Inch-key
Inch-key
Bag full of lies
Falsehood fake fraud phoniness
Inch-key
Inch-key
Boss doing side jobs on the sly
Husband hiding lipstick on his sleeve
Inch-key
Inch-key
Chinese eels that're selling as gourmet
Long expired are Senba Kiccho
Inch-key
Inch-key
Mattaku hattari
Mechakucha illusion
Inch-key
Inch-key
Swindler president judge and lover
Poet shaman online writer
Inch-key
Inch-key
Sneezing lying plastic surgeon
Snoozing this year's on-the-job evaluation
Inch-key
Inch-key
You believe what you got to believe
I'm mailing a letter addressed to me
Inch-key
Inch-key
Mattaku hattari
Mechakucha illusion
Inch-key
Inch-key
Eh, woo-so!
Showing posts with label Truth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Truth. Show all posts
Monday, July 21, 2008
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Criminals
Usually people make a point of avoiding criminals, but watching criminals up close (relatively up close, that is) is something journalists get to do as part of our jobs.
In movies, criminals are rather special, the anti-hero, or even the hero him/herself, someone to be feared, like a Mafia boss or Hannibal Lecter.
In real life, criminals are simply pathetic.
They are losers.
This was a revelation that came when I covered a murder trial in Detroit.
A man charged with murdering a researcher was asked how the murder happened, and he said _ with a straight face _ that he pushed her and she fell over backwards, hit her head on a sharp corner of furniture and died, as though it was her fault that she died.
We try to understand how a criminal mind works and we sometimes come up with elaborate explanations because we want to understand why something as horrible and tragic as serious crime happens.
This article doesn't address crime.
But I found out rationalizing irrational behavior is called "cognitive dissonance," and it's not that sophisticated because monkeys and toddlers do it.
This is exactly what happens in the criminal mind.
The criminal compartmentalizes, rationalizes, justifies to come up with a weird theory, no matter how filled with laughable self-serving illogical contradictions, to explain how it was the perfectly sound and smart thing to do.
But if cognitive dissonance is about survival, the ability to move on and shrug off complex doubts about the past, then does that mean the criminal is more highly evolved than a person with a developed conscience?
Being able to live with crime isn't a cerebral process.
It's an animal instinct for survival, a level of existence on the basest level.
It's not really about being human at all.
In movies, criminals are rather special, the anti-hero, or even the hero him/herself, someone to be feared, like a Mafia boss or Hannibal Lecter.
In real life, criminals are simply pathetic.
They are losers.
This was a revelation that came when I covered a murder trial in Detroit.
A man charged with murdering a researcher was asked how the murder happened, and he said _ with a straight face _ that he pushed her and she fell over backwards, hit her head on a sharp corner of furniture and died, as though it was her fault that she died.
We try to understand how a criminal mind works and we sometimes come up with elaborate explanations because we want to understand why something as horrible and tragic as serious crime happens.
This article doesn't address crime.
But I found out rationalizing irrational behavior is called "cognitive dissonance," and it's not that sophisticated because monkeys and toddlers do it.
This is exactly what happens in the criminal mind.
The criminal compartmentalizes, rationalizes, justifies to come up with a weird theory, no matter how filled with laughable self-serving illogical contradictions, to explain how it was the perfectly sound and smart thing to do.
But if cognitive dissonance is about survival, the ability to move on and shrug off complex doubts about the past, then does that mean the criminal is more highly evolved than a person with a developed conscience?
Being able to live with crime isn't a cerebral process.
It's an animal instinct for survival, a level of existence on the basest level.
It's not really about being human at all.
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