To Understand Is Not To Forgive

Lately I start to read Steven Pinker's highly-acclaimed book —— 《How The Mind Works》. Not like other book-reading experience such as 《Sway》、《Predictably Irrational》, it turns out to be a strenuous journey to digest such a witty, erudite tome on human mind, especially as a laymen. So, I have to change the habit of having a summary in the end to taking notes whenever I feel necessary.

When he discussed the implications of an innate human nature in charpter 1, Steven raised a very good point in the absurdness of blaming human bad behavior on our genes.

First, he refuted the concept that uncaused causation underlies the free will, and the uncaused free will underlies moral responsibility. Because:

1. Science see the world has no really uncaused events. Behavior is a complex interaction among:
• genes
• the anatomy of the brain
• the biochemical state of the brain
  
• person's family upbringing
• the way society has treated him or her,
  
• the stimuli that impinge upon the person.
2. According to chaoes theory, an unpredictable factor can be a cause of a hurricane of behaviors.
   

Second, he argued that science and morality are separate spheres of reasoning, we need to separates causal explanations of behavior from moral responsibility for behavior.

1. Science and ethics are two self-contained systems played out among the same entity in the world.
   
• Science treat people as material objects, explain the physical processes that cause behavior.
  
• Ethics treat people as free-willed agents as long as there is no outright coercion or gross malfunction of reasoning, assign moral value to behavior through the behavior's inherent nature or its consequences.
2. Depending on the purpose of the discussion, a human being is simultaneously a machine and a sentient free agent, different theories need to be applied to correspondingly.
3. Only by recognizing scienc and morality as separate can we have them both.

That means, we need to find a way to reconcile causation (genetic or otherwise) with responsibility and free will, we can't use gene to excuse our faults. To understand what cause we behave badly under given circumstance doesn't mean to forgive our faults easily. We are masters of our own fates.

此时相望不相闻，愿逐月华流照君

还记得，并肩走在夜色沉沉的街道时，突然没来由的对你说：“有时侯，看书看到触动处，心真的就象是被一把刀在 割着，生理痛，是真实存在的。”说的时候，有点赧然，眼睛是看向别处的。然后是你的回应：“我也是。” 没有赘语，一贯的贴心，你总是知道时机分寸的拿捏。我没有勇气继续的是：“那时，常常会想到你”......

很久没读故事了，今夜一阅，竟至泪眼模糊。什么时候开始，我也泪水涟涟了？

待心潮略微平息后，倚窗而立，看向那一轮皎月，从上弦至下弦，月复一月。我站在那，站在时间之外，站在一片仅仅献给记忆的风景中，仿佛又听到你轻轻的嗔语：“都是你这小...害的"。我有点艳羡这月光了，至少，它能照见你,追逐着你的身影......

花开，花落。日升，月没。春去，秋至。就这样，竟又半年了。

哦，我爱，需要怎样的坚强与克制，才可以对一个人念念不忘又不闻不问呢？

Illusion v.s Delusion

Recently, I am confused by 3 terms: illusion, delusion and hallucination. After doing a little "research" on web, I finally know how to distinguish one from another.

An illusion is a misleading perception, usually visual. It deals with stimuli that are actually present, but it is misinterpreted in terms of length, shapre motion or direction, or sometimes hard to interpret.

A hallucinations involve sensing something that is not actually present. It is most frequently auditory.

A delusion is a deeply held false belief that is maintained, even when other information contradicts the belief. The contradictory information is either ignored completely or discounted in some way.

In summary, an illusion is a perceptual disturbance, while a delusion is a belief disturbance.

潜流 —— 《摇摆》

关注心理学的时间不算长，讲座听了一些，书看了几本，网上博客跟了几个，文献读了一些，千丝万缕的联系，颇有点complex network的感觉。其中最明显的，就是同样的实验理论会被不同的人在各处引用来支持各自的立论，耳熟能详之余，于翻陈出新处也常有所得。

《摇 摆》一书，是《Predictably Irrational》的姐妹篇，同样是探究导致人们理性思考出轨的神秘力量，同样是从实验接近真相，它采取的手段则与Dan Airely各观点独立成章的风格相异。Brafman两兄弟用拼图的手法，从荷兰航空公司的一场空难出发，在看似毫不相干的事件与事件之间建立起联系， 追踪将人们推离理性岸边的心理潜流的各个分支，探讨它们是如何综合作用扭曲人们的决策过程，为我勾勒出人类非理性行为的疆域图。

首先是损失厌恶（loss aversion)，这个概念是由Dainel Kahneman和Amos Tversky首先提出，并因此获取2002年诺贝尔经济学奖. 在此书中，它强调了两点：

• 我们对遭受损失的痛楚要远远超过获得的快乐
• 某个潜在损失越重要，我们对损失的厌恶越强烈，也越容易陷入“追逐损失”（chasing a loss)的情境。
  

如 果真有造物者，那么这个造物者似乎嫌”损失厌恶“对我们的牵引力还不足以大，它还要加上另一个因素--”the power of commitment“。 译者将它译成牵累，我起始不太认可，后来随着阅读的深入，逐渐接受并认可了这样的译法。说白了，就是惯性的力量，明知前方成功的机会很渺茫，人们仍倾向于 坚持到底，忽视由延误而造成的失败代价更高的可能性。

在损失厌恶和牵累的潜流汇聚到一起后，作者又找到另一片拼图——价值归因 (value attribution)。这一次，对人类进化史上”缺失的环节“的追寻，纽约地铁边顶级小提琴演奏家Joshua Bell的演奏，让我再一次认识到价值归因和判断偏差带来的荒谬。

所 谓价值归因，就是根据我们对某人或某事价值的最初感知，为它们事先赋予某些特性的倾向. 这其实和Dan Ariely 提到的“the effect of expectation","the power of price"大同小异。简言之，就是：当你得到打折的东西时，你不会涌起强烈的积极期望。影响人们的，是”折扣“这一事实本身而不是折扣的程度。

所谓判断偏差 (diagnosis bias)，则是指在我们为某个人或某个情境定性的那一刻开始，我们便会对所有与我们的判断相左的证据视而不见。

判断偏差通常为我们设置了三个陷阱：

1. 武断得贴标签：
   
• 标签是我们认知的”眼睛“：面对海量信息的狂轰滥炸，我们利用判断标签来组织信息，简化信息。一旦信息不属于你划定的范畴内，你就不会再去关注。
• 做为心理捷径，它是双刃剑。带来好处的同时也会让我们付出代价。
2. 曲解甚至视而不见与我们的最初判断相左的客观数据。
3. chameleon effect(变色龙效应）:当我们为他人贴上标签，他们会接受我们所赋予他们的特质。这其实就是反复出现的Pygmalion effect的变身，只是Pygmalion effect是指人们接受我们所赋予他们的正面特质，至于负面特质，就被归在Golem effect的名下。
   

