Facilitated Exercise

Hey Everyone!

This week I'm talking about social facilitation. Social facilitation was proposed by Zajonc (1965,1980) and states that the presence of others causes individuals to preform better or worse on tasks depending on the task. Zajonc (1965, 1980) said that the presence of others will cause an individual to exhibit the dominate response, in other words, the reaction that is given most easily or quickly. This means that performance on a task increases in the presence of others when the task is easy or when someone is well practiced at it (such as playing a musical instrument or sport) but decreases when the task is difficult or novel (Zajonc, 1965; Zajonc, 1980).

However, some consider the simple presence of others to be insufficient to cause a change in behavior. Specifically, the evaluation apprehension theory states that performance will only be affected (either negatively or positively depending) if there are others watching who have the possibility to evaluate the performance (Geen, 1991; Henchy & Glass, 1968). Importantly, this theory makes it clear that in order for performance to be affected, an individual has to feel like they are being evaluated (or that it is at least a possibility) by those around them.

As someone who has taken FRAs and does not consider themselves particularly athletic, I can definitely attest to the influence of others on my performance (as I'm sure many others can). I took jogging for fitness as an FRA and when I started off my, I was not good, but no big deal, I quickly built up strength and stamina. After the class ended I continued running; I would jog casually outdoors (as opposed to the gym) and then stop after a little while feeling like I sufficiently got out and got some exercise. Then, one day, I thought, hey why not go back to the gym and run, so I did. I happened to go at a time when a jogging class met and there were a lot of people running on the track. No big deal I thought, I've been running often on my own. So I started jogging but I quickly was worn out and by the end I felt nauseous!

What happened? Well two things, first of all jogging around all of those other people caused me to jog harder than I normally did on my own causing me to push myself a lot harder to the point where I felt sick afterward. The second thing is that when I was jogging on my own all that time I didn't have all of that social pressure to jog harder and my performance declined. What a bummer! Another important part of this is that being around a ton of joggers activated the feeling that I could be judged as they would all be able to tell how bad of a jogger I was, specifically because I was having to exercise with them and they could see me. This would have not happened if all of the other joggers were blindfolded because, aside from them all running into walls and exercise equipment due to blind jogging, I would not feel like my performance was not being evaluated and I would not have felt nearly as pressured to increase my performance. In sum, I modified my performance (at least partly without even realizing it!) because I didn't want everyone to think I was unhealthy! I think there is an important lesson here, if you need some motivation to exercise harder, do it in a gym where you feel pressured to try harder due to the presence of other gym goers; it definitely worked for me.

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Geen, R. G. (1991). Social Motivation. Annual Review of Psychology, 42, 377-399.

Henchy, T., & Glass, D. C. (1968). Evaluation apprehension and the social facilitation of dominant and subordinate responses. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, 10, 446-454.

Zajonc, R. B. (1965). Social facilitation. Science, 149, 269-274.

Zajonc, R. B. (1980). Compresence. In P. B. Paulus (Ed.), Psychology of group influence (pp. 35-60). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Flourish

Flourish, A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being, by Martin E. P. Seligman, is about why some individuals flourish and what can be done to help other flourish. To “flourish” would mean that an individual meets a number of characteristics that are personal or present in their lives which are positive and contribute towards a “good” life. Seligman begins by explaining the development of the field of positive psychology as well as offering the latest understanding of the research and theory of what goes into an individual having a good life. Seligman explains well-being theory and the five components of it which contribute to well-being. The components are positive emotion, engagement, positive relationships, meaning, and accomplishment (PERMA). Positive emotion is fairly synonymous with happiness and is similar to daily happiness or positive mood. Engagement regards how often people participate in activities they really enjoy and that they get completely absorbed in. Positive relationships is self explanatory. Meaning relates to qualities of a person's life that they do or have because they are important to them (such as staying up late talking to my friend even though I'm tired but I do it because he is upset and my relationship with him is important to me). Accomplishment deals with a person completing goals and making progress on things that are important to them such as getting As in their classes or presenting in the student work symposium. I wanted to briefly explain the five components because I think the PERMA model is important and easily applicable. Therefore, these five components contribute to an individual's overall well-being (as well as a few other factors depending on how overall well-being is being measured).

The book then goes on to explain some positive psychology techniques to increase well-being as well as the current focus of much of current psychology and how it focuses on the negative or neutral and rarely the positive. Seligman then explains how positive psychology can be taught and incorporated into education and how it was and is being utilized by the army to help its soldiers. Then, Seligman discusses how well-being contributes to personal health and how a few other things contribute positively to individuals (such as optimism). Lastly, Seligman focuses on the goals of positive psychology and how people can be helped, especially focusing on pushing nations and governments to increase well-being for their citizens rather than focusing on economic (and material) growth. In a nutshell I would say the book is about the characteristics of people who are high in well-being and how one would work towards a life high in well-being. This includes the different parts of PERMA but also a few other things such as exercise, optimism, and individuals utilizing their strengths. Therefore, if you want to learn how to work towards greater well-being in your own life, or want to help others work towards well-being (including eventually working in this growing field) then this book is definitely worth your time!

I chose this book because I took a Positive Psychology course while studying abroad. Although the class focused on many applications of theory in the field and we were able to look into a number of different institutions and converse with professionals whose work was relevant to the field, many fellow students were skeptical about the validity of the techniques and the findings presented in the course. I saw this assignment as an excellent opportunity to explore much of the research and findings that the field is based on. Although Seligman was discussed in the course we never actually read any of his work. I thought this was a good idea for me as I was able to get perspective on the leading individual from the field as well as read about much of the research and the ways it is being applied that was not encountered in my earlier course. Furthermore, as someone who is interested in potentially pursuing clinical psychology I like to get many different perspectives on the different ways to help people and this is definitely one of them.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in positive psychology especially those who have not had much exposure to the field; it makes for a really good introduction. The book is definitely readable by people who do not have much experience with psychology (some of the methodology information may be a little tedious to read about for those who have been through research methods). The book is definitely a good read for social psych students as it provides many applications and explanations of relevant research that are relevant to concepts learned in class and that aren’t simply repeats of material.

