I’m generally pretty out of the loop when it comes to pop psychology phenomena, so I just stumbled across the term toxic productivity fairly recently. While I hadn’t heard the term before, I’m at least with it enough to know that productivity talk is all over the internet. What is toxic productivity? Toxic productivity is …
This post flows from a few different things that other bloggers have been talking about lately. I’ll refer specifically to a couple of posts about faith on Tisha B’Av, a Jewish day of mourning, but this also ties into what some other people have been talking about with regards to subjective vs. objective reality. This …
I got thinking about this after watching an interview with Steven Pinker, one of my academic crushes, and then another interview with Jordan Peterson. Both referred to biological differences between men and women, although in different ways, and I wanted to do a post exploring my own take on sex and gender differences, and the …
Separating Out Sex/Gender, Biology and Social Construct Read More »
It seems like everyone’s talking about gaslighting these days. But if everyone and their dog seems to be gaslighting (or being gaslit by) everyone else and their cat (or if cat and dog are both accusing the other of gaslighting them), is it really a meaningful descriptor of emotional abuse? Or does it just get …
Last week I reviewed White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. There were some important concepts that she alluded to but didn’t clearly explain, so I decided to do a post, from a social constructionist viewpoint, about how stereotypes and prejudice develop, and why the difference between implicit and explicit beliefs is important. Our societies create categories …
Racism, Prejudice, and Implicit/Explicit Beliefs Read More »
White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, whose background is education and who is white herself, looks at racism and why she believes white people don’t want to talk about it. I went into the book knowing that it was popular but having doubts about the effectiveness of the title at accomplishing the intended effect. White fragility …
The push to be politically correct drives some people crazy, while others think that being careful about language is necessary to keep from causing offence. There are all kinds of people out there being intentionally offensive (just look at Twitter), but to what extent should we as a society go hunting for it when it’s …
Is Being Politically Correct Helpful or Ineffective? Read More »
Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side by Simon McCarthy-Jones tells us why spite can actually be a good thing, even though it probably doesn’t seem like it could be. An act is considered spiteful if it involves harming another person, but in doing so, also harming (or potentially harming) oneself. Spite causes us to …
Book Review: Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side Read More »
I find religion to be quite fascinating, despite the fact that I’m a soft atheist and don’t personally believe the fundamentals of any of them. This post will be a bit of a meander through thoughts kicking around in my head related to religion and atheism. Hard vs. soft atheism I would say that I …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is cancel culture. Cancel culture is an odd phenomenon spawned by the social media era. Some argue that it poses a threat to freedom of speech. I didn’t know enough to write an opinion post on it, so …
