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 :)