I would say my favorite part of the book was the chapter on applying findings from the field to techniques and practices any person can do to increase their well-being (I will go into a couple later). Overall, I think the book does a very good job incorporating research findings and demonstrating how the research has been applied. Seligman did some work with the military giving him a gigantic sample size and many examples of his and other's work benefiting and helping individuals in the army through their program. This gives a lot of credibility to the field and book, and is therefore one of its biggest strengths. I would say the biggest weakness is how the book changes focus so much. Because it is basically an overview of the entire field it deals with history, personal application, research, huge programs, and future directions. It being not that long of a book and with the amount of personal detail Seligman likes to give, it often touches on a lot of things but fails to go super in depth. So again, it is a good introductory book to the field with good review of much of the research but possibly not for someone trying to critically examine the research or the programs and their success.

Much of the information in this book is very applicable to your everyday life and is one of its strongest points. Other than the PERMA model, the strengths is one of the best things to come out of the book because it really easy to apply (and really helps some people out). Basically everyone has strengths and Seligman makes the argument that regularly accessing your strengths in whatever way possible would increase well being. If you want to take the strengths test (be warned... it takes a good while!) then follow this link (http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx)! As you can see there are a number of other questionnaires you can fill out but the strengths test is in the list. The signature strengths test will rank your top 24 strengths based on 240 questions (10 per strength). I took the test and found that some of my top strengths were gratitude and perspective. Seligman makes the argument that accessing your strengths will make you happier and will make you more productive because you are doing things in a way that accesses what you are good at and what you enjoy. Based on my strengths I have been trying to go on walks at least once a week with a friend (perspective) and doing the What-Went-Well exercise which is also described in the book. The exercise is where you set aside about 10 minutes or so everyday and reflect on 3 or more things that went well that day (gratitude). So I might say, “Man! I'm sure glad that social blog is submitted!” or, “Today, I had a lot of fun in chemistry lab! And I didn't even set my lab partner on fire!” Basically, the exercise, which is really easy, gets you to reflect on the things that are good in your life and appreciate and recognize the daily experiences that you enjoyed. Anyway, this exercise is how I have tried to do more to access my strength of gratitude.

I like to think of signature strengths as being similar to schematic traits. As described by Hazel Markus (1977), the self concept is made up of self-schemas, or beliefs about the self. Furthermore, schematic traits are traits that an individual strongly identifies with and that they care about a lot, meaning they notice it in themselves and others (Markus, Hamill, & Sentis, 1987). Because these self-schemas represent what an individual thinks about themselves, acting in ways and taking advantage of activities that access their strengths, they are likely to be happier with their life. Therefore, I see accessing my strengths as another meaningful way of acting in ways that are consistent with my self-schemas which leads to me being happy and enjoying activities. For example, I think of myself as a thoughtful person, so a strength of perspective encourages me to do activities that are reflective and thought provoking (as I am currently doing with my walks as mentioned earlier).

Another quality (this is also a potential strength from the strength test) of individuals with high well-being is grit. Seligman discusses grit and how individuals with grit are more self-disciplined and are more persistent and passionate towards goals. Furthermore, Seligman explains how individuals high in self-discipline often achieve higher levels of accomplishment. For example, Duckworth and Seligman (2005) found that highly self-disciplined eighth graders exhibited a number of positive characteristics such as earning higher grades, going to more selective high schools, and watching less TV. Very relevant to grit is self-regulation. Muraven and Baumeister (2000) propose that self-regulation is a limited resource that can be used up or depleted and then replenished with energy, much like a muscle. Therefore, if having high grit is a natural extension of having high self-regulation abilities, it is important to recognize an individual's self-regulation capabilities as they are likely indicative of accomplishment. I received a poor grit result from the strength test which is not surprising because I consider my self-regulation abilities to be mediocre. As an example of this, I tried learning an instrument recently but kept pushing daily practice back everyday so that it was getting to the point where I was never practicing! In this situation if I could use self-regulation to get over my reservations and start practicing I would eventually be able to play an instrument. Reasonably I was not able to accomplish much regarding my instrumental abilities. I've been working on my grit though! I've been trying to be more persistent with my activities such as exercising which has resulted in me accomplishing more in some areas.

Another characteristic Seligman stresses the importance of is optimism. Optimism, as we all know, refers to a positive outlook towards the future and its potential outcomes. Seligman discusses how optimism is important for well-being by giving people a positive outlook on the future. It results in people feeling better and striving for better outcomes rather than being passive and assuming the worst. I think this is easily applicable to self-serving cognitions which are situations where people attribute success to themselves and where they push the blame for failure on anything but a personal reason (Mezulis, Abramson, Hyde, & Hankin, 2004; Schlenker, Weigold, & Hallam, 1990). Reasonably, people interpret future events positively and these serve as self-serving cognitions. For example, Weinstein (1980) found that college students were optimistic about the future thinking that they would be more likely to graduate highly in their class and get a higher paying job following graduation as well as being less likely to have negative events befall them. Optimism is a self-serving cognition because it does not reflect reality (it is just assuming positive things) but it makes us feel good by resulting in the idea that good things are going to happen to us. Personally, as an example of the opposite, pessimism, I can easily show how optimism is a good thing. When I first entered college there was a girl who I liked but I thought that she didn't like me and therefore thought it was not worth pursuing her. It turns out she did like me (I found out much later) but since I did not act on it I missed an opportunity. The converse behavior and thought would have been, “I bet if I ask her out it will go well, and then, even if it does not it will be fine because I'll move on and get another girl later!” This line of reasoning would have benefited me a lot more by resulting in no missed opportunities and me feeling better. It is easy to see how in this case pessimism created a negative outlook and an overall worse result and how optimism would have really resulted in a better outcome.

