Blog Post #13

I thought the Asch’s Conformity, Milgram’s Obedience, and Stanford Prison experiments were all very interesting. Although experiments like Milgram’s Obedience and the Stanford Prison study are no longer acceptable methods of observation, they teach a lot about how human’s will conform to different situations. In Asch’s Conformity experiment, the researchers got people to give obviously incorrect answers by planting others to give the wrong answer. They conformed to the majority rather than saying what they knew was right. Milgram tested to see how obedient people are. In his experiment he had a “teacher” that was told to give shocks to the “student” for wrong answers. Even though the student was in on the experiment and wasn’t receiving shocks, the person giving them believed each shock was more and more painful and that the person they were shocking had a heart condition. Even though many of the teachers did not want to continue much farther than a mild shock, most of them did because they listened to the experimenter. The Stanford Prison experiment shows how people can change to fit into situations - especially when given the role of a prisoner or guard, in this experiment. After a couple days the role playing became very realistic – the guards became sadistic and the prisoners began having stress reactions. The two-week experiment had to be called off after six days because the situation became so intense. All of the experiments show that it’s a part of human nature to conform to the situations we’re in.
Social influence is how we conform, comply, and act in social situations. How we act as individuals can vary greatly with our behavior as part of a group. We tend to mimic others and take on their behaviors too. Once, I was hanging out with a friend of mine when she had strep throat. She was whispering so she wouldn’t lose her voice. Without even realizing it, I started whispering too - even though I could have talked in a normal tone. Another example of my behavior changes within a group comes from when I was a counselor at science camp. There was a karaoke night for the campers – normally I would never get up in front a bunch of kids and sing and dance to music from Grease, but all of us counselors ended up doing it that night. This really shows how social influence can change our behaviors within a group situation.
The most interesting thing I learned in this class was about altruism and bystander intervention in this chapter. When an emergency situation occurs, a bystander has notice the incident, interpret it as an emergency, assume responsibility, and then attempt to help. If there are many other bystanders around, each individual feels less responsible. They may feel like someone else can be the one to help. In situations where individuals see an incident they will be more likely to help because they are the only ones around and therefore feel the most responsible. I think that’s really interesting, but it does make a lot of sense. When I was shopping this weekend, an older boy, who was also blind, had slipped in one of the aisles because he couldn’t see the melted ice and snow. A lot of people were standing around looking at him when my mom and I happened to walk by, but none of them were helping except for an older lady who was trying to see if he’s okay. She found out who he was with and had the store employees page his mother. (He was okay, but a little shaken up). This situation totally exemplifies how most people are less willing to help in group and social situations.

Blog Post #12

According to the book, ongoing patterns of thoughts, feelings, and actions that are deviant, distressful, and/or dysfunctional are considered psychological disorders. If some acts “abnormally” they don’t necessarily have a psychological disorder. Unless their abnormal behavior is harmfully dysfunctional, distressing, or deviant, their behavior is probably acceptable. A lot of people behave abnormally from time to time and it has nothing to do with a psychological disorder.
I think I may have an undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). I can’t eat Skittles unless I can eat them in true rainbow order: red, orange, yellow, green, and violet (purple). I have no logical explanation for why I do this, I just do. It really bothers me if I can eat all of the red Skittles before I eat the green Skittles. A person with a real, diagnosed OCD would experience obsessive thoughts followed by compulsive behaviors. An OCD is an anxiety disorder. Someone with an OCD may constantly think that they left the oven on, but rather than checking just once they will check ten or eleven times. The obsessive thought/worry is leaving the oven on and the behavior is checking to be sure frequently. I think if I had a real obsessive-compulsive disorder, life would be pretty difficult. Having to deal with constant anxiety and distress would make each day hard. Always obsessing over little things and acting weirdly and compulsively would be horrible! It would be impossible to live a “normal” life.
In this section, I thought it was interesting to learn how many people suffer from schizophrenia. I never knew that 1 out of every 100 people suffers from schizophrenia – it’s much more common than I ever realized. I also learned a lot more about the different types of schizophrenia. Some are more severe than others and that schizophrenia can also be genetically inherited.

