#Theory Of Interposition

[keytoinfo]

What Is Interposition Psychology

What Is Interposition Psychology

  Interposition Interposition psychology is the study of the human position in relation to his or her environment. It takes two perspectives to explain this phenomenon: the prevailing model assumes that humans combine two psychological states. A vanishing point is the point of equilibrium between the monocular and multimodal view of the world. This principle explains how we perceive and…

[bethanydelleman]

Knightley isn’t the Secret Villain of Emma

The book Jane Austen, the Secret Radical by Helena Kelly has been haunting me despite the fact that I’ve never read it and I probably won’t because everything I hear is wild. Theories from that book come up in discussions a lot.

Anyway, I would like to address the author’s theory that Mr. Knightley is actually the villain of the novel, marrying Emma just to he can enclose land and become more powerful/wealthy. Also, he caused the turkey theft by making people poorer. There is a argument against this theory here and, by the excellent John Mullen: here.

So firstly, this goes against everything we know about Mr. Knightley’s character. He shows concern for everyone, especially the poor, and he respects people of the lower class, such as Robert Martin. We see many examples of this, the Bates being a prime example. He sends his last apples to Miss Bates and offers his own carriage for the Bates and Jane Fairfax to go to the Coles. (This also proves he can use his carriage if he wants to). The most dramatic point of the book is him scolding Emma for being unkind to someone poorer than herself!

Secondly, there are still common fields, it’s right in the book: if one is blown over in the bleak part of the common field there will be the other at hand. I dare say we shall be all safe at Hartfield before midnight (Ch 15).

Thirdly, I don’t see how this is evidence at all of Knightley having evil plots:

“True, true,” cried Mr. Knightley, with most ready interposition—“very true. That’s a consideration indeed.—But John, as to what I was telling you of my idea of moving the path to Langham, of turning it more to the right that it may not cut through the home meadows, I cannot conceive any difficulty. I should not attempt it, if it were to be the means of inconvenience to the Highbury people, but if you call to mind exactly the present line of the path.... The only way of proving it, however, will be to turn to our maps. I shall see you at the Abbey to-morrow morning I hope, and then we will look them over, and you shall give me your opinion.” (Ch 11)

Knightley is talking to his own brother, among family. We have absolutely no reason to believe he is lying. In his annotated Emma, David M. Shapard points to this same passage as an example of Mr. Knightley’s thoughtfulness to the local people. If anything, this makes him an ideal, not a villain.

Fourthly, like, theft happens people. In every society all the time. Poultry are smallish and stupid and easy to steal. And to blame Knightley for poverty when even Jesus admitted that poverty will literally always exist? One man can only do so much!

Finally, Jane Austen does mention enclosure in her novels, indicating she’s not scared to bring it up, and which character does it? John freaking Dashwood. When telling his sister why he is so poor, John says, “The enclosure of Norland Common, now carrying on, is a most serious drain [to his finances].” (Ch 33, Sense & Sensibility) Of course he’s not poor; he also does not engage in charity at all, not even when he makes a deathbed promise to his father. If you read both of these novels and somehow took away that Knightley is another John Dashwood than... I mean honestly I don’t even know what to say.

But it’s also unclear in S&S if Austen though enclosure was a bad thing. Henry Dashwood, the girl’s father, seems to me to be presented as a good man, and he might well to have been planning enclosure as well:  

Mr. Dashwood’s disappointment was, at first, severe; but his temper was cheerful and sanguine; and he might reasonably hope to live many years, and by living economically, lay by a considerable sum from the produce of an estate already large, and capable of almost immediate improvement.

Which leads me to believe that the real crime of John Dashwood was to complain to his impoverished sisters, not necessarily the enclosure itself. He’s claiming poverty while doing something to make himself more wealthy.

Either way, however Jane Austen actually viewed enclosure, I don't know how you can read Emma and decide that the thoughtful, caring, polite, and truth-telling Mr. Knightley, who gives up his actual home to live with Emma and her father, is somehow the villain.

Additional Note: I am pretty disinclined to believe anything in the book Secret Radical because of her argument that Fanny bought a knife for Betsey to protect her from the abuse of Mr. Price. Which is.. just insane. I really doubt either Susan (14) or Betsey (5) could fight off a former Marine Officer with a pen knife, even if that was how child abuse worked... but also none of the Price children ever act like they are afraid of their father. He yells at the boys once to zero effect and then they come and make noise right in front of him... Anyway, I'm just addressing the Knightley thing because it comes up a lot online now.

[aryankhera]

Era of Misconception

It was all blank, but we don’t know was it really or it’s just our perspective because it was uncharted. Some used to utter that, there was nothing before it, as time never existed before, but we think that it’s a way to decline the beauty of universe. Many people say that it was empty and tranquil, but it was holding the rage of heaven. We were not knowing what was before it and what there will be in future as a quantum particle but there occurred an explosion, an explosion which changed everything. ‘BIG BANG’!!!

     It was the age of classical antiquity, around 350 BCE. When Aristotle, a Greek philosopher wrote his book ‘On the Heavens’ which changed the way human used. In that book, he was able to put two hypotheses in front of world regarding cosmos.

First, according to his geocentric model there was only 55 objects in the universe. He mentioned that the earth was laid in the centre of universe and other planets revolve around it in a respective line: Moon, mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. past Saturn, stars were in a stationary position. At that time, stars were thought as the end of the spiritual space of mankind, where person can never go.

Secondly, he believes that Earth had always existed in his eternal or immoral state. He postulated this in his theory of ‘how the Earth was created and how the universe is laid out’. According to his understanding, the Earth was unalterable and provide an exact circular motion for the other bodies revolving around. He also tried to manipulate era that Earth is spherical in shape with a strong proof of shadow on moon during moon eclipse.

He states that when moon eclipses, the shadow is always convex. If the eclipses are due to the interposition of the earth, the shape must be caused by its circumference.

At the same time, when it was the age of prospering the universe beyond the human mind, the age of Aristarchus another Greek mathematician and astronomer, who came up with a revolutionary astronomical hypothesis. He proposed the idea of ‘heliocentric model of the universe’, according to which Sun lies at the centre of our universe and other celestial bodies including earth revolves around it in a circular orbit.

He also mentioned that the stars were distant suns that remained unmoved. But his theory was not taken under consideration by the Greek astronomers. Ancient philosophers denied the theory due to fact taken under consideration that If the Earth is rotating about its axis, and orbiting around the Sun, then the Earth must be in motion. However, we cannot feel this motion. Nor does this motion give rise to any obvious observational consequences. Hence, the Earth must be stationary.

           "Aristarchus’s heliocentric model of the universe was rejected" .

 Geocentric theory became the accepted approach through generations. But this model of the universe had trouble explaining some planetary phenomena. So, it was later elaborated by Ptolemy around 150 A.D. The most prominent and conspicuous problem was of retrograde motion. Retrograde motion posses a very unique manoeuvre, each planet after a regular sudden point of time, slows down and then retrograde(reverse).

 Also, they noticed that planet seemed to grow brighter or dimmer while they move in night sky. Aristotle model of universe doesn’t seem to account for any of the phenomena. Claudius Ptolemy expostulate that planets move on two sets of circles at the same time: a deferent and on epicycle. This theory satisfied the retrograde motion while keeping the planets on their respective circular orbits.     

            Ptolemy used the device of an epicycle to explain the non-uniform motion. With an epicycle the planet orbits the Earth but is offset on its own circle within a circle known as deferent. Both circles rotate clockwise and are roughly parallel to the plane of the Sun's orbit (ecliptic). This epicyclic motion was able to explain the non-uniform angular motion of the planets at the expanse of increasing complexity of the geocentric model.  

Ptolemy’s model provided a reasonably accurate system for predicting the positions of heavenly bodies in the sky. But in order to predict these positions correctly, Ptolemy had to make an assumption that the moon followed a path that sometimes brought it twice as close to the Earth as at other times. And that meant that the moon had sometimes to appear twice as big as it usually does. Ptolemy was aware of this flaw but nevertheless his model was generally, although not universally, accepted. It was adopted by the Christian church as the picture of the universe that was in accordance with Scripture. It had the great advantage that it left lots of room outside the sphere of fixed stars for heaven and hell.

       “ The time for golden era of physics and astronomy was now to start! ”

[alwaysscreechingbasement]

This is why you need to vote in the runoffs, Georgia. “Had Democrats seized the Senate, they could have faced this problem head-on. The most obvious solution was to expand the court, adding seats to dilute the conservative bloc’s dominance. Democrats could have also explored 18-year term limits for justices and jurisdiction-stripping to stop them from striking down progressive measures. Without the Senate, by contrast, the Biden administration and blue states will have to explore more perilous options if SCOTUS boxes them in at every turn. The president could deploy departmentalism, arguing he has independent authority to interpret the Constitution that no court can overrule. Blue states could revive interposition, purporting to nullify court orders with which they disagree. But these are dangerous theories that have, in the past, edged the United States toward disunion. There’s little chance Democrats would be daring enough to test them out, even if the judiciary continues its scorched-earth campaign against democracy. Which means McConnell was right: The jurisprudence of Trumpism will outlast Trump by decades. Because this catastrophe will unfold more slowly than the typical political disaster, it might be tempting to ignore. There is a natural, sane impulse to be relieved at the prospect of life not in thrall to an erratic, vicious tweeter in chief. There is a natural, sane impulse to believe that life in the Obama era, when Mitch McConnell proudly stymied every legislative endeavor, wasn’t that bad compared with the existential mayhem of the past four years. But the Obama era didn’t include a judicial branch hand-picked for its youth and its radicalism, for a decidedly nonjudicial “own the libs” vibe, for a willingness to press the machinery of the courts into service of the singular goal of humiliating, belittling, and diminishing a President Joe Biden. We’re about to learn what that kind of judiciary is prepared to do and say to ensure that Biden is, as McConnell once pledged of Barack Obama, a one-term president. And it will take far longer than one presidential term to undo the damage. This was why McConnell was willing to seat justices and judges up to the last minute, in lieu of legislating COVID relief. It’s why so many conservatives were in an oddly gleeful mood on Wednesday even as it became clear that Trump is losing. As soon as he takes the oath in January, Biden will face a new kind of gridlock, a cold war with the judiciary that will get hot fast. The GOP will challenge every move he makes, then accuse him of intransigence and partisan obstinance during the 2022 midterms, blaming the country’s woes on his inaction. Like so many Democrats before him, Biden will spend his presidency battling with Republicans. But his most powerful foes cannot be voted out of office.“

[gravitascivics]

FROM NATURAL RIGHTS TO CRITICAL THEORY

This blog has presented, explained, and evaluated the natural rights construct – what some might call the classical liberal perspective.  It, the blog, claimed that this perspective is the dominant view among the American public in terms of governance and politics. Also, to a great degree, it assists those citizens in defining, understanding, and passing judgment over their expectations regarding their civic selves, that of other citizens, and of the government.