There are number of things you could take away from this book such as your strengths or the what-went-well exercise, but I would say if you were going to get one thing out of the book it would be the PERMA model. It is a good foundation for understanding many applications of findings in the field. Additionally, this model is a very good starting point for anyone trying to increase their life satisfaction or well-being by offering a good lens with which to view the different components of an individual's life as they contribute to that individual's overall well-being. Therefore, anyone who wants to improve their life can use this model as a tool to examine which parts of their life could really use improvement to increase personal well-being. Furthermore, it would be easy to help another person by going through the five components with them. Therefore, its an applicable tool that is easy to remember.

Martin E. P. Seligman is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He was the president of the American Psychological Association in 1998 and was instrumental in establishing the Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) in 2005 at the University of Pennsylvania, the first MAPP. He was also one of the researchers who discovered and produced research on learned helplessness. His work has been funded and supported by numerous organizations including the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation. Seligman was also instrumental through his position as president of the APA, his research and implementation of programs at the University of Pennsylvania, and through securing of funding in establishing the field of positive psychology. In addition to his work on positive psychology he has also done research and produced a few books on topics such as depression and ethnopolitical conflict. All of these topics are covered to some degree in this book (if you are interested in MAPP, this is a good place to get some information about it). He is also very good at bridge (as he likes to let the reader know). This dude has a pretty impressive resume. Furthermore, his writing is very readable and he makes the theories accessible and does a good job countering some of the criticism that has come up against him and the field at different points in his career. Overall, he is very qualified to talk about research and the field having been involved in a lot of it and otherwise being an experienced researcher. As mentioned, the book features a fair amount of research and goes into detail about how the field constructed and carried out its programs (primarily with the military and the MAPP) showing it to absolutely be scholarly. 

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Duckworth, A. L., & Seligman, M. P. (2005). Self-discipline outdoes IQ in predicting academic performance of adolescents. Psychological Science, 16(12), 939-944. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2005.01641.x

Markus, H. (1977). Self-schemata and processing information about the self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 63-78.

Markus, H., Hamill, R., & Sentis, K. P. (1987). Thinking fat: Self-schemas for body weight and the processing of weight relevant information. Journal Of Applied Social Psychology, 17(1), 50-71.

Mezulis, A. H., Abramson, L. Y., Hyde, J. S., & Hankin, B. L. (2004). Is There a Universal Positivity Bias in Attributions? A Meta-Analytic Review of Individual, Developmental, and Cultural Differences in the Self-Serving Attributional Bias. Psychological Bulletin, 130(5), 711-747. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.130.5.711

Muraven, M., & Baumeister, R. F. (2000). Self-regulation and depletion of limited resources: Does self-control resemble a muscle?. Psychological Bulletin, 126(2), 247-259. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.126.2.247

Schlenker, B. R., Weigold, M. F., & Hallam, J. R. (1990). Self-serving attributions in social context: Effects of self-esteem and social pressure. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, 58(5), 855-863. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.58.5.855

Seligman, M. P. (2011). Flourish: A visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being. New York, NY US: Free Press.

Weinstein, N. D. (1980). Unrealistic optimism about future life events. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, 39(5), 806-820. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.39.5.806

Cognitive Gymnastics

Hey everyone!

This week is the fun and fascinating cognitive dissonance! First off is a video.

 

This video features some awesome old fashioned animation but also some reasons for behavior as explained by the Jackson 5. They explain that the reason for their behavior is the "boogie", and this reason for their behavior is consistent with their attitudes, those being, as far as I can tell, that they really want to and like to boogie (mostly I just wanted to share this video).

Their reasoning is good as it is in line with the idea that is held by many social scientists who believe that people are motivated to have cognitive consistency, or a state where all of one's beliefs, attitudes, and actions are in conjunction with each other (Abelson et al., 1968). Unfortunately, people often do not act in ways that are consistent with what they think, which will cause cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957). Cognitive dissonance theory, proposed by Festinger, (1957) states that individuals are motivated to reduce dissonance that results from their actions if those actions are not consistent with their attitudes/beliefs. People can reduce dissonance in a number of ways, such as changing their behavior or attitude (Festinger, 1957).

The original study where cognitive dissonance was induced experimentally was conducted by Festinger and Carlsmith (1959). In short, Festinger and Carlsmith's (1959) study resulted in participants changing their attitude about a boring task by saying that they enjoyed it when they didn't have a good reason for saying it. Other participants also said that they enjoyed a clearly boring task, but their attitude did not change because they attributed their behavior to the fact that they were being paid a good amount of money to say that they enjoyed the boring task.

Examples of this theory are everywhere because they are often involved in small things though out the day where you justify not doing certain activities or behaviors even though not doing them is inconsistent with your beliefs. A good example is health. Many people think that they are pretty healthy and I am one of those. However, exercising really is not fun but it is good for you and I often plan to run in the morning but then when it comes time to go running I say to myself, “Oh! Sleep is more important so I'll do that.” or “I got a lot of exercise at work yesterday so I don't need to run today.” In any case, because I desire and think of myself as a healthy person (and therefore as someone who regularly does and engages in healthy activities), I have to justify my unwillingness to go running with reasons that are in many cases made up and determined after I have decided to not go running (because I need a reason!). If I did not make up this reason then I would be experiencing cognitive dissonance which I would not like.

