your free-body diagrams before you apply Newton's laws. So now in the x-direction, we have the pushing force minus the static friction minus-- we'll call this fk-- minus the kinetic friction and that's equal to m1 a1. Now in the vertical direction, we have the ground friction, N ground 1, minus block two pushing down on block one minus the gravitational force. And there is no acceleration in that direction. And I double-check my free-body diagrams, I check my signs, and that looks right to me. Now, for block two, I'll apply the same analysis. F2 equals m2 a2. Separate out my two unit directions. Notice even though these unit vectors are the same, I'm emphasizing that I'm talking about block two. I could have chosen different coordinate systems if I wanted. Now, I look at my free-body diagrams. On block two. I see that its static friction is the only one in the positive i-hat direction. So I have F equals m2 a2. And in the vertical directions, I have that my force between the blocks, the normal force between the blocks, minus gravity is 0.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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40_Week_2_Introduction.txt
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Last week, we discussed the kinematics of motion. How one describes the motion of an object by specifying its position, velocity, and acceleration as a function of time. This week, we will continue by discussing the dynamics of motion. How the application of forces on an object changes the geometry or trajectory of its motion. We will see that the applied forces and the change in trajectory are related through Newton's laws of motion. We will begin by reviewing Newton's three laws of motion. These were a landmark achievement in scientific thought. Most people who haven't studied physics tend to intuitively think in terms of the ancient mechanics of Aristotle in which an applied force is required to maintain a body in uniform motion. Superficially, this seems to agree with our everyday experience, but only because friction plays such an important role in our everyday life. One of Newton's great insights was that applied forces cause changes in an object's motion, rather than being necessary to maintain uniform motion. Newton's laws were the end result of a great deal of careful definition, observation, and reasoning by many scientists up to and including Newton. It is a fascinating and compelling chapter in the history of science, but we will not discuss that history in this course. Instead, we will simply state Newton's three laws of motion as assumed postulates or axioms and discuss their meaning and application. Finally, we will consider several specific examples of physical forces, such as gravity, contact forces exerted by a solid surface, like the so-called normal force, which acts perpendicular or normal to the surface, and friction, which acts parallel to the surface, pulling forces like tension in a rope or chain, and the force exerted by a stretched or compressed spring described by Hooke's law. Taken as a whole, this week will show us how to connect the two sides of Newton's Second Law of Motion, f equals ma, the dynamics or application of forces on the left-hand side and its relation to the kinematics, the change in geometry of the object's motion or trajectory, on the right-hand side.
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MIT_801SC_Classical_Mechanics_Fall_2016
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112_Worked_Example_Car_on_a_Banked_Turn.txt
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Let's consider the motion of a car on a circular track, and the track is frictionless. And it's also banked. So this is the overhead view of our circular track. It has radius, r. And here's our car moving at a constant velocity. Now, from the side view when we want to look at that bank turn-- let's draw a side view. So here's our side view, and the car is moving with a velocity into the plane of the figure. Now this surface here is frictionless. And what we'd like to do is find out what speed the car can move such that it doesn't slide up or down the inclined plane. So how should we analyze that? Well our approach will be to apply Newton's second laws. Now what's very important to realize is this is circular motion. And for circular motion we know that the car is accelerating towards the center of the circle. Now from the side view, towards the center of the circle is in this direction. So the car is accelerating radially inward. And that will guide how we choose our coordinate system. And so we can then write our free body force diagram. So let's begin with the analysis. So we don't need to see the overhead view anymore. So I'll just remove that, and then we can start drawing. This is what we can refer to as our acceleration diagram. And now let's draw the force diagram on the car as our choice of system. So here's our angle, phi. Because the acceleration was inward we're going to choose a radially outward coordinate and a vertical coordinate, K hat up. Notice that this is different than just a mass on a fixed incline plane where we used unit vectors up and down the inclined plane. The reason we choose our unit vectors like that-- to emphasize it again, is we already know this is constrain motion. It's circular motion. Now what is the free body-- what are the forces on the car? Well there is the normal force, the plane on the car, and the gravitational force. Now here-- whenever you're doing problems like this remember that the trig is crucial to get these angles right. So that's phi, and that's phi, and that's our free body force diagrams. And now we can write down Newton's second law. So we'll start out with our usual approach, and we have two directions that we have to consider. So in the radial direction there is an inward component of the normal force, like that. And that's opposite the angle, so it's pointing opposite our direction. So we have minus n sine phi. The gravitational force is only in the negative K hat direction. And we know that the acceleration is inward, and so there's a minus sign. We have the mass, and the constraint for circular motion is that that's phi squared over r. Where r was the radius of that circle, this can be thought of as the central point. Now for the k hat direction, we have a component of the normal force that's pointing up. I'll just draw that. That's adjacent to the angle, so we have plus and cosine phi. And we have the gravitational force downward, minus mg. And as far as the vertical direction goes, because the car is going in a circle, there is no acceleration up or down in the vertical direction. Again, that's a constraint in this problem. That's equal to 0. So in this problem, this is the side that we know, and we're trying to figure out up to the speed, v. Now, how do we analyze this problem? Well you can see that if I write my two equations, this n sine phi equals mv squared over r. And cosine phi equals mg. We have two equations. We have two unknowns, v and n. Many times people just solve for n and try to find the equation-- and then substitute in, but you're also allowed to divide two equations, and that's much easier. The masses cancel and we get the relationship, that tan phi is v squared over rg. And so we have our result that the speed that the car can travel on a frictionless inclined plane and maintain uniform circular motion is exactly the square root of rg tan phi. And that's how we analyze the motion of this car on a banked turn. What we would now like to think about is what would happen if you're traveling faster or slower than this speed. So suppose we have the prime bigger than the speed. Now, what that means is that the car is going faster and the new equilibrium-- if you asked what would the radius be such that traveling at v primed the car undergoes circular motion, the prime would be equal to r prime g tan phi. And so in order to go with this speed you have to go at a greater radius. Now what does that mean? Well, that means that if the car is traveling at v, so it's in this circular motion, and now the driver increases the speed to v prime, the car will start to slide up the inclined plane-- remember, it's frictionless-- until it reaches a-- as it starts slide up the inclined plane it will get to this new radius, r prime, but because a car will have a little inertia it will overshoot that speed, that radius, and then it will start to come back down the inclined plane, and it will oscillate about that point. It won't be sinusoidal oscillations, but they'll be a periodic oscillation about this new radius, r prime. The same thing, too, if we have the double prime less than d, then the double prime is equal to r double prime G tan phi. Now remember, this double prime is not two derivatives. I'm just using that as a notation to indicate different speeds. So if the car is going along at speed, v, and slows down, what would happen is the new equilibrium radius is smaller so the car slides down the inclined plane until it gets to r double prime. It turns out that it will overshoot that a little bit, and then start to move up. And, again, it will oscillate around this new equilibrium length. So on a frictionless inclined plane if you go faster then this speed the car slides up. If you go slower than this speed, the car slides down.
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