The Control of the Social Mind: Psychology of Economic and Political Relations

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D. Appleton, 1923 - Psychology - 263 pages
 

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Page 201 - Some men whose education ceased at fourteen acquire through experience in their trade powers of observation and correct inference which professional men whose education was continued to their twenty-fifth year never acquire. It is the men who have learned, probably out of school, to see and hear correctly and to reason cautiously from facts observed, who carry on the great industries of the country and make possible great transportation systems and international commerce.
Page 177 - ... release from a strained and tense situation, is another form of Kant's explanation. Bergson expresses the belief that laughter is primarily caused by the appearance of mechanical inelasticity in human life, which is another way of viewing Schopenhauer's incongruity explanation. Weeks declares that "when a man has only one idea, that idea is as serious as can be; when he laughs he is virtually saying that he has had another idea.
Page 201 - ... went to war with Germany there has been an extraordinary exhibition of the incapacity of the American people as a whole to judge evidence, to determine facts, and even to discriminate between facts and fancies. This incapacity appears in the public press, in the prophecies of prominent administrative officials, both state and national, in the exhortations of the numerous commissions which are undertaking to guide American business and philanthropy, and in the almost universal acceptance by the...
Page 201 - American business and philanthropy, and in the almost universal acceptance by the people at large, day by day, of statements which have no foundation, and of arguments the premises of which are not facts or events, but only hopes and guesses. It is a matter of every-day experience that most Americans cannot observe with accuracy, repeat correctly a conversation, describe accurately what they have themselves seen or heard, or write out on the spot a correct account of a transaction they have just...
Page 201 - ... transaction they have just witnessed. These incapacities are exhibited just as much by highly educated Americans as they are by the uneducated, especially if the defects of their education have not been remedied in part by their professional experience. The physician, the surgeon, and the public health officer often escape these defects, because their whole professional training and experience develop in them keen powers of observation and reasoning — powers which must be generally accurate...
Page 202 - Commission, and in that capacity had been much interested in lawsuits which grew out of accidents in the tunnels under construction, contrived an instructive experiment on the accuracy of the testimony of bystanders. He invited twenty highly educated gentlemen, all of whom had been successful in their several callings, to witness a brief scene enacted close to them by four actors in about one minute, and to write out immediately, each for himself, a description of what he had seen and heard. Of the...
Page 72 - Propaganda is twin brother to advertising, but goes beyond commercial advertising in that control of fundamental attitudes on great issues is sought, and not infrequently for no perceptible benefit to the people [controlled].
Page 201 - ... and national, in the exhortations of the numerous commissions which are undertaking to guide American business and philanthropy, and in the almost universal acceptance by the people at large, day by day, of statements which have no foundation, and of arguments the premises of which are not facts or events, but only hopes and guesses. It is a matter of everyday experience that most Americans cannot observe with accuracy, repeat correctly a conversation, describe accurately what they have themselves...
Page 201 - ... been named in a particular order 220 times by each person tested, and yet no one was able to repeat more than three or four colors in that order. The experimenter who had gone over the test 3300 times knew scarcely more about the colors. There had been no intention of course to memorize in the test. " It is a matter of everyday experience that most Americans cannot observe with accuracy, repeat correctly a conversation, describe accurately what they have themselves seen or heard, or write out...
Page 200 - Thirty-eight persons positively identified a man in Chicago the other day as an accomplice in a swindle. He was lodged in jail to await trial. There, in the usual course, fingerprints were taken, and were found to vary entirely from those of the real culprit, which fortunately for the prisoner were on file. The man was thereupon taken to court and released, the judge calling the mistake the "most startling proof of human fallibility

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