The students were interviewed after the study and most appeared “genuinely flabbergasted” to learn that an experimenter swap had occurred, yet they still responded differently to the prostitution scenario compared to the control group. Proulx and Heine say these results are similar to other studies where people have been made to feel threatened before making a judgement: when threatened, people are harsher judges of others. The researchers suggest that the students implicitly noticed the change of experimenter, but since this type of a swap is unusual in real life, they never became conscious of it. Because of this implicit detection of an unusual event, the students behaved as if they had been threatened.
via What if you saw something that rocked your world … and you didn’t notice? : Cognitive Daily.
Read the whole thing it’s very intructive. I’d like to just say that we should try to understand other people’s predicaments. Some are just simply lonely/sad/insecure and that’s why they are acting like class A @$$h0135. There was this movie “Pay It Forward”, where in upon receiving a major blessing from another person, you Pay It Forward. I think we can make something different. I don’t have a gift for naming things so let’s just call it “It Stops Here”.
Whenever somebody is acting harshly towards you, take a few deep breaths and tell yourself “It Stops Here”.
Whenever some other driver cuts you off, You don’t go ballistic. Respectfully correct the driver , take a couple of deep breaths and tell yourself “It Stops Here”.
When you get home after a long stressful day at work, before entering your house, you take a couple of breaths and tell yourself “It Stops Here”.
See when we are insecure we go into defensively offensive mode. If you really are the strong one, then you roll with the punches and make it stop where you are. We must make it such that there is a voice inside our heads that says “I would not be abusive because another person is abusive towards me.”,” I will not let my insecurity become the reason I shout at another person.” It’s the small things like this simple act that make the world so much more livable.