Biases In Psychology Which Affect How People’s Intellectual Contribution Is Valued; Behavioural Reactions to Dissonance and Confirmation Bias

This is the final part of three essays examining how people can be dehumanised through everyday mechanisms of perception.  The first part examined Prejudicial and Biased Reasoning as Illogical and Irrational; and the second part explored Implicit and Explicit Bias. In the third part we will examine Behavioural Reactions to Dissonance and Confirmation Bias.
Read more…

Podcast and Annotated Transcript: I Daniel Blake – The Benefit Cuts Debate with Jeane Freeman MSP Social Security Minister, Paul Laverty Screenwriter, and others

“I am not a client, a customer nor a service user. I am not a shirker, a scrounger, a beggar nor a thief. I am not a national insurance number, or blip on a screen. I have paid my dues, never a penny short, and proud to do so. I don’t tug the forelock, but look my neighbour in the eye and help him if I can. I don’t accept or seek charity. My name is Daniel Blake, I am a man, not a dog. As such, I demand my rights. I demand you treat me with respect. I Daniel Blake am a citizen, nothing more and nothing less. Thank you” Read more…

Corporate MOTing: Hints and Tips on Interpreting Business Reportage: Part two: Show me the money by Doreen Soutar

Let me tell you about financial ratios. Financial ratios were developed in the dim and distant as a way of finding out whether a company was worth investing in. Theoretically, financial ratios can tell you how much profit the executive team are making out of every buck that is invested with the company, and whether they are likely to be able to keep on doing it. Read more…

Corporate MOTing: Hints and Tips on Interpreting Business Reportage Part One: Annual Reports: What Are They Good For? by Doreen Soutar

Mindful consumption is a concept that is increasingly acceptable in the mainstream. We pretty much all have an idea of what a ‘green’ or ‘ethical’ product is like – sort of – and a lot of us would like to buy more of this kind of product, even if we don’t always manage to live up to the image of ourselves we give to market researchers about how green we are.
Now, I am not having a go at you – there are only a select few of us who have been spared the necessity of buying the cheap generic version of a product rather than the premium-priced fair-trade/local/organic/hemp-wrapped/made-on-the-premises-by-virgin-youths version. Sure we would all rather have the good stuff, but being hungry is not a reasonable option to being ethical. And your bum survives being attacked by cheap toilet roll now and again. So going cheap is neither sinful nor unusual. Read more…

Critical Apprenticeships: The Wrights and the Wrongs of Passage

This critical article was written in 2016 to review five years of policy documents on apprenticeships in Britain and the monumental failures in this area. We live in a time when the meaning of language in policy-land has become so eroded that a collective sense of confusion raises its head when words like ‘apprenticeship’ are thrown about. It seems that there is a common puzzlement now as to what it means in practice…. Read more…