Furthermore, examples of dissonance are not only present in my health goal inadequacies which have little consequence but also in more significant daily decisions (as well as big one time decisions). When I was in high school I frequently disliked attending church services. However, my parents expressed their displeasure at me not regularly wanting to go to church and making it clear that it was important to them that I go. Now, I really did not like catholic church but I still went; this is due to insufficient justification. According to Festinger (1957) insufficient justification is one condition that will result in cognitive dissonance because it is where individuals choose to preform an action that does not have a large reward (which was the case for me in high school regarding my church attendance). Because I was experiencing cognitive dissonance I made up reasons for attending church often such as, I can learn something from the sermons, or I get to hear songs that I like, or there are always really good breakfast tacos afterward. Whatever excuse I was making that week, it served as a reason for attending church even though I did not like the institution and participating in mass was inconsistent with this behavior. My parents and I eventually came to an agreement/understanding about my religious choices but before that I sure had to do some cognitive work to convince myself to keep going.

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Festinger, L. (1957) A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Festinger, L., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). Cognitive consequences of forced compliance. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58, 203-210.

Janis, I. L. (1968). Attitude change via role playing. In R. Abelson, E. Aronson, W. McGuire, T. Newcomb, M. Rosenberg, & P. Tennen-baum (Eds.), Theories of cognitive consistency: A sourcebook (pp. 810–818). Chicago: Rand McNally.

Switching Routes

Hey everyone!

First off just to get everyone in a good mood here is a song that I like!

The reason I chose this particular song is that I seriously have never met a person who is not a fan of it. Similarity has consistently been shown to make people more likable so I figured I could not go wrong with this choice (Montoya, Horton, & Kirchner, 2008).

But anyway, this week I am talking about routes to persuasion! The two routes are the peripheral route to persuasion and the central route to persuasion (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).

Which of these two routes people will use depends on both their ability and their motivation (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986). The peripheral route is distinguished by individuals relying on heuristics, rules of thumb, or generally superficial information to arrive at a decision (Chaiken, 1987; Chen & Chaiken, 1999) whereas the central route uses rationality and logic to arrive at a decision and individuals are therefore influenced by the content and strength of arguments when using this route (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).

I know I personally would rather be able to say that I always use the central route as I think of myself as someone who is generally thoughtful and has good reasons for the way I act or for what I believe. However, this unfortunately is not always true as I am definitely not always motivated and therefore sometimes use the peripheral route when making a decision.

A good example of me using these two routes was when I was recently hearing about the Southwestern presidential candidates. Originally, I did not care very much who won as, on the surface, I had little investment in the next president of Southwestern as I would be graduating soon (a sentiment I heard echoed by other senior students). I was content to simply side with my friend's evaluations and trust their decisions without much research. However, upon hearing some good arguments from different individuals, including a few professors, I was quickly persuaded to care about who was elected as president as the quality of the president would affect Southwestern's direction as an institution and would also affect how valuable my degree would be in the long term. Upon hearing this, I realized that decision did matter and I became much more involved in learning about the candidates. I read about their accomplishments and qualifications online and listened much more attentively to when others were making an argument for a candidate. Furthermore, I engaged much more actively in discussion with my peers regarding the candidates. My critical outlook on the arguments that were being presented (pro or con) were indicative of my switch to the central route. Therefore, because I became motivated to care about the decision because of my realization that the decision would affect me, I transitioned to a central route when evaluating information related to the candidates. 

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Chaiken, S. (1987). The heuristic model of persuasion. In M. P. Zanna, J. M. Olsen, & C. P. Herman (Eds.), Social influence: The Ontario symposium (Vol. 5, pp. 3-39). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Chen, S., & Chaiken, S. (1999). The heuristic-systematic model in its broader context. In S. Chaiken & Y. Trope (Eds.), Dual-process theories in social psychology (pp. 73-96). New York: Guilford.

Montoya, R. M., Horton, R. S., & Kirchner, J. (2008). Is actual similarity necessary for attraction? A meta-analysis of actual and perceived similarity. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 25, 889-922.

Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T., (1986). Communication and persuasion: Central and peripheral routes to attitude change. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Trying something different

Hey everyone!

For the Participant Observer Blog I decided to be a different person for a day! I actually ended up drawing from a several experiences over a few days in order to maximize the types of and number of situations I could try acting differently.

For this experience I decided to generally be more friendly! This trait manifested itself in a number of ways such as me generally being more talkative, using friendly body language, and looking for opportunities to help others. I choose this not because I think I'm unfriendly but because I am generally pretty shy unless I know a person pretty well and I think I could benefit from being more outgoing.

Before I launch into my behaviors and experience, I'd like to introduce some concepts relevant to this social experiment. First off is the self-concept which was proposed by Hazel Markus (1977) and refers an individual's beliefs about themselves. Essentially the self-concept is made up of self-schemas (referred to simply as schemas) which are these beliefs that determine how one interprets information relevant to themselves (Markus, 1977). Traits that matter a lot to the identity of the individual, such as shyness for myself, are referred to as schematic and traits or characteristics that the individual considers irrelevant about themselves are referred to as aschematic (Markus, Hamill, & Sentis, 1987).

With this in mind, it was important for me to change a schematic trait in order to produce an effect that would be the most meaningful to me. In other words, I wanted to try to change a characteristic that mattered a lot to my personal identity in order to get a better idea of what it would be like to have a different trait and behave differently.

