Fear, and how much your primal brain hates you.

Inspired by a conversation this weekend, psycholi-jay bring you the lowdown on how effective fear as a tool can be. But first? Like any good university-trained drone I will define fear for you, at least in the context of this little keyboard-hammering exercise.

Fear is the primal emotional response that warns you of danger, it can also be defined as insecurity, dread, or apprehension.

The thing about fear is it is one of our oldest physiological responses evolutionarily speaking. It could be argued almost every other species on earth shows evidence of a fear response, rabbits hammer their foot on the floor and bolt, cats arch their back and try and look big, and conservatives blame the poor and try to exploit as much cash as they can out the system before they are booted out again.

As humans our fear responses are fairly sloppily integrated into our conscious and unconscious thought, after all it’s been with us ever since we were lizards or fish or whatever, it’s going to be pretty tough to override or even ignore. We actually have very little defences against it because it’s a response designed to cut through all of our other thoughts feeling and responses in order to ensure we survive long enough to pass our genes on. There are actually parasites in nature who block the fear responses in their hosts to ensure they die young, and have a greater chance to spread the parasite to carrion feeders (The natural equivalent of “Come on! All the cool kids are doing it!”).

Interestingly the only other emotion that cuts through our cognitive processes so effectively is love, and modern psychologists weren’t the first to notice this. As Machiavelli said, a Prince must be either feared or loved, in order to rule. But if one must be chosen above the other, let it be fear.

So what does this mean? Well next time you turn on your TV and check your newsfeed, see how many people are trying to sell you fear. Fear of dying, fear of loneliness, fear of poverty, fear of immigrants, fear of joblessness, fear of religion, fear of sexual predators, fear of crime in general. These things are used so often because it’s known that you have very little protection from the fear response, and therefore their message will be taken in (especially around election time!). Why do you think those hideous chain-letter things that people continue to clog up newsfeeds with that promise “Sally McSceptic did not forward this and was found a day later eaten to death by Mongolian bugger-ants!” still get forwarded. It’s a clumsy attempt to poke your hypothalamus into giving you that fear, and getting the architect of the original post what they want, your compliance.

The fact that fear is pushed upon us so casually has led to some serious social problems. Each moth we are looking for a new hysteria, something new to be our boogieman, to sell our papers, win our votes, and market disposable good that you don’t really need but are suddenly insecure about not owning. Like the lifelong junkies of adrenaline abuse we need a bigger and bigger hit to get us motivated and compliant, so they threaten our children, our religion, our homes, and so on in order to win your support.

So next time somebody tells you that you should be scared. Be sure to look at what they have to gain by telling you that, reign in your knee-jerk response, and look out the window, and to your family, and to your friends.

And maybe the world won’t be so scary after all.

50 Shades of Grey-matter.

Thankfully this rather dross and frankly overhyped phenomenon has simmered down at this point. So now that the moral hysteria and flaming libidos have ebbed I have decided to give everyone a little bit of psychological insight into not only the BDSM scene, but also people frankly embarrassing reactions to this mainstream porn that was actually popular enough to get into cinemas.

So why is 50 shades so attractive to women? Well in 2006 a few researchers (one of them called Horne… ho ho ho!) looked into female sexual fantasies and found that by far the most common was a “forced encounter” scenario, with over 60% admitting they found the fantasy of sex against their will to be arousing and exciting.

Now, the key word here is fantasy. Obviously women do not want to be raped, that’s just silly, but in the private confines of their own head they found the thought of being dominated in such a way to be a serious turn on. So why is this?

Well, there are a lot of opinions on this, and considering the very emotionally charged nature of the subject matter it doesn’t take long for the opinions to become floundering shouting matches between ideologies/science/ethics/religion/politics/ect… so feel free to take all this with a pinch of salt.

Here in the western world we characterise chastity (especially for girls) as a virtue worth maintaining, words like “slut” creep onto people lips when they hear of a female’s sexual exploits and often people are quick to condemn others for their sexual partners. So in the sexual culture of the XX types we’ve managed to impart a sort of “residual guilt” for all sexual encounters, the nagging feeling that you should not have engaged in the horizontal mombo. Or if you did, you are now viewed in a more negative light, what if you are too “easy”? What if he(or she) will give you a bad reputation? What if I get pregnant? Not to paint all the ladies of the world as neurotic, some of these worries may not even be conscious, but framed this way it can understand why the idea of sex where you have zero of the responsibility for the sexual encounter is enticing. You can just lay back and let yourself go, abandon all your sexual hang-ups and just enjoy the experience.

This sets the scene for BDSM culture. Many people are surprised when they hear “The Submissive has all the power,” mostly because this is given no context and just uttered with smug assurance by people who have an alternative lifestyle and so are therefore more “enlightened”. But essentially this means that in a heathy BDSM relationship, the terms of a sexual encounter are established WAY before hand, and the Submissive (being in a position of often physical weakness or restraint) gets the final say-so of what will and will-not go on, they can also reject the encounter at any stage. Bearing this in mind, it’s in the Dom’s interest to make sure that the Subbie is having fun at all times! Because at any moment they can literally and figuratively “pull the plug”. Thus in terms of mental, emotional, and sexual power dynamic, the subbie holds all the cards.

Sooooooooooooo…. Why are people so pissed off about 50 Shades of Grey?
Well I won’t go into detail, as I am sure you have heard it all to death, but essentially it falls under the same tired argument that human are so simple that we can have our entire outlook changed by the entertainment we choose to expose ourselves to. To wit:

-          Video games lead to aggression/misogyny.

-          Horror movies create killers.

-          D&D causes devil worship.

-          Page 3 girls make rapists.