Blog Post #11

I am funny, easy-going, bubbly, outgoing, hard-working person. I love to making people laugh and meeting new people. I enjoy working hard on projects for school and extracurricular activities but I almost always go with the flow and live life. I consider all of these traits to be positive because they’re the traits that have allowed me to make so many friends and be successful in school and FBLA. Being able to go with the flow just helps in general, especially when things don’t necessarily go they I want them to. I also have an analytical personality. I tend to think about things more than most - sometimes things will bother me for a long time before I say they do. This can be good and bad, but most of the time it’s just really annoying. I’m also stubborn. Once I start something I refuse to finish it, no matter how difficult the task, or how much stress it causes me. If I disagree with something – you’ll know it. And if I don’t want to do something, I probably won’t do it unless I have no other choice.
On a scale of 1-10, I would have to say my optimism level is a 7 or 8. I always try to keep a positive attitude about everything and always hope for the best. I think being optimistic is a really good thing. If you’re really pessimistic you may not be willing to try new things because you’re afraid that things won’t turn out well. On the other hand, being too optimistic can cause more disappointment and let-downs when things go bad. Personally, being optimistic plays a big part in my life. Always believing in the best gave me confidence to run for a state office in FBLA when I was a sophomore. I was scared to death to speak in front of 2,000 people but I knew that no matter what I would benefit from doing it. I definitely wouldn’t have made it to being the state president if I didn’t think so optimistically two years ago. Another role optimism plays in my life is more personal. My dad has had a lot of health problems my entire life and was diagnosed with cancer right before school started. It would be easy to be pessimistic, quit hoping that things will get better and I wouldn’t be as disappointed when things get worse, but being pessimistic doesn’t help him feel any better. By having a positive, optimistic outlook, my family has been able to keep going through all of it. Believing that it can get better makes it easier to deal with.
In different situations, I would have to say that my personality is a little bit different. Or at least, I choose to show different sides of my personality in different situations. When I’m spending time with my friends, I tend to say whatever’s on my mind and tell lots of jokes and use sarcasm because I’m comfortable with them. I hardly ever shut up, actually. When I’m talking with someone I’ve just met I can be a little more shy and tone down my personality because situations like that seem to be more awkward. Also, my personality during class or doing homework can be different from my personality when I’m in class or working. In class, I tend to be less talkative and more serious and focused on schoolwork. After class, I like to have fun and be a little more laid-back. Just because I don’t act the same in every situation, I still have the same personality. It’s important to adapt our personalities because there are certain times when it’s appropriate to show different sides of our personality.
Three defense mechanisms that I use are repression, denial, and displacement. Repression is basically forgetting thoughts, memories, or feelings that are unpleasant or threatening. Denial is refusing to recognize information or events that cause anxiety or stress. Right now, I’m kind of going through repression and denial because I have to write a farewell letter for the FBLA members. I keep forgetting that it’s due soon – my teacher and my parents have to keep reminding me to do it. I think I’m forgetting to do it because a large part of me doesn’t want to say goodbye to all of the friends that I’ve been working with for the past four years. I also feel like the final conference in April is still a long way off and that I still have plenty of time, when in actuality I have very little time to get everything finished. On a different note, displacement is expressing aggression on socially acceptable outlets. Whenever I get really angry and I just want to scream, rather than screaming out loud in front of everyone I scream into a pillow because it’s a little less crazy. If I ever want to hit something, I have a punching bag that I hit instead of hitting a person. It’s a much better way to handle anger.