         As such, this foundational construct goes to provide the manner in which the nation’s civics instruction is developed and shared in American classrooms.  In this presentation, the blog focused on various elements of this view, particularly its moral element.  Also, a good deal of effort was made to describe how the view affects the quality of interaction between students and teachers, including how it influences policy and practice regarding discipline.

         The moral element was presented to highlight the way natural rights argues for individual free choice and behavior – only limited by the rights of others to the same standing – and that any counter condition to this liberality constitutes subjugation.  As for its link to academic input, the view was described as having a theoretical attachment to the political systems approach in the study of politics.  In that, the blog specifically highlighted the models presented by David Easton[1] and Gabriel Almond and G. Bingham Powell, Jr.[2]

         These models were reviewed in relation to Eugene Meehan’s criteria[3] for viable and reliable constructs.  The Meehan-style review led naturally to a critique which emphasized the perspective’s excessive promotion of individualism and the detrimental effects such an emphasis has caused in the teaching of government and civics.

         And as with any view, any construct, any dominant perspective, there will be those among the populace who will not agree.  In true dialectic tradition, the natural rights view is not immune to such challenges. This blog favors one such opposing view, that being federation theory.  But in truth, currently, the most prominent view picking up the challenge is critical theory, and this blog will next turn its attention to this other view.  

It is a view with an interesting history and has spread its appeal among academics in certain socially related fields – sociology, political science, education, etc. Unlike natural rights, with a relatively simple basic set of ideas, critical theory has a varied foundation. Some of its basic concerns are exploitation, injustice (as it defines justice), and an imbalance the way power is distributed in society.  Many advocates disagree with themselves in a variety of claims and positions, but all share, to some level, an adherence to Marxian principles.

A recent development that reflects the strength of this view is how the Democratic Party seems to be divided between a moderate wing – noncritical theory partisans – and the progressive wing – the critical theory contingency.  One way to measure how “critical” a particular politician is, is how apt that policymaker is to favor a governmental interposition – including ownership – to meet some human problem area such as the environment, the economy, health, etc.

As with the constructs already reviewed in this blog – that being the parochial federalist view and the natural rights view – this account of critical theory will set out to provide responses to this blog’s list of research questions.  To remind readers, the overall concern is:  does critical theory as a view of governance and politics provide a legitimate and viable way to study government and politics at the secondary level, i.e., in middle schools and in high schools?  There, the targeted courses would be civics and American government, respectively.

With this overarching concern, the review employs subsidiary questions. They are directed by the dialectic stance projected by the dominant view, natural rights, and by this challenging view, the fairly leftist stance which constitutes the critical theory.  These views are in many ways not only at odds with each other, but place in opposition the role schools should play in American society.  Within this context, further questioning is:

 1.    What role has the history of critical theory played in the development of civics curriculum?

2.    What consequences have resulted from the efforts of critical theorists in the teaching of civics?

3.    Ideally, if critical theorists were to “get their way,” how would American social arrangements be affected?

4.    And how would those desired social arrangements – per the percepts of the construct – be achieved?  

 If critical theory were to attain the nation’s support, how would Americans proceed as the future unfolds, at least as the advocates of this view, view it?

         Utilizing a developmental arrangement of competing notions as to how the opposing perspectives foresee the effects of their claims and policy proposals, hopefully readers will be able to compare how this antithesis compares with the thesis, i.e., how critical theory compares to natural rights.  

This will be at times be overshadowed by this blog’s effort to inform readers about how critical theory came about – through relating some of its history.  But guiding the effort will be the commonplaces of curriculum developed by William Schubert[4] and include the subject matter, teachers, learners, and milieu.  In turn, the commonplaces serve to organize a good deal of what will follow.

[1] David Easton, The Political System (New York, NY:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1953) AND David Easton, A System Analysis of Political Life (New York, NY:  John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1965).

[2] Gabriel Almond and G. Bingham Powell, Jr., Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (Boston: Little, Brown. 1966). 

[3] Eugene J. Meehan, Contemporary Political Thought:  A Critical Study (Homewood, IL:  Dorsey Press, 1967).

[4] William H. Schubert, Curriculum:  Perspective, Paradigm, and Possibility (New York, NY:  MacMillan Publishing Company, 1986).  The commonplaces can be defined as follows:

·       The subject matter refers to the academic content presented in the curriculum.  

·       The teacher is the professional instructor authorized to present and supervise curricular activities within the classroom setting.  

·       Learners are defined as those individuals attending school for the purpose of acquiring the education entailed with a particular curriculum.

·       Milieu refers to the general cultural setting and ambiance within the varied social settings found at the school site.

[pbr-paulbunyan-blog]

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/21117/thomas-robert-malthus In celebration of May Day I googled the location of Robert Malthus' grave. I will someday be banned from the UK for publicly urinating on it. "Now, as then, the Malthusian doctrine parries the demand for reform and shelters selfishness from question and from conscience by the interposition if an inevitable necessity... ...for poverty, want, and starvation are by his theory not chargeable to individual greed or to social maladjustments;" Malthus wrote during during the era of the French Revolution when those who held power needed epistemology that would support their power as natural or just. They then became a backbone to eugenics movements as moral imperatives on population control were becoming justified. His theories are wrong and I bet he sucked toes and shit.

[siva3155]

300+ TOP PSYCHOLOGY Objective Questions and Answers

PSYCHOLOGY Multiple Choice Questions :-

1. At which site the mind and body interact in the brain … a) Pineal gland b) throid gland c) Hypothalamus d) gonads 2. Who discovered the chemical basis of neurotransmission … a) Bandura b) Charles sherrington c) Luigi galvani d) Otto loewi 3. Human CNS is composed of … a) somatic nervous system b) brain and spinal cord c) autonomic nervous system d) all of these 4. The link between the nervous system and the endocrine system is due to the presence of? a) corpus callosum b) reticular formation c) cerebellum d) hypothalamus 5. In neurons, the axons are insulated by the a matter named as … a) Nerve fiber b) Myelin sheath c) Ganglion d) Sylvian sheath 6. The term “soma” is related to … a) synapse b) neuron c) axon d) cell body 7. Melatonin is produced by which gland? a) posterior pituitary b) hypothalamus c) pineal gland d) anterior pituitary 8. The goal of social cognitive therapy is basically … a) self-actualization b) self-regulation c) uncovering hidden conflicts d) all of these 9. Social Learning Theory was developed by … a) Albert Bandura b) Alfred Hitchcock c) Albert dakwin d) Albert Einstein 10. Bandura’s social cognitive theory is based on which perespective? a) agentic b) learning c) behavioral d) none of these4

