User:Morgan9218/Jordan B. Peterson

Peterson in 2017

Jordan Bernt Peterson (born 1962) is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He has previously worked at Harvard University as an associate professor of psychology, and maintains consulting clients and a clinical practice. He has a distinguished career as scholar with over 100 academic papers and being high-referenced with over 8500 indexed citations. He has been nominated for the Levinson Teaching Prize. Since 2004, he has gained great public exposure through TV, including one of his courses being condensed and broadcast on TV in a series of 30-minute episodes. Countless interviews and reports on television and media, and self-publishing many years of his course lectures via YouTube provides regular fresh material for his growing public audience.

Research and Development

In collaboration with an international team of scientists and educators, he developed the Self Authoring program.

NPR Education reports on the Self Authoring program: "Experiments going back to the 1980s have shown that 'therapeutic' or 'expressive' writing can reduce depression, increase productivity and even cut down on visits to the doctor ... Most people grapple at some time or another with free-floating anxiety that saps energy and increases stress. Through written reflection, you may realize that a certain unpleasant feeling ties back to, say, a difficult interaction with your mother. That type of insight, research has shown, can help locate, ground and ultimately resolve the emotion and the associated stress.". This article references a paper "A scalable goal-setting intervention closes both the gender and ethnic minority achievement gap", and provides a summary: "He co-authored a paper that demonstrates a startling effect: nearly erasing the gender and ethnic minority achievement gap for 700 students over the course of two years with a short written exercise in setting goals."

Oprah Magazine reports: "I had come to a personal and professional crossroads without a road map to help me make sense of it all. It was at this juncture that I read about Self Authoring, an online series of guided writing exercises that the Department of Education hailed in a 2013 report as a promising tool to boost resilience and perseverance—skills not only critical for academic achievement but also for determining whether people lead happy, successful lives. They had research to back their claims: One of Self Authoring's creators, Jordan Peterson, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, had tested part of the curriculum on 85 students who were struggling academically at McGill University in Montreal, and the students' collective GPA rose by 29 percent in a single semester. In 2011, the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University in the Netherlands made a portion of the course mandatory for incoming undergraduates. The result: a nearly 10 percent increase in GPA, a 15 percent decrease in dropouts, and the highest-performing cohorts in the history of the school. " .

In "Writing and Health", from "Writing Benefits": "A fascinating body of research, pioneered by James W. Pennebaker in 1986, has linked written narrative to enhanced mental and physical health. Studies of this effect typically employ written output, although variations such as verbal expression do exist. Participants are asked to describe a traumatic personal event in writing (or, in the control condition, to write about a trivial topic), during 15 to 30 minute sessions. These sessions range in frequency, from a single instance to multiple sittings, spread out over a number of weeks. During each session, individuals are instructed to write continually for the allotted time, without regard for grammar or spelling. In conjunction with this manipulation, a number of health-related variables are assessed, beginning during the writing period, and continuing for several weeks afterwards. Individuals assigned to write about a stressful occurrence in their own life typically experience improvements in general physical health, compared to those who write about trivial events. These improvements include fewer consultations with physicians, greater long-term psychological health3 and improved immune function.

Authorship

Much of Peterson's writings is available online. His book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (1999, Routledge) has been cited hundreds of times and is available in PDF on his website

Academia.edu has around 200 documents, and Google Scholar aggregates 127 documents, and has indexed over 8500 citations of Peterson's work.

Jordan Peterson on Academia.edu with 199 papers

Jordan Peterson on Google Scholar, 127 papers

Courses and Lecture Series

Hundreds of videos, courses, standalone lectures and lecture series have been published to his YouTube channel, spanning from 1996 through 2017.

Psychology 434: Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (University of Toronto)

This course considers the nature of objective knowledge via science, the history of perception and knowledge-creation, and the evolution of knowledge and construction of meaning across all biological history, but primarily on human history. The text was published in 1999 by Routledge. Videos for his lectures in this course are available from 1996, 2015, 2016, 2017. The Maps of Meaning lecture video subtitles have been manually translated by a dedicated team into Farsi, Spanish, Portuguese, with efforts in French, and other languages.

