Interesting piece on NPR's "All Things Considered Today": the journal Science recently published a study by a behavioral economist at UT-Austin's McCombs School of Business. Her recent work examines how, why, and when people see patterns when none exist. She asserts that, when we feel least in control of our circumstances, we find patterns that might explain why things are happening to us; that is to say, when we have no idea what's going on or what to do, we tend to attribute control of our situation to some other force. We imagine a connivining coworker has sabotaged our promotion, a global conspiracy has oppressed us, or even our failure to follow a certain pregame ritual has lead to us failing on the field.
Take a listen, and think about our friend Walt in Confederates in the Attic.
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Our friend Walt would be a perfect case to strengthen the study. He went through college, which means that he has a certain level of intelligence, but he was unable to find a good job even though he got the right amount of education. The theory of 'Lack Of Control' would be an economical one in Walt's case. He was unable to control the amount of income and therefore tried to attribute this failure to the fact that there is a hierarchy of race. While most people would call this just simply paranoid, Walt has taken this thinking and spun his world around it. Myself personally I can feel the uncertainty of Walt and the need for an explanation. When we loose something we often say it got stolen instead we lost it and then we go ahead and start suspecting people. In Walt's case he needed to suspect other ethnic groups for his failure to score big in life.
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