EPTRelating to your point about people performing worse when they know about "the odds" against them, it might stand to reason that the less space occupied in someone's mind by such existential questions, the more effective they are in making decisions; i.e. objectifying self-betterment; shaping one's will and existence into an idea rather than an ego. That's just a thought that comes out of my own experience.
Measuring Ability to Reason - Page 2
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tsuxiit
1305 Posts
Relating to your point about people performing worse when they know about "the odds" against them, it might stand to reason that the less space occupied in someone's mind by such existential questions, the more effective they are in making decisions; i.e. objectifying self-betterment; shaping one's will and existence into an idea rather than an ego. That's just a thought that comes out of my own experience. | ||
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poundcakes
Norway239 Posts
I am not a psychologist or neuroscientist so I cannot imagine a scientific measurement of human reasoning, let alone how that reasoning differs while undergoing depression. | ||
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7mk
Germany10157 Posts
But life decisions arent decided like an experimental test that you fill out in 1 hour, you think of them for a longer period of time, and you dont think about them only when youre malnourished or constantly tired. Depression on the other hand can stick with you for the entire day, and that for weeks, months.. Sure, you might be smarter than a lot of psychologists, but your decisions might still be different to the decisions you yourself would make in a healthy state of mind. I'm kinda puzzled by your mentioning of your self-authority being taken away, cause one can only take wild guesses at what exactly you mean by that. It's not like a doctor can force you to do anything, unless he thinks you're in immediate danger of hurting yourself or others. But like you say, some decisions are better not because of ones ability to reason, but because of ones experience and knowledge, and that is something that a psychologist or a psychiatrist will most likely be good at, and there are things that are just typical for depressed patients, that they dont see things the way they would if they were healthy. | ||
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Zaragon
Sweden235 Posts
The problem is that you can’t know about someone else. You can think you have a good idea, but you have to think very similarly to the person yourself to be sure you can see some things from the same angle—the same angle plus other angles that they can’t see. That is very rare unless the person has blind spots that you can help them find for themselves (which I suppose is a basic description of when therapy works). I don’t see any kind of test or criteria that covers it all short of observing severe self-destructive behavior, at which point it might be too late. But that is probably a risk we have to take. Personally, well, my depression is not as bad as it once was. These days it’s combined with cognitive issues related to MS though. But even when the two combine at their worst, so far I know myself far better than anyone else possibly could even if they studied me for a lifetime. I know very well what you mean about making decisions. It’s extremely frustrating. I never think completely like myself and am always aware of it. You can’t sit around hoping to feel better before you do something at a certain point. Nor can you struggle for huge amounts of time with each decision to work yourself around to what that decision really “should” be. But I have to take time thinking about everything that I once would have left to impulse or intuition. As a result, I’m aware that I think things through much longer than most people do. Are my decisions more reasonable than most, or less reasonable since they are not a hundred percent true to what I want? Well, I don’t know. I do know that I’m by far the most qualified person to decide for myself, and have been even in my darkest hours. The enormous amount of context (self-knowledge more so than any exterior circumstances) I always put to every decision I make means that whatever my emotions say, they’re unable to pull a decision out of my hands. Of course, the context, both self-knowledge and circumstances, change with time. I don’t believe that people ever stay the same, only some aspects of them do, and those aspects different from person to person. If you have an extended problem that affects your reasoning, then that context warps over time. But I personally believe that if you’re aware of that, aware of it all--the entire process, then you can always prevent the warping. Then you’re always the best person to make decisions for yourself. Others can only guess at when that process fails. This is a generalization and I know it—I apologize in advance to psychologists and therapists that don’t fall into this category—but from my experience most trained professionals don’t know how to identify when a person’s self-perception and reasoning are working. They look for blind spots, they look for ways a problem usually works. When a person doesn’t seem to be finding blind spots—from the beginning or after a time—they work under the assumption that the person’s self-perception and self-knowledge have flaws. They may often be right to some degree, but I feel that assumption heavily influences their perception of when decision-making is impaired. If they make any assumption like that, and if they’re wrong in either direction, it means disaster. In an ideal world, every professional could identify when long-term self-knowledge is being warped and simply help reinforce it rather than even consider taking decisions away. But all of us are human. Some people do lose their ability to make rational decisions. I think for the foreseeable future, it’s going to be something we have to fight for. I guess the deciding point is whether you can fight for it, for better or worse. | ||
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divito
Canada1213 Posts
People with the ability to control their emotions, or to be "cold," as society likes to blanket them with, are statistically able to make tougher and more rationed decisions in situations; like the aspects of triage and other critical thinking exercises. Now as you bring up, there's no way to say whether a depressed person will be more hampered with X decision in their state of mind versus Y decision. I may be able to decide a meal just fine as a depressed person, whereas changing my career path, or taking up a reasonably questionable hobby points to an obvious red flag given my state of mind. Critically, one would reflect that they'd prefer to become healthy before making such a decision, rather than promptly doing it during an unhealthy phase of their life. | ||