Maps of Meaning was also condensed and broadcast as a 13-part TV series .

PSY230h: Personality and its Transformations (University of Toronto)

This course begins with defining personality from multiple angles, historical, constructivist, psychoanalytic, behavioral and neuropsychological. "Personality is a way of looking at the world, and a characteristic mode of behaving. It's both stable and adaptively dynamic." Included is focussed study on biological traits, and gives one or two lectures each to various notable figures in psychology and philosophy, including Jean Piaget, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Rogers, and more.

Psychology 430H: Self-Deception (University of Toronto)

This course is not available on YouTube.

Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories

His continued growth in popularity together with a crowd-funding campaign using Patreon is generating USD 60,000+ monthly as of August 2017. In early 2017 he developed and produced a new lecture series. This psychological analysis of biblical stories expands much of the work in his course Maps of Meaning. This series takes a rationalist approach to the writings, while respecting the unknown personal and cultural evolutions of ancient humanity. The analysis through the lectures makes an assumption the stories are the aggregate of life experiences passed on over centuries, collected and abstracted into meta-stories, and maps the meta stories, to make them applicable for contemporary living.

Going Viral

His media exposure and public persona went viral internationally in Autumn 2016. In an attempt to articulate concerns with Canadian legislation, he recorded and published a video to his YouTube lectures channel on September 27 2016. The legislation is Canadian Bill C16, passed into law on June 13 2017. The bill amends the Canadian Human Rights Act to add gender identity and gender expression to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination. Further, the bill amends the Criminal Code to extend the protection against hate propaganda set out in that Act to any section of the public that is distinguished by gender identity or expression. A primary fault decried by Peterson regarding Bill C-16, was not in fact with the Bill in and of itself, rather more concern was with the Ontario Human Rights Commission and related policies within which the new rules would be enforced, which he described in a Senate hearing, May 17 2017.

A series of events have lead to exponential exposure, both positive and negative. The polarized political climate due to United States federal election campaign between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump provided a backdrop for increased tensions. Yet more significant exposure was due to antagonism and a video-recorded physical assault, perpetrated by aggressive anti-Peterson protestors. The assault was initially blamed on Peterson's audience by the reactionary protestors. A second physical assault by an anti-Peterson protestor occurred in the same event but was not caught on camera. Criminal charges were brought against two individuals. The assaults, false blaming, criminal charges, and Peterson's own calm demeanour all captured on video, contributed immensely to national awareness and hundreds of interviews. Unfortunately, this has also lead to far-right individuals attempting to align themselves with Peterson and gain legitimacy in destructive anti-left group attitudes. He staunchly denounces far-right group ideology as equally as he denounces that of the far-left. He regularly separates himself from any and all group-identity, especially far-right .

Opposition to Collectivism

Many people far-right in the political spectrum who have racist or otherwise aggressive group attitudes have attempted to associate themselves to Jordan Peterson's public following. He strongly and regularly denounces racism and group-identity ideologies, focussing his strongest opposition against Nazism and Socialism alike, for their tendency to murder and genocide in 20th century historical record. He also brings alternative angles of critique to environmentalism and other movements.

Peterson has been continuously defamed by reporters in the far-left, due to his media exposure, his financial success in crowd-funding, and scientific biological- and psychological-based opposition to the politicizing of gender issues. In August and September 2017 he has published a couple videos, calling-out a reporter for careless and false categorization as far-right (Peterson himself despises the far-right, as verbalized in the video August 13) with individual personality traits that tilt him both left and right and clarifies philosophically he is an individualist, not a collectivist of the left or right.

Free speech

A quote from a recent conversation, Peterson talks here about the individual's responsibility for using free speech in healing society, by focussing on everyone's own role in reducing political polarization, and not about using it to inflame or increase polarization:

"... we're surrounded by these interactions between people that are positive feedback loops.