PSYCHOLOGY MCQs 11. The ecological theory explains about … a) cognitive development b) affective processes in development c) environmental influences on development d) none of these 12. Which theory says that there are sensitive periods of development in human life? a) social cognition theory b) ecological theory c) ethological theory d) none of these 13 Which of the following approaches to personality is least deterministic? A The humanistic approach B The behavioral approach C The psychoanalytic approach D The social learning approach Answer: A 14 In Freud’s theory of personality A The id operates by secondary process B The superego obeys the pleasure principle C The ego obeys the reality principle D The ego operates by primary process thinking Answer: C 15 The frustration-aggression hypothesis; A Was developed by social learning theorist B Assumes that frustration produces aggression C Assume that aggression is basic instinct D Claims that frustration and aggression are both instinctive Answer: B 16 The James-Lange or body reaction theory of emotion says A You feel emotion then a bodily reaction B Emotions and visceral reactions are simultaneous C The somatic nervous system is the seat of emotion D You react with your body first then you feel emotion Answer: D 17 Analysis of avoidance learning suggest that many phobias are acquired through ______ conditioning. A Classical B Operant C Intermittent D Reinforcement Answer: A 18 The ability to learn by observing a model or receiving instructions, without reinforcement, is called_____ A Contingency B Social learning C Cognitive learning D Instrumental learning Answer: B 19 Conditioned response may be eliminated by withdrawing reinforcement. This is known as: A Extinction B Discrimination C Spontaneous recovery D Stimulus generalization Answer: A 20 Any stimulus that follows a behavior and increases the likelihood that the behavior will be repeated is called a: A Cue B Punisher C reinforcer D Situational stimulus Answer: C 21 Illnesses that seem to result from an interaction of physical and psychological factors are called: A Somatic B Hysterical C Psychosomatic D Conversion disorder Answer: C 22 Which of the following clinical procedures are based, in part on classical conditioning? A Transference B Token economy C Two chair technique D Systematic desensitization Answer: D 23 When people are _____ they have lost touch with reality. A Manic B Neurotic C Psychotic D Psychopathic Answer: C 24 Intelligence can be defined as: A Knowledge of a great many facts B The ability to get good grades in school C All the factors that make one person different from another D The ability to think abstractly and learn from experience Answer: D 25 According to Piaget the process of building mental representation of the world through direct interaction with it is: A Adaptation B Conservation C Metacognition D Egocentrism Answer: A 26 People who consistently come up with _____ explanations of events are more prone to depression. A dysthemic B Delusional C Pessimistic D Overly optimistic Answer: C PSYCHOLOGY Objective type Questions with Answers 27 The leading cause of mental retardation is believed to be: A Inherited traits B Environmental factors C Organic brain syndrome D Fetal alcohol syndrome Answer: B 28 An affective disorder in which a person swings from one mood extreme to another is classified as: A Bipolar B Unipolar C Manic D Depressive Answer: A 29 Albert Ellis and Aron Beck are names associated with the ____ therapy approach. A Gestalt B Cognitive C Behavioral D Phenomenological Answer: B 30 The process by which a trained professional uses psychological methods to help people with psychological problem is known as: A Psychiatry B Psychoanalysis C Psychosurgery D Psychotherapy Answer: D 31 Basic characteristics of tasks that result in social loafing is that they are: A Additive B Negative C Subtractive D Multiplicative Answer: A 32 Job satisfaction is enhanced by tasks that are: A Very easy to accomplish B Overwhelming and rewarding C Unrelated to one’s personal needs D Challenging but not overwhelming Answer: D 33 Piaget’s stage for infancy is: A Formal operation B Preoperational thought C Sensory motor thoughts D Concrete operations Answer: C 34 When a researcher tests several groups of people at the same time each group at a different age, he is conducting a(n) ______ study. A Sequential B Cross-sectional C Longitudinal D Observational Answer: B 35 An individual becomes a member of social group through the process of: A Aging B Learning C Maturation D Socialization Answer: D 36 The first two weeks of life are referred to as: A Early childhood B The neonatal period C The period of infancy D The preoperational stage Answer: B 37 It would be more accurate to say that maturation: A Can be delayed by illness or poor nutrition B Is dramatically accelerated by good nutrition C Is not affected by any environmental factors because it is genetic D Is greatly accelerated by good health care and delayed by illness Answer: D 38 Which of the following is part of the psychosocial domain? A Memory B Judgment C Motor skills D Style of behaving Answer: D 39 The stage of prenatal development during which the developing organism is most vulnerable to injury is the: A Embryonic stage B Fetal stage C Germinal stage D Zygotic stage Answer: A 40 The child’s increasing skill at using his muscles is due chiefly to: A Maturation B Learning C Pushing by parents D An opportunity to exercise Answer: B 41. In psychology, case studies are used to: A show importance of case studies. B assess heritability of individual C draw general conclusions about behaviour of the client D draw conclusions , about individual behavior on the basis of group finding View Answer Answer: C 42 Perceptual constancies are A Likely inborn and not subject to leaning B An aid in perceiving a stable and consistent world C Confusing to an individual rather than helping him determine what really exists D Illusion in which we perceive something that does not correspond to the sensory information Answer: B 43 Psychology may best be described as the scientific study of _______ and ______. A Mental states, physical states B Thoughts, emotions C Behavior, mental processes D Mental health, mental illness Answer: C 44 Freud believed that adult problems usually: A Result in Freudian slip B Result in bad dreams C Can be traced back to critical stage during childhood D Are the result of poor behavior Answer: C 45 Gestalt theory emphasizes: A A flow of consciousness B The atoms of thought C Environmental stimuli D Our tendency to see pattern Answer: D 46 Whereas the _______ asked what happens when an organism does something; the _____ asked how and why. A functionalist, behaviorist B structuralist, introspectionist C structuralist, functionalist D functionalist, structuralist Answer: D 47 The _____ lobe is to hearing as the occipital lobe is to vision. A cerebeller B Parietal C Temporal D Frontal Answer: C 48 Reflexes are usually controlled by the: A Hypothalamus B Spinal cord C Frontal lobe D Medulla Answer: B 49 A part of the brain that sends signals “alert” to higher centers of the brain in response to incoming messages is: A amygdala B Hippocampus C Limbic system D Reticular formation Answer: D 50 Perception of the brightness of a color in affected mainly by: A The saturation of light waves B The wavelength of light waves C The purity of light waves D The amplitude of light waves Answer: A 51 Which of the following is not a clue for depth perception? A Orientation B Interposition C Reduced clarity D Linear perspective Answer: A 52 Psychophysics is the study of: A Depth perception B Perceptual illness C Movement perception D The psychological perception oh physical stimuli Answer: D 53 Which of the following is a subdivision of the autonomic nervous system? A Brain and spinal cord B Only sympathetic nervous system C Only the parasympathetic nervous system D Both the sympathetic and Para-sympathetic nervous system Answer: D 54 Which one of the following does not contribute to memory ? A Interesting / disinteresting learning material B Goal behind learning C Gender D Some rest after learning Answer: C 55 In terms of efficiency in scanning information, which one of the following strategies is considered to be the best ? A Conservative focusing B Focus gambling C Simultaneous scanning D Successive scanning Answer: C 56 According to Master and Johnson following is the correct sequence of human sexual response : A Excitement → Orgasm → Plateau → Resolution B Excitement → Plateau → Orgasm → Resolution C Excitement → Arousal → Orgasm → Resolution D Arousal → Excitement → Orgasm → Resolution Answer: B 57 In graphical representations showing stress levels on X axis and performance on Y axis, best performance can be expected at A Lower end of X axis B Middle portion of X axis C Higher end of X axis D None of the above Answer: B 58 Lesions of the ventromedial nuclei in the hypothalamus produce A Anorexia B Obesity C Low level of Leptin D Hypoinsulinemia Answer: B 59 When the action potential reaches the end of the axon terminals, it causes the release of A An electric spark that sets off the next neuron B Positively charged ions that excite the next cell C Negatively charged ions that inhibit the next cell. D Neurotransmitters that excite or inhibit the next cell. Answer: D 60 AIDS attack a number of very different population; young gay men, intravenous drug users, haemophiliacs, Haitians, infants and recipients of blood transfusion, but commonly among them is the decrease in T lymphocytes, so it is an example of A Inductive reasoning B Deductive reasoning C Analogical reasoning D Syllogism Answer: A 61 Muller-Lyer illusion is likely to occur more in cultures characterised by A People living in rectangular and square buildings B People living in buildings which are round and have few corners C People living in open spaces D People living in caves Answer: A 62 One prominent class of theorists of deductive reasoning believe that deduction depends on _____ of inference akin to those of ______. A informal rules; logical calculus B formal rules; analytical calculus C procedural rules; logical calculus D formal rules; logical calculus Answer: D 63 What is the correct sequence of products in Guilford’s Struct of Intellect Model (SOI) ? A Unit → Class → System → Relations → Implication → Transformation B Class → Unit → Systems → Relation → Transformation → Implication C Unit → Class → Relation → System → Transformation → Implication D Unit → Relation → Class → System → Transformation → Implication Answer: C 64 The light passes through the eye in which of the following sequence ? A Cornea, Pupil, Lens, Retina B Cornea, Lens, Pupil, Retina C Lens, Cornea, Pupil, Retina D Pupil, Cornea, Lens, Retina Answer: A 65 Which one of the following statement is true in the context of item analysis ? A Item-total correlation = Item-remainder correlation B Item-total correlation is greater than or equal to item-remainder correlation. C Item-total correlation is smaller than or equal to item-remainder correlation. D Item-total correlation cannot be negative. Answer: B 66 The difference in images in the two eyes is greater for objects that are close and smaller for distant objects is an example of A Binocular Disparity B Convergence C Accommodation D Relative Size Answer: A 67 Shaping in instrumental conditioning means A Teaching a complex sequence of behaviours by first shaping the final response in the sequence and then working backwards B A continuous reinforcement schedule is used for establishing new behaviours. C It involves reinforcing successive approximations of the final desired behaviour. D Consistent occurrence of a behaviour in the presence of discriminative stimulus. Answer: C 68 According to Trichromatic theory of colour vision, which of the following are the three types of cones ? A Red, Yellow and Blue B Red, Blue and Green C Yellow, Blue and Green D Yellow, Red and Blue Answer: B 69 Which one of the following conclusion can be drawn on the basis of the above study ? A The researcher’s hypothesis has been accepted. B The researcher’s hypothesis has been rejected. C The researcher’s hypothesis has been partially accepted. D Inadequate data to evaluate researcher’s hypothesis. Answer: B 70 Amit met with an accident and later turned into impulsive, irresponsible and less concerned with the consequences of his actions. He must have suffered damage in A Parietal lobe B Frontal lobe C Occipital lobe D Temporal lobe Answer: B 71 Effective teaching may include conceptual scaffolding, which is best described by the following statement : A introducing practice sessions after every module. B gradually fading support as student proficiency increases. C punishing student for incorrect answers. D encouraging brighter students to help weaker students. Answer: B 72 A social worker, appointed to assist the psychiatrist, used to administer and interpret Rorschach test. This is an A ethically incorrect practice B ethically correct practice C ethically correct practice provided the results are used only for diagnostic purpose. D ethically correct practice provided the results are kept confidential and are used only for diagnostic purpose. Answer: A 73 A social worker, appointed to assist the psychiatrist, used to administer and interpret Rorschach test. This is an A ethically incorrect practice B ethically correct practice C ethically correct practice provided the results are used only for diagnostic purpose. D ethically correct practice provided the results are kept confidential and are used only for diagnostic purpose. Answer: A 74 The following instrument can not be utilized in the measurement of emotions : A Sphygmomano meter B Galvanic skin response C Digital thermometer D Pupillary measurement camera Answer: C 75 Arrange in sequence the stage of personality development according to Rollo May A Innocence → ordinary consciousness of self → rebellion → creative consciousness of self B Innocence → rebellion → ordinary consciousness of self → creative consciousness of self C Ordinary consciousness of self → innocence → rebellion → creative consciousness of self D Rebellion → innocence → ordinary consciousness of self → creative consciousness of self Answer: B 76 The rapid change in performance as the size of reinforcement in varied is called A Crespi effect B Disequilibrium hypothesis C Premack principal D Programmed learning Answer: A 77 In Solomon Asch’s study on conformity, subjects conformed to the Group approximately what percent of time A 25% B 35% C 45% D over 50% Answer: B 78 Perceived fairness of the amount and rewards among individuals refers to ________ while perceived fairness of the ways used for rewards and pays refers to _________. A Organizational justice, Distributive justice B Equity, Organizational justice C