I have this belief, or theory that “One extreme leads to another”. OK, extreme may be kind of a strong word, but I’ll give a couple of examples.
Actually, I’m kind of nervous about doing that because I’m afraid that my examples will get nit picked as opposed to my question being answered, but, here goes anyway.
Staunch conservative parents turn out an ultra liberal child.
TV has gone from the early days where things were so ridiculously puritanical that married couples slept in separate beds and a toilet flushing wasn’t heard until the 70’s (I think All in the Family was the was credited as the first sitcom to have a flushing toilet sound) to now, where increasingly, anything goes.
Again, these aren’t extreme, and there are probably some better examples out there, but I think you get the idea.
I am just going to guess here and say that it is something like a reactive effect or a reactive tendency. I have no idea if those have ever been coined before but it seems to fit at least for me.
Well, it has some resemblance to the Hegelian dialectic. Hegel proposed that history moves this way. He called it “thesis, antithesis, synthesis.” And idea pops up, then it goes to the opposite extreme, then the pendulum eventually settles down somewhere in the middle.
It’s been a few years - OK, quite a few years - since my one philosophy class, but that’s how I remember it anyway.
Isn’t that called the pendulum effect (or something like that) with parents and kids? Bad parents have kids, who become good parents, who have kids, who become bad parents, and so on.
Maybe Newton’s third law of motion also applies to our social system? For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
I remember hearing someone say that in the past TV was so censored that now, there’s a desire to have an “anything goes” policy with it. I don’t remember if they had a name for the phenomenon, but how about “rebounding” or “coming full circle”?
Your first example of the staunchly conservative parents and the ultra liberal child could be a reaction formation, a Freudian defense in which we substitute the opposite for something that is either unobtainable or brings us unhappiness.
or something like that, it’s beem a while since I worked in psych
Before my wife and I got seperate computers, we were doing that all the time. Well, mostly me, posting as her, then having to log back in as me and clear things up.
Thanks for posting that
Glad to hear it is not just us :eek:
When my daughter visits she logs on to my computer. My husband and I use different computers so I have gotten really accustomed to not sharing and always forget to check the log in until I post something and her screen name pops up. The first time I did that I read “her” post and thought “my god, we really think alike…”
:o
The pendulum effect simply means that the weight will swing from one extreme to the other and rarely will be in the middle. So the majority of the time one side or the other is not happy with how things are going.
Argh!!! No! You’re completely misinterpreting Newton’s 3rd Law! Newton’s 3rd Law states that if A exerts a force on B, then B will exert a force of the same sort, but in the opposite direction, on A. Now, I can accept a metaphorical substitution of interpersonal interactions for forces, but with that substitution, the equivalent of Newton’s 3rd Law would have “A loves B and B loves A”, or “A hates B and B hates A”, or the like. Which is quite different than what the OP is talking about.
