The point of the article is to disassociate oxytocin from causing a specific emotion. The point is that oxytocin does not cause a specific emotion, rather how it contributes towards feeling specific emotions.
theowl
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A brain can only focus on so many things at one time. Attention is considered a resource. Thus oxytocin promotes paying more attention to people’s facial expressions rather than other things happening around there.
Thanks for clarifying the complaint. Is there a recommended way to fix the formatting? I copied and pasted it from my blog. I didn’t realize that there was a specific format to follow.
The Mr. Hyde of Oxytocin
Mind fallacy plays a greater role in how we interpret other people’s thinking, like what is their framework for making decisions. Mind fallacy has us believe that everyone else has the same terminal values and goals.
For instance, I suffer from mind fallacy in the sense that my system 1 believes that everyone has the goal of having a very tidy and efficiently run household. As soon as the dishwasher has finished drying the clean dishes, I find it logical to then immediately put away the dishes to make room for any dirty dishes. Not promptly putting away dishes creates more work and wastes time because one will eventually have to put the dishes away anyhow, and delaying doing so will create the extra task of putting dirty dishes in sink, then transferring into dishwasher. Mind fallacy has me believe that everyone else sees how promptly putting away dishes is the ideal method and the one that should be done.
Mind fallacy has a role in how we interpret ambiguous social cues or sentences that are not uber precise. My boyfriend was once asked by his housemates if he is okay with sharing his bath towel. Due to his mental framework, he interpreted the question as ‘In the rare instances that someone in the house is in need of a towel (like a guest coming over, laundry machine broke and towel is drenched in water), can we use yours?’. He interpreted the question in that way because of mind fallacy. According to his mental framework, people prefer using their own towels and it didn’t occur to correctly interpret the question as, ‘Is it okay we if we use your bath towel everyday instead of having our own?’
Mind fallacy leads to misunderstanding and misinterpretations because it causes us to assume that others share our same values. Even under mind fallacy, one can appreciate that people think differently and have a different method to accomplish goals, but mind fallacy has one assuming that the goal is the same.
Hi All, I live at the LW Boston house, the Citadel. My undergrad and grad was in Biology, and I am switching into programming. I am interested in psychology and cognitive biases. I value self-improvement and continuous learning. I recently started blogging at https://evolvingwithtechnology.wordpress.com.
By ambiguous social cues, I am referring to neutral expressions and other expressions that can be interpreted in different ways. The facial expression of concentrating can look like one of disapproval. Here’s a link to a research article to the type of social cues I am referring to: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18729619 and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16643844.