Distributive justice; Procedural justice D Procedural justice; Distributive justice Answer: C 79 The concept of _______ is vital in the understanding of fractional antedating goal response A Drive stimulus reduction B Reactive Inhibition C Secondary Reinforcement D Conditioned Inhibition Answer: C 80 Which of the following identity status describes the individual who has been exploring but not yet committed to self chosen values and goals ? A Identity achievement B Identity foreclosure C Identity diffusion D Identity moratorium Answer: D 81 Scientific study of Creativity is considered to be started by A Galton B Guilford C Torrance D Mednick Answer: B 82 Culture exerts strong effect on memory through the operation of cultural schema. One’s memory is influenced by learning in A Own culture effect B Culture effect due to enculturation C Acculturation effect D Socialization effect Answer: A 83 Evolutionary Social Psychology Research seeks to investigate : A Changes in human behaviour B Seeks to investigate the potential role of genetic factors on social behaviour C Interrelationships between people of two groups of different social environment D Focuses on individual’s behaviour. Answer: B 84 Which one of the following is the right explanation of flash bulb memory ? A New, important, helpful social events B Unspecific, important, common events C Specific, surprising, unimportant events D Unspecific, important, common events Answer: A 85 Which of the following sequences is correct with respect to effective teaching ? A Match student’s level → specify learning goals → emphasize self comparison → suggest improvements and model problem solving. B Specify learning goals → emphasize self-comparison → suggest improvements and model problem solving → match student’s level. C Suggest improvements and model problem solving → match student’s level → specify learning goals → emphasize self-comparison D Emphasize self-comparison → match student’s level → specify learning goals → suggest improvements and model problem solving. Answer: A 86 Sleep disorders can be categorized as A Paraphilias and Dysfunctions B Insomnia and Hypersomnia C Parasomnias and Dyssomnias D Serotonergic and Dopaminergic Answer: C 87 Which is the correct sequence of the stages involved in creative thinking ? A Preparation; orientation; illumination; incubation; verification B Preparation; incubation; illumination; orientation; verification C Orientation; preparation; incubation; illumination; verification D Orientation; preparation; illumination; incubation; verification Answer: C 88 Selective attention in vision and audition respectively have been dubbed as A ‘optic’ and ‘haptic’ B ‘spotlight’ and ‘gateway’ C ‘spatial’ and ‘acoustic’ D ‘central’ and ‘peripheral Answer: B 89 Which is not the part of “on the job training” ? A Orientation training B Job instruction training C Role playing D Apprentice training Answer: C 90 “Pygmalion effect” in educational settings suggests : A exceptional progress by student as a result of high teacher expectations. B biases creeping into summative assessment C authenticity factors in classroom assessment. D influences on curricular structure. Answer: A 91 Which of the following is not a diagnosable sleep disorder : A Somnambulism B Somniloquy C Sleep terror D Insomnia Answer: B 92 A field experiment at the Bronx Zoo illustrated the potential importance of _________ indicating that an individual has legitimate authority. Fill in the blank from given below. A Gender B Uniforms C Age D An authoritarian personality Answer: D 93 Thinking is a complex set of collaborations between __________ and _________representations and processes. A Linguistic; semantic B Linguistic; verbal C Semantic; non-linguistic D Linguistic; non-linguistic Answer: D 94 Signal detection depends upon A motivation and expectations B signal intensity and noise C sensitivity and response criterion D absolute and relative thresholds Answer: C 95 Which of the following does not present with symptoms of mental retardation ? A Cri du chat syndrome B Down’s syndrome C Fugue D Trisomy-21 Answer: C 96 Therapist suggested to Sunil that while trying to give up the habit of washing hands unnecessarily, he should wear a rubber band around his wrist and snap it everytime he feels like washing his hands. What therapy he is using ? A Systematic desensitization B Aversion therapy C Flooding D Modelling Answer: B 97 The need for _______ produces active, controlling social behaviour while need for _________ produces more passive, less controlling social behaviour. A affiliation; self-esteem B confidence; intimacy C affiliation; intimacy D intimacy; affiliation Answer: C 98 According to Triarchic Theory of Intelligence, arrange the correct functional sequence of metacomponents A Identification of problem → defining the givens, goals & obstacles → choosing appropriate strategy → selection of lower order processes → selection of mental representation → allocation of mental resources → monitoring → evaluation. B Identification of problem → defining the givens, goals & obstacles → selection of lower order processes → choosing appropriate strategy → selecting a mental representation → allocating mental resources → monitoring → evaluation. C Identification of problem → choosing appropriate strategy → defining givens, goals and obstacles → allocating mental resources → monitoring → selecting mental representation → evaluation D Defining the givens, goals and obstacles → identification of problem → selection of lower order processes → choosing appropriate strategy → selecting a mental representation → allocating mental resources → monitoring → evaluation Answer: B 99 Which is the correct sequence of the stages involved in creative thinking ? A Preparation; orientation; illumination; incubation; verification B Preparation; incubation; illumination; orientation; verification C Orientation; preparation; incubation; illumination; verification D Orientation; preparation; illumination; incubation; verification Answer: C 100 In which one of the following scaling methods, Law of Comparative Judgement is used clearly while computing scale values ? A Summated ratings B Equal appearing intervals C JND scales D Paired Comparison Answer: D 101 The model of memory most frequently cited consists of Short Term Memory (STM) which serve(s) as gateway to Long Term Memory (LTM). This model was propounded by A Ebbinghaus B Craik and Lockhart C Tulving D Atkinson and Shiffring Answer: D 102 The phenomenon of clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed and had been discredited refers to : A Belief bias B Belief perseverance C Over confidence D Framing decisions Answer: B 103 Mechanistic and Cognitive approaches to motivation differ in the extent to which ______ are invoked to account for the initiation, direction, intensity and persistence of goal directed behaviour. A Dynamic traits B Higher mental processes C Drives D Instincts Answer: B 104 Which of the following is the term for describing a child’s one word utterances ? A Over extensions B Under extensions C Holophrases D Telegraphic speech Answer: C 105 What would be the multiple correlation between the job efficiency and the three predictors (M.B.A. marks, selection test scores, and the evaluations scores at the end of inhouse training) ? A 0.50 B 0.65 C 0.75 D Inadequate data Answer: C 106 The b coefficient obtained in multiple regression is A Partial correlation coefficient B Correlation coefficient C Regression coefficient D Partial regression coefficient Answer: D 107 Which one of the following conclusion can be drawn on the basis of above paragraph ? A All the four predictors (M.B.A. marks, selection test scores, evaluation scores at the end of inhouse training and communication skills) are uncorrelated with each other. B Out of the four predictors, at least some are correlated with each other. C Communication skills scores are uncorrelated with other predictors. D The four predictors theoretically appear to be correlated, but we cannot infer about their intercorrelations from the data provided. Answer: B 108 Words learned under water are recalled : A Better on land than under water B Better above land (sky) than on land C Better above land (sky) than under water D Better under water than on land Answer: D 109 Amit met with an accident and later turned into impulsive, irresponsible and less concerned with the consequences of his actions. He must have suffered damage in A Parietal lobe B Frontal lobe C Occipital lobe D Temporal lobe Answer: B 110 Effective teaching may include conceptual scaffolding, which is best described by the following statement : A introducing practice sessions after every module. B gradually fading support as student proficiency increases. C punishing student for incorrect answers. D encouraging brighter students to help weaker students. Answer: B 111 A social worker, appointed to assist the psychiatrist, used to administer and interpret Rorschach test. This is an A ethically incorrect practice B ethically correct practice C ethically correct practice provided the results are used only for diagnostic purpose. D ethically correct practice provided the results are kept confidential and are used only for diagnostic purpose. Answer: A 112 Arrange in sequence the stage of personality development according to Rollo May A Innocence → ordinary consciousness of self → rebellion → creative consciousness of self B Innocence → rebellion → ordinary consciousness of self → creative consciousness of self C Ordinary consciousness of self → innocence → rebellion → creative consciousness of self D Rebellion → innocence → ordinary consciousness of self → creative consciousness of self Answer: B 113 The rapid change in performance as the size of reinforcement in varied is called A Crespi effect B Disequilibrium hypothesis C Premack principal D Programmed learning Answer: A 114 In Solomon Asch’s study on conformity, subjects conformed to the Group approximately what percent of time A 25% B 35% C 45% D over 50% Answer: B 115 Perceived fairness of the amount and rewards among individuals refers to ________ while perceived fairness of the ways used for rewards and pays refers to _________. A Organizational justice, Distributive justice B Equity, Organizational justice C Distributive justice; Procedural justice D Procedural justice; Distributive justice Answer: C 116 Which of the following identity status describes the individual who has been exploring but not yet committed to self chosen values and goals ? A Identity achievement B Identity foreclosure C Identity diffusion D Identity moratorium Answer: D 117 Scientific study of Creativity is considered to be started by A Galton B Guilford C Torrance D Mednick Answer: B 118 Sleep disorders can be categorized as A Paraphilias and Dysfunctions B Insomnia and Hypersomnia C Parasomnias and Dyssomnias D Serotonergic and Dopaminergic Answer: C 119 Which is the correct sequence of the stages involved in creative thinking ? A Preparation; orientation; illumination; incubation; verification B Preparation; incubation; illumination; orientation; verification C Orientation; preparation; incubation; illumination; verification D Orientation; preparation; illumination; incubation; verification Answer: C 120 Selective attention in vision and audition respectively have been dubbed as A ‘optic’ and ‘haptic’ B ‘spotlight’ and ‘gateway’ C ‘spatial’ and ‘acoustic’ D ‘central’ and ‘peripheral Answer: B 122 In Erikson’s theory, which psycho-social crises preceed and succeed Autonomy v/s Shame : 1 Basic trust v/s mistrust and Industry v/s Inferiority 2 Basic trust v/s mistrust and Industry v/s Inferiority 3 Industry v/s Inferiority and Identity v/s Role confusion. 4 Basic trust v/s mistrust and Initiative v/s Guilt. Answer: Basic trust v/s mistrust and Initiative v/s Guilt. 123 Read each of the following statements - Assertion (A) and Reason (R); and indicate your answer using code given below : Assertion (A) : Horner found high level of motive to avoid success or fear of success in females. Reason (R) : As a result of success, the threat of social rejection and fear concerning perceived lack of feminity are aroused in women 1 Both (A) and (R) are true, and (R) is the correct explanation of (A). 2 Both (A) and (R) are true, but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A). 3 (A) is true, but (R) is false 4 (A) is false, but (R) is true. Answer: Both (A) and (R) are true, and (R) is the correct explanation of (A). 124 Read each of the following statements - Assertion (A) and Reason (R); and indicate your answer using code given below : Assertion (A) : Perceived fairness of the interpersonal treatment is used to determine organizational outcomes. Reason (R) : People expect informational transparency and respect in organizations. code : 1 Both (A) and (R) are true, and (R) is the correct explanation of (A). 2 Both (A) and (R) are true, but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A). 3 (A) is true, but (R) is false. 4 (A) is false, but (R) is true. Answer: Both (A) and (R) are true, and (R) is the correct explanation of (A). 125 Match List - I with List - II and select the correct answer by choosing from code given below : List-I List-II (Concept) (Explanation) (a) Episodic retrieval (i)Physical environment at retrieval matching that at encoding. (b)Context-dependent retrieval (ii)Mood at retrieval matching that at encoding. (c)State-dependent retrieval (iii)Retrieval stimulated by hints from the external and internal environment. (d)Cue-dependent retrieval (iv)Subsequent reactivation of stored memory code : (a) (b) (c) (d) 1 (i) (ii) (iii) (iv) 2 (ii) (iv) (iii) (i) 3 (iii) (iv) (ii) (i) 4 (iv) (i) (ii) (iii) Answer: (iv) (i) (ii) (iii) 126 Read each of the following statements - Assertion (A) and Reason (R); and indicate your answer using code given below : Assertion (A) : Rational persuation refers to the use of logical arguments and facts to persuade others for achieving a desired result. Reason (R) : Managers use several techniques to influence others in organizations. code: 1 Both (A) and (R) are true, and (R) is the correct explanation of (A). 2 Both (A) and (R) are true, but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A). 3 (A) is true, but (R) is false. 4 (B) is false, but (R) is true. Answer: Both (A) and (R) are true, and (R) is the correct explanation of (A). 127 Read each of the following statements - Assertion (A) and Reason (R); and indicate your answer using code given below : Assertion (A) : Perception remains constant although the proximal sensation changes Reason (R) : Our perceptual system has mechanisms that adjust our perception of the proximal stimulus. code: 1 Both (A) and (R) are true, and (R) is the correct explanation of (A). 2 Both (A) and (R) are true, but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A). 