Do these arguments have merit? Sadly yes… to an extent, though keep reading and do not quote me there or I will find you and slap you hard enough to make your face spin around to the back of your head.
You’ll note most of these things have age certification, because yes they can be very influential on the formative years of children and adolescents, (keep reading!) but these changes are in no way permanent, and indeed are often corrected as the child ages and discovers that the fantasy does not mesh with the reality of the world around them.

Secondly, people who have misogynistic tendencies, sexual sadism, homicidal urges etc. will be drawn towards media that supports their views, in the same way that hard-line liberals read the Guardian and hard-line conservatives read the Daily Mail. People like to be informed of what they already believe to be true, and not have their beliefs challenged.

So, would somebody watching 50shades believe that it is a functional and heathy relationship? No. (or yes if they were underage, but underage people shouldn’t be watching!!) However, somebody who already believed that relationships should function that way would use that movie as proof of their convictions. BUT, (and it’s a big but!) these people make up a tiny minority of the general population, and they will likely continue to hold their views regardless of the media they are exposed to.  Just as most people with strong (and occasionally radical) beliefs will not be easily swayed by a short conversation, movie or book.
… or for that matter, a few paragraphs of blog post, so I guess I am wasting my breath.

 

Cheating: The psychology of keeping it in your pants.

Forgive the lack of updates again, believe it or not I am struggling to decide what I want to write about, as there have been a few things recently that I’ve wanted to hammer out a few paragraphs on, but I couldn’t decide between them.

In order to preserve my sanity I have decided to write about cheating, as in “Cheating on your spouse/partner” not sticking cards up your sleeve. As the other topics were a little heavy, even for me. And I had actually had a request to write about this from somebody, believe it or not (I do requests!)

So why do people cheat?

Well evolutionary psychology tend to reach for the low-hanging fruit on this one: It proposes that we’re “biologically hard-wired” (yes I hate that term) to either sow our seeds as broadly as possible for the XY’s, or to find the most fitting donor of genetic material to have perfect little babies for the XX’s.

I hate this.

I hate it so much, it makes me want to punch people in the face with a fist made out of salt and lemon juice.

I hate it because, yes, it is very likely these evolved impulses do feature into our collective decision making processes. And I hate it because, yes, it does make sense to the layman and it’s reasoning everyone can understand.

But I hate it the most because it takes something so very complex as the motivations for human behaviour and reduces it to animal impulses. It encourages side-stepping of any other thought regarding the motivations of these individuals. After all; they are a dirty cheater, right? Barely better then hormone fuelled monkeys, guided by their libido and nothing else, let’s all get together and hate them! Maybe we can set a time for it, perhaps 12 o’ clock? We could all join together in the euphoric bonding experience of moral superiority and shared vitriol at 12 ‘o clock-

Okay I just had to delete a paragraph there, kinda went on a bit on my own hate-rampage, but I am sure you get my gist. Psychologically speaking, abandoning your love, even temporarily to have sex with another is a pretty big deal for most people and requires much more careful analysis then “They’re just clever primates.”

Men and women both cheat, and despite their sex differences they do tend to have similar reasons, and those reasons are many and varied so I won’t go into them. Suffice to say they will often do it because their needs are not being met.

A clever fellow called Maslow constructed what he called “A hierarchy of needs” if you google it now you can likely find a picture shaped like a triangle with “Food, rest, etc..” at the bottom and “Morality, creativity, etc” at the top. That is to say the further down the triangle you go, to its foundation, the more urgent the need becomes. For example food is at the bottom, you’d probably not feel a need to feel moral if you were starving, indeed the reasoning behind many a theft of food is to offset starvation.

Sat bang in the middle of the triangle, below morality and self-esteem I might add, is the need for love and belonging. Maslow recognised that as humans we need to feel loved, and to love others, and also we need to feel we belong, the expression “Home is not a place it’s people” springs to mind, and essentially that’s it. Everyone need to feel like they are part of something, for the more intimate groups of course that is a spouse, a girlfriend or a family, but it also encompasses bigger things such as belonging to a religion, a belief or a political movement/identity.

So how does this relate to a cheater?

Well I’m sure you’ve probably cottoned on to it by now, but people often cheat because they lack a basic need, a need that Maslow categorized as more urgent then even morality or self-esteem. The need to feel love (including sexual intimacy). You go home to a spouse who belittles you, ignores you or who withholds affection from you then it’s likely you’ll fulfil that basic need elsewhere, even paying somebody to fake it just to feel human again. The need for self-esteem and morality will keep it in check for a time of course, but eventually that need will become so urgent that it supersedes the other desires.

Sorry… this isn’t as funny as my usual posts. Serious Jay is Serious.

Okay I will try and spice things up a bit…

Why are people insecure about their partners cheating?

To be blunt? Because you’re treating your partner like shit. And you know it. A person who loves you will put up with neglect and lack of love for a very long time as “Need to love another” can fulfil that human desire for a very long time. But ultimately they will reach a point where that won’t cut it anymore and you are back on single street.

That is not to say that everyone who gets cheated on deserves it, some people are just very weak willed and listen to their libido a little too closely, after all as I said at the beginning there are many reason to cheat, and some of them are as simple as “lolboner!” but I like to think that most people are a little more complex then that.

Ultimately a relationship between two people can only work if both parties want it to. And if one person is doing all the work, then only one person will be happy, usually the one who isn’t doing all the work.

Sadly, after an emotional relationship breakdown, there is nothing more comforting then hopping on the blame-train, riding it down to self-pittyville and arriving just in time for the 12 o’ clock hate against your ex. It’s cathartic and a good way of preserving your “esteem” part of your hierarchy of needs. But it’s a short term solution, and a little bit unfair on both of you.

So, back to our original question, why do people cheat?

Well as a psychologist I can tell you the short answer, it’s because people need to be loved.