How to Talk to Anyone (Junior Talker #4), DeYtH Banger [ebook reader screen .txt] 📗

Assumptions

 

Humanistic psychology begins with the existential assumptions that people have free will:

Personal agency is the humanistic term for the exercise of free will.  Personal agency refers to the choices we make in life, the paths we go down and their consequences.

People are basically good, and have an innate need to make themselves and the world better:

The humanistic approach emphasizes the personal worth of the individual, the centrality of human values, and the creative, active nature of human beings.

The approach is optimistic and focuses on noble human capacity to overcome hardship, pain and despair.

People are motivated to self-actualize:

Self-actualization concerns psychological growth, fulfillment and satisfaction in life.

Both Rogers and Maslow regarded personal growth and fulfillment in life as a basic human motive. This means that each person, in different ways, seeks to grow psychologically and continuously enhance themselves.

However, Rogers and Maslow both describe different ways of how self-actualization can be achieved.

The subjective, conscious experiences of the individual is most important:

Humanistic psychologists argue that objective reality is less important than a person's subjective perception and understanding of the world.

Sometimes the humanistic approach is called phenomenological. This means that personality is studied from the point of view of the individual’s subjective experience.

For Rogers the focus of psychology is not behavior (Skinner), the unconscious (Freud), thinking (Wundt) or the human brain but how individuals perceive and interpret events. Rogers is therefore important because he redirected psychology towards the study of the self.

Humanism rejects scientific methodology:

Rogers and Maslow placed little value on scientific psychology, especially the use of the psychology laboratory to investigate both human and animal behavior.

 

Humanism rejects scientific methodology like experiments and typically uses qualitative research methods.  For example, diary accounts, open-ended questionnaires, unstructured interviews and unstructured observations.

Qualitative research is useful for studies at the individual level, and to find out, in depth, the ways in which people think or feel (e.g. case studies).

The way to really understand other people is to sit down and talk with them, share their experiences and be open to their feelings.

Humanism rejected comparative psychology (the study of animals) because it does not tell us anything about the unique properties of human beings:

Humanism views human beings as fundamentally different from other animals, mainly because humans are conscious beings capable of thought, reason and language. 

 

For humanistic psychologists’ research on animals, such as rats, pigeons, or monkeys held little value. 

Research on such animals can tell us, so they argued, very little about human thought, behavior and experience.

 

 

methods of study.

 

Critical Evaluation

 

The humanistic approach has been applied to relatively few areas of psychology compared to the other approaches.  Therefore, its contributions are limited to areas such as therapy, abnormality, motivation and personality.

A possible reasons for this lack of impact on academic psychology perhaps lies with the fact that humanism deliberately adopts a non-scientific approach to studying humans. Humanistic psychologists rejected a rigorous scientific approach to psychology because they saw it as dehumanizing and unable to capture the richness of conscious experience.  In many ways the rejection of scientific psychology in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s was a backlash to the dominance of the behaviorist approach in North American psychology. For example their belief in free-will is in direct opposition to the deterministic laws of science.

Also, the areas investigated by humanism, such as consciousness and emotion are very difficult to scientifically study.  The outcome of such scientific limitations means that there is a lack of empirical evidence to support the key theories of the approach.

However, the flip side to this is that humanism can gain a better insight into an individual's behavior through the use of qualitative methods, such as unstructured interviews.  The approach also helped to provide a more holistic view of human behavior, in contrast to the reductionist position of science.

Chapter 8 - Bill Maher (WORLD OF JOKES) (Part 1)

 New Rule: You’re never going to pick up women at a coffee shop pretending to be working on your laptop. You don’t look like you’re sensitive; you look like you’re homeless. The last guy to pick up a chick with an Apple was Adam. And when you sit across from another dateless loser with a laptop, it still doesn’t look like you’re working—it looks like you’re playing Battleship.


New Rule: Stop bringing me the phone book. The last time anyone even needed a phone book was 1988. And that was a cop using it to beat a suspect.

New Rule: If your doctor pulls on rubber gloves and then a condom, there’s something wrong. An Oregon woman is suing her doctor, claiming he had intercourse with her as “treatment” for her lower-back pain. Call me a traditionalist, but I prefer when doctors screw their patients the old-fashioned way—by giving them the bill.

New Rule: Anyone who whines about America losing its freedoms must watch any Jackass movie. This is a country where you can still Super Glue a midget to a fat guy and set off fireworks inside your ass. If that’s cramping your style, Tea Baggers, then move to Holland.



New Rule: Stop calling bagpipes a musical instrument. They’re actually a Scottish Breathalyzer test. You blow into one end, and if the sound that comes out the other end doesn’t make you want to kill yourself—you’re not drunk enough.


