Knee jerk

 

Knee jerks

This may not be terribly useful, but here goes anyway. It is something that I've written about before. The trouble is, I am relying upon memory, and memories can fail. If memory serves, then perhaps this could be useful.

The recollection is that human beings have psychological "knee-jerk" reactions to certain stimuli. There were six of these cited in a book, in which I cannot remember much else about. One of the authors names ( there may have been more than one author ) may have been Zimbardo.

One of the six was used as a possible explanation for the lack of response from the neighbors of a woman named Genovese, who was murdered in New York in the sixties. The story was this woman was screaming for somebody to help her, but nobody did. There was a lot of criticism of this failure to act, but it was something of a head scratcher. Why didn't anybody come to her aid?

The theory put forth in this book was that it was a knee-jerk reaction, of which there are six. I cannot remember all six, but one of them was called "social proof". What is social proof? In a novel situation, people do not always know what to do. In this situation, people may not have known what to do to help this lady. They looked around at others, and nobody was doing anything, so therefore that was their cue to respond likewise---voila, social proof.

A novel situation prevails today with this coronavirus. It is novel because there has not been anything like this in my lifetime, and I am in my sixties. What do you do? If social proof is of any validity, then people are taking their cues from what others are doing, and are acting the same way.

But there could be another knee jerk reaction mentioned in that book which could be at play. It is called authority. Yes, people do defer to authority. This is necessary for an orderly society, but when does it become unhelpful and even harmful? Well, it was not very helpful in dealing with the likes of Adolf Hitler when he assumed authority in Germany back in the 1930's. That failure led to the bloodiest war in history thus far.

Can you act against your own knee-jerk reactions? If knee-jerk reactions are the explanation for this seemingly mindless reaction to the coronavirus scare campaign, then we might be in some trouble if there is nothing that can counter it.

I'd like to think that human reason can help. All you can do is point to why this thing is not at all the way it is being hyped up as being, and people should be asking questions.

One thing that you don't want is to be the type of person who can only do knee jerk reactions. People can die from that too, you know. The lady Genovese did in New York back in the sixties, and millions died as a result of World War II. It is very important to let your higher faculties being put to use, if you have any.