书 读到这里，转入到对公平因素影响人的非理性行为的探讨。一直以来，对公平与否的计较执着，是影响我至深的因素之一。Brafman对它的论述，给予它的篇 幅，自然不能餍足我的好奇，不过，总算不是空手而归。俩兄弟用分钱实验，”谁想成为百万富翁“，囚徒对判决结果的满意度调查，汽车经销商与制造商的关系来 分别点出公平因素与经济收益对恃的几个结论：

• 我们对公平有根深蒂固的追求，我们会不遗余力的捍卫它。
• 公平在不同的文化背景下，有不同的准则。
• 就公平而言，是过程，而不是结果，导致了我们如此不会情理的反应。这就是程序正义(procedural justice)
• 我们会为“他人倾听自己的声音”赋予不成比例的权重，从而影响对整个事件的满意度。
  

身为社会这张网络里的一个节点，激励与被激励，对我们而言一定不陌生。书的第七章，对司空见惯的金钱激励机制提出异议，并为此提供神经生理学机理的解释：

• 愉快中枢(pleasure center）区域, 是大脑中的“伏核”nucleus accumbens）部位，会对金钱刺激出现反应。
• 利他中枢(altruism center)，是大脑中“后颞上沟”部位（posterior superior temporal sulcus）则针对利他行为产生反应。
• 愉快中枢与利他中枢不能同时运作，它们会争夺控制权。我们要么从利他主义的角度做事，要么从利己主义的角度从事工作。
• 两个不同的引擎需要不同的燃料来驱动，而且所需燃料量也不太一样。
• 当愉快中枢和利他中枢对垒时，愉快中枢具有“劫持”利他中枢的能力。（这与Dan提出的”social norm"屈从于"market norm"的理论殊途同归）
  

既 然提到了激励与被激励，利己与利他，就不可避免的要提到人所生活工作的群体。而在心理学领域提到group think，似乎就绕不开Solomon Asch的conformity实验。这个实验说明了人有与群体保持一致的倾向，而要破解这个魔咒，需要异见者的出现。他们进而提到了群体中常见的四类角 色：initiator,blocker,supporter, observer。Blocker虽然不为人所待见，却承担着“制动器”的职责，阻止群体走向可能带来灾难性后果的道路。最好的应用就是美国航空业机组资 源管理系统的普及，这在Malcom Gladwell的畅销书《Outlier》中也曾被浓墨重彩的触及。

最后，作者为我们提供了几种思维方式以抵御这些潜流的力量：

• 利用“长线思考，关注长远目标”来克服我们的损失厌恶。
• 利用“禅”的思考模式--“让过去成为过去”的策略，来摆脱牵累力量的羁绊。
• 利用观察事物的本质而不是表象来解决“价值归因”带来的扭曲结果。
• 利用“个人建构理论”（personal construct theory)的原则（保持灵活性，从不同的角度分析事物），来克服自己屈从于判断偏差的倾向。
• 利用客观评估事物，不要屈从于情绪性判断或心理判断来应对我们对公正偏离的情绪反应。当我们做出会影响他人的决策或行动时，要记得让他们参与进来，增加沟通，透明化你的决策过程，即使结果不能如他们所愿，也会极大改善他们的情绪反应。
• 允许持异见者的存在(devil's advocate)，在群体中起到平衡效应，克服“群体一致性”带来的可能灾难。
  

The Way We Are Wired —— 《Predictably Irrational》

如 果说“人是地球上最复杂的生命形式”，应该没多少人会反对。这其中，仅占人类体重2%左右的大脑，更是人体内最神秘最让人困惑的组织结构，做为人体的感觉 中枢，信息处理中枢，它收集消化外界芜杂纷呈的信息，主宰着我们的思想情绪，左右着我们的行为决策，其中既有符合逻辑之处，也不乏令人难解的迷思，因此， 近百年来，引得无数能人智士竟折腰。

研 究人类，研究大脑，可以从各个层面，各个角度入手。身为MIT行为经济学教授的Dan Ariely，则立足于行为经济学和社会心理学的交点来观察世界，带着无数问号，对我们习以为常的行为举止展开探索之旅。传统经济学的立论：人是理性的， 一旦犯错，市场的力量也会将我们重新纳入理性的轨道。随着跨学科研究的日益普及，行为经济学做为新兴领域，借助了社会心理学分析手段，用大量的科学实验来 分解对人类行为施加影响的各种力量和因素，探求行为背后的决策过程，检验既有理论，寻找替代理论。此书做为行为经济学的通俗读本，呈现大量精心设计的原始 实验，旁征博引，夹叙夹议得为我们揭示了：人类不如自己想象得那么理性，对我们生活的方向，也并不具备自我期许的完全掌控力，人的非理性不但司空见惯，有 迹可寻，而且能被系统预测。说到底，我们不过是一枚被人类本性所操控的棋子。

Here are the key findings/points from this book:

Everything is relative:

• Humans rarely choose things in absolute terms. We don't have an internal value meter that tells us how much things are worth. Rather, we focus on the relative advantage of one thing over another, and estimate value accordingly.(人们很少做不加对比的选择。我们关注的是物品与其他相比的相对优劣，并以此估价。)
• Most people don't know what they want unless they see it in context.(多数人只有在具体情境下才知道自己真正想要什么。)
• The way the mind is wired: we are always looking at the things around us in relation to others. (我们靠观察周围的事物以确定相互关系。我们有生以来就被比较所束缚。)
• We not only tend to compare things with one another but also tend to focus on comparing things that are easily comparable—and avoid comparing things that cannot be compared easily. (我们不但倾向于比较，而且倾向于比较容易比较的，回避难以比较的。）
• We look at our decisions in a relative way and compare them locally to the available alternative.
• Decoy effect: effect:the phenomenon whereby consumers will tend to have a specific change in preference between two options when also presented with a third option that is asymmetrically dominated.(我在“数字追凶”的剧集中率先遭遇此名词，没想到时隔不久，再度相遇）

The fallacy of supply and demand:

• Arbitrary coherence:Initial prices are largely "arbitrary" and can be influenced by responses to random questions; but once those prices are established in our minds, they shape not only what we are willing to pay for an item, but also how much we are willing to pay for related products (this makes them coherent).(任意的一致:首次的价格是任意的，可能受任何因素影响；但一旦价格在脑中确立，它形成的不仅是对某一产品的出价意愿，还包括对其他 有关产品的出价意愿。)
  
• Anchor price:我们一旦以某一价格买了某一产品，我们也就为这一价格所锚定。
• Our first decisions resonate over a long sequence of decisions.(我们将自己锚定在初次出价上，并长期存在，影响我们的很多决定。)
• Herding: It happens when we assume that something is good (or bad) on the basis of other people's previous behavior, and our own actions follow suit.(羊群效应:基于其他人的行为来推断事物的好坏，以决定我们是否仿效。)
• self-herding:This happens when we believe something is good (or bad) on the basis of our own previous behavior. (自我羊群效应:基于我们先前的行为来推断事物的好坏，决定是否继续。)
• The determination of prices of products in traidition economics depends centrally on the assumption that the two forces (demand and supply) are independent and that together they produce the market price. Arbitrary coherence challenge these assumptions.
1. consumers don't in fact have a good handle on their own preferences and the prices they are willing to pay for different goods and experiences. (消费者的购买意愿很容易被操控。)
   
2. demand is not, in fact, a completely separate force from supply。(需求并不完全独立于供给)

Zero price effect: Zero is an emotional hot button—a source of irrational excitement.

