The music for this week is a song by Kyle Lucas and his band Vonnegutt, I met him at his show on friday and am still running on a concert high of sorts from it so here it is...
Conflict Spiral...what is it? According to psychologydictionary.org, conflict spiral is "a trend of advancing friction and conflict between at least people or teams who go against each other's replies with even further aversive and more radical replies."
I think this is an idea we all can relate to. We all have had that instance where you're in the middle of an argument with someone and it just keeps escalating and getting more and more intense and soon (at least in my case) it turns into an all out war (where perhaps you...punch the person in the face...don't worry I'll explain that here in a minute, but first things first). Anyways like I was saying we all know what conflict spiral is, even if we don't/didn't know the technical term for it before now.
So my example of conflict spiral is maybe more intense than most peoples (mainly because it was a 4 year long conflict spiral). When I moved to Hawaii there was this girl named Brooke, her and I were alright at first and we were cordial to one another but then one day she started talking trash about my mother (not knowing that that was my mother) and I, being the 8th grader I was, started yelling at her and she started going back at me. This continued for years, every time we saw each other it seemed like it got more and more intense and more personal. The crazy thing about this was I had to deal with her on a daily basis...she was on the swim team, the club swim team, the water polo team and the club water polo team that I was on as well as in my honors classes throughout high school. When I say that EVERY DAY we fought and it was consistently escalating, I am not exaggerating. As members of the water polo team our coach had encouraged physical and aggressive reactions to when someone upset you (it made you a better water polo player) and so things started to get physically violent between the two of us. It started off as just extra kicking and elbowing during scrimmages (kicking and elbowing was expected in water polo) to one point other girls had to come seperate us because when our coach said 5 minutes without rules we ended up full on fighting in the water and kept basically rolling in the water (it's really hard to explain well).
Then came my last ever water polo practice, it was the summer that I moved from Hawaii to Texas (summer before my senior year of high school). At this point I was angry 24/7 and had a very short temper. I went to the club practice that day after having just left seeing my friend for the last time (she was in the hospital) and the coach wasn't there, really there was very few people there. There was Brooke, her older sister, her younger sister and the "assistant" coach (aka Robin). My friend called me just before I jumped into the water crying because the Dr.s were in her room and they were talking about her having surgery and she was freaking out. Since nobody was there I figured it didn't matter if I got in late or not. I was wrong. After getting off the phone with my friend (I am now about 15 minutes late) Brooke and her older sister start going off on me. Brooke was making comments about how she didn't have any respect for me and all this other crap and finally I just got out of the water, that's where Brooke messed up, she started to follow me while still talking crap. She got out of the pool and raised her hand towards me like she was about to hit me, so what did I do? I punched her square across her face and walked off.
So this conflict spiral started with her making some small comment about my mother and 4 years later ended up with me knocking her out. Now I am not a violent person, I had never (outside of a sporting event) put my hands on someone in that manner which is why that was such a shocking thing for me to do. But, because the conflict spiral just kept going and going and building and building I snapped.
If you want to see part of a water polo match from my high school see video below (we are the white team)
So, once again I was unable to think of any songs that really went with this particular topic and the tradebook in and of itself so here is the music I am listening to as I write this post
So for my trade book I chose to read "The Honest Truth About Dishonesty; How We Lie to Everybody- Especially Ourselves" by Dan Ariely
Dan Ariely was born April 29, 1967 and currently is employed at Duke University where he is a professor of psychology as well as behavioral economics. Ariely is also the founder of The Center for Advanced Hindsight ( according to the TCAH's website, their main goal is to "develop great insights about an extensive and diverse set of research projects")
Ariely earned his B.A. in psychology from Tel Aviv University. He then got his M.A. and PhD in cognitive psych at the University of North Carolina as well as a second doctorate in business administration from Duke University. Ariely has taught at MIT, and Duke, and is considered one of the best behavioral economists. He has published many studies as well as three books.
I would certainly call this book credible for many reasons; not only does his work academically show that he is credible, but also throughout the book itself he cited many studies that were done as well as personal stories that work to back up what he is saying in this book.