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dnld12
United States324 Posts
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Chef
10810 Posts
The only issue I take is that you insist there is a 'correct' decision (or perhaps you don't mean it that way, it is consistently your choice of words). But this is a matter of perspective. Taking your example of the psychiatrist and the patient disagreeing. From the psychiatrist point of view, maybe the correct decision is whatever makes you most functional in society. From the patient point of view, maybe that is unacceptable because he or she views the functions of society as unhealthy or disturbing. One big reason I avoid this profession. It's not that psychology is bullshit, as some less astute posters have mentioned. It's that the conclusions you can come to from psychological studies are limited, and certain professionals (and indeed amateurs) go far beyond what they are capable of determining. The studies you mention about people doing worse on tests when reminded of negative stereotypes regarding their ability to take the test... That's legit. You can apply it and just not remind people of those stereotypes and you will improve scores and people's lives a lot. What you can't do is take a study that is based on the general population of relatively healthy adults, and apply to an individual with very specific problems. Not all depressed people are alike, is my basic point... | ||
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PrinceXizor
United States17713 Posts
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guN-viCe
United States687 Posts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism Studies by psychologists Alloy and Abramson (1979) and Dobson and Franche (1989) suggested that depressed people appear to have a more realistic perception of their importance, reputation, locus of control, and abilities than those who are not depressed. | ||
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urashimakt
United States1591 Posts
On July 02 2012 08:41 guN-viCe wrote: I'm not convinced that being "depressed" reduces one's ability to reason (though, in some cases it clearly does). "Depression" is a broad word. There are multiple types of depression as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism So then the reality of our situations must be really depressing. | ||
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Saechiis
Netherlands4989 Posts
Unfortunately for us, our consciousness is but a tiny fraction of our brain's processing power, yet it is all we really have (or are aware of), so we give it an exorbitant amount of weight in our interaction with the physical world. Our subconcious does all the decision making, whereas our conscious mind just gets the press release and gives it it's own spin of logic (since it doesn't know where the answer came from). In that context it's hard to say that anyone has any real control over their decision making and it suggests that humans can't objectively judge abstract concepts at all, or rather, they can't tell whether they're being rational. It will require a total understanding of the brains processes before we can even deduce how our subconscious mind weighs decisions. I'm not even sure whether we'll ever reach a point where we can (literally) read our own mind, let alone be capable of fathoming the millions of variables that influence our decision to eat a banana or not. For now you can argue that an emotionally detached person will make better decisions than an emotionally engaged person, since the subconscious weights emotions into its decision making (even though the conscious mind might reason otherwise). But even that is just an attempt at approximating the truth. | ||
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Wampaibist
United States478 Posts
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EpeenKingPrime
Netherlands61 Posts
On July 02 2012 04:39 Th1rdEye wrote: Why don't we all just put our lives on hold until it's the way we want it.. wait...don't we have to make changes now to get there? Well said sir. If you don't know when your depression will end (which I think should be in most cases), then you can't just stop making important decisions. | ||
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AySz88
United States83 Posts
I don't think utilization, in this context, is necessarily conscious - for example, depression skews one's interpretation of difficulty and probability (basically, where you fall between optimism and pessimism), and it's very hard to catch and convince oneself that you have to, say, write things down or revisit your interpretations of events. In general, even when judging rationally, the human brain takes a lot of shortcuts to be efficient (taking various things for granted, using archetypes, etc.), and it's those shortcuts that get affected by depression. There certainly are various experiments out there that can point out peoples' cognitive biases, and I would imagine those could become more or less pronounced depending on depression. YourMorals.Org has a few of those. I would point out specific ones, but I worry that might bias results if you end up "trying too hard". (Be sure to hit "complete list of studies" at the bottom of the list of studies, which opens up both current and past surveys.) Also, I'd point out that the alternative isn't necessarily to have someone else make the decision for you - the antidote might just be to have a friend there helping make the decision with you, to keep oneself honest, so to speak. [edited to add] I should note that this is all speaking from my own experience; not an expert, etc. [edit2 to add] I'd beware of tests that just test ability - this context doesn't call for something like an Alzheimer's screening test, for example, even though that sort of thing does literally test ability to reason. It needs to be something that tests how well you use your ability to reason. I have little doubt in any SC2 player's technical ability to reason... :p [edits] clarifications, rewordings, formatting... | ||
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ImDrizzt
Norway427 Posts
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meeple
Canada10211 Posts
Time and time again I watch him argue with himself about a certain decision... and it almost never fails to go wrongly.. He spends time making charts and weighing pros and cons when most others would simply go with their gut feeling... Everything that he does, "should" turn out for the best... so why doesn't it? | ||
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EchelonTee
United States5244 Posts
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UniversalSnip
9871 Posts
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Jinsho
United Kingdom3101 Posts
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xavra41
United States220 Posts
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