3 (A) is true, but (R) is false. 4 (A) is false, but (R) is true. Answer: Both (A) and (R) are true, and (R) is the correct explanation of (A). 128 Which of the following explains the Threshold Hypothesis regarding Intelligence - Creativity relationship ? 1 There is a positive correlation between Intelligence and Creativity 2 There is a positive correlation between Intelligence and Creativity upto a particular level of Intelligence 3 There is a positive correlation between Intelligence and Creativity beyond a particular level of Intelligence. 4 There is a negative correlation between Intelligence and Creativity beyond a particular level of Intelligence. Answer: 2 129 Which one of the trait theories/models is/are NOT based on factor analytic methodology ? (a) Allport’s Theory (b) Costa and McCrae’s Model (c) Goldberg’s Model (d) Eysenck’s Theory code: 1 (a) only 2 (a) and (c) only 3 (b) and (c) only 4 (4) (b) and (d) only Answer: (a) only 130 The factors that operate with deep levels of processing are : (a) Distinctiveness (b) Sameness (c) Elaboration (d) Physical contours Code: 1 (a) and (b) only 2 (b) and (c) only 3 (b) and (d) only 4 (a) and (c) only Answer: (a) and (c) only 131 Backward Conditioning occurs when : A CS and US are presented simultaneously B CS is presented first and US is presented before the termination of CS C CS is presented first and US is presented after the termination of CS D US is presented first and CS is presented after the termination of US Answer: D 132 The James-Lange theory and the cognitive theory of emotion disagree on whether : A specific brain centers are involved in specific emotions. B bodily feedback determines which emotion is felt. C individuals can judge their emotions accurately. D there is no any biological involvement in human emotions. Answer: B 133 Biologically based emotional and behavioural tendencies that are evident in early childhood represent : A Trait B Type C Temperament D Style Answer: C 134 In Jungian theory, the idea that energy is automatically redistributed in the psyche in order to achieve equilibrium or balance depicts : A Principle of Equivalence B Principle of Synchronicity C Principle of Entrophy D Principle of Opposites Answer: C 135 After the recent terrorist attacks in France, a psychologist proposed a study wherein he would interview two hundred French citizens to find whether their attitude towards fate as a consequence of the attack. This study can best be labelled as : A attitude change experiment B field experiment C ex post facto study D psychometric study Answer: C 136 Which of the following is correct while comparing classical and operant conditioning ? A Operant conditioning takes place before reinforcement while classical conditioning takes place after reinforcement. B Operant conditioning takes place as a result of some voluntary action while classical conditioning takes place without choice. C In operant conditioning, response is elicited while in classical conditioning it is emitted. D In operant conditioning magnitude of the response is the index of conditioning while in classical conditioning it is the rate of response. Answer: B 137 Words learned under water are recalled : A Better on land than under water B Better above land (sky) than on land C Better above land (sky) than under water D Better under water than on land Answer: D 138 Which of the following sequence is correct ? A Oral phase ® Anal phase ® Latency ® Phallic ® Genital B Anal ® Oral ® Phallic ® Latency ® Genital C Oral ® Anal ® Phallic ® Latency ® Genital D Oral ® Phallic ® Anal ® Genital ® Latency Answer: C 139 Which memory is the result of instrumental/motor learning processes ? A Semantic memory B Episodic memory C Sensory memory D Procedural memory Answer: D 140 In which lobe of the cerebral cortex, the primary olfactory cortex lies ? A Frontal lobe B Temporal lobe C Occipital lobe D Parietal lobe Answer: B 141 “Factor Analysis is used as a means of confirming a structured model than as a means of discovering a structural model”. This is true of which theory of intelligence ? A Spearman B Thurstone C Jensen D Guilford Answer: D 142 What is the role of positive and negative reinforcement ? A To increase the likelihood that responses preceding both will be repeated. B To decrease the likelihood that responses preceding negative reinforcement will be repeated. C To increase the likelihood that responses preceding only positive reinforcement will be repeated. D To ensure that there are no negative consequences following the behaviour. Answer: A 143 While forming a concept one chooses to take one hypothesis and selects many of its features to quickly form the concept at once : A Successive scanning B Conservative focusing C Focus gambling D Simultaneous scanning Answer: C 144 What is the correct sequence an auditory stimulus takes to reach the primary auditory cortex ? A Cochlear nuclei - Superior olive - Inferior colliculus - Medial geniculate nucleus B Cochlear nuclei - Inferior colliculus - Superior olive - Medial geniculate nucleus C Superior olive - Cochlear nuclei - Inferior colliculus - Medial geniculate nucleus D Medial geniculate nucleus - Inferior colliculus - Superior olive - Cochlear nucleus Answer: A 145 In the above context, which one of the following correlation should be computed to obtain item-remainder correlations ? A Point biserial correlation B Phi-coefficient C Rank difference correlation D Tetrachoric correlation Answer: A 146 Which one of the following statement would be true in the above context ? A Kuder - Richardson reliability coefficient would also be .90, but the split-half reliability coefficient may differ from .90. B Split-half reliability coefficient would also be .90, but the Kuder - Richardson reliability coefficient may differ from .90. C Both Kuder - Richardson reliability coefficient and split-half reliability coefficient would be .90. D The correlation between odd and even parts of the test would be .90. Answer: A 147 To obtain inter-item correlations, which one of the following correlation coefficient should be used in the above analysis ? A Biserial correlation B Point biserial correlation C Phi-coefficient D Rank difference correlation Answer: C 148 What is the expected Cronbach alpha for the short versions, referred to in the paragraph ? A 0.45 B 0.67 C 0.82 D 0.90 Answer: C 149 Which one of the following conclusion can be drawn from the data provided above ? The new Abstract Thinking Test has : A Satisfactory convergent validity B Satisfactory divergent validity C Satisfactory concurrent validity D Unsatisfactory concurrent validity Answer: D 150 The factors that influence social behaviour and thoughts in certain ways are called : A Independent variables B Confounding variables C Dependent variables D Mediating variables Answer: D 151 Phonemic restoration as we perceive speech in a noisy party is an example of : A Top down processing B Bottom up processing C Subliminal perception D Supraliminal perception Answer: A 152 Feeling touchy or hypersensitive following an upsetting experience is a form of : A Imprinting B Habituation C Sensitization D Reflexive Behaviour Answer: C 153 Because it has the external features associated with the concept of dog, a wolf is perceived as a dog. This is an example of : A Centration B Equilibration C Object permanence D Prototype Answer: D 154 Which of the following is the final destination for much of the brain’s information about emotion before action is taken ? A Amygdala B Anterior cingulate cortex C Pre-frontal cortex D Hypothalamus Answer: C 155 Cattell propounded gf-gc theory of intelligence mainly based on : A First order factors of abilities B Second order factors of abilities C Third order factors of abilities D Higher order factors of abilities Answer: B 156 Which one of the following statements is true ? A The ‘Global Five’ factors in personality refer to the second-order factors of 16 PF, latest edition. B The ‘Global Five’ factors refer to the factors assessed by the NEO-Five Factor Inventory, latest edition. C The ‘Global Five’ factors refer to the factors assessed by Goldberg’s bipolar adjectives. D The ‘Global Five’ factors are derived from Eysenck Personality Profiler, latest edition. Answer: A 157 Which of the following statements best defines maturation ? A It is directly based on social-cognitive learning B It is an automatic biological development of the body that naturally unfolds over time C It does not take place in human beings D It is the basis of all physical and psychological developments Answer: B 158 Four important elements in the theory of signal detection are : A errors, hits, speed and accuracy B speed, accuracy, power and false alarm C hit, miss, correct rejection and false alarm D acuity, efficacy, speed and power Answer: C 159 Jia had written a list to do her week end work, but incidently left it home while going out for her first activity. Trying to remember the list, Jia remembers what was at the beginning of the list and what was at the end but not those things in the middle. This is an example of : A Encoding specificity effect B Flash bulb memory C Serial position effect D Tip-of-the tongue effect Answer: C 160 Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) are mainly indexing : A Creative Products B Creative Processes C Creative Personality D Creative Persuation Answer: B 161 Which one of the scaling method is more likely to yield multidimensional attitude scale ? A Guttman scalogram analysis B Paired comparison method C Equal appearing intervals method D Method of summated rating Answer: D 162 When is aspiration a method of choice to make a lesion ? A in a deeper brain area B in an area of cerebral cortex C an irreversible lesion D in underlying white matter Answer: B 163 A psychologist was administering a projective test which involved a word association task. She tended to nod and smile every time a plural word was given by the respondent. The following testing bias was seen : A favoritism B test wiseness C selective reinforcement D gender of assessor Answer: C 164 Which of the following is a characteristic of Chomsky’s theory ? A Development of language is between three and five years of age B Language development is dependent on the reinforcements received by the child C Children acquire mistakes in language by observing their parents and others around them D Children have an innate mental grammar Answer: D 165 The centre - surround organization of ganglion cells that enhance contrast at edges in a visual environment is well illustrated by : A Craik bands B Mach bands C Luminance bands D Optic bands Answer: A 166 The growth needs of ERG theory are represented by various needs in Maslow’s model : A Physiological and social needs B Safety needs and esteem needs C Social needs and esteem needs D Esteem needs and self-actualization needs Answer: D 167 In Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives, the following appear in ascending order : A Remember ® Understand ® Apply ® Analyze B Apply ® Analyze ® Understand ® Remember C Understand ® Apply ® Remember ® Analyze D Analyze ® Remember ® Apply ® Understand Answer: A 168 Helpers respond to the needs of a victim because they want to accomplish something rewarding; this may be referred as : A Negative state - relief model B Empathic - joy hypothesis C Empathy - altruism hypothesis. D Pluralistic empathy Answer: B 169 Which is the correct order of the emergence of following Psycho-Social strengths ? A Love, Fidelity, Wisdom, Care B Care, Fidelity, Love, Wisdom C Fidelity, Love, Care, Wisdom D Care, Fidelity, Wisdom, Love Answer: C 170 Detecting movement in spite of camouflage is easier for people who are : A field dependent B field independent C both field dependent and field independent D neither field dependent nor field independent Answer: B 171 Self is conceptualized in Western and Eastern perspectives on personality, respectively, as : A free and deterministic B instinctive and learned C ideal and real D independent and interdependent Answer: D 172 When a Background Interference Procedure was used experimentally, the following findings became apparent ? A Field independent persons did better than field dependent persons B Field dependent persons did better than field independent persons C Both field dependent and field independent persons did equally well D BIP enhanced the performance of all subjects Answer: A 173 People with moderate mental retardation would have an IQ in the range of : A 10 to 19 B 35 to 54 C 55 to 70 D 20 to 34 Answer: B 174 The following is not typically found in a school guidance counsellor’s office : A Sand pit B Lie detector C Psychometric tests D Puppets and play dough Answer: B 175 According to Piaget the children are able to grasp the concept of object permanence and conservation in : A Sensory motor stage B Pre-operational stage C Concrete operational stage D Formal operations stage Answer: 176 Which one of the following design is used in the above research ? A Multigroup design with single I.V. B 232 factorial design C 232 mixed factorial design D Repeated measures design Answer: B 177 Which one of the following statement is true in the context of above study ? A The assumption of homogeneity of variance was satisfied. B The assumption of homogeneity of variance was not satisfied. C The correction for heterogeneity of variance was required. D The data are insufficient to evaluate the assumption of homogeneity of variance. Answer: A 178 On the basis of the information provided about the main effect of A, it can be concluded that : A Interpolated learning had no effect on the recall of A. B Interpolated learning caused retroactive interference. C Interpolated learning caused retroactive facilitation. D Either retroactive interference or retroactive facilitation has occurred. Answer: D 179 What would be the degrees of freedom for the numerator and denominator of the F - ratio defined as ‘MSA3B/MSE’ ? A 1 and 96 respectively B 1 and 98 respectively C 2 and 97 respectively D 3 and 96 respectively Answer: A 180 A procedure that establishes a sequence of responses which lead to a reward following the final response and then working backwards is called A Shaping B Stimulus control C Chaining D Stimulus generalization Answer: C 181 In a study on scaling of attitude items, eleven statements were included. What would be the number of pairs of attitude statements ? A 21 B 55 C 110 D 121 Answer: B 182 Who first attempted to describe personality traits in terms of Lexican descriptors ? A Ross Stagner B Allport and Odbert C R.B. Cattell D Coasta and McCrae Answer: B 183 Which of the following is correctly arranged ? A Encoding – retrieval – storage B Encoding – storage – retrieval C Storage – encoding – retrieval D Retrieval – encoding – storage Answer: B PSYCHOLOGY Questions and Answers Pdf Download Read the full article