My experience over the few days had a ton of relevant examples but I can only talk about a few in depth. One situation where I was really able to try to behave differently was at my restaurant job where I work once a week as a server. Usually at work I tend to hang back and get my work done and only really talk to one or two people for extended periods of time during my shift. For this shift however, I struck up conversations with many other servers and throughout the shift tried to be helpful in small but noticeable ways (like taking drinks or food out). Towards the end of the night I talked at length with a few coworkers, more than I ever had before, and found that I really enjoyed it. Because a lot of this behavior (especially being so talkative) was so different from how I normally acted, I found it very difficult to keep it up just because it was always on my mind that I needed to engaging others in conversations when I had the opportunity. Don't get me wrong, I did enjoy talking to others and had fun conversing with them, it was just so at odds with my normal behavior that it was really draining to keep it up for so long. My coworkers really enjoyed me talking more however and definitely joked with me a lot more than usual during the shift. One of them even commented that she noticed that I was in a really good mood that night.

A second example happened immediately that night after work was when I came back to campus and there was a party going on at a friend's apartment. These are definitely not my usual scene as they are filled with people who I vaguely know but I went to this one on a mission, to talk to (at length) at least one person who I don't know. During the party I talked to a few people who I don't know as well and surprised myself by talking to two people who I had never talked to before for a pretty long time. While talking to them I really tried to talk to them for awhile (whereas normally I would probably move onto someone who I know better after a short period of time). In this situation, I really enjoyed talking to some new people for a long period of time and was glad I made the effort to do so.

Another good example was on a later day when I was volunteering for a organization. I was tabling and selling t-shirts for the organization, which is an activity that I wouldn't ever want to do anyways but I did it regardless. I volunteered with another psych major who I didn't know that well but who I had met before and resolved that during volunteering I would talk a lot. During volunteering I talked to her a lot about her internship and job experience as well as my own. During this interaction (and during other interactions where I was trying to be more friendly) I really worked on and was cognizant of my body language. When talking to her, I tried to look at her often and nodded to let her know I was listening. I also smiled and leaned forward, again trying to show an engaged and interested attitude. Normally, in a situation like this, I would not inquire or so easily share so much about myself but I really wanted to try to have positive interactions with the other volunteer. Although something like this could easily be a fluke, I think that the other volunteer really enjoyed talking to me and I think my behavior influenced how she acted (e.g. I encouraged talking and showed my interest in her professional experiences). Again, this was difficult because I making an effort to be very friendly, definitely more so than usual and the experience was a little draining however, positive.

There were a lot of other small examples of friendliness such as me just asking how people were doing and getting smiles in return or making a joke with a HEB cashier but I think these three examples show more of how my behavior affected my day. In each of these three examples I had to ignore or inhibit my natural tendency, which is to be shy and reserved, for a significant period of time but instead make a conscious effort to be friendly, sociable, and interactive. I'm not normally really boring or anything, I just had to make the effort to step out of my comfort zone to see what would happen.

Before each time I was going to enter a situation (such as the three already described) I was pretty anxious as I knew I was going to have to act different from usual. During each event it was usually pretty fun although also fairly exhausting as I wasn't used to acting that way and had to work hard to act differently from usual. Afterward, I was generally pretty happy with how things went as my interactions were all positive and enjoyable (go figure). In sum, even though each experience was somewhat draining, it was definitely rewarding!

Overall, I did like the change in my behavior because I think it produced positive interactions and led to productive discussions. Because my natural inclination is usually more towards the quiet side it was fun to let some of my social inhibitions go and just be more sociable for a little while (and I could always tell myself that I needed to do this for a class which was alright encouragement).

Although, I have only discussed that I was affecting my internal view of myself, I was also clearly affecting my behavior which relates to self-presentation. Self-presentation is an active effort to change or affect behavior in order to influence what other people think of you (Schlenker, 2003). This theory was inspired by Goffman (1959) who said that individuals act out roles and behave as if in a play where we have a certain face that we desire to and make an active effort to maintain. Therefore, this process was largely influenced by my changing this face that I was putting on in social situations. Essentially, I was trying to change how I acted and therefore how other people saw me by behaving in a more friendly manner.

Even though changing my behavior was an active effort, it was clear that both self-concept and self-presentation are very self constructed and the possibility to change them exists. It is certainly not easy to change these things as they have been stable (and generally people are pretty happy with how they have been) for a good amount of time. For me, I had to actively consider how I would normally act, how I desired to act in the upcoming situation, and then (during the situation) act appropriately. However, it was possible to effectively change my behavior.

Going along with the fact that these are changeable attributes, even though they seem so central and innate, I would like to continue working on being more confident in my social interactions with people who I don't know. This was a pretty fun social experiment and overall I was pretty happy with how each experience turned out! Most importantly I'm glad I tried to affect my self-presentation heavily by choosing a trait that was more central to my self-concept, and by doing so, producing the greatest and most meaningful effect.

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Goffman, E. (1959) The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City: Doubleday.



Markus, H. (1977). Self-schemata and processing information about the self. Journal of and Social Psychology, 35, 63-78.

Markus, H., Hamill, R., & Sentis, K. P. (1987). Thinking fat: Self-schemas for body weight and the processing of weight relevant information. Journal Of Applied Social Psychology, 17(1), 50-71.

Schlenker, B. R. (2003). Self-presentation. In M. R. Leary & J. P. Tangney (Eds.), Handbook of self and identity (pp. 492-518). New York: Guilford.

Undesirable Associations

Hey everyone!

While the IATs were incredibly stressful and some of my results were not all entirely encouraging, I think it is definitely good to try use them educationally and realize some underlying assumptions you have. 

First off, here is a great video that many of you have probably seen, but after talking about race so much today I was thinking about culture and remembered this video from a few years ago!

