What Comes Around Goes Around

I've been thinking a little more about the therapy session a couple days ago. I am still bothered by some of the comments encountered in that group. One of the comments was “What Comes Around goes Around.” That statement was used in reference to my assertion that alpha males/bullies are accepted by society and they may even get ahead in life. To this a member of the group disagreed citing that old afore mentioned statement. The instructor agreed stating that they had more experience than I.

I am not very good at articulating in spoken words how I see a certain idea. I need to time think about why I feel they was I feel about something and I feel that their equivocating what happens to alpha males/bullies to karma is a type of illusory pattern perception.

Before I go further I should explain that there is some truth to the statement “What comes around goes around” on social grounds. Treat people bad, for example, and they are likely to treat you bad as well. I get the feeling, however, knowing that both the group leader and that individual group member are Christians, that they attach a magical karma like connotation to that statement as if there is some higher power ready to exact justice. Because of this I think the instructor is biased towards attributing alpha male hardships to something magical when the truth is all kinds of people, alpha bully or not, face hardships.

 Let’s now take a detour around this topic one moment.

Illusory Pattern Perception

A psychologist named Jennifer A. Whitson published a study in Science magazine relating to belief in god and Illusory Pattern Perception in 2008. You can actually read the full journal article yourself at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/322/5898/115.full if you sign up for a free account. One of the experiments mentioned by the study caught my eye. In the second set of experiments there were two groups of participants. Both groups were supposed to identify whether or not there was an embedded image in white noise. Think of a TV without a signal. Some of the images did have an embedded image, some of them didn't   The groups differed in the type of feedback they received when answering whether or not there was an image. One group received accurate feedback about their answers. In other words, if a participant correctly answered that there was an embedded image in the white noise, they would be told they were correct. The other group received random feedback about their answers that may or may not be accurate.

The result was that the group who did not receive correct feedback were more likely to see images in the white noise that was not there than did the group who received accurate feedback. What the researched gleaned from this is that in a world of lack of control humans resort to seeing illusory patterns in the chaos. The TV show, Through the Wormhole, took this a little further and suggested that people who lack control in their lives are more likely to perceived events as pertaining to acts of God (in other words, Illusory pattern perception), than people who have more control. It further went on to suggest that this might be why impoverished countries citizens are more likely to believe in God than wealthier countries.

Back to the main topic.

So you see then, when I hear people say “What comes around goes around” with a karma like connotation, I think they are having illusory pattern perceptions.

This kind of insight is why I have issues with DBT. When I hear psychologist throwing around the terms like “magical thinking,” I am generally annoyed by the fact that they themselves exhibit this magical thinking in the form of religious beliefs. It is just that their magical thinking is more socially acceptable. The hypocrisy of it all!