THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Boost your chances of getting a job or passing an exam... by thinking about your ancestors for five minutes

Boost your chances of getting a job or passing an exam... by thinking about your ancestors for five minutes

I don't have a lot of confidence in this finding but it is conservatives who are more likely to respect the past so it may be a straw in the wind

It seems an unlikely route to the top. But researchers have discovered that spending a few minutes thinking about your ancestors before an exam or job interview can significantly boost your chances of success. The so-called 'ancestor effect' appears to work by acting as a reminder to the brain that seemingly impossible hurdles can be overcome.

Psychologists think the effect may be rooted in the fact that those who familiarise themselves with their family history - such as in the hit TV series Who Do You Think You Are? - appear to gain a stronger sense of identity and self-esteem, which somehow boosts intellectual performance.

In intelligence tests on 80 volunteers, scientists found a marked improvement among those who, prior to the tasks, were asked to spend a short while considering what previous generations of their families had endured. Those who simply had to recall a more mundane memory, such as a recent shopping trip, did not fare as well.

The findings, published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, suggest remembering the hardships of grandparents, great grandparents and even long forgotten ancestors, seems to have a direct benefit on the brain's ability to cope with demands on its intelligence.

Dr Peter Fischer, from the University of Graz in Austria and a member of the research team, said: 'Our ancestors managed to overcome a multitude of problems, such as severe illnesses, wars, loss of loved ones or severe economic declines. 'So when we think about them, we are reminded that humans who are genetically similar to us can successfully overcome a multitude of problems and adversities.'

More here. Journal abstract here. The tests used do not appear to have been IQ tests but rather ad hoc tests of some sort.

6 comments:

ToafJanuary 5, 2011 at 11:05 AM
"...it is conservatives who are more likely to respect the past..."

Another inference without evidence, John?

I'm no conservative - least of all by the definition you apply - yet I have plenty of respect for the past. In particular, I have worked on tracing the history of my family back several generations, and I assisted my late grandfather with his memoirs.

So I don't have a lot of confidence in your finding.
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arJanuary 5, 2011 at 4:15 PM
Yeah, Toaf. Leftists love the past... as long as it's the left-sanitised version.

And how did your family tree go? Find any humans?
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JRJanuary 5, 2011 at 6:28 PM
I gather together here:

http://ray-dox.blogspot.com/2006/07/monograph-below-monograph-is.html

Some evidence about how and why conservatives have more respect for the past
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ToafJanuary 5, 2011 at 11:31 PM
From ar's comment I infer, "all the right has is abuse".
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arJanuary 6, 2011 at 1:36 PM
Toaf, there is no "right" - Left and Right are just different branches of Socialism. They both suck.

But OK, let's just say right is "not left". Your inference is only partially correct, curtailed... I would infer... by the left's total lack of introspection. Your sentence should read, "for stupid leftists all the right has is abuse".
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JRJanuary 6, 2011 at 3:48 PM
Conservatives get so much abuse from the Left that they sometimes return it
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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights