June 2024 Author Spotlight

First of all, happy Summer Solstice to you!

Secondly, thank you to all those who submitted for our June Author Spotlight. If you want to submit something for July, submit your work here.

We’re switching gears this month and getting academic! Cognitive neuroscientist Isabel Torres is our June Author Spotlight. She is also the guest on our latest episode of the Moxie Press Podcast, which you can watch here and listen here.

Here is an excerpt from a piece she wrote in graduate school. Enjoy!

Dismantling Collective Narcissism By Boosting Self-Esteem

by Isabel A. Torres

Controlled processing was studied specifically in relation to police officers and the racial bias in their decision to shoot a potential civilian or assailant. When studying the psychology of learning, many studies focus on the development of automatic learned behaviors. In their work studying latencies in police reaction time, Correll et.al. asserted that despite holding preconceived racial biases, they were able to correctly identify civilians vs assailants by consciously focusing their attention on key cues to compensate for their bias (Correll, 2007). For example, prompting yourself to look for more cues to assess the perceived threat after first noticing that the person has dark skin. 

While officers showed a significant amount of bias in their decision to shoot, they were better able to delineate between armed and unarmed subjects than regular civilians, suggesting that training can increase controlled processing proficiency(2007). The authors further elaborated that it was unclear what kind of training reliably helped people to perform better in racial bias tasks utilizing controlled processing. 

I propose that training individuals to utilize controlled processing in intergroup interactions can help create an internal system of checks and balances in the way we express our biases. Biases and generalizations about the world around us are natural consequences of our brain’s attempt to conserve energy and process information efficiently. Instead of fighting those innate cognitive mechanisms, I propose that we have to find ways to redirect and harness them for community building. An apt analogy is that we cannot stop a river from flowing; we can only redirect the current. In fact, if the right geographical structure is present, rivers can flow south to north like the Nile or flow simultaneously in different directions like the Hudson. 

In psychology and human society, redirecting maladaptive prejudiced biases starts with building a healthy self-esteem and in-group satisfaction structure. In the same vein that someone can not put what they need to in a romantic relationship if they don’t love themselves; people cannot dismantle their own prejudiced beliefs about others until they dismantle the prejudiced beliefs they hold against themselves. For example, a white, straight man who is successful in his career may view an asian queer woman who is successful in their career as cold competition who is competent but isn’t “smart like him”. Collective narcissism would prompt this individual to view the other person as competition and simultaneously as inferior. In this case, the woman is perceived as having too much agency in one area of her life (like her career) but not enough warmth or agency in others (having a child). This “punching down” behavior is a reflection of an individual’s fear that their in-group, and by association, themselves will be dismissed in the same way others are. 

In order to redirect this maladaptive projection to productive introspection, one first has to accept the following conclusions: 

Stage 1: I am not perfect, nor am I able to perfectly embody all of the values of my community (good and bad).

Stage 2: People in my community can have experiences I never thought possible. 

Stage 3: The lived experience of people inside my group  is not the only one of value or the only one that strives for the pursuit of happiness 

Stage 4: People within my group deserve altruism because they are people, not because of their identification with a particular group. 

Stage 5: People outside my community can have experiences I never thought possible. 

Stage 6: The lived experience of people outside in my group is not the only one of value or the only one that strives for the pursuit of happiness. 

Stage 7: People outside my group are deserving of altruism because they are people, not because of their identification with a particular group.

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