How is it possible that a group of highly educated researchers never heard anyone say, “An idle mind is the Devil’s workshop”?
Did Pfattheicher, Lazarevic, Westgate, and Schindler of Aarhus University not have grandmothers? Those four published a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology entitled “On the Relation of Boredom and Sadistic Aggression.” * Surely, someone along the paths of their development said something about idleness.
The researchers claim to have shed some light on why people troll people online and perform physically sadistic acts that I will allow you to list from your experiential catalog of human behaviors. They do acknowledge that there are some people who have high dispositional sadism, that is, that some people are pathologically sadistic. Such people appear to be continuously motivated to hurt others. But for the rest of humanity? Well, that's where boredom plays its role.
Who hasn’t seen train cars with graffiti? Who hasn’t seen a few scenes from a teen movie with “mean” girls? Who hasn’t heard of MS-13 atrocities? Or those atrocities of World War II's Nazis in Europe and Japanese soldiers in Manchuria, Sadam Hussein’s sons in Iraq, or ISIS’s terrorists throughout their brief Caliphate? Given boredom and power over others, people live in the Devil’s workshop. I know that because my grandmother told me, and my mother, and my teachers, and my experiences, all telling me that boredom leads in many instances to bad behavior, including cruelty.
With Stanislav Andreski, ** a critic of social science, I keep wondering why social scientists and social psychologists just keep pointing out the obvious. Are they bored?
*Pfattheicher, S., et al. 2021. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 121(3), 573-600. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000335. Accessed January 15, 2022.
**Andreski, Stanislav. (1972) Social Science as Sorcery. London: Andre Deutsch.
Did Pfattheicher, Lazarevic, Westgate, and Schindler of Aarhus University not have grandmothers? Those four published a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology entitled “On the Relation of Boredom and Sadistic Aggression.” * Surely, someone along the paths of their development said something about idleness.
The researchers claim to have shed some light on why people troll people online and perform physically sadistic acts that I will allow you to list from your experiential catalog of human behaviors. They do acknowledge that there are some people who have high dispositional sadism, that is, that some people are pathologically sadistic. Such people appear to be continuously motivated to hurt others. But for the rest of humanity? Well, that's where boredom plays its role.
Who hasn’t seen train cars with graffiti? Who hasn’t seen a few scenes from a teen movie with “mean” girls? Who hasn’t heard of MS-13 atrocities? Or those atrocities of World War II's Nazis in Europe and Japanese soldiers in Manchuria, Sadam Hussein’s sons in Iraq, or ISIS’s terrorists throughout their brief Caliphate? Given boredom and power over others, people live in the Devil’s workshop. I know that because my grandmother told me, and my mother, and my teachers, and my experiences, all telling me that boredom leads in many instances to bad behavior, including cruelty.
With Stanislav Andreski, ** a critic of social science, I keep wondering why social scientists and social psychologists just keep pointing out the obvious. Are they bored?
*Pfattheicher, S., et al. 2021. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 121(3), 573-600. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000335. Accessed January 15, 2022.
**Andreski, Stanislav. (1972) Social Science as Sorcery. London: Andre Deutsch.
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