So before I go any further into this book, the main reason I chose this book (besides the fact that I missed the original sign up and had a smaller list than normal, which of course is my own fault) is the title really caught my attention. This again is for 2 main reasons, one of which is due to my personality (I am a very suspicious person and have an incredibly hard time trusting people) and the other reason that I chose this book was the title really stuck out to me. I have ADHD so it is hard for me to keep focused on things if they don't immediately grab my attention, so when I came across this title and it caught my attention in the way it did I figured hey why not?! And boy am I glad I picked this book. Not only did the book present interesting facts about lying, it gave many real world examples and Ariely showed how his research applied to many different areas such as golf, pharma reps and academics. Areily also talked about the role that money and incentives played a role in the levels of dishonesty and how feeling like you owe someone (be it a person, group of people, company or so forth) can influence your perception of something at a physiological level (We'll look into these examples more later). The application of Ariely's theories and research to everyday life were not only interesting but often times incredibly funny and/or shocking, which helped to keep my attention throughout the entire book. Ariely did not only focus on lying but also on things such as how cognitive load affects instinctive desires, "ego depletion" ( resisting temptation takes considerable effort and energy, and the more you say no and resist temptation as the day goes on, the more likely you are to succumb to temptation later), and more.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who has ever lied (which, let's be honest ;). is everyone), and when I say everyone, I really mean everyone (within reason, i.e not small children who would not understand it) regardless of if they have a background in psychology or not. The way the book was written makes it easy to follow and understand regardless of the amount of psychology someone has in their background, however I do feel that those with a psychology background are likely to get more from the book than those without.
While Ariely uses many real world examples, many of them applied to either activities I don't participate in or professions I am not in nor deal with on a normal day to day basis, this got me thinking about how examples of these topics played a part in my everyday life.
First off there are not that many times I have found myself falling for and/or doing any of the things mentioned in the book, call it ignorance or whatever, but it is true, I really did struggle when it came to find ways to apply it to my life in more ways than just being more aware of how we lie to/about ourselves in different situations. One of the examples that I could come up with, however, deals with a topic covered in the beginning of the book and how we can become blinded by our own motivations and in particular the "hidden cost of favors". I am one of those people who tend to feel indebted to others for even the smallest things, that is how I have always been. The book talked about how that feeling of being indebted to someone/something can "color our view, making us more inclined to help that person in the future". This was shown in a study done by Ann Harvey, Ulrich Kirk, George Denfield, and Read Montague and the Baylore College of Medicine. The results of this study (focusing on favors and what happens when we feel indebted) tended to suggest that once we feel indebted, whether it be towards a person or an organization, we become "partial to anything related to the giving party". This got me thinking about myself. When people do something for me, give me something, or just are there for me when I need a friend, I feel a HUGE need to repay them for whatever it is that they did. There have been times, many many times, where said person keeps telling me that I don't owe them anything, but I can not stop feeling like I owe them until I repay them. The feeling is overwhelming and is very strong for me. I often go out of my way to repay them but it is as though it is something I HAVE to do.
Then I read about the "I Knew It All Along" theory (in a sense) and decided to do a mock version of his idea (to eliminate the tendency for people to come up to him after the show and say that they weren't surprised by the results because they "knew it all along", Ariely had audience members vote on what they believed the outcome was or write down what they think happened. After that people rarely gave him the whole "I knew it all along"speech) So what did I do? I found a bunch of different facts online (some dealing with music, other with famous people, and finally geography/history) and tested this out on 3 of my friends over a two day span. The first day I would pull the whole "hey did you know...." and they usually responded with "of course" or "yes". Well the next day I would turn it into a question of sorts and even though it was the same information, many of them proved that they didn't in fact "know"
(an example of this would be: "did you know Hitler was Times Man of the Year in 1938?" vs "do you know who Times Man of the Year was in 1938)
My results were that NOBODY was able to correctly answer the question that they had all insisted they knew only a day before.
So what did I like about this book and what didn't I like about this book. I loved how this book kept you interested throughout the book and showed how we lie to ourselves and others more than we think. To me that was its biggest strength was just how wonderfully it was written as to be able to hold your attention throughout the book, which due to my ADHD is hard enough haha. However I did not like the way the book was set up (and perhaps that is my fault for having it on the Kindle) as well as how while it did give many real life examples of these theories being played out or what inspired him to look into a particular idea and so forth were generally unrealtable to myself as someone still in college.
So what is the "take home message" of the book? Dishonesty and honesty have a lot to do with our motivations, one where we want to benefit from cheating, the other is that while we want to benefit from cheating, we also want to be able to think of ourselves as good people. There are many factors that increase dishonesty and many that decrease dishonesty and some that have no affect on the level of dishonesty. Those that increase dishonesty include our ability to rationalize the lying, creativity, and conflicts of interest, whereas moral reminders and supervision decrease the levels of dishonesty. Interestingly money and probability of being caught have no effect on our levels of dishonesty.
Ariely, Dan. The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---especially Ourselves.