• Most transactions have an upside and a downside, but when something is FREE! we forget the downside, FREE! gives us such an emotional charge that we perceive what is being offered as immensely more valuable than it really is.
  
• Humans are intrinsically afraid of loss. The real allure of FREE! is tied to this fear. There's no visible possibility of loss when we choose a FREE! item

Social norm v.s. Market norm: Why we are happy to do things but not when we are paid to do them?

1. One explaination provided by this book is:
   
• We live simultaneously in two different worlds— one where social norms prevail, and the other where market norms make the rules.When a social norm collides with a market norm, the social norm goes away for a long time.
• MONEY, AS IT turns out, is very often the most expensive way to motivate people. Social norms are not only cheaper, but often more effective as well.
• Money can remove the best in human interactions.
2. Another explaination I read from other resource is:
• Overjustification hypothesis: the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. When we do something for its own sake, because we enjoy it or because it fills some deep-seated desire, we are intrinsically motivated. On the other hand when we do something because we receive some reward, like a certificate or money, this is extrinsic motivation. Reward remind us of obligations, of being made to do things we don't want to do.
  
• Sometimes rewards do work, especially if people really don't want to do something. But when tasks are inherently interesting to us rewards can damage our motivation by undermining our natural talent for self-regulation.

The influence of Arousal:

• Every one of us, regardless of how "good" we are, systematically underpredicts the effect of passion on our behavior.
• Our inability to understand ourselves in a different emotional state does not seem to improve with experience.
• We are prone to making the wrong decisions when gripped by intense emotion.
• Perhaps there is no such thing as a fully integrated human being. We may, in fact, be an agglomeration of multiple selves.

The Problem of Procrastination and Self-Control:

• Almost everyone has problems with procrastination, those who recognize and admit their weakness are in a better position to utilize available tools for precommitment and by doing so, help themselves overcome it.
• Resisting temptation and instilling self-control are general human goals, and repeatedly failing to achieve them is a source of much of our misery.
• We have problems with self-control,related to immediate and delayed gratification, the best course might be to give people an opportunity to commit up front to their preferred path of action.

Why we overvalue what we have:

• Endowment effect:the ownership of something increases its value in the owner's eyes.
• We are mostly fumbling around in the dark. Why? Because of three irrational quirks (非理性怪癖）in our human nature.
1. The first quirk is that we fall in love with what we already have.
2. The second quirk is that we focus on what we may lose, rather than what we may gain.
3. The third quirk is that we assume other people will see the transaction from the same perspective as we do.

Keeping the doors open:

• We have an irrational compulsion to keep doors open. It's just the way we're wired.
• Running from door to door is a strange enough human activity. But even stranger is our compulsion to chase after doors of little worth—opportunities that are nearly dead, or that hold little interest for us.
• The other side of this tragedy develops when we fail to realize that some things really are disappearing doors, and need our immediate attention. Sometimes these doors close too slowly for us to see them vanishing.

The Effect of Expectations:

• When we believe beforehand that something will be good, therefore, it generally will be good—and when we think it will be bad, it will bad.
• Expectations not only change our beliefs, but also change the physiology of the experience itself.
• Providing information will heighten someone's anticipated and real pleasure.
• Eepectations also shape stereotypes (a way of categorizing information, providing shortcuts in our never-ending attempt to make sense of complicated surroundings): priming research, scrambled-sentence test.
• We are trapped within our perspective, which partially blinds us to the truth.

The Power of Price:

• In general, two mechanisms shape the expectations that make placebos work: Belief + Conditioning.
  
• Placebo effect place the blurry boundary between beliefs and reality, pose dilemmas not only for scientists but also for marketers.

The Context of our character:

• We are so adept at rationalizing our petty dishonesty, our internal honesty monitor is active only when we contemplate big transgressions
• Once tempted to cheat, the participants didn't seem to be as influenced by the risk of being caught as one might think.
• People cheat when they have a chance to do so, but they don't cheat as much as they could. Moreover, once they are reminded of morality at the moment they are tempted, then they are much more likely to be honest.
• When cash is a step away, cheating is a lot easier and by a factor bigger than we could ever imagine.

总体而言，这是一本轻松有趣的读物，读的过程，也会让你停一停，想一想，继而一拍脑袋，做恍然大悟且悔之不及状（自己怎么就没想到呢？咋就着了商人的道呢？等等等等）。此外，书后列举的各相关主题的延伸阅读，也为有兴趣的读者进一步的阅读学习提供有益导引与参考。

"Introduction to Psychology" Notes (16) —— Mental Illness

Lecture 19 - Mental Illness

Mental illness:

• Schizophrenia: a split from reality, schizophrenia do not have multiple personalities.
• Multiple personality disorder: a split of personality. It's a sort of dissociative disorder.

Five symptoms of schizophrenia:

• hallucinations: the most typcial are auditory
• Delusion: The difference between a hallucination and a delusion is a hallucination is a sensory experience that's wrong, that just didn't really happen. A delusion is a belief that isn't right. It's a belief that you shouldn't be having.
• disorganized speech
  
• disorganized behaviors
• absence of normal thought or affect (emotion).

The root of problems: an inability to put together your thoughts and perceptions, to sequence them and coordinate them, to impose a logical structure and a reasonable, realistic temporal sequence on your experience. As a result of this is you lose contact with others, you lose social contact and don't get much reality checking.

Types of anxiety disorders:

• generalized anxiety disorders: very anxious, worried all the time and it could be paralyzing. It could give you physical symptoms like headaches, stomachaches, muscle tension and irritability.
• phobias: intense, irrational fears. They could focus on objects, events, and social settings.
• obsessive-compulsive disorder:irrational disturbing thoughts that intrude into your consciousness.

