Rami Gabriel
Associate Professor of Psychology, Columbia College Chicago
Rami Gabriel studies the philosophy of psychology and is founding fellow at the Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture at Columbia College Chicago. He is the author of Why I Buy: Self, Taste, and Consumer Society in America (2013) and co-author with Stephen Asma of The Emotional Mind: Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition (2019). His forthcoming book, A Suspicious Science: The Uses of Psychology, will be published by Oxford University Press.
Written by Rami Gabriel
essay
Self-improvement
The self-help game
Millions believe that pop psychology can change their tennis skills, their love life or their moods. Are they all wrong?
Rami Gabriel
idea
Medicine
Do psychotropic drugs enhance, or diminish, human agency?
Rami Gabriel
essay
Human evolution
United by feelings
Universal emotions are the deep engine of human consciousness and the basis of our profound affinity with other animals
Stephen T Asma & Rami Gabriel
essay
Neuroscience
Myth and the mind
Saturated with rites and symbols, psychology feeds a deep human need once nourished by mythology
Rami Gabriel
Fringe theories stack
Rami GabrielThanks for another thought-provoking essay, Michael.
A couple things came to mind: one was Quine’s structural epistemology with the core of ideas massively connected and thus impervious to changes. The ideas farther out, the fringe, being less connected and thus more likely to be modified. Freud’s cathexis model also shimmers into mind here, the higher the stack the more highly cathected individuals become against the psychic disturbance of ideas that do not conform. A psychologist (and increasingly, big data demographers) may argue that the likelihood of adopting fringe positions is most pragmatically explained as the effect of emotional factors, like insecurity, anger, ressentime...