Primeiro esse, do
Edge.org, denominado
The Social Psychological Narrative – or – What Is Social Psychology, Anyway?(Se meus comentários não forem pertinentes ao texto, ou contraditórios, avisem, eu não revi!)
O texto trata, basicamente, de como intervir no comportamento das pessoas. Algumas passagens que soam como a malfadada auto-ajuda,
(...) the limits of introspection; and the problems of introspection. For example, how it can sometimes get us into trouble to think too much about why we're doing what we’re doing.
Quando ele trata dos limites do auto-conhecimento, mas sem fugir muito da auto ajuda, pois ele pretende encontrar maneiras práticas de trabalhar o comportamento humano utilizando-se dessa abordagem denominada Psychological Narrative or Social Psychology, que assume que não é o ambiente objetivo (?) que influencia as pessoas, mas suas construções de mundo, histórias que as pessoas contam pra elas mesmas. Nesse sentido, afirma,
What can get people into trouble sometimes in their personal lives, or for more societal problems, is that these stories go wrong. People end up with narratives that are dysfunctional in some way.
Um exemplo interessante de como editou histórias de pessoas cujo problema não necessitava de intervenção clínica,
One of the first studies I did after graduate school tested a story-editing intervention of this kind. We recruited a sample of college students who were caught in a self-defeating thought cycle, where they were not doing well academically (these were first-year students) and were quite worried. They seemed to be blaming themselves and thinking that maybe they were one of those admissions errors that just couldn't cut it at college, which of course made it all the more difficult to study.
We did a brief intervention where, in about 30 minutes, we gave them some facts and some testimonials from other students that suggested that their problems might have a different cause; namely, that it's hard to learn the ropes in college at first, but that people do better as the college years go on, when they learn to adjust and to study differently than they did in high school and so on.
This little message that maybe it's not me, it's the situation I'm in, and that can change, seemed to alter people's stories in ways that had dramatic effects down the road.
Dessa maneira, ele afirma ter conseguido que esses tais estudantes percebessem de uma outra maneira a situação a qual estavam inseridos e, dessa forma, mudarem sua própria atitude,
This is an approach that I've come to call story editing. By giving people little prompts, suggestions about the ways they might reframe a situation, or think of it in a slightly different way, we can send them down a narrative path that is much healthier than the one they were on previously.
Numa outra passagem que trata de problemas sociais, especificamente o chamado “stereotype threat”, que significa literalmente ameaça de estereótipo, principalmente entre a população negra norte-americana, que em muito se percebe menos inteligente que a branca, um colega seu realizou o seguinte experimento baseado num outro estudo também mencionado no texto,
...Well, Cohen thought, maybe we can take the research on self-affirmation and use it to reduce stereotype threat in middle school kids. If we can get African-American middle school kids to affirm themselves in some domain unrelated to the academic realm, he hypothesized, this will take the heat off and make it actual easier for them to do well academically. He did an intervention in which middle school kids wrote about a value that they cared about in their lives, other than academics. They did this for 15 minutes, three to five times during the semester, depending on the version of the study. That was it: write about something you care about in your life other than academics.
This was a good experiment, because there was a randomly-assigned control group of kids who did not do this exercise. The intervention had remarkably long-term effects: The African American kids who did the writing exercise, compared to the control group, did better academically for the next couple of years. In fact, the intervention closed the achievement gap between the black and white students by 40 percent.
Outros temas do comportamento humano que saltam do texto e as quais achei interessante,
Sobre “Viés de Impacto” (tradução literal!),
...which is that people overestimate the emotional impact of many events on their lives. We think that if we win the lottery we'll be happy forever. The research on that suggests that not only is that not true, but if anything, lottery winners become less happy, often, because their lives are disrupted in any number of ways. On the negative side, we tend to think that those things that we dread, that would be awful, the death of loved ones, the loss of a job, and so on, will make us unhappy forever. Although they are terrible things to endure, we are more resilient than we anticipate and often get over these events more quickly than we anticipate.
Sobre “previsão afetiva”, ou affective forecasting,
Research on affective forecasting has been a solace because I know that yes, terrible things might happen, and if they do, it will be terrible at first, but then life goes on. We are pretty resilient creatures, and sooner rather than later, we'll find a way to deal with life’s worst blows.
Aqui, ele faz uma crítica aquelas explicações evolucionárias para tudo e qualquer nuance do comportamento humano,
Evolutionary theory has its use. Of course, evolution is true, as a general theory of how the human species evolved. As an explanation for current social behavior, it can be a useful heuristic, if it can generate hypotheses that we would not have come up with otherwise that can then be tested with rigorous methods. But too often, there's a very loose kind of theorization that goes on, where people just tell a story and assume that it's true because it kind of makes sense.
É interessante essa simples ressalva, não é por que faz sentido que seja verdadeiro. A Teoria da Evolução quando aplicada ao comportamento humano gera diversas hipóteses, mas poucas teorias de onde se pode prosseguir por fundamentos seguros e demonstráveis.
Essa crítica prossegue e se encontra com um termo que eu desconhecia, a Nova Psicanálise, que também pode gerar hipóteses demonstráveis,
Both theories, at some general level are true. Evolutionary theory, of course, shows how the forces of natural selection operated on human beings. Psychoanalytic theory argues that our childhood experiences mold us in certain ways and give us outlooks on the world. Our early relationships with our parents lead to unconscious structures that can be very powerful.
But both theories led to a lot of absurd conclusions, and both are very hard to test rigorously. The influence of psychoanalysis waned in research psychology because it was too broad. It made too many assumptions that were very hard to test, and basically it explained everything. That said, it did actually lead to some interesting hypotheses that were tested rigorously. One example is Susan Andersen's work on transference, which shows that, indeed, we do have blueprints about relationships that form and influence our perceptions of new relationships.
Tópico: O Comportamento Humano (Lida 931 vezes)