Anyway, I took both the race (more than once to see if my results varied) and gender related to occupation IATs. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) was developed by Greenwald, McGee, and Schwartz (1998) and they work by provided you with either a word or picture (depending on which you're taking) and you have to sort it into a correct category as quickly as you can. Specifically with the race IAT, you are shown either a picture of a person's face (their race is either white or African-American) or you are shown an adjective that is either positive or negative (e.g. nasty, joy, peace) and you must quickly press a key that correctly sorts the word or image with the left or right category. Because there are only two categories, half the time the white faces are paired with negative adjectives and the African-American faces are paired with positive adjectives and the other half of the time the pairings are switched. Therefore if both African-American and positive is on the right, if an African-American face or the word joy appears you press the key for the right category (and if a white or negative word appears you press the left category key) as quickly as you can attempting to minimize error. 

Because this task is completed on a computer, the IATs are able to determine millisecond differences in response time and measure ability to associate and sort words and faces accurately and quickly. Therefore, if one is able to more easily (as in more quickly) associate positive words with white faces or, said differently, they quickly associate negative words with African-Americans or take a longer time with positive associations towards African-Americans, they are considered to have a preference for whites (the strength of that preference depends on the difference between the time one can associate negative words and positive words with members of each race).

On the gender IAT I obtained the result of little to no preference towards ones gender and their association with occupational or domestic words. I actively make an effort to think of men and women equally in terms of their career aspirations and think that this result is consistent with my beliefs and behaviors towards groups on this matter. I know that I am very proud of both my mother and father for working for my entire life. Furthermore, I have worked with many women professionally recently through several internships and that may have affected why my results showed no preference (my results may have been different at the start of college which I would not have been thrilled about). I very much hope that this is my “true” attitude as I greatly respect and admire hard workers and wouldn't want to have an underlying association that men are harder workers than women or that I have a primary or initial domestic association towards women.

Additionally, I took the race IAT several times in order to see if my results varied. They did vary but my overall result was not encouraging. I showed a slight to moderate preference for European-Americans. Again, I try to not make associations based on any external characteristic such as race and was therefore unhappy with this association. I had taken the race IAT during high school and obtained a similar result then. While I was unhappy with finding that out a few years ago, I would have thought that I would have made progress in destabilizing that association, as since then, I have have met many African-Americans in many different contexts and have really enjoyed my interactions with many of them. Unfortunately, I apparently have some work to do in continuing to break down my initial snap associations regarding individuals of a different race than mine. Therefore, I don't think of my results as representing my “true” or at least not desired attitude towards African-Americans but probably does accurately reflect some of my quickly made implicit associations which I would like to continue to try to change.

I think it is personally important to continue having diversity and variety in my relationships. Furthermore, I think having diverse relationships is one of the best ways for me fight these implicit biases. Indeed many of the examples I can think of for African-American friends are/were definitely positive, but perhaps not as significant or long lasting as they could have for various reasons. This insight informs how I have thought about stereotypes recently, that being that its is not a one time process to eliminate my biases but is an attitude that has to be challenged by continuing to experience diversity in my life. Therefore, I think my retaking the IAT I acquired insight into how I can personally be effective in continuing to effectively challenge my stereotypes. In sum, although I frequently and actively combat these associations (and have had many positive relationships with African-Americans) I will have to continue to endure and challenge these associations as I want them to diminish or be eliminated.

(Word count = 835)

Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1464-1480.

That makes (con)sense(us)!

Hey everyone! Sorry for the terrible title (It's late).

This week I'm going to tackle attributions and one theory as to how people make them. As explained by Fritz Heider (1958) attributions are simply explanations for other's behavior and the theory that describes this process is known as attribution theory.

One theory that sprung from Heider's (1958) ideas about attributions is the covariation theory (Kelley, 1967). According to the covariation principle, something only explains (is the cause of) a behavior if it is both present when the behavior is present, but also absent when the behavior is absent (Kelley, 1967). There are three kinds of information that are useful for determining behavior, those being, consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency and these three kinds of information are used to understand and make attributions about an individual's behavior (Kelley, 1967).

Consensus information refers to determining if different people behave or react similarly or differently to the same stimulus (Kelley, 1967). This information allows attributions be attributed more to the situation or to the individual; if consensus is high (i.e. a lot of people respond the same way to the stimulus) then behavior is attributed to the stimulus, if consensus is low (i.e. different people respond in a number of different ways to the same stimulus) then behavior is attributed to the individual (Kelly, 1967).

The second type of information is distinctiveness. When deciding about an individual's behavior you would also like to know how they respond to other situations or stimuli (Kelly, 1967). If the behavior is low in distinctiveness (i.e. an individual responds the same way to all situations), their response is attributed to the individual; if distinctiveness is high (i.e. the individual does not always respond in the same way to a variety of situations) then behavior is attributed to the stimulus (Kelly, 1967).

Lastly, consistency information regards determining if the behavior is present every time the stimulus occurs or only some of the time (Kelley, 1967). If the behavior always occurs when the stimulus occurs then the behavior is high in consistency and is attributed to either the individual or the stimulus depending on whether the behavior is also high or low in consistency or distinctiveness; if the behavior is low in consistency (i.e. the behavior does not always occur when the stimulus does) then the behavior may be attributed to other irrelevant factors that relate to the situation and not due to the actual stimulus itself (Kelly, 1967).

As an example of this theory and process, my friend's girlfriend was recently mean to him for an entire day. Mostly she was not very responsive and generally grumpy and resulted in responding in less than nice ways to jokes, etc. When trying to decide the reason for this behavior I asked my friend why his girlfriend was acting this way and he attributed it to her large amount of homework and obligations she had that day. This is a fine explanation but I was not certain that it was the true explanation and the way to better determine if this was the true cause was to examine the three sources of information. First is consensus. Do people usually respond in grumpy ways when they have a lot of work to complete? Not always but that is definitely a common way for people to act when they are stressed, therefore I considered consensus to be high which therefore lended support to the probability that her behavior was due to the stimulus (i.e. her large workload). Next was distinctiveness, or, does this person react to different situations similarly. Generally, this person is in a good mood and is very pleasant to be around, therefore, distinctiveness was high (as they usually act differently) and again, it was likely that her behavior was due to her large workload. Last was consistency, or does this individual always respond this way when the stimulus is present. Well, unfortunately for my friend (because his girlfriend is a go getter and often has a lot of work) his girlfriend basically always responds in this way when she is very stressed, therefore consistency is high and the behavior was not attributed to random irrelevant situational factors.

