People honestly and very wrongly believe that “you have to be an idiot to get into a cult.” The fact is that recruitment into these groups is done almost exclusively through emotional manipulation that bypasses a person’s IQ or critical thinking. In this short clip, I break down how this works. Enjoy!
Read More »Cults are About Feeling, Not Thinking
Scientologists are routinely noted by outsiders as being “happy” all the time (except for when they’re demanding at the top of their lungs that critics confess their crimes). What is up with them smiling and being so “up”? Is this real or what? Watch this short clip to find out. Enjoy!
Read More »Why Scientologists are So “Happy”
Today we’re going to talk about emotions and logic and critical thinking.
There are lots of videos and talks out there about logic vs emotion and how these are two different kinds of thinking, or how emotions mess up critical thinking and make it difficult for people to make good decisions or form accurate opinions. I disagree with that analysis because let’s be real: emotions are not something you can separate out or take away from people. Despite having very strong feelings on lots of different topics, people have been able to make perfectly valid and reasonable decisions about all kinds of things. Even Mr. Spock from Star Trek, the ultimate logical thinker, experienced a full range of emotions. He just suppressed the crap out of them because his people adopted a philosophy that emotions were bad. They had good reasons to think so, but as I think any psychologist would tell you, suppressing or denying how we feel only gets us into some real psychological messes and is not much of a solution for critical thinking.Read More »Do Emotions Impede Critical Thinking?