A positive feedback loop occurs when you do something, then it makes whatever caused that, occur even in a greater way. And polarization is like that. So I say something left-like, and you say something right-like, and that annoys me so I get more left, and it annoys you and you get more right and all-of-a-sudden we're at each-other's throats. And that's happening EVERYWHERE. Right. It's VERY unstable. And what's to be hoped for, is that we can pull back from that, and DISCUSS it.

We can say "look, you know, under 'circumstance A' I could have been a communist inquisitor, or a nazi prison guard. I need to know that. And then I need to know what were the situations that made that likely? And I then I need to know how should I conduct myself so that's less possible. And the only way we can figure that out is to have the kind of conversations that we're having right now... ... I've been emphasizing the role of personal responsibility instead of ideological identification, right. GET IT INTO YOUR HEAD that you have the capacity for great evil. And STOP targeting! Stop assuming that that's something that's manifesting itself only in the people that you disagree with politically. Take responsibility for that. And try to put your life together, I don't see an alternative to that. But it's been very difficult to [participate in discussion], and simultaneously to avoid becoming a participant in this process of polarization."

Various thoughts

on Intelligence, IQ, Performance, Personality, Grades

Peterson discusses IQ in many videos, especially as part of a class lecture on Openness/Intelligence/Creativity in his Personality and its Transformations course.. IQ and personality metrics and academic performance are studied in his paper Neuropsychological performance, IQ, personality, and grades in a longitudinal grade-school male sample Concluding Discussion:

We hypothesized that academic achievement would be as strongly associated with neuropsychological test performance as it was with IQ, particularly in the case of tests of executive function and verbal learning. We also hypothesized that neuropsychological test scores would account for variance in academic achievement, over and above that of IQ. Finally, we hypothesized that Big-Five personality variables, particularly agreeableness , as well as conscientiousness and reversed neuroticism , would be positively related to academic achievement, and would account for variance over and above that of IQ and neuropsychological performance. ... Personality testing did not fare so well, at least on its own. One potential reason for this is the lag between grade assessment and personality testing in the present study. However, traits are supposed to remain constant over time periods of at least three to seven years, at least in theory (with r's ranging from .51 to .82). Some evidence did emerge, supporting Wentzel's presuppositions: once variance in IQ and neuropsychological test performance had been accounted for, with regards to failure-weighted grades, Agreeableness appeared positively related. Perhaps this is because children with better interpersonal skills are looked upon favorably by teachers, and given the benefit of the doubt; perhaps this is because agreeable children actually learn more

on Women seeking Careers

With his executive consultancy and his clinical psychological practice, he has summarized "career" versus "job" and longer-term goals, generally, as they change in importance to women during their working years and later years. He identifies changes of goals both personal and professional, as women age through 20s, 30s, 40s, and promotes the idea for professional women consider establishing a family relatively early.

on Post Modernism

Jordan Peterson is very opposed to postmodernism. His opposition of Marxism is a foundation point, but he criticizes the idea of economic oppressed versus oppressor, and its new evolved political angle of identity oppressed versus oppressor. Peterson identifies the founders of post-modernism as highly intelligent. He identifies French philosopher Jacques Derrida as originally a Marxist but they were forced to abandon Marxism due to its regularity in creating murderous societies ruled by dictators. Therefore evolving from the economic to the identity platform, and with the proposition that any set of phenomena can be broken down into infinitely smaller parts and broken down meanings. As things are broken down, there is continually less stability in understanding, moving and acting in the world, and anything can be meaningful, or nothing, and meaning itself becomes arbitrary.

Peterson argues against this particular point in many recorded lectures and interviews. He often provides a caveat, by discussing artificial-intelligence engineers and sight sensory interpretation, which has been a highly challenging endeavour since the 1960s. That while deconstructing somewhat can be valuable for understanding, there are few practical functional configurations of such broken-down things, which the PostModernist founders did not conclude. His position is plainly understandable because of his authorship of Maps of Meaning, and clinical psychology practice, and his self-authoring program. His goal in all of these, is treating individuals, bringing greater meaningful to the lives of his clients, and students, and indirectly his students' clients, makes him a great opponent of the arbitrary deconstructionism of postmodernism.