Blog Post #10

In chapter nine, I learned that animals, such as chimpanzees or monkeys, use gestured languages like humans do. In fact, our language probably evolved from gestured communication like this. I find this interesting because I am guilty of constantly “talking” with my hands. (I even use my hands when I’m talking on the phone). According to the book, using gestures makes it easier to talk about things with spatial content and it makes speaking and hearing easier for both people involved in the conversation because being able to visually represent something allows us to form mental pictures more easily than if we relied on words alone. I also thought it was interesting that blind people will also use gestures – even when they believe the person they are talking to is also blind. It makes sense for deaf people to use gestures too – how else would sign language have evolved? I think it is very true that it’s harder to talk with your hands in your pockets.
The textbook defines emotional intelligence as “the ability to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions.” I feel that I am more emotionally intelligent than I am creative because I can often recognize the emotions of my friends and family just by looking at them. A lot of times I can have entire “conversations” with them without ever having to say a word but I will still know exactly what they are trying to say. I can read their faces and their eyes to understand if they are happy, sad, confused, upset, angry, or hurt. Keeping one’s own emotions in check is another characteristic of emotional intelligence, Most of the time I can keep my emotions under control too. Even when something really angers me or upsets me I can keep my cool. In stressful situations I can remain calm and solve the problems without letting my emotions get in the way. I think being emotionally intelligent helps me form relationships with others quickly and it makes my relationships stronger because I can usually relate to others easily. I see how beneficial this is – especially because I frequently meet new people and have to work with complete strangers on projects for FBLA. Being able to quickly become friends helps make the work easier.
I think the most interesting thing about chapter ten was just learning about all of the different intelligences and the different ways psychologists have discovered to measure intelligences. The methods vary a lot, and I think all of them are accurate to a certain degree but I feel like they also have their faults. Some intelligences could really be considered talents and other intelligences are too broad and include many sub-categories. Personally I think Gardner’s theory is one of my favorites because it includes a variety of different aspects of intelligence and it also allows people to have more than one strong point or a “general intelligence.”

Blog Post #9

I think our memory makes up a very large portion of who we are. Many of the experiences I have had in my past have had an impact on who I am today, and being able to remember and learn from mistakes has kept me from making them again. Having to start over from scratch every single day would be very frustrating even though I wouldn’t be able to remember it. However, when I think of Clive Wearing, I noticed that he still knew that he loved his wife and he could still remember how to play music. He’s definitely not the same person he was before, but he is just as intelligent and passionate as he was before. The things that truly made an impact on his life, his passions, stay with him. In some ways he is still the same, and luckily for him he can’t remember starting over each day. His wife, however, can. I think it must be extremely hard to see someone you love struggle over and over each day and it must be so heartbreaking to know that the person you love can’t always recall who you are or ever meeting you. It makes me feel so grateful that I can remember the people and experiences in my life – I’ll definitely try to keep myself from taking that for granted.

After this section, I perceive memory much differently. I used to think my memories could be trusted, but after doing some of the exercises I realized that a lot of details can be lost and sometimes our memories can even altered if we’re strongly convinced that something happened in our past. From the exercises, I also realized that what our brain determines important effects memory too. In one activity, I was shown 16 pennies, each one was different and only one was a correct depiction of a penny. It took me five guesses to get the right one. In most cases, people only need to know that a penny is smaller and different colored than other coins – that’s enough for us to distinguish which coin is which and how much its worth. Knowing which direction Abe Lincoln is facing, where the date and text is located, and what is written on the penny is not necessarily essential information so our brain doesn’t feel the need to store it. Obviously, I should not rely on my memory for some information or details.

The most important concept that I learned was that memory is not something that we can just play back over and over – we can “edit” our memories and so can other people. The idea that memory is imperfect has a lot to do with everyday life – I explains why me and my friends recall events differently and why someone can remember a detail that nobody else can. It could be that the rest of us forget a detail that happened to stick out for the other person or that person is incorrect. The point is that you can’t always rely on what you know and remember. Skepticism has its good points.