Dissociative disorder: a dissociation of memory; become somehow unaware, separated from some part of your identity or history and unable to recall them except sometimes under special circumstances

Three types:

• dissociative amnesia: memory loss, selective or global without identity replacement.
• dissociative fugue: global memory loss with identity replacement
  
• dissociative identity disorder: Multiple personality disorder, 2 or more distinct personalities manifested by the same person at different times

Personality disorders:

• narcissistic personality disorder: 自恋型人格障碍
• Multiple personality disorder：多重人格障碍
• avoidant personality disorder：回避型人格障碍
• histrionic personality disorder：剧化型人格障碍
• dependent personality disorder：依赖型人格障碍
• borderline personality disorder：边缘型人格障碍
• paranoid personality disorder：偏执型人格障碍
• antisocial personality disorder：反社会性人格障碍

"Introduction to Psychology" Notes (15) —— Mood Disorder

Lecture 18: Mood Disorder (Guest Lecture by Professor Susan Nolen-Hoeksema)



The judement of mood disorder are heavily influenced by factors:

• social norms. Whether you get labeled as having a mental disorder or a problem depends very heavily on what your social or cultural norms are.
• characteristics of targets: gender roles, gender stereotypes
  
• context:the context in which you exhibit a particular behavior

Tthese characteristics of abnormality in clinical psychology are three Ds:

• distress: behaviors that cause the individual or others significant distress. (Depression-cause himself; antisocial personality disorder-cause others distress)
• dysfunction: a set of behaviors prevents the person from functioning in daily life
• deviance:the behaviors or feelings are highly unusual. (heavily influenced by the social norms.)

Types of mood disorder:

• unipolar depression disorders: depression only
• bipolar disorders: the person cycles back and forth between debilitating depressions and manic episode.

Symptoms for Depression:

• sadness
• anhedonia:a diminished interest or pleasure in their usual activities
• show significant weight or appetite change
• sleep disturbances--insomnia or hypersomnia,
• psychomotor retardation or agitation
• feelings of worthlessness or excessive guilt
• diminished ability to concentrate or indecisiveness
• suicidal ideation or behavior

Mania episode: the person has an abnormally and persistently elevated expansive or irritable mood. Symptoms:

• inflated self-esteem or grandiosity
• Decreased need for sleep
• pressure to talk
• Flight of ideas, racing thoughts
• Distractibility
• increase in "goal-directed activity."
• get involved in all kinds of "pleasurable but dangerous activities"

Biological Theories:

• genetics are involved in the mood disorders, especially bipolar disorder.
• a number of neurotransmitters been linked to both of the mood disorders, both bipolar disorder and depression. the receptors for neurotransmitters like serotonin don't function efficiently.
• brain areas that seem to be involved in the mood disorders

1. The prefrontal cortex: involved in higher order complex thinking and problem solving and in goal-directed behavior. lowered activity in the prefrontal cortex may play a role in the difficulties in concentration, in goal-directed behavior, in planning and problem solving and in regulating emotion.
2. The amygdala: involved in the processing of emotional information. overactive amygdala responses to emotional information play role in depression.
3. The hippocampus: involved in memory and in concentration. shrinkage in the hippocampus may be related to problems in concentration and attention.
4. the anterior cingulate (前扣带）: involved in a lot of different activities, such as stress and the choice of behaviors. dysregulation of the anterior cingulate may be involved in the person's difficulty in responding appropriately to stress, in choosing good coping behaviors and changing their behaviors whenever their behaviors aren't working well.

Cognitive and Behavioral Theories:

Aaron Beck's "negative cognitive triad" theory: People who are depressed have a negative view of the self, of the future and of the world.
distortions in thinking:

• "All-or-nothing thinking": is thinking that things are either all good or all bad.
• "emotional reasoning" : an example of that is just if I feel like a loser I must be a loser. Of if I feel stupid, I must be stupid.
• "personalization": self-blame

Cognitive behavioral therapy: based on Beck's theory, very structured, focused on the present

• Identify themes in negative thoughts and triggers.
• challenges the truth value of these
• change aspects of the environment that are related to depressive symptoms.

Interpersonal therory: negative views of the self and expectations about the self and relationships are based on upbringings that really fostered these kinds of negative self-views.

IPT(Interpersonal therapy): less structured, more focused on the past, explore patterns of relationships and roots in childhood, look for four types of interpersonal problems:

• Grief or loss
• Interpersonal role disputes
• Role transitions
• Interpersonal skills deficits

"Introduction to Psychology" Notes (14) —— Self and Other

Lecture 16: Self and Other

Interestingly, in this lecture Paul Bloom mentioned Malcolm Gladwell and his book 《The Tipping Point》again. Seems he is a loyal reader of Gladwell. And there were also some familiar concepts, experiments refer to the topic of self perceptions and interactions with others.

3 aspects of the self: (From William James)

1. the material: our awareness of the physical world
2. the spiritual:the part that thinks of ourselves as thinkers -- the inner witness to events
3. the social: the part of the self that focuses on the images we create in the minds of others is called the social self.

Self and Situation:

• Self-efficacy(自我效能感): people's beliefs in their capabilities to exercise control over situations that affect their lives.
• Behavioral confirmation: our beliefs, our sense of self, create their own reality
• One of the most important factors that influence our identity is the cultural context in which we live. Culture is a matter of the common ideas and the common ways of doing things.We can view culture and self as a collaboration: culture shapes self and self perpetuates culture.

Six degree of separation: people are connected to one another via chains of people.

Self Perceptions:

• Spotlight effect: you believe that people are noticing you all the time but they aren't. They're busy noticing themselves.
• The transparency effect: we believe that we're more transparent than we are. We often feel like things bleed out of us and so people will systematically overestimate the extent to which other people notice their secrets.
• Lake Wobegon effect: involves a systematic bias to see ourselves as better than average.
• One possibility is the nature of the feedback we get. For a lot of aspects of your life you only get feedback when you're good, when you do something good.
• Another possibility is there's different criteria for goodness.
• Self-serving bias: You think that you're terrific and because you're terrific the good things that happen to you are due to your terrificness; the bad things are due to accident and misfortune.
• Confirmation bias: People want to have information that confirms what they believe in and that supports it.
  
• Cognitive dissonance: what you do makes sense. If it doesn't make sense or, more to the point, if it's something that you do that's foolish or makes you look manipulative or cheap, you'll distort it in your head so that it does make sense.
• The fundamental attribution error: we tend to over-attribute things to a person's personality or desires or nature and not enough to the situation or the context. (An attribution is a claim about the cause of somebody's behavior)
• Enhancement of the self v.s. Oversimplification of the other: When things go badly, we'll blame the situation. When things go well, the self-serving attribution bias, we'll credit ourselves. To other people we're a lot less forgiving. When things go badly, we'll blame others themselves.
• A Mattew effect: the rich get richer and the poor even lose what they hath.
• The Pygmalion effect/Self-fulfilling prophesy: if I believe you have a certain characteristic this might cause you to behave as if you have that characteristic.

Towards Others:

• The mere exposure effect: simply seeing something makes it likable.
• Impression formation：
• first impressions matter a lot
• we form impressions very fast, very quickly, and this is a literature known as "thin slices."

Stereotype: refer to information we have about categories and intuitions we have about the typicality, our frequency of certain features of categories.