New York: Harper, 2012.
Info about his education and birthday were provided by the wikipedia page for Dan Ariely (as much as I hate using wikipedia it was the only site I could find that gave me the biographical information needed)
"Dam Ariely." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 9 April 2013. Web. 4 April. 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely#Education_and_academic_career>
SOOOOO, I struggled to find a song that matched the topic of this weeks blog so I am just going to post the song that I am listening to as I write this (its actually not one song but a CD put into one long youtube song haha). Sooooooooooooo without further ado I give you, Hoodie Allen
As much as we all want to deny it, we have all conformed to fit in at one point or another. If we are lucky we start to realize that if someone doesn't like you for who you truly are than they aren't worth our time and we start to not care about what others think.
What exactly is conformity? Conformity is defined as the tendency to change our perceptions, opinions, or behavior in ways that are consistent with group norms. One example of a time that I caved in to pressure to conform was when I was in high school, in particular my sophomore year.
As a military kid, you are never guaranteed to have all your friends there more than a year and in my case, my entire group of friends moved the summer before my sophomore year in high school and once school started I found myself without a group of friends to hang with. I soon started to hang out with one of the girls in my class, Gwen, and her friends. Gwen was a cheerleader and hung out with the kids that partied, drank, and smoked weed, and I was, at this point, shy, reserved and had never been to a "party".
One night after Gwen's brother and father had left (her mom didn't live with them), Gwen invited me over for a party. I told my mom I was going to go stay the night with Gwen and headed over to Gwen's house. Literally the second I walked in the door she was handing me a shot. Now I had NEVER drank before nor had I really had the urge to, but I wanted to fit in and be accepted that I took the shot, then another, and another...I drank so damn much that night that I honestly don't remember much of that night. That night however, started me on a downward spiral of partying, drinking, skipping class, and more. I didn't necessarily WANT to do any of that, I just wanted to fit in, to conform. This is an example of public conformity which is a superficial change in overt behavior without a corresponding change of opinion that is produced by real or imagined group pressure.
This behavior lasted till second semester of my junior year when I realized that I no longer cared what they thought, I realized that they weren't the kind of people I wanted to associate with and I distanced myself from them and that entire "scene". I got really lucky in that it didnt take me longer to realize that they were not who I needed to be associating myself with. Even more amazing is the group of friends that I met after I stopped hanging out with Gwen and them.
I still remain close to those friends that I met after I stopped hanging with Gwen and them and am even bringing one of them to formal with me this weekend :)
I felt that this song really related to this weeks blog post so with that being said The song of the week is...*drum roll*
LOVE THE WAY YOU LIE
Oh and because I deleted every picture of my ex and I, I'm going to ad pics from ad campaigns aimed at helping women in abusive relationships
I kind of talked about my past and being in an abusive relationship in a previous post, but I was having a hard time relating the lesson to my life other than this. For those of you who didn't read my previous post here is a brief synopsis...when I was younger and living in Hawai'i I was dating this guy who used to beat the crap out of me on a regular basis. It took a long time for me to tell someone and an even longer time for me to leave him. That takes us to what today's blog post is about...
A lot of people don't understand why many times those in an abusive relationship don't leave, why the keep going back, why they still love that person that is causing them so much pain. But, you can chalk up much of why the "victim" stays to effort justification, that is that we love what we suffer for (according to the definition given to us in class by Dr. Guiliano). This paradigm of cognitive dissonance (to what extent our behavior affects our attitudes (Festinger) ) basically says, that when we suffer more for or because of something, that we tend to change our attitude so it becomes more of a positive. In the case of abusive relationships, and particularly my situation, my ex had even gone as far as to try and kill me so I was terrified to leave, that lead to me starting to focus on the good attributes that he did have and soon I truly believed that I was still in love with him. He meant so much to me, that I began to justify his abuse and in my head, because I had stayed instead of leaving, I figured I really did love him, that that was what love was. It took a while before I finally told someone, and even more time before my friends convinced me to leave and showed me that that wasn't love
When I first heard this song (Love the Way You Lie) I seriously felt like I was listening to someone sing/rap about my relationship. I seriously began to justify what was happening to me by telling myself that I liked it.
Effort Justification does not only apply to abusive relationships but as
I said earlier, it was the one thing that kept popping into my head as I
thought of topics for this weeks blog.
Word Count=435
Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press
I couldn't really think of a song that went well with this blog post so y'all get to listen to what I am listening to as I write this..(and since it is a longer post, I'll post multiple videos throughout the post)
So for my participant observer blog I chose to be a different person for a day.