New Rule: If you get to bring your baby into the public swimming pool, I get to follow you home and piss in his bathwater.


New Rule: Just because you’re drunk and it’s October, it doesn’t make it Octoberfest. When you drink in November, it’s not Novemberfest. It’s just Thanksgiving, and you hate your relatives. Besides, we already know what happens when people get drunk and start acting like Germans.

 

 

Overall health: seventy-second. Freedom of the press: forty-fourth. Literacy: fifty-fifth. Do you realize there are twelve-year-old kids in this country who can’t spell the name of the teacher they’re having sex with?
America has done many great things. Making the New World democratic. The Marshall Plan. Curing polio. Beating Hitler. The deep-fried Twinkie. But what have we done for us lately? We’re not the freest country. That would be Holland, where you can smoke hash in church and Janet Jackson’s nipple is on their flag.
And sadly, we’re no longer a country that can get things done. Not big things. Like building a tunnel under Boston, or running a war with competence. We had six years to fix the voting machines; couldn’t get that done. The FBI is just now getting e-mail.

DEATH TO POOCHY
 
New Rule: Don’t feel bad that the Taco Bell Chihuahua died. Yes, the Taco Bell Chihuahua has gone to his great reward in the ground. Oddly enough, the cause of death? Taco Bell. But don’t worry, fans. If you would like to visit the dog’s remains, just order a Burrito Grande.

ORWELL THAT ENDS WELL

New Rule: Liberals must stop saying President Bush hasn’t asked Americans to sacrifice for the war on terror. On the contrary, he’s asked us to sacrifice something enormous: our civil rights. When I heard George Bush was reading my e-mails, I probably had the same reaction you did: “George Bush can read?” Yes, he can, and this administration has read your phone records, credit-card statements, mail, Internet logs—I can’t tell if they’re fighting a war on terror or producing the next season of Cheaters. I mail myself a copy of the Constitution every morning just on the hope they’ll open it and see what it says.
So when it comes to sacrifice, don’t kid yourself: You have given up a lot. You’ve given up faith in your government’s honesty, the goodwill of people overseas, and six-tenths of the Bill of Rights. Here’s what you’ve sacrificed: search and seizure, warrants, self-incrimination, trial by jury, cruel and unusual punishment; here’s what you have left: handguns, religion, and they can’t make you quarter a British soldier. If Prince Harry invades the Inland Empire, he has to bring a tent.
In previous wars, Americans on the home front made a very different kind of sacrifice. During World War II, we endured rationing, paid higher taxes, bought war bonds. In the interest of national unity, people even pretended Bob Hope was funny. Women donated their silk undergarments so they could be sewn into parachutes—can you.

imagine nowadays a Britney Spears or a Lindsay Lohan going without underwear? Okay, bad example.
George Bush has never been too bright about furreners, but he does know Americans. He asked this generation to sacrifice the things he knew we wouldn’t miss: our privacy and our morality. He let us keep the money. But he made a cynical bet that we wouldn’t much care if we became a “big brother” country that has now tortured a lot of random people. And yet no one asks the tough questions, like: “Is torture necessary?” “Who will watch the watchers?” and “When does Jack Bauer go to the bathroom?” It’s been five years; is he wearing one of those astronaut diapers?
After 9/11, President Bush told us Osama bin Laden could run but he couldn’t hide. But then he ran, and hid, so Bush went to plan B: pissing on the Constitution.

Conservatives always say the great thing Reagan did was make us feel good about America again. Do you feel good about America now? I’ll give you my answer, and to get it out of me, you don’t even have to hold my head under water and have a snarling guard dog rip my nuts off. No, I don’t feel very good about that. They say that evil happens when good men do nothing. And the Democrats prove it also happens when mediocre people do nothing.

Chapter 8.1. - Bill Maher (WORLD OF JOKES) (Part 2)

 So enjoy these New New Rules now, while they’re fresh. Because I find the world is changing much more quickly than I can bitch about it.

New Rule: If you tweet neat stuff about your life for your friends to read more than ten times a day, I can tell you a neat fact about your friends: They hate you!

New Rule: Waiters must stop saying, “Did you save room for dessert?” This is America. We don’t save room for dessert, we make room for dessert. Dessert isn’t a delightful way to cap off a meal, it’s a challenge. In Russia they swim in subzero temperatures, in Spain they run with the bulls, and here we eat forty pounds of goo from a place called The Cheesecake Factory.

New Rule: The kid behind me on the plane who’s kicking my seat must put that energy to good use and beat the shit out of the kid in front of me on the plane who’s playing peekaboo.

New Rule: Halloween must replace July Fourth as our National Holiday. Forget fireworks.