Because both distinctiveness and consensus were high (and consistency was not low) I agreed with my friend and decided that her grumpy behavior was due to her situation (i.e. the large workload and high stress) and was not a personal factor. 

(Word count: 730)

Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York: Wiley.

Kelley, H. H. (1967). Attribution in social psychology. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 15, 192-238.

Healthy Relationships

Earlier this week I attended a workshop for Healthy Relationships. While I felt that the presentation didn't have a ton of depth it did provide a lot of good information and considerations about healthy romantic relationships.

A main focus was on accepting oneself and how that was basically the most important quality for a good healthy relationship as, if you don't love yourself, how could you ever think that someone else could love you? So, that's was good, sounds like high self-esteem is a good thing. On top of that, qualities such as trust and communication were emphasized. Personally, I think communication is really important and in my relationships that has always been the most difficult thing to accomplish. While its importance was emphasized, I would have liked if the workshop approached more specific instances where communication can be difficult and how to approach those situations.

Lastly, an emphasis was put on communicating in an assertive but respectful manner. I liked this focus because, in line with my importance given to communication, I think it is very important in a relationship to be direct and clear with what you are thinking and feeling about the relationship. Additionally, this reasonably applies to any relationship, not just romantic ones. After the workshop, I found myself reflecting on the fact that I have been somewhat upset with my roommate recently which was silly because I didn't communicate well at all why I was upset (which of course resulted in nothing positive happening regarding the matter). Of course the best way to deal with this was not stewing but being clear with my roommate about what was bothering me and taking steps to address it.

They're smarter than that...

Hey everyone!

Before I start, watch this neat video and (ideally) form a positive impression of me and this blog post. 

Anyway, it's pretty easy to think back on experiences I've had and how I likely formed impressions of people and how that affected my behavior towards that person. Particularly interesting to me is when we have a pretty strongly formed idea about a person that is suddenly challenged and we deny whatever introduced that challenge to our idea about the person. The reason we deny the challenge is because of implicit personality theory which proposes that we have a network of traits that we associate together and therefore, when we know that an individual has one trait, that leads us to infer that they have other traits as well (Bruner & Tagiuri, 1954; Schneider, 1973; Sedikides & Anderson, 1994).

Reasonably this would occur both when we hear a positive or negative trait (or get information) about a person, that information would lead us to assume other traits about a person that are connected with the initial information we obtained. Furthermore, this is why we deny the information that challenges our construction for the person. In other words, when the new information contradicts the current associations with traits and behaviors, we dislike it because we have made the assumption that the person will not act that way or have that trait because it is not associated with the original information we obtained.

A personal example of this happened last year with friend who attends another university. In short, there was a girl who liked him quite a bit and was quite pushy with her affections and he was not interested in a relationship with her (or encouraging affection from her due to the emotional nightmare that would likely result). One time towards the end of the summer, she convinced him that she should sleep over because she was too drunk to drive home despite the fact that he knew that he shouldn't let her in order to not encourage such behavior (I'm not encouraging drunk driving here, just she could have stayed at a nearby friends house, or had someone come pick her up, or whatever).

Now, this dude is usually reasonable and makes pretty good and responsible decisions with things such as school work, how he has fun, but also definitely in helping people with inter/intra personal concerns. In fact, these are central traits to me regarding my friend meaning that they are traits that exert a significant effect in my overall impression of him (Asch, 1946). Because these traits are so important to me, they are even more significant when challenged.

Therefore, upon hearing about his actions I could not believe it. My friend was not one to make decisions such as these lightly. This made me question, how did he end up acting this way when it seemed like such a bad decision? It is easy to see how I would assume that he would not act in such as way because my previous experience with this friend would make me think that he would act in a more responsible manner. For quite some time, I questioned the tale's legitimacy (I heard about it through another friend) as it was not in line with the traits I currently associated with my friend. Even as I became convinced that it was true, I twisted the details to make it consistent with what I thought of my friend such as, “oh, he only let her do that because he was worried for her safety.” In time, I finally had to accept that it happened just as it was told to me, but importantly, I initially strongly resisted the actual sequence of events and all the relevant information.

In sum, I associated a certain way of behaving for my friend and when his behavior did not conform to my associations I resisted the truth of his behavior actually occurring. In the end, his relationship with this girl got all worked out, don't worry. But seriously, it was complicated.

Word count: 638

Asch, S. E. (1946). Forming impressions of personality. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 41, 258-290.

Bruner, J. S., & Tagiuri, R. (1954). Person perception. In G. Lindzey (Ed.), Handbook of social psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 634-654). Reading, MA: Addision-Wesley.

Schneider, D. J. (1973). Implicit personality theory: A review. Psychological Bulletin, 79, 294-309.

Sedikides, C., & Anderson, C. A. (1994). Causal perceptions of intertrait relations: The glue that holds person types together. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20, 294-302.

All I do is win

Hey everyone! This week I'm talking about self-esteem. Self-esteem involves an individual's total positive and negative thoughts and opinions about the self (Coopersmith, 1967). Furthermore, self-esteem fluctuates regularly in response to events and experiences that happen to an individual such as receiving a bad grade on a test, getting asked out on a date, or scoring a goal in a soccer game (Heatherton & Polivy, 1991). As we all know, people can vary in their levels of self-esteem with high-esteem being associated with confidence, liking oneself, etc. For an example of two individuals who likely posses high self-esteem see the video below...