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The world can be a scary place. This is a view exacerbated by popular media, which tends to focus attention on sources of violence and despair in disproportion to their prevalence. No surprise there – these things translate into ad revenue more readily than a cold assessment of reality. So it is that polls have the public rating ISIS and North Korea as greater threats than climate change. An exceedingly large portion of Americans also see their own government as a top threat.

There are some good reasons for this. Foremost among them is the loss of legitimacy brought about as private interests seize more and more of the public domain, bending government action toward narrow aims and away from the public interest. The U.S. government has grown exceedingly expensive and unwieldy over the years, even as it has grown less and less capable of acting in the interests of the majority. A desire to rein it in is not misplaced.

However, disguised beyond all this concern over ISIS and North Korea and the U.S. government is a more fundamental threat to the American way of life. That it is so poorly recognized, despite being so well evidenced, is both depressing and disturbing. Because the fact of the matter is that there are forces working to deliberately undermine American democracy. And they are succeeding.

Currently, a cadre of wealthy Americans and far-right intellectuals is working to transform the United States into something rather twisted. Their core motivating principle is that the accumulation of capital takes precedence over all other values. Indeed, it is in their view the ultimate arbiter of value. To them, human worth scales with earnings.

Given the preeminence of wealth in their worldview, it is little surprise that the architects of the modern conservative agenda evince open disdain for the principles of democratic self-governance*. Fanatical ideologues, these people hue to a perverse and extreme doctrine, wherein any effort by the majority to put common interests ahead of personal wealth is viewed as an act of tyranny. Their allegiance to community and nation ends where those entities cease to serve as instruments furthering the accumulation of wealth and power. Less there remain any ambiguity: these people are the greatest threat to the American way of life – to open societies and representative democracy – that has existed since World War II.

They have set for themselves the explicit goal of turning government to their will, eliminating all barriers to the accumulation of profit while simultaneously turning every element of the private sector into a new avenue for the generation of wealth. To this end, they have captured the Republican Party and bent it into a tool of radical greed. Gone are the principles of traditional conservatism. No more reverence for tradition. No principled commitments to self-determination or limited government. In their place stands a single-minded passion for unfettered self-interest.

This all reads like some kind of hard-boiled conspiracy theory. But it’s not. It is ice-cold, brutal reality, uncovered by the diligence of intrepid journalists and documented in the written words of the ideological fanatics themselves. These people have built a network of shadowy 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) organizations for the express purpose of concealing their machinations. They have seized control of the GOP by demanding fealty in exchange for political self-preservation. Those with the courage and integrity to dissent are branded as Cucks and RINOs and primaried out of office, replaced by rabid ideologues and lick-spittles more amendable to an extremist, anti-democratic cause.

History of the Cause

The history of the radical libertarian movement, as documented in Nancy Maclean’s exhaustively researched and deeply admirable book Democracy in Chains, is itself damning. As a political movement, modern American libertarianism – the philosophical lifeblood of radical conservatism – traces its roots back to John C. Calhoun, a savage bigot and fierce defender of slavery. Calhoun correctly saw in democratic governance a potential threat to property rights and therein his right to accumulate wealth by owning people as property. He recognized that in a contest of values, there were significant domains in which property rights and human rights might conflict, and set about dreaming up a body of political theory compatible with his personal sympathies (spoiler: Calhoun favored property rights over human rights).

In Calhoun’s view, the majority had no legitimate right to inflict its will on a minority, for any reason. This meant that an electorate enlightened enough to recognize chattel slavery as repugnant moral abomination had no right to impose their views on a minority who found slavery a righteous engine of personal profit. In this light, Calhoun dreamt up the right of interposition – a state’s right to veto federal authority.

This self-serving view carried on through history, festering in the stew of racial tensions and class conflict that has long characterized the American South. When Brown vs. the Board of Education placed the weight of federal law behind school integration, the regressive elements of the old aristocratic order in the south used the doctrine of interposition as an instrument of rebellion. When that failed, they became fierce advocates for school privatization. In Virginia, voucher programs were first instituted as a way around integration – dropping public funding for public schools in some majority black counties and offering white students special scholarships to attend private all white schools.

In this crucible of social upheaval, acolytes of what came to be known as the Austrian school of economics began to frame developments in terms of Calhoun’s old contest between individual rights and communitarian values. This is how they framed things, but it’s worth noting that at the outset that it is a thorough misrepresentation of their true values. The only individual right they cared about protecting is a person’s right to acquire and dispense wealth as they saw fit. In order to protect it, they were willing – and have only grown more so – to strangle any other individual right that inconvenienced this aim.

Over time, this movement has only grown, gaining as allies radical billionaires like Charles Koch. Today, they work to influence policy at every level of government, staffing and funding so-called “think-tanks” (really sophisticated propaganda outlets, given their a priori intellectual constraints and vicious intolerance for dissent) like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute and operating a network of putative “charity” organizations for the express purpose turning policy to their will.

Their strategy – from their own writings and personal communications – is to “crab-walk” American democracy into a system of restraints that cripple collective action. It begins by working to incrementally erode confidence in public institutions. As outlined by James Buchanan, one of the movement’s chief architects, it begins with disingenuous expressions of concern.  Ideologically sympathetic – and, frequently enough, directly coached – politicians express concern over the future of some program like Social Security, wondering whether it will be there for them and their families in the future and what they can do to fix it.

From there, they secure support from the most vulnerable, promising those 5 or 10 years out from retirement that Social Security will still be there for them. Thereby heading off their most vocal opponents, they proceed to encourage further doubt in the program’s viability and stoke frustration over its performance. They push the age of eligibility back a few years and work to sew discontent among the young by planting questions about why they pay into an entitlement scheme that will probably have collapsed by the time they come of age. Further discontent is generated through the very suggestion of means-based welfare redistribution – naively favored by progressives.

It all paves the way for privatization, which does more than turn the targeted program into an engine of wealth for the already wealthy. Every instance of privatization works to corrode public confidence and interest in government, as it begins to steadily play less and less of a role in their lives. By the time they realize what has happened – if they realize it – it is too late. The public is left adrift to fend for themselves in a cutthroat system of corporate feudalism and economic coercion.

This is why the Republican Party is willing to engage in dangerous brinksmanship like shutting down the government or stealing a Supreme Court seat. Their ideological needs are met either way. Either they decrease government spending and capture a branch of government through nefarious means or they increase the public perception that the government is irredeemably broken. It’s a win-win for people so fanatically devoted to a perverse ideology that they are willing to pay any cost to see it enacted.

The Fanaticism of the Radical Libertarian Movement

If one is going to tar a belief system as dangerously fanatical, it’s probably best to explain why. The short answer is this: the libertarian movement currently working to drastically reorder the American political sphere is entirely divorced from empirical reality. It is based on a theory of human behavior that has been repeatedly refuted by scientific studies from a variety of disciplines. That’s a long way of saying it is false. Despite this, the proponents of the movement – the radical right – are willing to abandon fundamental American values and cause untold suffering to see their beliefs put into practice. Someone who holds a belief in disproportion to the available evidence is a fool. Someone who is so passionately dedicated to that belief that they are willing to hurt people to see it manifest is a fanatic. And a dangerous one at that.

It would be unfair to cast the motivating concerns of modern libertarianism as entirely unfounded. Like all radical social movements, it starts with a seed of legitimate grievance. In this case, the problem is what has been called “rent seeking” behavior. Rent seeking occurs anytime a person or organization extracts a benefit disproportionate to their contribution, be it economic or social. In the realm of government, the famous libertarian economist Milton Freidman called this the problem of distributed costs and concentrated benefits. Despite the protestations of the most ardent leftists, it is real.

It all boils down to this. Politicians have it in their interests to meet the demands of voters, however they might be conceived. Libertarians couch this in the language of “public choice” theory – which we’ll return to shortly – and describe it all as a matter of rational self-interest. There’s no reason to be so reductive (and even less reason to think rational actor theory is a robust model of human behavior) but the analysis still stands. Maybe politicians want to address public concerns as matter of civic duty, maybe they want to do it is a way of securing re-election. Presumably there are instances where both are true.

In any event, the outcome is the same. Groups of like-minded voters form interest groups to pressure politicians into granting them political favors. There’s no need to frame it in terms of seedy back room dealings. This can all be very innocuous. Indeed, most of the targets of libertarian outrage are either inoffensive or objectively beneficial, like arts programs, public schools, and environmental protections. This is, in fact, precisely how democracies should work.

However, it can become problematic over time, because the benefits these initiatives secure almost always come with some cost, distributed in tiny increments among the tax base. Over time, successful campaigns that benefit narrow interest groups – at a cost virtually invisible to any given tax payer – can pile up. Widespread costs accrue gradually, eventually leading to a big, expensive government.

From this, hardcore libertarians contend that majority rule is inherently oppressive and that minorities should always have the right to defect from the popular will. This, as James Madison – the primary author of the U.S. Constitution – argued at the time the founding of the United States, would effectively neuter representative government and abolish democratic rule. It also paves the way for corporate tyranny, as powerful minority groups maintain unchecked power to coerce and exploit the less wealthy while laying waste to public goods.

What we have here is a fanatical overreaction to a real problem. One would have to be an oblivious milquetoast to look at the spending of the modern U.S. government and not spot at least a handful of programs they find completely frivolous. The solution is to find ways to more effectively evaluate the costs and benefits of special interest programs – and do so continuously – so government can periodically clean house by getting rid of programs that no longer do much good. Abolishing government entirely and reducing the domain of public action to free-market spending, as libertarians and hard-line conservatives advocate, is a recipe for widespread misery (a point the libertarian movement’s intellectual architects cheerily accept).