Blog Post 8

In classical conditioning, you learn to link two or more stimuli and anticipate events. Seeing leaves change colors and feeling the temperature become cooler has always been one of the first signs that summer is turning into fall. Therefore, every year when the leaves start to change we expect cool temperatures and a new season too. With operant conditioning you link a behavior with a consequence. Positive response to the behavior will strengthen the behavior. Getting a good night’s sleep and then doing well on a test suggests that sleeping more will help you do better in school, so you keep doing it in order to get the same result. I think classical and operant conditioning has been crucial for humans and animals alike. Conditioning is what has allowed us to adapt to our environments and learn about our surroundings. If I hadn’t been able to learn from operant conditioning I also would not have learned to distinguish between good and bad behaviors. That means I may have never learned that brushing my teeth and flossing every day was a good thing or that having my shoes tied would keep me from tripping over my feet.

In my example for operant conditioning I said behaviors are linked with a consequence, or more specifically positive or negative reinforcements. My FBLA state adviser wants everybody on the team to check their email and respond to emails quickly so every now and then an email will say “the first person to respond to this email and finish the assignments below will receive a surprise in the mail.” Sometimes the surprise is candy or an FBLA keychain. Even though I never know what the surprise might be or which email is going to be the email that has the surprise inside, I still check my email often, just in case. This proves that positive reinforcement strengthens behavior by providing a pleasant stimulus.

Negative reinforcement also strengthens behavior, instead by reducing or removing an undesirable stimulus. Negative reinforcement sounds like punishment but the two are actually quite different. Negative reinforcement removes a punishing event. If I don’t have my homework done on the weekends my parents won’t allow me to go out with my friends. The idea of not being able to see my friends reinforces my behavior of always finishing my homework as soon as possible so I can have fun. If I didn’t finish my homework, the punishment would be staying home.

Punishment decreases the behavior it follows, but it won’t necessarily stop the behavior. Honestly, I have a hard time recalling a time where I’ve been punished. I’m a bit of a goody-goody, but I remember when I was younger that my brother would swear a lot so my parents would spank him and wash his mouth out with soap to get him to stop. Doing this made my brother stop swearing in front of my parents but he still swore in front of other people. My parents were successful in decreasing his behavior of swearing, but they didn’t end the behavior entirely.

Learning about learning has been a bit of an eye opening experience. First of all I’d never really thought about what the definition of learning is. Any time I learn something new I have to link it with a previous experience or something else I have learned or I have to learn by watching somebody else. Now I know that those processes are associative and observational learning, respectively. It doesn’t necessarily change how I think of things, but now I know why I think and learn the way I do. And when I don’t understand something or when I want to change something about myself I can use what I’ve learned to teach myself new behaviors.

Blog Post #7

Sensation is what occurs when our sensory receptors and our nervous system receive stimulus energies from our surroundings. We can sense sights, sounds, taste, touch, and feeling. Perception is organizing and interpreting the sensory information into something more useful. You can sense the smell of flowers but you wouldn’t be able to recognize that you were smelling flowers without perception.

I found prosopagnosia (face blindness) to be one of the most interesting things in the chapter. I find it interesting that some people can not recognize faces – even the faces of their good friends and family. I used to feel bad when I couldn’t always put names and faces together of people I met at leadership conferences, but the thought of not being able recognize of my best friends would be so much worse. It’s one thing to forget someone you only met for a few minutes but to forget a face you’ve known for years is difficult to grasp. I definitely appreciate that I can sense and perceive faces, and I will definitely try harder to remember faces, but I won’t feel nearly as bad.

I also read “The Attentional Spotlight” on Psyblog. The main point of the article was that our eyes could focus on one thing, but our attention could be focusing on another. For example you could be gazing towards the teacher in class, but your attention could be focused on the peripherals of your vision. The blog also examined a study showing that attention moves faster than the eye. In other words, you could notice a detail before actually looking at it, just by using your peripheral perception. Our attention is spotlighted on what interests us instead of just what we point our eyes at. It makes a lot of sense to me. There are a lot of times when we can be looking at a person in the middle of a conversation, but we are more concerned about something else that’s going on around us. In everyday life we don’t always have control over what we’re paying attention to. And sometimes it may seem like everybody’s paying attention when really they’re distracted by something else.

