Why People Believe Invisible Agents Control the World

reply to post by The All Seeing I


Just Great! Scientific American has debunked this entire site. I guess we can kiss ATS goodbye. At least this means that most of us are crazy..which makes it normal.

After some further reflection, i have to the conclusion that Bruce Hood and his ilk are suffering from the Martha Mitchel Effect:

John Mitchell was the Attorney-General during the Nixon administration.

His wife - Martha Mitchell - told her psychologist that top White House officials were engaged in illegal activities. Her psychologist labeled these claims as caused by mental illness.

Ultimately, however, the relevant facts of the Watergate scandal vindicated her.

In fact, psychologists have now given a label - the "Martha Mitchell Effect" - to "the process by which a psychiatrist, psychologist, or other mental health clinician mistakes the patient's perception of real events as delusional and misdiagnoses accordingly".

The authors of a paper on this phenomenon ( Bell, V., Halligan, P.W., Ellis, H.D. (2003) Beliefs About Delusions. The Psychologist, 6 (8), 418-422) conclude:

Sometimes, improbable reports are erroneously assumed to be symptoms of mental illness [due to a] failure or inability to verify whether the events have actually taken place, no matter how improbable intuitively they might appear to the busy clinician.

In other words, psychologists who haven't taken the time to examine for themselves the claims of their patients will tend to label as delusional anything which they "intuitively" feel is improbable.

source: www.washingtonsblog.com...

well in star wars its mentioned that theres always a bigger fish. We live in a macrocosm of diverse chaos and random points of connection..i personaly can say there are some people out there who act and think of themselves as servators of the monolithic design..who appear as secret, or what not..