Inasmuch as the libertarian response to the burden of taxation is an overreaction, the intellectual tradition that leads them to posit pure capitalist anarchy as the foundation for an ideal society is riddled with fallacious reasoning. To describe modern academic libertarianism as intellectually stillborn is probably unjust. Ideas are judged according to their performance in tests against empirical reality. In this domain, the libertarian enterprise has faced countless rebukes and been reduced to a program of pure, self-interested propaganda.

Libertarianism takes many of its philosophical cues from the Austrian school of economics, a school dependent on an obscure line of reasoning called “praxeology”. Succinctly put, praxeology contends that the study of human action and behavior can be purely deductive. This is a rather curious position, in no small-part because it holds itself as immune to refutation. One can simply start with a few premises about the nature of human action and work out how humans ought to behave as a result.

As a logical proposition, that is all well and good. Premises lead ineluctably to conclusions and boom, there you have it, a prescription for human action. Problems arise, however, when the premises you use as a launch pad for your reasoning are false. In the school of praxeology, as well as in the more widely recognized domain of public choice theory, many of the starting assumptions have been repeatedly proven to be thoroughly erroneous.

Take just two of their founding tenets: that humans are entirely rational and infinitely selfish. Both have been disproved, again and again, by experiments with ultimatum and dictator games. In an ultimatum game, two players are matched up and charged with distributing a given sum of money. One is given the role of “the proposer” and one is given the role of “the responder”. The proposer offers a certain amount and the responder decides whether or not to accept it. If the responder accepts, both players take home their allotted share. If the responder refuses, both players get nothing. The dictator game is pretty much the same thing, except the responder is completely passive – they get whatever the proposer gives them.

If human are rational and selfish, this yields pretty firm predictions about what ought to occur. In the ultimatum game, the proposer should offer the lowest possible sum and the responder should accept it. It doesn’t matter if it seems unfair. That is an irrational consideration. If the proposer divides a $100 pot 99:1, the responder should still say yes because they leave $1 dollar richer than they would have otherwise. But this never happens. The experimental subjects that come closest to realizing the libertarian fantasy are economics students who have been educated (or perhaps indoctrinated) with the principles of rational choice theory. Everywhere else, subjects consistently offer bids that exceed rational utility optimization and reject those that seem unfair. This is true even in the dictator game, where the proposer has the option to keep the entire pot for himself.

The implications are clear. Humans are bad at rationally maximizing their payoffs and are innately predisposed toward fairness.

So much for the assumptions that motivate the entire libertarian belief structure. If human behavior were simply a matter of selfish rationality, a belief that the unfettered pursuit of wealth is a sound basis for sociopolitical order would be supremely justifiable. Libertarians have reached the right conclusion from their founding axioms. It just happens that those axioms are fundamentally wrong.

This doesn’t seem to affect their enthusiasm much. According to Nancy MacLean, Amity Shlaes, a devotee of the libertarian pioneer James Buchanan and author of The Forgotten Man, claims that “public choice theory explained everything.” An impressive feat. It is also, as it happens, the feature of Marxism that led Karl Popper to reject it as a scientific discipline. Public choice theory and praxeology are nonsense on stilts (to borrow Jeremy Benthem’s phrase) precisely because their application is limited only by their practitioner’s imagination. They are irrefutable because they are endlessly plastic.

In science, the most robust system humans have ever devised for assigning confidence in our beliefs, the proper use of deductive reasoning is as an instrument of refutation. One takes a body of theory and uses it to derive predictions (i.e. hypotheses) about what the actual world should be like. Ideally, the relationship between theory and hypothesis is axiomatic – meaning if theory X is true then we should see Y. If we don’t see Y, theory X is false. Scientists then perform experiments or observations and look out how closely the results match predictions. If the results look nothing like the prediction yielded by theory, then scientists start to think the theory in question suffers from serious flaws.

Of course, in any social science, things tend to be a lot trickier than that. But it is still considered bad science to continue to build theories – much less large scale policy prescriptions – around disproved premises. Public choice theory, like Marxism, is more akin to a body of religious dogma than a serious scientific or intellectual framework.

Libertarian Utopia

Paradise, for an ideological zealot like Charles Koch, is an alien world. Plenty of people feel the sting of their tax bill and reasonably think they could do with a lighter load. They might even have specific public services in mind as targets for reduction or eradication. Few, however, actively dream of the world proposed by the hardcore libertarian. In the utopia envisioned by the radical right, government only exists to protect property rights. It serves no other purpose.

This is a perverse vision. The architects of the campaign are well aware of this. Many of them are, after all, pretty sharp people. Charles Koch himself holds a number of engineering degrees from MIT. Koch and his allies recognize that few people would freely elect to live in the world they are trying to build, which is precisely why their campaign is so secretive. They do not want to expose their dreams to an open trial in the marketplace of ideas, because they know they will very likely fail that test.

So what is that world actually like? Cutthroat, myopic, and fraught with suffering. Now, it is important to recognize that, while Charles Koch and the intellectuals on his payroll would choose to describe things in more rosy terms, they have no fundamental disagreements with what I am about to describe.

In the libertarian utopia envisioned by the radical right, inequality – already at record levels in the United States – is radically worse. The U.S. of libertarian dreams looks considerably more like a third-world country, complete with slums and favelas where people who can’t make it in the mainstream market scrape by on their own. Clean water is a commodity for people with the means to buy it. Public health crises like the lead contamination in Flint, Michigan are far more common. There is no Center for Disease Control or National Institute of Health working to cure diseases or prevent the outbreak of devastating epidemics. If you don’t save enough to retire, you’re on your own, condemned to old age poverty. This is true even if you saved prudently and happened to have a personal health crisis that drained your savings account years short of retirement.

Unsurprisingly, radical libertarians see no room for environmental regulation or public lands. Land belongs to whoever values it the most, which will tend to be very rich individuals or corporations who can afford to transform large swaths of land into profitable enterprises like mining or logging. There will, in short, be no land left over for the common folk to camp or hunt or hike on.

Public schools will be gone, virtually guaranteeing that patterns of intergenerational inequality will be cemented in place and carried on in perpetuity. The prospects of children will be shackled to the economic performance of their parents. This will also have the effect of paralyzing discourse and intellectual progress, as the ideologically inclined can opt to send their children to indoctrination academies that will reinforce their preferred brand of nonsense. The children of fundamentalist Christians will learn that the earn is 6000 years old and the children of postmodern liberals will learn that their subjective feelings take precedence over any strain of established fact.

Of course, you could take some solace in the fact that you won’t have much of tax bill any more. That would be a mistake. First, the libertarian vision will actually demand a massive police state. While drugs and prostitution will be legal, police will still be necessary to stifle the communitarian uprising that are sure to crop up from time to time, threatening the property rights of the moneyed classes. Likewise, there will still be a strong military for enforcing the spirit of righteous, unfettered capitalism throughout the rest of the world. So you’ll still have a tax bill. But a lot of your savings will be consumed paying to drive on private toll roads, send your kid to the best private school you can afford, forking out for fire department services (if you’re into having someone help you put out a house fire – or can afford a house), and paying market value for clean water.

This is the world Charles Koch and his pawns in the Republican Party are working to build. Those with the intelligence to recognize it or the integrity to admit it openly are on board with all of this. They see the obvious costs as a worthy price for economic liberty. In their view, it is all ethically justifiable because people always succeed or fail according to their inherent value. If you are poor, it is because you are lazy and stupid. If you are rich, it is because you are intelligent and ambitious. An inability to secure clean drinking water or pay a private security detail to keep your house safe from the upstarts who sneak out of the slums at night is a sign of personal failure. In this world, you can only ever be a victim of self-sabotage.

If you think that seems extreme, you are right. But it is a natural conclusion to reach if you start from blatantly fallacious premises like “humans are rational, self-interested, utility maximizing machines.” Libertarians don’t care about the suffering and chaos that would be caused by a pure victory of their ideology. In fact, suffering, in their worldview, would be a signal of righteous victory. Those who can’t make it in a libertarian utopia are victims of self-sabotage and personal ineptitude. Libertarianism, for them, represents a world in which everyone gets what they deserve.

It is worth taking a moment to pause and reflect on this view. This version of “the cream will always rise up to the top” socioeconomic theory is rooted in a meaningless tautology, entirely immune to external evaluation. The problem is that economic success, like biological fitness, is a what is called a “supervenient” property. In layman’s terms, that means it is not reducible to a unitary set of causes. In the world of evolutionary biology, there is not one feature that causes fitness. Rather, fitness can be understood in one of two ways: as a description of the number of offspring an organism produced or as a probabilistic estimate of the number of offspring an organism might produce, given its characteristics within a given environment.

That’s all rather esoteric, but the long and short of it is that you can’t say fitness is all about being strong or fast or pretty. Sometimes it’s about those things. Sometimes it’s about others. Sometimes it’s just about luck. Likewise, success is only probabilistically associated with the features we colloquially attribute to successful people. We have folk theories of success that say it’s a matter of intelligence, skill, competence, ambition, and hard work. The truth is, success is only probabilistically associated with those traits. In the social/economic/political world, intelligence and ambition are enormously useful. They play a role in success that exceeds what would be expected by pure chance. But it is perfectly possible to gain success without them (say, through inheritance or dumb luck) or possess them in abundance and go nowhere.

In the libertarian vision, is the smart, hard working person who simply has a life riddled with bad luck just an unfortunate cost of liberty? Maybe. What of a person who is born with a very low IQ to poor parents who can’t afford a good education? Do they deserve a life of poverty and suffering? The libertarian position here, is – quite explicitly – “yes”. Some people are going to eat shit and die and communitarian efforts, expressed through majority will, to alleviate that suffering through taxation and welfare are considered a form of tyranny.

The End Game

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.” One could find a modicum of irony in this bit of wisdom, considering its source. Friedrich Nietzche believed that one of the core impulses behind human behavior was a will to power – a desire to exceed social or ethical confines and an ambition to exercise control.  This is an ambition radical libertarians would not find entirely alien.

Nietzsche produced a lot of garbage (the concept of “eternal return”, anyone?) but the sagacity of the aforementioned quote is hard to dispute. In combating any evil, one should be vigilant of the potential risks. The Austrian school of economics was spawned in the wake of World War II, at a time when brutal despots – Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin – had seized control of Germany and the Soviet Union. Friedrich Hayek, one of the founding thinkers of the Austrian school, perceived a direct line between communitarian values and tyranny.