While I find this video very entertaining, if you found it annoying or disheartening please see the video at the end to help decompress.

Anyway, one theory as to why humans need self-esteem was proposed by Leary and Baumister (2000). Leary and Baumister (2000) proposed that self-esteem serves as an indication of how we are doing socially and alerts us to when we need to improve (as well as when we do a good job) due our behavior being under the judgment of others. Therefore, it encourages us to feel bad when we experience a negative social interaction and encourages us to modify our behavior in order to gain the approval of others and makes us feel good and behave in a similar manner when we do something that improves our self-esteem (Leary & Baumister, 2000). This would mean that self-esteem makes us more successful (ideally) by helping us to recognize our strengths and weaknesses.

Now, because we know that as humans we need self-esteem and that it serves a function for us (other than just making us feel good) it also makes sense that we would try to preserve it. This can be accomplished in multiple ways but one such way is self-handicapping. Self-handicapping is essentially when people give themselves an excuse or take actions to reduce their performance due to an anticipated failure (Berglas & Jones, 1978). This makes sense because it gives individuals the ability to blame something else (whatever the self-handicap is) for their failure rather than a personal shortcoming or lack of ability.

I know that I especially used to take advantage of this tactic when I was a first year. Upon getting back a test and receiving a grade that was lower than I would have liked, I would rationalize to myself that I am just taking so many courses that I don't have time to adequately study for all my classes. Now this was not true in the slightest as I still had plenty of free time which I liked to use for nonacademic activities. Other times I would complain that I had a headache at the time of the test or that I stayed up late the night before studying and that my low sleep impacted my performance. Of course, the root of the problem was my study habits and not taking responsibility for my work and time management. This pattern continued for my entire Fall semester and it was the Spring semester when I managed to make some changes in my behavior. Essentially I got much better about doing all of my regular work and getting it done on time but before I was able to do that, I was regularly self-handicapping in order to maintain my self-esteem while doing poorly in some courses.

Word count: 530

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Berglas, S., & Jones, E. E. (1978). Drug choice as a self-handicapping strategy in response to noncontingent success. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 405-417. 

Coopersmith, S. (1967). The antecedents of self-esteem. San Francisco: Freeman.

Heatherton, T. F., & Polivy, J. (1991) Development and validation of a scale for measuring state self-esteem. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 895-910.

Leary, M. R., & Baumeister, R. F. (2000). The nature and function of self-esteem: Sociometer theory. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 32, 1-62.

A short interview

 As usual for a psychology class, after learning a new concept, I go out into the world and look for examples of the concept and its application. So the other night I decided to give my younger brother a call and inquire about his own self-concept with very little information (don't worry he gave informed consent and was debriefed after I asked all my questions). As explained by Hazel Markus (1977), the self-concept is made up of self-schemas which are beliefs about the self which are instrumental in an individual making sense of why they act and think in a certain way.

I'm not able to discuss our entire conversation, but here are a few relevant things that came out of it.

So my younger brother was unexpectedly subject (“Do you have time for a short survey?” “I'm watching Hercules right now but sure...”) to the same question we were asked in class; I asked, “What are five traits or adjectives that you think describe yourself well? Or, if you had to pick five words to describe yourself what would they be?” His five words were stubborn, optimistic, friendly, trustworthy, and intelligent. These five words are most likely characteristics of himself that he very strongly identifies with (based on him picking them from the question asked). In other words he is schematic for these characteristics (Markus et al., 1987). Because he is schematic for these traits he would likely be very defensive about any challenge to having these characteristics (which is extra hilarious because of his picking of stubborn) due to his strong identification with them. Importantly, he may not be actually be any of these things but they are characteristics that he feels that he possess which means they are relevant as he will likely pay attention to them in others and with himself due to their being highly relevant to his self-concept. Additionally, he most likely acts in everyday life in ways that are fairly consistent with these attributes.

I pressed him further after he gave me his five attributes as to why he thought that these five words were good personal descriptors. Interestingly he didn't focus on his thoughts very often but drew upon examples from his day where he mentioned his behavior as an example of how these words were accurate descriptors (Describing trustworthy, “Today I told my boss that I would stay late to help finish a delivery and even though the delivery came at the end of my shift and I was tired I stuck around to help because I said I would earlier.”). His method of describing the applicability of these words was in line with Bem's (1972) self-perception theory in which Bem posits that individuals look to examples of their own behavior and the situational context for understanding aspects of and making inferences about themselves and their behavior. Although an individual could select examples of behavior that conform to their schematic traits, the fact that individuals use the behavior (as opposed to other means of understanding the self) as a way of describing the self and building their self-concept is important. Therefore, his reflections involving his behavior as prime examples for how he picked important attributes makes sense with regard to Bem's self-perception theory.

I encourage everyone to ask your roommate or a sibling or significant other what five attributes they would pick because it's pretty interesting to hear what they say! I personally would have expected a few different ones from my brother.

                                                           

Bem, D. J. (1972). Self-perception theory. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 6, pp. 1-62). New York : Academic Press.

Markus, H. (1977). Self-schemata and processing information about the self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 63-78.

Markus, H., Hamill, R., & Sentis, K. P. (1987). Thinking fat: Self-schemas for body weight and the processing of weight relevant information. Journal Of Applied Social Psychology, 17(1), 50-71.

Word count: 487

Welcome post

For my first post I guess I'll just say what some of my future plans are after graduating from Southwestern.

This summer I intend to go to Europe with a few close friends and spend 3-4 weeks going to as many locations as we can. Once I return, I plan on living in the Austin area for a year. The following year I would like to begin working for Teach for America and will ideally continue to do that for an extra year or two. After that experience I plan on going to graduate school for some Masters program in psychology.