Geoffrey W. Sutton PhD, Psychology and Culture

George Washington Out of Context, 2025 Geoffrey Sutton and Artspace.ai How Do You Interpret the News? How Do We Put Today's News in Context? When asked what something means, we usually respond based on our context, which involves an interaction between ourselves, other people, and our location. By location I mean our geographic place and our historical timeframe. For example, the words ‘Civil War’ evoke different associations if heard in England or the USA, or through media from different nations. These two events occurred some 200 years apart. There is a connection. President George Washington’s great-grandfather John Washington was a royalist who supported King Charles I against Parliament. Thus, context is not just about spatial location but also time. President Washington and the Continental Congress likely considered the issues of the Civil War (the English one). When significant changes occur in a nation, as reported in the news today, we try to put them into context. Unfortu...

  Sculpture at Terazin  2024 “Those Who Do Not Learn History Are Doomed To Repeat It.” George Santayana ***** A great quantity of information in the form of text, photographs, statues, films, drawings, and paintings portray and honour the lives of those who were victims of the Nazi’s murderous plan. The concentration camps do concentrate one’s focus on a particular era of terror. The evidence from the past 80 years suggests Santayana was right and wrong. In a sense, his statement was too general to be contradicted. For example, the specific conditions that generated and maintained the Nazi system of mass murder are unlikely to be replicated; however, some timeless characteristics of human nature persist. ***** I’m a psychologist and not a historian yet, I come away from recent visits to several Nazi terror sites with some impressions. 1. Religion supports dictators. Horrible leaders often have an amiable relationship with the larger religious groups who fail to dissuade th...

  Pants on Fire 2023 Geoffrey W. Sutton & Bing AI CLIMATE SCIENCE and the Unscientific MIND Challenging Thoughts About Climate Science and Psychological Explanations   Climate science has become a political football. The teams of political rivals seek to exploit research about climate science to score points they can trade in for political power. Their fans cheer and sneer and look for penalties. Now a scientist seems to reveal a weakness. Good scientists can look back on their studies and those of others to identify what should have or could have been considered. It’s the never ending quest we read in scientific journals, “more research is needed.” Patrick Brown is a climate scientist. He’s caught some attention for his opinion piece about other variables that could account for the world’s wicked wildfires. Shannon Osaka does a good job of telling the complex story in WAPO, but I’m not sure the details will change the game. But then he changes fields to bec...