Blog Post #6

One thing that I learned in the interview assignment is how different things are for teens today compared to teenagers years ago. The woman I interviewed is probably around 85 years old, and she said that back then money wasn’t as a big a deal – she had to make her own fun. Her friends would often walk, bike, or skate to get places and they would play softball or go ice-skating depending on the weather. Going out to movies was rare and was usually set aside for dates. Now a days we’re always driving ourselves around and could go to the movies as often as we want, as long as we have money. We also tend to date more too. Vi started dating a senior at the end of her sophomore year of high school and then married him a couple years later. Most people today have a few relationships in high school and in college before getting married, I think it’s really interesting to see how much things have changed, but I think I’d prefer to be a teenager in the present-day, just because we have a lot of exciting opportunities available to us.

I think the “Parenting and Adolescence” video made a lot of sense. When I was younger I would fight with my parents a lot, usually over small things, but now the same issues are not a big deal. I think my time as an adolescent was a little different than some, just because my dad has always had a lot of health issues and there has always been extra stress in the house because of that. I think that all of my experiences will in some way have an impact on who I am as an adult because some of them have showed me what’s truly important in life and have defined me as person.

In Chapter 4 I learned about gender schemas. I thought it was really interesting how young children learn behaviors that are typically characterized to their gender i.e. girls play should play with dolls and boys should play with trucks. I had never really given it a whole lot of thought before – I figured part of had to do with the toys their parents gave them to play with, but really its more about what the children observe that makes them think they need to act a certain way and play with kids of the same gender.

In chapter 5 I learned about how we develop cognitively from infants to adults. Toddlers and small children are constantly active in trying to reason and learn about the world around them, and they do this by making schemas or mental molds of their experiences. As we all get older we form countless schemas that allow us to reason better than younger children. I thought this was interesting to think about it, because again I’ve never really thought about why we develop the way we do, and this chapter has answered a lot of questions I never even realized I had.

Blog Post #5

In this chapter I learned the importance of nature and nurture. I thought that personality was something that was affected by the nurture aspect, but surprisingly I was wrong. Our parents can influence our manners and political and religious beliefs, but our personalities are one thing they cannot control.

The videos talked about evolutionary psychology and natural selection. Evolutionary psychology and natural selection explains why animals and humans mate the way they do. Males search for healthy, fertile-appearing partners while women search for men with resources to help support their offspring. This information wasn’t really surprising, but it does make a lot of sense and applies to real life for nearly all of us.

I also learned more about the differences between fraternal and identical twins. (I didn’t know that Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen weren’t identical). I thought it was interesting that even separated twins can end up with very similar personality traits, and that identical twins in general are usually more alike than fraternal twins. I thought it was creepy that the twin brothers in the book shared the same name, habits, health issues, and pet name. Of course not all cases are extreme as this one, but it’s still really interesting to think about!

Blog Post #4

For this blog post, I read the article “What? Me Biased?” The article was written about a year ago before the 2008 Presidential Elections. Researchers used an implicit association test (IAT) to measure whether people regarded one candidate to be more “foreign” or “American” than others. When the participants where primed to think of either race, age, or gender they would think differently of a candidate as opposed to just responding naturally. (For example if they were focusing on age they might subconsciously see John McCain as less American than Barack Obama).

What surprised me most in the article was that most people in the study, regardless of race or ethnicity, view Americans as white. The example in the article of Lucy Liu v. Kate Winslet makes sense. If you didn’t follow pop culture too closely or know anything about either women you would probably assume Winslet was American and Liu was Chinese, but the truth is that Winslet is British and Liu is Asian-American. And when it was between Barack Obama and John McCain both were view as equally American when the participants were told to consider political parties and age, but when it came to skin color Barack was perceived as less American.