For those of you who know me pretty well know that I am not usually a "shy" person nor am I usually a "quiet" person, so for an entire day I altered my usual behavior. I chose this particular aspect of my life to alter for the day because it is so different from how I usually am around people I know and even some people I don't know all that well and I knew that this was probably my best shot at getting a reaction.
So how did I become "shy" and "quiet"???? First off, I made sure to kind of separate myself in social situations, that is, I would make sure to stand at least 3 feet away from the people congregating in front of the commons before it opened at lunch and dinner, I also sat towards the back and at least 2 feet from everyone at chapter that day. I would never start a conversation, and if someone were to approach me to say hi or something I would avoid making eye contact, I spoke quietly and avoided long responses on my part. If someone were to touch me (as in a hug or putting their hand on my shoulder) I would shy away and just keep looking away. I basically kept to myself the whole day, and did not seek out social interaction. I would walk around with my head down and made sure not to make eye contact with anyone just walking by and made sure not to keep eye contact for more than 3 seconds at a time when people approached me. Not only was this hard on my part (at first at least), but it really worried a lot of people, as in someone talked to my RA and had them come check on me!!!!
The hardest part of this experience for me was basically choosing to be alone an entire day. I know that shy doesn't mean you spend a lot of time alone, but by shying away from social interaction, especially "fun" interactions I felt incredibly lonely. I do not have a roommate so usually lunch, dinner, chapter, and Thursdays in general (I have no classes that day) are when I get to just hang out with friends and its kind of a stress reliever. So, for me, the fact that the only conversations I was having that day quickly went from "Hey! How are you!?" to "Are you ok!?" and then I would say that I was in fact ok.....but NOBODY listened. It actually got quite annoying after the first 5 times. I also started feeling incredibly sad. This is an example of self-awareness theory (Duval & Wickland 1972). This theory states that when you are focused on yourself (in this case focusing on my behavior) leads to you noticing self-discrepancies, which leads to wanting to escape that self-awareness or change in behavior, and also often leads to a negative mood. I also found that because I was so focused on self-regulating when I was focusing on making sure that I was "shy" and "quiet" that I was unable to control myself in other ways. The biggest being anger. The more people kept asking me if I was OK, the angrier I got. This concept was first discovered by Muraven and Baumeister in 2000 when they stated that there is only one "reservoir" in which our self-control is stored and that the more you use it, the harder it becomes and the less effective it gets until it has a chance to "replenish".
Most people became "worried" that something was wrong based on my behavior, with many of them thinking that it had something to do with my concussion (one of my friends even told me to go to the ER). Others thought that I was just really sad and that something bad had happened. There also is the whole getting my RA involved and having my RA check on me because I was "acting really strange". Many of them tried to console me and would attempt to give me a hug, which when I pulled away REALLY worried them. People were trying to make sure I was OK all day, and as stated earlier, it got really annoying. Because I had changed my self-presentation, and my non-verbal behavior ( behavior that reveals a persons feelings without using words) and no longer fit into people's idea of who I was, they assumed something was wrong. Self-presentation is defined as strategies people use to shape what others think of them (Pontari & Schlenker 2000).
I did not like being "shy" and "quiet", even though it was just for a day, I did not feel like I was myself, I felt strange all day, and I got incredibly sad and lonely that day. The biggest thing that I took away from that day was that even the smallest of behavior changes can really affect how not only we see ourselves but how others see us as well. I also learned that (at least in my opinion) self-concept is pretty stable. While I was able to change an aspect of my self-concept it was actually incredibly difficult for me to do so. I constantly felt myself fighting myself to actually act "shy" and "quiet", and by the day I was mentally exhausted. I like who I am. I am a social person who loves social interaction. I did not like how being "shy" and "quiet" made me feel and do not believe I will ever actively work on changing to become more "shy" and "quiet".
n= 991
Duval, S. & Wickland, R.A. (1972). A theory of objective self-awareness. New York: Academic Press
Muravan, M. & Baumeister, R.F. (2000). Self-Regulation and depletion of limited resources. Does self-control resemble a muscle? Psychological Bulletin, 126, 247-259
Pontari, B.A. & Schlenker, B.R. (2000). The influence of cognitive load on self-presentation: Can cognitive busyness help as well as harm social performance? Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology. 27, 975-986
*ALL DEFINITIONS WERE PROVIDED AND ARE NOT THE IDEA OR DEFINITION OF MYSELF, I JUST COULDN'T FIND THE REFERENCE FOR THE DEFINITION*
And the song of the week is....*drum roll please*....
