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This was addressed in the article: For Branden, the violent people Baumeister wrote about might have appeared confident, but underneath all that bluster they a
by karmacondon 12y ago
This was addressed in the article:
For Branden, the violent people Baumeister wrote about might have appeared confident, but underneath all that bluster they actually had low self-esteem.“One does not need to be a trained psychologist to know that some people with low self-esteem strive to compensate for their deficit by boasting, arrogance, and conceited behavior,” he wrote.
It's all a game of he said/she said. The bottom line is that the human mind is opaque. There's nothing easier than theorizing about something that can't be measured, or even directly observed.
- adekok 12y agoWhen something is unmeasurable, it's more properly placed in the realm of "magic" or maybe "philosophy". If people have unmeasurable low self-esteem, than the original theory is unfalsifiable, which means it's outside of the realm of science. Or, we can talk about reality. We can treat people like black boxes, and correlate their claims with their actions. This is called "psychology". The human mind is nowhere near opaque. http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/ http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/ With some work, a computer can determine the video a person is watching in an MRI. It's not perfect, but it's amazingly close. Saying "the human mind is opaque" is wishful thinking. It's magical thinking that somehow people (and thought) is different from everything else in the world. It's not. We're meat puppets.