• Purpose: collecting information about categories is essential to our survival because it allows us to respond adaptively to novel instances.
• Pros:
• Stereotypes are often positive;
• Stereotypes tend to be accurate
• Cons:
• Not always accurate:confirmation bias with stereotypes；misleading data from media
• Moral problems: people should be judged as individuals, not as group members
• negative stereotypes have all sorts of bad effects.

Stereotype threat: if your race or your group has a negative stereotype associated with it in any particular domain, being reminded of it serves as a stereotype threat and hence damages your performance in all sorts of domains.

3 levels of stereotypes: public, private, implicit (Use of priming: subject might not know stereotype is being activated, can’t work to suppress it)

Trish Devine's automaticity theory, which goes something like this. The idea is that everybody holds stereotypes. These are automatically activated when we come into contact with individuals. In order to not act in a stereotyped fashion, we have to consciously push them down, we have to consciously override them, and that's possible, but it takes work.

The power of situation: the situation matters not only in terms of its objective reality, but also in terms of the way it's perceived, understood, and interpreted by the people inside it.

The power of cognitive control: the power of people's beliefs to give different meanings to the situations in which they find themselves.

"Introduction to Psychology" Notes (13) —— Morality

Lecture 15 : Morality


3 facets of morality:

• moral feelings: emotions like shame, condemnation, pride, righteous anger, affection, caring, being upset if an injustice is to be done, empathy (to feel what others are feeling) etc.
  
• moral judgments: notions like something is good or bad, fair or unfair.
  
• moral action

How could moral feelings evolve?

• kin selection:Selfish genes lead to altruistic animals
• cooperation

3 hallmarks for moral judgments:

• Evaluation
• Obligation
• Sanctions

3 different frameworks of moral thought:

• an ethics of autonomy: rights, equality, freedom.
• an ethics of community: duty, status, hierarchy, and interdependence.
• an ethics of divinity: purity, sanctity, pollution and sin.

2 forces for evil:

• Deindividuation of self: There is a sense of reduced accountability and shifted attention away from the self that occurs in the context of groups. That is so-called diffusion of responsibility. The famous case is Milgram's conformity study.
• Denigration of others:
  
• Keep psychological distance or physical distanceDistance
  
• Use euphemism (‘cargo’, ‘extermination’) to think about you not as a person
• Use humor to denigrate and demote people
• Take away their names
  
• See them as disgusting can make others matter less

2 forces for good:

• Contact and interdependence:
• Perspective taking:

"Introduction to Psychology" Notes (12) —— Gender Differences

Lecture 14: Sex



By biologist's definition, males are animals that have a little sex cell, which carries genes and nothing else – sperm cells. Females are animals that have a big sex cell, which has genes but also food and a protective cover and all sorts of other stuff.

Why is the animal with the tiny sex cell typically larger and more aggressive than the animal with the large sex cell?

• Parental investment (Bob Trivers):investment that's going to increase the offspring's chance of survival at the cost of the parent's ability to invest in other offspring.
• Difference in the size of sex cells leads to differences in typical parental investment, leading to differences in the sorts of psychological and physiological mechanisms that evolved.
• Males have to compete not merely with other males to get reproductive access but also to woo females.
• So it is able to predict the size differences and aggression differences based on differing parental investment.

Gender Difference:

• Aggression: males are more physically violent.
• Sexual choosiness: the parental investment theory predicts females should be more picky.
• Sexual attractiveness: Females focus more on power and status and more on interest in investing in children.
• the capacity for math and science: refer to Gender Differences Debate between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke as below.
  

Steven Pinker: intermediate positions -- that the difference is explainable by some combination of biological differences in average temperaments and talents interacting with socialization and bias.

Why study sex differences?

• differences between the sexes are part of the human condition.
• the topic of possible sex differences is of great scientific interest.
• The nature and source of sex differences are also of practical importance.

Similarity between sexes:

• general intelligence
• basic categories of cognitive:objects, numbers, peoples, living things, etc

Six relevant difference:

• life priorities: men on average more likely to chase status at expense of familiy and other valuable things in life
• interests: people versus things and abstract rule systems.this difference in interests will tend to cause people to gravitate in slightly different directions in their choice of career.
• men are the more reckless sex: intellectual risk taking, participate in risky experiment
• 3-D mental transformation: mental rotation, spatial perception, spatial visualization (correlated with mathmatical problem solving, dynamic spatial imagery prominent in physicist, chemist.)
• mathmatical reasoning: women are better at mathmatical calculation; men are better at mathmatical word problem and test of mathmatical reasoning
• variablity:males are the more variable gender.(more prodigies, more idiots.)as a result there are more men at the extreme upper end of the ability distribution from which scientists and mathematicians are drawn.

Elizabeth Spelke: the nurture position -- that males and females are biologically indistinguishable, and all relevant sex differences are products of socialization and bias. That is social forces including overt and covert discrimination and social influences that lead men and women to develop different skills and different priorities.

Humans are endowed with the core system for representing numbers and space. The system develops equally in male and female.

female advantage:

• verbal fluency
• mathmatical calculation
• memory of spatial positions of objects;

Male advantage:

• verbal analogies
• rapid mathmatical reasoning
• memory of layout geometry, mental rotation

Why are fewer women scientists?

• biased perception by fellow scientists will week out some talented women directly
• unequall opportunity will deter some talented women from attempting careers in science
• biased perception in earlier life will deter some talented girls from studying science
• the gender gap in science faculties will lead some students view high-level science as a man's world.

"Introduction to Psychology" Notes (11) —— Differences

Lecture 13: Differences

At the root of all human differences are two main factors: personality and intelligence.



"The Big Five" personality factors: O-C-E-A-N

• Openness: open to experience versus closed to experience.
• Conscientiousness: conscientious versus not conscientious, careful versus careless, reliable versus undependable.
• Extroversion: extrovert versus introvert
• Agreeableness: agreeable which is courteous, friendly versus non agreeable which is rude, selfish.
• Neuroticism: neurotic versus stable. nutty and worrying versus calm.

2 types of test:

• Cognitive tests: measure various aspects of your mental ability.
• Personality tests:measure the noncognitive parts of human personality including interests, values, and personality traits.

Minestone in intelligence testing:

1. Alfred Binet -- French -- the first workable intelligence test in 1905 -- an individual child's performance was compared to the average score for his or her age, Test results were expressed in terms of mental age.
2. Louis Terman -- Standford -- IQ (intelligence quotient) in 1916 -- was the ratio of mental age to chronological age multiplied by 100
3. David Wexler -- 1939 -- nonverbal intelligence tests
4. Howard Gardner - Harvard - a list of seven intelligences:
   

1. linguistic
2. logical mathematical
3. musical
4. Spatial
5. bodily kinesthetic
6. Interpersonal
7. intra-intelligence (having a viable understanding of yourself, who you are, what kinds of abilities you have, what kinds of needs you have, what kinds of intelligences you have, how to use those effectively to solve problems or to make something.)

