Psychology and More

In class, we have been discussing conformity and obedience. The always great Mind Hacks blog pointed me toward a first-person account of participation in the Stanley Milgram obedience experiments:

Jewish Currents: Resisting Authority: A Personal Account of the Milgram Obedience Experiments :

With some trepidation on my part, we began the experiment. After a few shocks, the learner let out an “Ouch!” and I asked if he was okay. He said he was, but after the next shock, his complaint became louder. I said I would stop. The “professor” told me to continue, and the learner said he was ready to go on, too. I went on for two or three more shocks. With each, the learner’s cry of pain became louder — and then he asked to stop, and I refused to go any further. The professor became very authoritative. He said that I was costing them valuable time, it was essential for me to continue, I was ruining the experiment. He asserted that he was in charge, not me. He reminded me that I had been paid and insisted that I continue. I refused, offered to give him back the five dollars, and told him that I believed the experiment to be really about how far I would go, that the learner was an accomplice, and that I was determined not to continue.

Technorati Tags: psychology, social psychology

The New York Times has a short piece by Gary Marcus, author of a book on memory — Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind — which relates to social psychology and how our decisions are influenced by our memory systems.

Idea Lab - Memory - New York Times:

The dubious dynamics of memory leave us vulnerable to the predations of spin doctors (because a phrase like “death tax” automatically brings to mind a different set of associations than “estate tax”), the pitfalls of stereotyping (in which easily accessible memories wash out less common counterexamples) and what the psychologist Timothy Wilson calls “mental contamination.” To the extent that we frequently can’t separate relevant information from irrelevant information, memory is often the culprit.

Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Gary Marcus)

Technorati Tags: memory, psychology, social psychology

Scientific American Mind has an article online about Stereotype Threat — the idea that we take on and act out the stereotypes we think others have of us.

How Stereotyping Yourself Contributes to Your Success (or Failure): Scientific American:

As it turns out, research shows that such performance failures cannot always be attributed simply to inherent lack of ability or incompetence. Although some have jumped to the highly controversial conclusion that differences in attainment reflect natural differences between groups, the roots of many handicaps actually lie in the stereotypes, or preconceptions, that others hold about the groups to which we belong. For instance, a woman who knows that women as a group are believed to do worse than men in math will, indeed, tend to perform less well on math tests as a result.

The same is true for any member of a group who is aware that his or her group is considered to be inferior to others in a given domain of performance—whether it is one that appears to tap intellectual and academic ability or one that is designed to establish athletic and sporting prowess.

Technorati Tags: psychology, social psychology, stereotypes