I think this study was very interesting because a lot of people who say they believe in equality might be subconsciously biased towards. I couldn’t think of a lot of ways that this research is relevant to my life, and I also don’t think I can agree with the research. After taking an IAT test about religion, I feel like the testing method really says nothing about my subconscious beliefs. The results of my religion IAT showed that I don’t favor any particular region or disfavor them. I perceive them all equally, with exception of Islam. Apparently I view Islam more negatively, which is not true at all. The test tells you to press a certain key for good words (superb, wonderful, good, great, etc.) and another key for bad words (terrible, awful, horrible, etc.). Then it tells you to keep pressing the same key for good words and for words that relate to a certain religion, and mark everything else the same as you would for bad words. The reason why I perceived Islam more negatively is because I pushed the key too hard and ended up marking my answer wrong. Of course, I could be an exception to this rule, but I’m still pretty skeptical about the accuracy of this kind of research.

Blog Post #3

I did the “Time to Think?” and “Seeing More Than Your Eye Does” activities. The first activity measured the amount of time it takes for you to see a black square on the screen and click a button. In this activity, I learned that it takes a few hundred milliseconds to see the square and click the button, no matter how prepared you are. In the second activity I had to close one eye and focus on a black cross on the screen. When I did that, a black dot on the other side of the screen “disappeared” because of a blind spot in my vision. I learned that the brain tends to fill-in and make up information it doesn’t see which is why when the black dot disappeared it seemed like that area was just blank. When there was a line going through the dot part of the line would disappear, but not all of it. I thought that was kind of surprising, I didn’t realize that our brains did all of that. It’s crazy to think that a small portion of what I see is made up by my brain. Perhaps everything really isn’t as it seems?
In this unit I learned about all of the different parts of the brain structure. I knew that different parts of the brain controlled different things, but now I know when I’m having a hard time remembering something I can blame the hippocampus. I also learned that our handedness can affect the organization of our brains. For example, some left-handed people will use the right hemisphere of their brain to process speech while many other left and right handed people use the left hemisphere. I never really thought that handedness had that big of an effect on the mind. I also thought this was particularly interesting because I can write pretty well with both hands (either way my handwriting looks like chicken-scratch). It makes me wonder which hemisphere of the brain I use to process certain information.

I thought the video, “The Man With Two Brains” was really interesting! It’s really cool that a person with a split brain could draw to distinct shapes at the same time, but a person with a “normal” brain couldn’t. I also though it was pretty intriguing that he could draw the telephone after seeing it flash on the screen but he couldn’t say what it was until after he drew it. It’s also amazing that he can literally do two things at once, sometimes I wish I could do that, but I think I’ll keep my brain whole for awhile.

Blog Post #2 - Related to "Critically Thinking" Chapter

Research is important for many reasons. In psychology, basic research is necessary to provide general information. Applied research expands on basic research – instead of focusing on general knowledge, information is gathered on specific topics or areas of study within psychology. The research gathered allows psychologists, or scientists in general, to learn more about a problem so they can form hypotheses, conduct experiments, and form new conclusions from the resulting data.

While perusing the Psyblog website, the blog titled“18 Ways Attention Goes Wrong” jumped out at me. After reading through it I noticed that several of the items apply or have applied to my life at one point or another. The first one that I noticed was #4 – Pain. The post talks about how chronic pain can pull your attention away from a task and force you to constantly re-focus. Last year I had a headache for nearly two months. The pain was excruciating, and I remembered how hard it was for me to do my homework most nights. Sometimes I would end up re-reading the same passage over and over again without realizing it and without getting the main idea. I also found #7 – Errors of automaticity, and #9 – Ironic processes of control, to be quite interesting. Errors in automaticity occur when we become so set into a routine or behavior. Every morning I have the same routine of washing my face and brushing my teeth, and I know I’ve occasionally had moments where I’ve been distracted by other thoughts and have almost but soap on my toothbrush instead of toothpaste. Errors like these happen to a lot of people. In my final choice, ironic processes of control, I have learned that too much attention can be bad too. There have been times when I have been so focused about something, like shooting an arrow at a target that I’ve actually missed the target entirely.