Measure and define intelligence:2 factors

• “g” = general intelligence :accounts for the similarity in test results
• “s” = specific ability :accounts for the differences in test results

Why people are different: heredity + shared environment (proportion of the variance due to environment shared by family members) + non-shared environment (proportion of all other variance like random events)

2 big findings of behavioral genetics:

• High heritability (0.3 -0.8) for almost everything: intelligence, personality, happiness, religious, political orientation, sexual orientation...
• Almost everything that's not genetic is due to non-shared environments: The behavioral genetic analyses suggest that shared environment counts for little or nothing.

Flynn effect: the rise of the average intelligence quotient (IQ) test scores over generations/time. The average rate of rise seems to be around three IQ points per decade.

Here is a list of Flynn effect potential factors:

• Media: radio, television, computer, Internet, Multimedia, ...
• Technology: sedentarisation, house healthiness, sciences, printing works, industrialization, electricity, motor vehicle, ...
• Physics: medicine, health food, hygiene, comfort, security, ...
• Pedagogy: parental attention, less incest, literacy, female education, length of study, trainings, language, national language use, ...
• Genetics: Flynn effect is not genetically linked, only social Darwinism can be counted
• Social: leisure, length of work, free education, male/female equity, end of slavery, ...

"Introduction to Psychology" Notes (10) -- Emotions

Lecture 11&12 Emotions

In these 2 lectures, Paul Bloom described evolutionary explanations for several important emotional responses, discusses some interesting case studies which I encountered previously in different places, such as Malcom Gladwell's books 《Outlier》 (A culture of Hornor), 《Blink》 (Paul Ekman's FACS introduction), the prisoner dilemma and the ultimate game.

Why emotion exist:

• Emotions are basically mechanisms that set goals and priorities. Without emotions to drive us we would do nothing at all: supported by some unusual and unfortunate cases like Phineas Gage.
• Emotions like fear, love, anger, gratitude are not aberrations or noise in the system. Rather, they're exquisitely complicated motivational systems that are crafted to deal with the natural and social environment.
• Motivation is the general term for all the physical and psychological processes that start behavior, maintain it, and stop it. Motivational currents that shape the flow of our daily lives; motivations that are constantly reflected in our preferences for some activities over others, the intensity of what we do, and the persistence of our actions.
  

Facial expressions are ways in which we communicate our emotions.
Paul Ekman's FACS: some expression are universal; some are subtle and interestingly different across countries and across people.

Smile:

• smiles are universal.
• Smiles are social signals: people smile when they wish to communicate happiness
• different types of smiles:
• Pan Am smile: a greeting smile, a smile to communicate "hello"
• Duchenne smile: a smile to communicate genuine happiness. (eyes moving)
• a coy smile:an appeasement smile, a smile of embarrassment or stress.
• Smiles are extremely contagious.

Nonsocial emotion —— Fear:
We are afraid of these things that through the course of human evolution have been dangerous to us.

Social emotions can be broken down into two categories:

1. emotions towards your kin (genetic relatives):
   
• Gene need to be reproduced.
  
• People invest in quality, not quantity. We produce very few children in our life, and our evolutionary trick is to focus very intently on them and make sure they survive, to form a long period of dependence and deep bonds between the parent and the child.
2. emotions towards the people you're not related to but interact with —— Altruism:
   

• Individuals benefit more by working together than working alone -- the benefits outweigh the costs of altruism.
• It can only evolve if the cheaters can be recognized and punished.

The benefit of irrational:

• A rational person is easily exploited. (The Ultimatum Game)
• People are forced, by dint of your irrationality, to treat you better.
• Head over heels in love is irrational but it's also, within certain parameters, endearing because the irrationality of the person means you could trust them more in the long run.

Psychologist Robert Plutchik has proposed that we are born with eight basic emotions, depicted here in the inner circle:

"Introduction to Psychology" Notes (9) —— Evolution and Rationality

Lecture 10:Evolution and Rationality

The problems of Creationism:

1. it pushes back the question.
2. there's always been evidence for evolution:fossils,vestigial characteristics, continuity with other animals
   
3. there is occasional poor design.

3 components to natural selection:

1. variation
2. variation which gives rise to different degrees of survival and reproduction gets passed on from generation to generation
3. adaptations

2 misconceptions to apply evolutionary theory to psychology.

1. Natural selection will cause animals to want to spread their genes. It's wrong because it fails to make a distinction between ultimate causation and proximate causation.
• Ultimate causation is the reason why something is there in the first place, over millions of years of history.
  
• Proximate causation is why you're doing it now.
2. Natural selection entails that everything is adaptive, that everything we do, everything we think is adaptive. It's wrong because there's all sorts of things a body will do that have no adaptive value, rather just accidents. Natural selection and evolution, more generally, distinguish between adaptations and byproducts and accidents.

3 ways to reject evolutionary psychology:

• the mind is not subject to the same physical laws as the rest of the physical world.
• accept that the mind is a physical thing but then argue that all of these instincts and these hard-wired facets of human nature might exist for other animals but they don't exist for people.
• the study of evolution can't inform and enlighten us about the mind as it is

What can evolutionary theory say about:

1. it can tell us what can be innate and what cannot.
2. a focus on evolution could help discipline us to make coherent claims about what is built-in and what isn't built-in.
3. evolutionary theory can help us say intelligent things about what sort of group differences you should expect because evolutionary theory predicts that some populations should evolve in different ways than others.

Human are not always logical thinkers, who think in accord with the axioms of logic and mathematics and rationality, they actually have sort of rough and ready heuristics. Several examples of heuristics permeating our reasoning:

• framing effect: you could respond differently to a situation depending on how the options are framed.this combines with "loss aversion".
• ignorance of base rates: Base rates are very difficult to think about, tendency to neglect the overall frequency of an event when predictiing its likelihood.
• availability bias: tendency to form a judgment on the basis of information is readily brought to mind.
• Confirmation bias:when we have a hypothesis we look for confirmations.

“Introduction to Psychology" Notes (8) —— Love

Lecture 9: Love (Guest Lecture by Professor Peter Salovey)

A definition of love--according to Robert Sternberg

1. intimacy:the feeling of closeness, of connectedness with someone, of bonding.
2. passion:Drive that leads to romance, physicalattraction and sex.
3. commitment:desire to maintain the relationship.

Different permutations of relationships:

1. liking: with intimacy, without passion and commitment. It is happening in most typical friendships, not your closest friendship but friendships of a casual kind.
2. infatuation: with passion, without intimacy and commitment.
3. empty love: with commitment, without intimacy and passion.
4. romantic love:with intimacy and passion, without commitment
   
5. companionate love:committed to sharing intimacy, to being friends forever, committed to this relationship but physical attraction is not part of the equation here.
6. fatuous love: passion, but no intimacy, but committed to maintaining this physical attraction to you.
7. consummate love:have all three -- intimacy, passion, commitment.

