Notices by Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social), page 7

One theory that I have always found compelling from more recent psych on this is the uncertainty theory wrt to intergroup cohesion/formation. Basically, just like with the "just world hypothesis," we have a lot of very deep reasons that we want to resolve "group uncertainty." IS something a cohesive group? DO we share a common fate? IS this my ingroup? We actually navigate highly ambiguous group situations a lot, but people show quite a bias to resolve that uncertainty with entitativity

(yeah it IS a terrible term that no one can spell though, lol! That's part of why I like it)

I'm going to regret this but I need an ELI5 for the WordPress situation??? I mean sociologically speaking how did it get here

Ending every work week in tech lately like 🐏 I fought real hard to Make It out of my rural no tech childhood but it is time to go back to the sheep raising 🐏

I have no doubt the 30-author social psychology paper that's gonna come out about this will be good, but I swear to God I'm going to find one of you and tell you about the Mindset * Context framing of interventions and force you to establish clearly that hypocrisy reverses an intervention effect

I would like to get OUT of the national text public health intervention experiment I am CLEARLY in from a large pharmacy chain because they're sending me a goddamn social incentive intervention about getting a covid booster despite the fact that this particular chain literally denied me a booster and insultingly told me long covid wasn't real

The way public health intervention social science just treats public health-interfacing organizations as neutral-to-positive "platforms" instead of actors in their own right, who have patterned behaviors for specific populations, really grinds my gears. Of course people have relationships with these as actors and blockers of care.

@williampietri you may or may not recall idk (our own personal experiences obvi are writ larger in our minds than in anyone else's) that I had a rough go on mastodon for a minute, which made me leave for a few months and nearly shut it down altogether. There was a personalized pileup shaming quality to the way a certain group decided I was "bad" (including making wild associative accusations about what I did research on that were just fully lies/wrong). Some of that got couched in reply guys...

@inthehands "it's possible!" And "here's what makes it possible for me and what I did!" TOTALLY different messaging imo than some of the moralizing claims

@inthehands as you might imagine, being a psychological interventionist, I worry a lot about where we do v do not have the right or the knowledge to intervene without harm. Eg, brave change in one context is certainly peer pressure and bullying in another context. Is the aim of reducing anxiety in a dangerous context the right aim? These are big and in some cases testable questions! I believe in increasing self-efficacy but shaming is effective social control, not effective empowerment :)

@inthehands 💯💯!! As with many such things, caring people would not for an instant make the same kind of mistake as people mouthing off about what "everyone" can do (or that if you're disabled you should just be cleverer than your infrastructure and you're a bad person if you're not!)

Having chronic lung issues really changed my attitude about all these people who post about how everyone should cycle everywhere. My dudes. 😭 I cannot express how scary getting around the world is when you know your lungs might crap out totally unexpectedly. 😭 It's all cute to be like "I am so noble because I don't own a car in the most aggressively car-dependent country" until you measure the chances of surviving by getting to the ER in a unit of minutes

Am I the only person who sometimes is like, a hundred years ago it would've been like "I can't believe you aren't a philosopher, the only Pure Intellects" and a hundred years from now it'll be like, "you got automatically assigned at birth into Drone Farm Fertilizer Automatic GWAS internship placement, which is far less Hardcore than the Carbon Capture Strike Squad?!" like, fields are fake and every one of these labels is more slippery than your desperate grip on them

It is unbelievable how many people blithely, cheerfully, seemingly obliviously announce to my face that I am "not technical." I have learned to see that it is a projection about how the speaker relates to their world, but still, woof. Being a constant sampler of this kind of thing in this kind of way is interesting. As Ashley and I have discussed on our podcast, she is ALWAYS called technical and I NEVER am and it's so noticeable.

Very difficult to insult with that one when the hierarchy of knowledge is not shared, buddy!!!

My work got posted to a forum that seems to have bad vibes and a friend sent it to me and the comments were all like, "wtf, this isn't technical this is just psychology" and I was like, *obama shrug gif*

This is just psychology! You are just cells! This is just the sharp shadow on the cave wall echo of social connection you are choosing and you've named it technical! These are just the firings in your brain that should they go wrong will remove entirely your ability to recall the words to make a miserable stranger on a forum say you are technical! This is just the list of software vendors that you can keep memorizing every year to convince yourself that they love you! This is just your life!

"You, a complex being attempting survival on this rock in the middle of space in the exact band of atmosphere where your survival is possible, you navigating the bundle of social cognition and needs that arrived here via an evolutionary process you don't really understand or know, you who were a literal child when your education started, with an entire society around you steering your odds, have chosen the Wrong Career"

Your ancient ancestors are WEEPING y'all

Relatedly I was having a conversation with Ashley the other day about this and she said "people in your world don't realize that sometimes the goal of a piece of science can just be understanding in the first place"

@glyph if you feel like it, can you describe a little bit more what you mean by social relationships? Apologies if this is should be obvious to me!