I'll bet you think that your attitudes towards "good" and "bad" are primarily influenced by your values, your upbringing, your culture, or maybe even a religion. But there are far more subtle influences that you probably aren't aware of. For example, did you that most people unconsciously associate "good" with their dominant hand side and "bad" with their other side?
It gets better: people who lose the use of their dominant hand tend to move the "good" over to the other side with the hand that still works. There's a simple test used for this: show people are cartoon character between two boxes and tell the subject that the character loves zebras and hates pandas, then ask them to place the animals in whatever box seems appropriate. The
The team then asked 55 right-handed students to wear a heavy glove on one hand while trying to stand up dominoes. When they were then asked the panda/zebra question, the students were five times more likely to put the zebra in the box corresponding to their mobile hand.
"If wearing a glove for a few minutes can reverse our decisions about what's good and bad, maybe the mind is more malleable than we thought" says Casasanto.
Source: New Scientist
Obviously this experiment didn't address "real" issues around "real" values like abortion and gay marriage... right? Well, not on the surface, but such experiments usually have something to say about "real" issues from an unexpected direction. That's the point: they bypass our usual filters and prejudices and thereby get us to reveal something true about ourselves that we'd probably rather not reveal.
On a very basic level, it appears that something as trivial as a heavy glove can influence how you make decisions about what's "good" and what's "bad." We already know that the weight of something can influence how seriously you take what's in it. Who knows what else is influencing your decisions about right and wrong, good and bad, without you realizing it. I'll bet you think that a lot of your conclusions about what's right and wrong are based entirely on reasoned arguments and evidence, right?
Well, maybe not.
As someone who once suffered from untreated depression, I am not at all surprised by these subtle (and even not-so-subtle) brain behaviors that bypass our reasoning filters. Mental functioning is probably best expressed on a continuum, with true mental illness on one end, ideal functioning on the other, and most of us wobbling about somewhere in-between based on level of alertness and other things that vary by circumstances. The classic example is someone posting something at 3 am, looking at it the next day, and saying “wow, I said that? I guess I was really tired!”
Is this really about right and wrong, or about bias towards own people, discriminating to prevent being discriminated against? It’s very likely the former right-handers only changed to calling the left the “good hand” because it was the only hand available to them. The same was true of those made to wear a heavy glove.
Forced behaviour from outside can heavily influence and affect people. I haven’t seen the movie “The King’s Speech” and don’t know if it’s mentioned, but forced righthandedness is the suspected reason why “Bertie” (a natural leftie) had a stammer. Not to be pedantic, but that was my own experience – parents and public school teachers attempting to force me to be righthanded with physical and mental abuse, and having a stammer as a child. Just look at the language and weighted words we use:
- “Gauche” means clumsy in English, and left in French.
- “Sinister” means evil, while “sinistre” means left in Spanish
- “Dextro-” means “right” in Latin, and “capable” in English
- “Right” originated in politics because the government sat on the right hand side of the speaker in the British parliament.
I’m not saying this is a left-versus-right issue. This is about a majority attempting to impose dominance and biased and insulting language on a minority, and can apply to anywhere. Remember Newt Gingrich’s idiotic statement about Spanish being “the language of poverty”?
It doesn’t even have to be a majority, discriminatory “thinking” can happen when a minority holds military power and uses violence against a larger population (e.g. Apartheid in South Africa, jews in Israel, etc.). Small wonder the far right in the US is panicking about the growing Hispanic demographic, how whites will be the minority within a few decades.
As I’ve said in other items on this site, religions are only peaceful when they are a minority. The majority only change their tune when they no longer hold power.
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