The social psychology of attraction has focused on seven variables which are divided into two categories:

1. the big three:People who are similar to you, people who are already familiar to you, people who are nearby in space.
1. Proximity: "All other things being equal": people who find themselves in close spatial proximity to each other, like sharing an armrest in a lecture, will be more likely to be attracted to each other and form a romantic relationship.
2. Similarity: "Birds of a feather flock together":the more similar the more likely you'll find each other attractive.
3. Familiarity--We tend to fall in love with people in our environment with whom we are already familiar.
2. The more interesting four:
1. Competence:The kind of person we're really attracted to is the competent individual who occasionally blunders.
   
• Pratfall Effect:our liking for the competent person grows when they make a mistake, when they do something embarrassing, when they have a failure experience.
• Why: Because people who seem competent on all dimensions, they're kind of threatening to us. They don't make us feel so good about ourselves. They make us feel a bit diminished by comparison.
2. Physical attractiveness: the feedback from the attractive person matters more to us.
3. Gain, loss: a general idea in psychology that we are in a way wired up to be more sensitive to change than to steady states.
• Gain Effect: We are really attracted to people whose regard for us is gaining momentum over time.
• Loss effect: People who really hurt us are not the people who have always been negative.The person who always was positive to you whose regard starts to fade is hurting us most.
4. the misattribution for the causes of arousal:you make a mistake in your explanation and think it's love when it might be due to something else.

"Introduction to Psychology" Note (7) —— Memory

Lecture 7&8: Memory

Memory is a complex psychological process, a dynamic one, that's influenced by many factors:

• how much you concentrate
• how much you rehearse
• the context in which you learn something and recall sth
• motivation
• physical state and biological condition
• interference from other events and experiences

The complexity of memory could be dissected into its component processes:

• encode
• store and retain
• retrieved on demand when it's needed.

Different kinds of memory:

1. Sensory memory: a residue in your senses.
2. Short-term memory: the transient working memory that holds all the knowledge currently in use, spans for a few minutes.
3. Long-term memory: the storehouse of everything you know about the world and yourself, and is essentially unlimited. It is like a passive storehouse of information, and not an active information dispatcher.

1. Explicit memory: what you have conscious access to.
2. Implicit memory: more unconscious, what you might not be able to articulate and might not even be conscious of but still have access to.

1. Semantic memory: is basically facts, what you know from the world of concepts, ideas, and things.
2. Episodic memory: is autobiography, is what happened to you, each engram tagged with a time and a place, when and where it happened.
3. The procedural knowledge behind every skilled action: forms the foundation of everything you know how to do.

Attention could be crudely viewed as a flashlight, a spotlight on experience that willingly zooms in on something and makes it memorable.
Change blindness: the phenomena is, we have a very narrow focus of attention and huge changes can happen that we are oblivious to.

Memory Mechanism:

• Chunk: a basic memory unit, something you think of as a single, individual entity. People remember things in terms of chunks.
  
• Standard memory storage of short-term memory is seven chunk, plus or minus two (George Miller).
• Schema: frameworks of our basic ideas and preconceptions about people, objects, and situations.
• All the new information we learn is organized by relating it to existing schemas, and many of our constructions of memory and distortions arise as we try to fit new information into old schemas.
• To get things into long-term memory, rehearsal is usually not enough. You need to structure and organize information.
• The best way to remember something is to give it meaning, to give it sense.
• Expertise effects: How much you know or understand affects how much you memorize in long-term memory.
• Context-dependent memory/State-dependent memory: you're much better to remember something in the context in which you have learned it. This is the general relationship between encoding and retrieval so-called "compatibility principle".
• Elaborative rehearsal: the more you think about something the easier it is to remember.
• Elaborative retrieval: a finding that when you want to get something back out of memory people tend to give up too soon. You keep retrieving and over the span of time things might come back.
  

Different explanations for forgetting:

• Physical things decay: The memory traces that are laid onto your brain will just decay over time.
• Interference: The more information that comes in that's similar to the stuff you're trying to remember, it blocks your recovery of original information.
  
• Changes in retrieval cues: The more time goes by the more the world changes. And if your memory is to some extent dependent on cues bringing it back to life, then the change in retrieval cues can make it more difficult to recall certain things.

2 types of amnesia:

1. retrograde amnesia: "retro" for past. Retrograde amnesia is when you lose some memory of the past.
2. anterograde amnesia: you lose the ability to form new memories. And so you live in a perpetual present, unable to accumulate new memories.

Failures of memory:

• everyday failure of memory when you forget
• forgetting due to brain damage
• memories can be implanted in people's minds through suggestion and through leading questions
• Flashbulb memories: memories are so vivid but they can't really be trusted.

"Introduction to Psychology" Notes (6) —— Perception

Lecture 7: Perception

Perception is our way of making contact with our environment, of discovering what's happening outside our body and our brain.

To sense, perceive, and understand our world, we utilize two very different processes:

1. bottom-up processing: our sensory receptors detect external stimulation and send this raw data to the brain for analysis.
2. top-down processing:It adds what we already know about such stimulation, what we remember about the context in which it usually appears, and how we label and classify it.In this way, we give meaning to our perceptions.

How to perceive:

• hardware: in the form of sensory apparatus
• software: to process the information and make sense of it

The characteristics of our perception:

• We tend to see what we expect to see.
• Our previous experience, our expectations, interests, and biases are constantly giving rise to different perceptions.
• We see things with our minds as well as our eyes.
• We are constantly selecting only a small part of the available sensory information to attend to and process.
• One of the ways we perceive something actively is by taking into account its context.This context can even determine the nature of the perception itself, with the same object looking very different in different contexts.
• To be effective, perception also has to work fast and extract the minimal amount of information necessary to form an impression of the entire pattern.

Why we have vision illusion: We got a two-dimensional retina and have to figure out a three-dimensional world. Our minds contain certain assumptions about how things should be that enable us to make educated guesses from the two-dimensional array on to the three-dimensional world.

3 problems can cause vision illusion:

1. Color: Objects' color is not merely a matter of what material they're made of but of the amount of light that hits it.
2. Object: There are certain cues in the environment so that you can segment a scene into different objects based on them. These cues are often described as Gestalt principles.
• Proximity: When you see things that are close to each other, you're more likely than not to assume that they belong to the same thing.
• Similarity:
• Closure
• Good continuation
• Common movement: If things move together they're a single object
3. Depth: need to figure out a three-dimensional world via a two-dimensional retina.
• Binocular disparity
• Interposition
• Relative size
• Texture gradient
• Linear perspective
• the Mueller-Lyer illusion
• Ponzo illusion

Edges and boundaries in particular convey lots of information about an object.They provide a visual shortcut which can help the brain fill in the whole patterns from the fewest identifying parts.Sometimes the brain will even register a pattern that doesn't exist.A boundary or an edge can powerfully influence the way we see things.

