Ohio State University

About: Ohio State University is a education organization based out in Columbus, Ohio, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 102421 authors who have published 222715 publications receiving 8373403 citations. The organization is also known as: Ohio State & The Ohio State University.

The totalitarian ego: Fabrication and revision of personal history.

Abstract: This article argues that (a) ego, or self, is an organization of knowledge, (b) ego is characterized by cognitive biases strikingly analogous to totalitarian information-control strategies, and (c) these totalitarian-ego biases junction to preserve organization in cognitive structures. Ego's cognitive biases are egocentricity (self as the focus of knowledge), "beneffectance" (perception of responsibility for desired, but not undesired, outcomes), and cognitive conservatism (resistance to cognitive change). In addition to being pervasively evident in recent studies of normal human cognition, these three biases are found in actively functioning, higher level organizations of knowledge, perhaps best exemplified by theoretical paradigms in science. The thesis that egocentricity, beneffectance, and conservatism act to preserve knowledge organizations leads to the proposal of an intrapsychic analog of genetic evolution, which in turn provides an alternative to prevalent motivational and informational interpretations of cognitive biases. The ego rejects the unbearable idea together with its associated affect and behaves as if the idea had never occurred to the person at all. (Freud, 1894/1959, p. 72) Alike with the individual and the group, the past is being continually re-made, reconstructed in the interests of the present. (Bartlett, 1932, p. 309) As historians of our own lives we seem to be, on the one hand, very inattentive and, on the other, revisionists who will justify the present by changing the past. (Wixon & Laird, 1976, p. 384) "Who controls the past," ran the Party slogan, "controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." (Orwell, 1949, p. 32) What follows is a portrait of self (or ego—the terms are used interchangeably) constructed by interweaving strands drawn from several areas of recent research. The most striking features of the portrait are three cognitive biases, which correspond disturbingly to thought control and propaganda devices that are considered to be defining characteristics of a totalitarian political system. The epithet for ego, Vol. 35, No. 7, 603-618 totalitarian, was chosen only with substantial reservation because of this label's pejorative connotations. Interestingly, characteristics that seem undesirable in a political system can nonetheless serve adaptively in a personal organization of knowledge. The conception of ego as an organization of knowledge synthesizes influences from three sources —empirical, literary, and theoretical. First, recent empirical demonstrations of self-relevant cognitive biases suggest that the biases play a role in some fundamental aspect of personality. Second, George Orwell's 1984 suggests the analogy between ego's biases and totalitarian information control. Last, the theories of Loevinger (197,6) and Epstein (1973) suggest the additional analogy between ego's organization and theoretical organizations of scientific knowledge. The first part of this article surveys evidence indicating that ego's cognitive biases are pervasive in and characteristic of normal personalities. The second part sets forth arguments for interpreting the biases as manifestations of an effectively functioning organization of knowledge. The last section develops an explanation for the totalitarian-ego biases by analyzing their role in maintaining cognitive organization and in supporting effective behavior. /. Three Cognitive Biases: Fabrication and Revision of Personal History Ego, as an organization of knowledge (a conclusion to ,be developed later), serves the functions of observing (perceiving) and recording (remembering) personal experience; it can be characterized, therefore, as a personal historian. Many findings Acknowledgments are given at the end of the article. Requests for reprints should be sent to Anthony G. Greenwald, Department of Psychology, Ohio State University, 404C West 17th Avenue, Columbus, Ohio 43210. AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST • JULY 1980 • 603 Copyright 1980 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0003-066X/80/3507-0603$00.75 from recent research in personality, cognitive, and social psychology demonstrate that ego fabricates and revises history, thereby engaging in practices not ordinarily admired in historians. These lapsesin personal scholarship, or cognitive biases, are discussed below in three categories: egocentricity (self perceived as more central to events than it is)', "beneffectance" (self perceived as selectively responsible for desired, but not undesired, outcomes), and conservatism (resistance to cognitive

Clinical Practice Guidelines for the Prevention and Management of Pain, Agitation/Sedation, Delirium, Immobility, and Sleep Disruption in Adult Patients in the ICU

Abstract: Objective:To update and expand the 2013 Clinical Practice Guidelines for the Management of Pain, Agitation, and Delirium in Adult Patients in the ICU.Design:Thirty-two international experts, four methodologists, and four critical illness survivors met virtually at least monthly. All section groups g

Spectroscopic Target Selection in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: The Main Galaxy Sample

Abstract: We describe the algorithm that selects the main sample of galaxies for spectroscopy in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) from the photometric data obtained by the imaging survey. Galaxy photometric properties are measured using the Petrosian magnitude system, which measures flux in apertures determined by the shape of the surface brightness profile. The metric aperture used is essentially independent of cosmological surface brightness dimming, foreground extinction, sky brightness, and the galaxy central surface brightness. The main galaxy sample consists of galaxies with r-band Petrosian magnitudes r ≤ 17.77 and r-band Petrosian half-light surface brightnesses μ50 ≤ 24.5 mag arcsec-2. These cuts select about 90 galaxy targets per square degree, with a median redshift of 0.104. We carry out a number of tests to show that (1) our star-galaxy separation criterion is effective at eliminating nearly all stellar contamination while removing almost no genuine galaxies, (2) the fraction of galaxies eliminated by our surface brightness cut is very small (~0.1%), (3) the completeness of the sample is high, exceeding 99%, and (4) the reproducibility of target selection based on repeated imaging scans is consistent with the expected random photometric errors. The main cause of incompleteness is blending with saturated stars, which becomes more significant for brighter, larger galaxies. The SDSS spectra are of high enough signal-to-noise ratio (S/N > 4 per pixel) that essentially all targeted galaxies (99.9%) yield a reliable redshift (i.e., with statistical error less than 30 km s-1). About 6% of galaxies that satisfy the selection criteria are not observed because they have a companion closer than the 55'' minimum separation of spectroscopic fibers, but these galaxies can be accounted for in statistical analyses of clustering or galaxy properties. The uniformity and completeness of the galaxy sample make it ideal for studies of large-scale structure and the characteristics of the galaxy population in the local universe.