Psychologically Sound & Social

Introduction In The myths of happiness: what should make you happy, but doesn't, what shouldn't make you happy, but does, Lyubomirsky (2013) breaks down common misconceptions about happiness. She explains why we are not affected by major life events in the ways we believe we should be (Lyubomirsky, 2013). Without using the term itself, she suggests that impact bias, how we imagine the effects of a positive or negative event will affect us more strongly and for a longer duration than it actually will, is partially to blame (Gilbert et al., 2002.; Lyubomirsky, 2013).   Lyubomirsky (2013) approaches a broad range of the most common self-help topics, such as romantic relationships, parenthood, loneliness, career dissatisfaction, financial issues, terminal disease diagnosis, aging, and death. She centers the book around these situations, rather than on specific psychological concepts (Lyubomirsky, 2013).  She also adds more specific thought exercises, suggestions, and anecdotes for...

  According to   Zajonc’s Solution to Social Facilitation , being around other people excites our bodies, and that leads us to behave in the way that comes to us most automatically, our dominant response (Zajonc, 1965).     This behavior tends to lead to greater success with simple or familiar activities (Zajonc, 1965). However, this immediate reaction also tends to hinder our abilities in difficult or novel activities (Zajonc, 1965).     Triplett (1898) studied how the presence of other people could affect the speed at which one does an activity. In this study, he asked children to wind up fishing spools, either on their own, or together, and the results suggested that the paired-up children rolled up the spool faster than those on their own (Triplett, 1898). This supports part of Zajonc’s solution, that social facilitation tends to help with easy tasks (Zajonc, 1965).  I was taught how to swim at a young age and participated in teams on and off throu...

  Effort justification is a situation in which we suffer for something, and justify it to ourselves by valuing the end result more than if we had not suffered for it (Aronson & Mills, 1959). It is a situation in which cognitive dissonance occurs (Aronson & Mills, 1959; Festinger, 1957) . Cognitive dissonance is the uneasiness we feel when we do something that does not align with our feelings or beliefs (Festinger, 1957) . Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory (1957) states that we dislike this disconnect between our wants and our actions, so we do everything we can to alleviate our uneasiness about it. Sometimes, we change our beliefs or feelings to avoid cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957) .  Aronson and Mills’ (1957) study is a well-known example of effort justification. Female participants were told that they would soon engage in a group discussion about sex (Aronson & Mills, 1959). Some participants were told that they needed to prove themselves to be a...

  why I chose this person Sometimes, it feels like psychologic research exists in a vacuum. Not only has Dr. Kristin Dukes done research which connects to racial justice, she also will actively use that knowledge to create organizational change within a college campus.   background According to her LinkedIn profile, Dr. Dukes graduated from Rice University with her undergraduate degree in psychology in 2005. She went on to earn her master’s degree in social psychology at Tufts in 2007. In 2012, Dukes would earn her PhD in social psychology at Tufts. Up until recently, she had been an associate professor at Simmons College. She shifted her career focus and, this past summer, has taken a job as Chief Diversity officer at Chatham University.   research She hasn’t produced a wide body of research, yet. She has a bit of research on the consequences of alcohol and marijuana use. However, she has a passion for social issues. She focuses on how racial stereotypes affect how ...

The  actor-observer effect   is that when we act, we attribute our own actions to the situation we are in, whereas when we observe others, we believe their actions reflect on who they are as people (Heider, 1958; Nisbett et al.,1973) The actor-observer effect is one of many attributional biases (Nisbett et al.,1973). As introduced in Heider (1958) we explain behavior with either situation attribution or personal attribution.     Situational attributions view actions as a result of forces outside of the individual actor (Heider, 1958). For example, someone could be in a bad mood because they were hungry, got cut off in traffic, or were worried for a loved one in the hospital. Personal attributions view actions as a result of the actor’s mental characteristics (Heider, 1958). Someone might take the last slice of pizza without asking first because they are selfish. If they stopped to help someone with a flat tire, they must be a kind person.    I experience t...

  The   availability heuristic   is the tendency to guess how often something happens based on how easily we can think of times it has happened before (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). In Tversky and Kahneman’s (1973) study, participants were asked whether there were more words that start with “r” or words with “r” as the third letter. It is much easier to come up with words that start with “r” (race, rabbit, red) than words that have “r” as the third letter (tired, corn, war). Since participants could think of words that start with “r” most easily, they used the availability heuristic to infer that more words start with “r” than have “r” in the third position (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). However, there are actually more words with “r” as the third letter (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973).     The  vividness effect  states that people tend to trust vivid, anecdotal evidence over empirical evidence (Nisbett & Ross, 1980).    One summer, for ...