Now that THAT is established, on to the important stuff
Are you prejudicial? Do you hold on to certain stereotypes? Most people, would say no. We as a society like to answer in a socially acceptable way so of course we would say no. The thing is, is that is not entirely true, most of us whether it be consciously or unconsciously are both prejudicial and have certain stereotypes that they hold on to. That's where the IAT or Implicit Associates Test comes in.
The IAT was developed by Greenwald and Banaji and is used to uncover our unconscious feelings, preferences and beliefs. The IAT is taken online and participants are told to categorize words into 2 different categories. For example one of the tests I took was on Gender and Careers. The first task was to categorize names by either male or female by pressing E for girl or I for a male. Then, they switched it and E became male and I became female. Next you had to categorize words into either career (E) or family (I). Then like the male and female categorization, they switched. The next one had you press E for female OR career and I for male OR family. Finally they changed it so E was male or career and I was female or family. I also took the Skin Tone IAT which used the same format as the Gender and Career one, however used pictures of dark skinned faces and light faces and Good or Bad.
For the Gender and Career Test I got "little or no association between Female and Male with Career and Family" For the Skin Tone Association Test I got "slight automatic preference for light skin compared to dark skin." The results for the Gender and Career test I felt were pretty consistent with my conscious beliefs. I have never been one to associate certain careers with male or female connotations or believe in the whole "men work, women stay home" idea. Even as a kid (kindergarten) I would walk around saying how I was going to be an astronaut when I grew up and actually got in trouble that year for smacking a boy (his name was Miles) who said I couldn't. And unfortunately I realized that I do have a slight preference towards light skin faces. I have always grown up in relatively "white" communities and due to events in my past that I would rather not put into detail on the internet that has lead to intense PTSD, I have a hard time not being afraid if I see a guy with darker skin (darker as in any shade darker than me) at night. Looking back, I probably should have done different IATs that I didn't already know the answer to, because these two really didn't show me anything about myself that I didn't already know. Overall, I think that this is a really interesting test and I will definitely use it in the future. n=508 Website where the IAT is https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html
Excus me if it has a lot of speling probleems (this concusion is realy messing up my speling at times)
This post may be hard for some people.
Song for post:
This is me when I was sixxteen:
I like to think I was (still am) a good perosn, I voluntered, I didnt break cufew, I didn't party, drink, or do drugs. Not that I was perfect, but yeah, I was a good kid, espeially for wher I lived.
When I was 16 I met Jay. Jay treted me lik a princes for the first couple months....then he got on steroids.
Soon, I would haave a new bruse or brokn bone (usualy ribs) daily. At first peole didnt give it any attenion, I played water polo, we were all always hurt (its a visious sport). But once season was over and the bruises didn't stop people got concrned. It was a girl in my clas who firsst noticd. She grabed my hand after schooll and asked me wher the bruises were comeing from, and wher the old me had gone. I looked at her, wantin to tlel her eveything, I was just so scared, so I used the age old excuse, I fell down the stairs. That's when Jay came to take me to swim practive. He saw me talkin o Kaity and he got pretty pissed off. He smaked me acros my fac (HARD) in fron of everyone. Not one person said anything, not one person tried to help, not evn Kaity.
The nex day the whol school was talkin bout how I was in an abusive relationship, and the wors part, the I DESERVED it. It was the perfect example of Melvin Lerner's theory of Belief in a Just World which states that "people need to view the world as a jus plave in wich we get wat we desrve and derserve what we get".
The way people acted, and treated me, ad saidd abou me adn hwo I desrved bein abused because "if I realy was upset, if it realy was that bad and I hadnt left yet, that I deservd it. The wors was the girls who didnt know me at all and would say "She must desrve it, she mus be a bad person" or "Karma" (I got that one a lot).
At the time, I dint realize exactly why peole were sayin that. It wasn't until las year avtually when Kaity and I wer talking and Jay was brought up. She apoligzed to me for never saying anythin when he hit me, and for not helpin me when I neded it. When I asked her why, why she didnt help when sh knew what was goin on? She said, that she "jad to beleive that somehow I deserved it, because if somethin like that could happen to someone lik me, what did that say abot what could hapen to her".
Before that covo, that whole thing had been a sore sot for me. It wasn't that I felt like they needd to help me, becuse I felt that was somethin I needed to so on my own, it was the remark about how I deserved it.
n=537
Lerner, M.J. (1980). The Belief in a just world: A fundamental delusion. New York: Plenum
