The results are clear – people (or at least, children) with the most exaggerated views of their popularity have further to fall emotionally when their social status is challenged. As Thomaes says, “These results support the view that distorted self-views promote emotional vulnerability and that realistic self-views promote emotional resilience.” It’s better to deal with the reality, bite though it may, than to whitewash over it with an ultimately vulnerable facade.
via The bigger the ego, the harder the fall – how self-awareness buffers against social rejection : Not Exactly Rocket Science.
-rePost-Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: Y2K, the Credit Crisis, and the Rosencrantz Fallacy
I think one big thing that is different here is that in most of those systems the snowball effect is less than in the financial system. But I have to say that I feel for the sentiment and hope that the small individual actions of each company/individual/Government end up to be enough to fix things!
But then it didn’t happen. January 1st 2000 went by, and pretty much nothing happened. While some people then pronounced that the whole Y2K thing had been a fraud, the truth was much more interesting and important. It hadn’t been a fraud; there had been real and consequential risks in important and complex systems. If those problems hadn’t have been addressed, many of the consequences imagined by the apocalypticists might well have happened. We could, in the limit, have been facing real breakdowns in societal fabric.
So, why didn’t the worst happen? In part what happened is this: People acted. While they were late, slow, stupid, and error-prone, they did what people do when a big enough alarm bell is rung loudly and long enough: They tried to figure out what they could do in the time they had to reduce their risk, and they did those things. They didn’t think other people would get there, but they knew they would.
Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed.
rePost: Better Press Corp Please:Chris Blattman's Blog: Heroes are born, not made
in the spirit of Brad Delong‘s Why Oh Why Can’t We Have A Better Press Corp!
The article is partly confusing or badly written.
the key paragraph to understand the way the writer tried to sensationalise this is
He said the research could lead to new training programmes – mental therapies or “push-ups” or medications to make others just as good at dealing with extreme stress.
“So much so we’re now getting to the point where we might be able to train people to do better under high stress and there might be ways to augment their hormonal system, mental health push ups might help to better deal with that stress.”
He said that it was not that the “heroes” were not scared but they just did not exhibit signs of panic.
and from the title
Heroes are born not made, scientists claim
Heroes are born not made, a study claims after it found some people just naturally have more grace under fire.
<Emphasis and underline mine>
They should have posted the actual statements of the study. for all we know Dr Aikins may be claiming this but from my reading of the article he was just saying some people are biologically well suited to handle stress! Maybe i am wrong but I believe i am closer to the truth here!
read the telegraph article here:
Heroes are born, not made
Professor Deane Aikins, a psychiatrist at Yale University, said a small minority of individuals remain cool even in the most stressful circumstances.
His findings, based on research with the military, found that some individuals did not panic because their body naturally protected them.
Unlike the majority of people who were flooded with a stress hormone, they had much lower levels and also showed signs of another hormone that actually calmed them down.
Chris Blattman’s Blog: Heroes are born, not made.