This connection has not been born out as matter of social law or historical fact. Most modern Western countries engage in some mixed strategy of social democracy and capitalism. It is only with considerable effort that one can look at Germany, Denmark, Norway, Canada, or even the United States and see a world of tyranny and oppression. But at the time, the argument didn’t look nearly as frail. Radical leftist ideologues, deeply motivated by an extreme commitment to communitarian values – above and beyond any consideration for individual rights – had recently seized control of huge swaths of Europe and Asia in the form of the Soviet Union. Very shortly, China would also fall to the fanatical leftist ideology of political communism. It looked very much like there might be a direct road from the communitarian ethos behind public education and infrastructure projects to authoritarianism.

Hayek and his intellectual kin saw the injustice and oppression sired by a virulent strain of ideological fanaticism and set about building a body of political theory to combat it. Thus was born their fire and brimstone devotion to individual economic liberty and absolute, inalienable property rights. History and science have since revealed the body of socioeconomic theory they constructed as a rather fevered overreaction, empirically unsupportable in theory and ethically disastrous in practice.

Yet the modern devotees of that tradition still herald it as a utopian vision. Belligerently indifferent to the vast flaws in their intellectual framework, they have set themselves the task of reshaping the United States of America to better match their fanatical aspirations. In this, they directly mirror Mao Zedong, Vladimir Lenin, Pol Pot, and Joseph Stalin. They are so convinced that their vision of the world is true and righteous that they are willing to go to almost any lengths to see it put into practice. No amount of human suffering seems too high a cost. Their dreams of a glittering utopia for commerce and personal ambition are worth any toll.

The similarities run deeper still. Political operatives in the Koch organization advise new recruits to study Vladimir Lenin’s playbook for revolution. The parallels are truly disconcerting. An extreme ideology, largely divorced from the findings of serious scientific or historical research. A passion to put that ideology into practice that trivializes the suffering it will cause. A plan of operation that involves deliberate deceit and misdirection. A disdain for democracy.

It is partially ironic, that people so fearful of the threat of one extreme ideology would champion an equally extreme remedy. But it is not surprising. This is what happens anytime anyone begins to put their beliefs about the way the world ought to be ahead of the way the world actually is. Ideology poisons reason. It has happened on the Regressive Left, where a nasty brew of identity politics, postmodern subjectivism, and neoMarxism is motivating savage anti-democratic behavior and a disturbing embrace of authoritarianism. The radical right is no different. They have taken concerns about the burden of taxation and regulation – reasonable targets for open debate – and turned them into justifications for a fanatical campaign with a dangerously anti-democratic endgame in mind. The difference here is that the Regressive Left is still an obnoxious fringe group. The Radical Right, on the other hand, is calling the shots for one of only two major political parties in the United States – one with majority control in both houses of congress, ideological control of the Supreme Court, and megalomaniacal imbecile ripe for manipulation in the White House.

The ultimate goal of the radical right is wholesale constitutional reform. In this, they have made considerable progress. They have captured the majority of state legislatures and used that authority to redraw congressional districts to disenfranchise liberal and independent voters. Likewise, they have instituted a huge number of voter suppression laws, ostensibly to prevent voter fraud, a virtually nonexistent problem. The real purpose of those laws – as their architects have occasionally let slip – is to rob people who don’t agree with them of their political voice. In the Senate, they effectively stole a Supreme Court seat. Some argue this was done in principled defense of traditional conservative interests like gun rights and abortion. Those people are fools. This was done to protect Citizens United and McCutcheon vs. FEC – Supreme Court rulings that undermine one-person, one-vote democracy by allowing unlimited, undisclosed political spending by wealthy individuals and corporations – from judicial review.

None of this is surprising to anyone who understands the motivating ethos of the radical right. The only value they cherish is wealth – the ability to accumulate more of it, the ability to protect, the ability to spend it however they wish. As I have stressed repeatedly, this would be fine if two things were true. First, if the socioeconomic theory they endorse were not flagrantly indifferent to the actual working of reality. Second, if they were not so secretive in their dealings. Instead, they are secretly working to refashion the U.S. Constitution into an instrument of a fanatical ideology.

Consider, in this regard, that they revere the regime of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as an example of the successful implementation of their ideology. Pinochet stole power in a brutal coup, torturing and murdering members of the opposition. Thereafter, the Pinochet regime embarked on a campaign of neoliberal reform that included significantly curtailing the electorate’s capacity to influence their government through majority vote. To be fair, the economy of Chile performed well in the succeeding decades. Corruption and exploitation was rampant in privatized industries (privatized social security, for instance, took 30% of invested funds from people as fees) and income inequality rose sharply, but GDP looked healthy.

Pinochet was supported by the likes of free-market fundamentalist Friedrich Hayek. In undertaking constitutional reform, his government was advised by James Buchanan, a principle designer of the Koch network’s plan of constitutional restructuring in the United States. Their views on the outcome are telling. Pinochet murdered his opposition and ruled as dictator. He deliberately worked to erode the average citizen’s capacity to shape political outcomes. The Pinochet regime’s programs reduced real wages for many and increased income inequality substantially. They did, however, likely contribute to prosperity for some and overall increases in GDP. The implication is clear: the people on radical right are willing to sanction brutality and oppression, forsake democracy, and increase economic suffering if doing so makes it generally easy for some people – the most skilled, intelligent, and ambitious, in their view – the get very rich.

In all of this, nothing is more damning that radical right’s commitment to secrecy. One arm of their political machine, the State Policy Network, currently funds efforts to mislead the public into keeping the sources of political spending secret. In New Mexico, they run ads on social media that suggest campaign transparency laws will lead to harassment. This is an outrageous lie in service of deliberate fear-mongering. The law in question only demands disclosure for donors who spend more than $1000 dollars. As of 2016, only 0.52% of donors give more than $200. The State Policy Network’s real goal is to keep the political machinations of the Koch network hidden from public scrutiny.

This is a thoroughly anti-democratic stance. Democracy is impotent if the electorate is uninformed. One of the most important pieces of information they can have is what interests are providing the financial backing for this or that candidate. This is true across the board. But this anti-democratic stance is now dogma in the bought-out GOP, openly promoted by the likes of Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz. The libertarian fanatics and hard-line conservatives on the radical right are working to erode the foundations of democracy and institute a system of oligarchic rule invincible to public rebuke. This campaign is being enacted behind a smoke-screen of unctuous patriot rhetoric and cruel misinformation. They are doing so because they know their fanatical ideology will not survive a public hearing. Few people want what they want. They don’t care. Their chief political aim is the establishment of a governing system built to ratify their will.

In all of this, there are real items of pressing public concern. They should be subject to open debate, not pressed through clandestine dealings and cynical political manipulation. The United States has plenty of problems. They should be addressed through the action of an informed electorate. Contrary to the political strategy and policy initiatives of the Koch network and modern Republican Party, this means more transparency and better public education.

There is a tradition in political discourse of couching debate in terms of the views held by the Founding Fathers. Personally, I consider this traditional mostly nonsensical, based in a breed of fallacious reasoning that holds that people in the past were somehow wiser or more intelligent that people today. Good arguments, of course, stand independent of their originators. But in deference to said tradition, it is worth pointing out that men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison were fierce advocates of government transparency and all favored some breed of public education. John Adams, for instance, wrote:

Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially of the lower class of people, are so extremely wise and useful, that, to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.

Insofar as we take defection from the views of the Founders as an indication of treasonous intent or anti-democratic spirit, the implication here is obvious. The Koch network and the modern Republic Party are open foes of democracy. Their devotion to secrecy and opposition to public education rob them of any right to claim to be acting in best interests of the American electorate, writ large.

By all means, include recalcitrant, hard-line conservatism and radical libertarian philosophy as items of debate in the endless contest over how best to accomplish the aims outlined in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence. No idea should be off the table and no rational person should ever expect the best solution to all problems to fall under one ideological umbrella. Those who argue otherwise are blinkered ideological fanatics and we should be wary of their influence. But those who would work in secret to undermine democracy in service of ideological fanaticism are something far worse: they are enemies of liberty, of the right to free expression and the tools of self-governance. They, more than anything, pose the most immediate threat to the American way of life.

  Further reading:

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  *It is worth noting, given the amount of space dedicated in this essay to a defense of majority rule, that this system is not without out its problems. As Christopher Achens and Larry Bartels outline in their excellent book, Democracy for Realists, a lot of voting behavior can be boiled down to myopic retrospection and tribalism. Voters tend to align according to political identity (am I a Liberal or a Conservative?) or choose candidates based on a shallow reading of well they have fared over the months directly preceding an election, regardless of how much their fortunes were actually impacted by the policies of the candidates under consideration.

Likewise, as critics of Nancy MacLean’s book have pointed out, ending institutionalized segregation would have been a longer battle – perhaps still underway – if matters had been left entirely to majority rule. In my view, all of this speaks well of the checks and balances the Founding Fathers built into the U.S. Constitution. It also argues strongly in favor of transparency and public education. I don’t see it as an argument in favor of abolishing majority rule in favor absolute sovereignty of property rights.

As a point of pure fantasy, I am partial to a system that weights votes according to competency. That is, everyone still gets a vote, but those who take the time to educate themselves above and beyond the average should get more of say. In practice, however, this also looks problematic. First, it’s easy to imagine such a system being gamed for partisan advantage. Indeed, a fair test that asked questions like “How old is the planet earth?” or “What is the scientific consensus on the causes of current patterns of climate change?”  would be instantly smeared by some critics as biased, because the correct answers to those questions run contrary to popular opinion in conservative circles. Second, voter competency might not be a good measure of a voter’s capacity to fairly judge candidates and policy – it would only be a measure of how much they know about them. Thanks to motivated reasoning, people are perfectly capable of drawing contradictory conclusions from the same body of evidence, according to existing biases.

  Unmasking Leviathan: The Radical Right’s Assault on American Democracy The world can be a scary place. This is a view exacerbated by popular media, which tends to focus attention on sources of violence and despair in disproportion to their prevalence.

[megwarart]

I didn't have good photos of these two pieces before because they were too big and parts got cropped out. 🖌🖌🖌 "Sensation and Perception" - Techniques associated with sensation and perception are used in art in a daily basis, such as linear perspective, interposition, and monocular cues; however, in this piece, phenomenas such as selective attention, blind spots, retinal disparity, prosopagnosia, sensory adaptation, and the Gestalt Theory are also referenced. - Oil - finished 1/6/17 - 3.5 ft x 4 ft - SOLD 🖌🖌🖌 "The Brink of Oblivion" - The line between a storied past and a persecuted present. 24" x 32" - Mixed Media - 3/12/17

[megwarart]

"Sensation and Perception" - Techniques associated with sensation and perception are used in art in a daily basis, such as linear perspective, interposition, and monocular cues; however, in this piece, phenomenas such as selective attention, blind spots, retinal disparity, prosopagnosia, sensory adaptation, and the Gestalt Theory are also referenced. - Oil - finished 1/6/17 - 3.5 ft x 4 ft - SOLD