In this class I have learned about the different perspectives of psychology. It never occurred to me that psychologists would study why we turn red in the face when we get angry (neuroscience). Some of the other perspectives I had heard of in some shape or form and others surprised me. However, they all answer specific questions related to psychology. No single area is more or less important because they all benefit the psychologists and researchers that study behaviors and mental processes. I also learned how misleading charts and graphs can be and that the wording of survey questions can make a difference in the results. Conducting research and representing data can be very tricky and has an impact on how we perceive and interpret information.

Chapter 1 - Thinking Critically with Psychological Science

Before beginning this class, I knew that psychology included the study of the mind and human behaviors. However, the mental picture I envisioned was one of a patient laying on a couch talking about his thoughts and feelings while a doctor wrote scribbled on a pad of paper. Obviously, I knew my vision of a psychologist was stereotypical and somewhat off base but I couldn’t form a better mental picture because I didn’t know enough to form new ideas. Now I’ve realized the psychology is everywhere. It’s not always apparent at the first glance, but if you really think about it becomes blatantly obvious.
Everyday we experience psychology in the way we act and interpret information. What we choose to believe is true, our dreams, and our feelings about our experiences can all be explained and studied in psychology. Every time I accept something new or form an opinion, psychology is playing a role in my life.

Two things I found interesting in this chapter were about correlation and causation and illusionary correlations. Reading about this reminded me of an activity that I participated in for CTSO State Officer Training last summer. The leader of the workshop asked for two volunteers. He told them they were going to be reporters. He was going to ask them to leave the room while he told the rest of the group about a dream he had. Then he would bring the reporters back in one at a time and have them try to figure out what is dream was about. However they could only ask yes or no questions.

Two girls volunteered to be reporters, and once they left the room, the workshop leader explained what we were really going to do. He didn’t actually have a dream to decide – when the reporters asked us questions that ended with letters between A and M in the alphabet we were to collectively respond with a “Yes.” All other questions were to be answered with a no. When the first reporter came back she was obviously shocked when her first guesses about the dream were correct and then even more confused when her guesses were wrong. The workshop leader encouraged her to believe that she was working in the right path and that she had guessed his dream perfectly. When the second reporter came in the first reporter stayed inside the room. When the two had guessed completely different dreams – their confusion only became greater.

Both girls thought they were on the right track because a whole group convinced them that they were right. As each they began eliminating possibilities their dreams became more and more far fetched and even less likely, but in their own minds they thought their ideas were plausible because the rest of the group was so convincing. But when the second reporter asked her questions she noticed the how confused the first reporter was becoming and began to doubt some of the things we were telling her. Eventually she felt like she was beginning to notice a pattern in the data. Even though her guesses were wrong, it does prove that we try to find pattern in random data as illusionary correlation suggests. Both experiments show correlation and causation – when they thought they were right it caused them to believe more and more false fact.

I think it’s very ironic that I’ve witnessed a sort of psychological experience without really realizing it. I think it’s funny, that even after reading about it I know that I have and probably still will “fall” for tricks like that.

Introductory Post :)

Hello! My name is Larissa Speerstra. I am 17 years-old and I am a senior at Gilmanton High School.

One BIG thing that has shaped me as a person was/is the experience of being a state officer for Wisconsin Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA). When I was a sophomore I was elected state secretary and last spring I was elected state president. Having to go through the process of campaigning and getting elected helped me gain a lot of confidence in myself that I didn't have when I was younger. I've also learned a lot of useful public speaking, leadership, and team building skills that have helped me in a lot of other areas. Basically, I would be a totally different person if it weren't for my involvement in FBLA.

I believe that studying psychology is important because understanding human behaviors and interactions will be beneficial for my future plans of becoming a marketing manager. Based on what I know, psychology is a social science, and it also deals with one's thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Therefore psychology would probably include studying human behaviors and interactions whether they are conscious or sub-conscious. Psychology can help one understand why they have a strange dream or react certain ways in a situation.