"Introduction to Psychology" Notes (5) —— Language

Lecture 6: Language

Basic facts about language:

• Man has an instinctive tendency to speak.
• Every normal human has language which is part of human nature.
• Languages all share some deep and intricate universals. Every language in the world can talk about abstract things.
• Any adequate theory of language has to allow for both the commonalities and the differences across languages.
• All languages are creative and this means:
  

1. Our capacity for language is unbounded and free.
2. Language allows us to produce a virtual infinity of sentences.

• Language has structures going from the bottom to the top.

All languages consist of:

• Phonology (语音体系): the system of sounds or signs;
• Morphology(词法、词态学): the system of words or morphemes, basic units of meaning;
• Syntax(语法): rules and principles that put together words and phrases into meaningful utterances.
• Recursion: a mechanism that use of finite vocabulary to produce a virtual infinity of sentences.

Nature v.s Nuture:

• Both nature and nurture are at work in the development of language, through learning and as growth.
• Only human beings have the language acquisition device which makes it possible for infants and children acquiring language to know what the deep structure or the meaning is of language.
• Social interaction really is at the basis of language development in children.
• Language is not learned abstractly. It is learned by embedded language in context so that the intention of the speakers can be decoded.

Language development timeline regulates the maturing of the brain and certain muscles in the mouth and throat that are needed for communication:

1. Stage 1: acquiring language by crying.
2. Stage 2: babbling of syllable-like sounds.
3. Stage 3: one-word stage.
• The earliest words are part of a behavioral ritual
• The next set of words are those that express relationships of various kinds (between objects and actions, between objects etc).
• And finally come words that are meant to affect events,
4. Stage 4: two-word stage. to express a number of common functions: locating and naming things, demanding and desiring things, describing actions and situations, questioning, modifying, and qualifying.
5. Stage 5: the telegraphic stage, can form simple sentences, mostly of nouns and verbs.

"Introduction to Psychology" Notes (4) —— The Development of Thought

Lecture 5: The Development of Thought

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny is the belief guided Piaget to study the emergence of knowledge in general via studing how a kid develop his knowledge.

Schemas are frameworks that people develop to help organize knowledge. Child developed their understanding through two sorts of mechanisms:

1. assimilation: process of taking new information or a new experience and fitting it into an already existing schema.
2. accommodation: process by which existing schemas are changed or new schemas are created in order to fit new information.

Stage theory:

1. Sensorimotor stage(birth -2): Child is purely a physical creature. Information is gained through the senses and motor actions. Child perceives and manipulates but does not reason. In this stage, child acquire object permanence: The understanding that objects exist independent of one’s actions or perceptions of them.
2. Preoperational stage(2-7 years): the capacity to represent the world, to have the world inside your head, comes into being. The limitations are:
• egocentric--children at this age literally can't understand that others can see the world differently from them.
• Lack the concept of conservation-The notion of conservation is that there's ways to transform things such that some aspects of them change but others remain the same. Kids don't know that.
3. Concrete operations(7-12 years):Understanding of mental operations leading to increasingly logical thought to some extent stuck in the concrete world. The mathematical notions of infinity or logical notions like logical entailment are beyond a child of this age.
4. Formal Operational Stage(12~adulthood):you could get abstract and scientific reasoning.

Limitations in Piaget's theory:

• theoretical
• methodological
• factual

Methods for studying infants:

• Brain wave
• Sucking: look at how much they suck on the pacifier to determine what they like.
• Looking times: preference, habituation & surprise

How do we explain development?
• Neural maturation
• Problems with inhibition --A-not-B
• The accumulation of knowledge

Another alternative view developed by by Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor is a modular conception of development -- There are separate pre-wired systems for reasoning about the world. These systems have some built-in knowledge, and they have to do some learning, but the learning pattern varies from system to system and there's a separateness to them.

"Introduction to Psychology" Notes (3) —— B.F.Skinner

Lecture 4: B.F.Skinner

Unlike Freud, Skinner was the successor in a school of thought -- behaviorism -- that was there long before. The main contribution of Skinner is he packaged these notions, expanded upon them, publicized them, developed them scientifically and presented them both to the scientific community and to the popular community and sociologically in the 1960s and 1970s.

At the core of behaviorism are three general positions of behaviorism.

1. Strong emphasis on learning: There is no innate knowledge, no real human nature. Everything you know is the result of experience.
2. Anti-mentalism: internal mental states like desires, wishes, goals, emotions and so on, are unscientific.you could explain human psychology without mental notions like desires and goals.
3. No interesting differences across species: you could study human learning by studying nonhuman animals.

Learning is the way that a species profits from its experience.It's the mechanism by which past experience guides future behavior. Learning allows us to do two important things in the quest for survival:

1. to anticipate the future from past experience
2. to control a complex and ever- changing environment.

Main learning principles

1. Habituation: a decline in the tendency to respond to stimuli that are familiar due to repeated exposure.You get used to things. It's a way to learn through experience, to change your way of thinking through experience.
2. classical conditioning(经典条件反射): the learning of an association between one stimulus and another stimulus. New mainstream view is the conditioned response is a preparation for the unconditioned stimulus.
3. instrumental conditioning(工具性条件反射): Those behaviors followed by good consequences are selected and repeated, while those leading to bad consequences or no consequences at all are not repeated.
4. operant conditioning(操作性条件反射): behavior operates upon the environment and produces consequences. And operant conditioning is the change that takes place when those consequences have a particular effect, and we call this effect strengthening or reinforcing.

Reinforcement is something that makes the behavior increase. There are 3 types of reinforcements:

1. Positive reinforcement: something give to you when you to do something;
2. Negative reinforcement: something are taken away when you do something.
3. Partial reinforcement: reinforce given intermittently

In Skinner's view of psychology, all learned behavior can be stripped down to the relationship between the behavior, its antecedents, and its consequences. Any behavior that is followed by a consequence will change in its rate of occurrence in direct relationship to changes in the consequence. Beyond this, recognizing alternatives to a particular behavior helps to change that behavior.

3 main claims from behaviorism are mistaken because:

1. There is considerable evidence for different forms of innate knowledge and innate desires
2. Science, particularly more advanced sciences like physics or chemistry, are all about unobservables. They're all about things you can't see. And it makes sense to explain complex and intelligent behavior in terms of internal mechanisms and internal representations.
3. The reward helps, but the reward is in no sense necessary. e.g. How rat learn to run a maze.
4. There is animal-specific constraints for learning.

Behaviorists have provided a richer understanding of certain learning mechanisms, particularly with regard to nonhumans. But today behaviorism as a dominant intellectual field has faded, as Chomsky suggests that the law of effect when applied to humans is either trivially true, trivially or uninterestingly true, or scientifically robust and obviously false.

"Introduction to Psychology" Notes (2) —— Sigmund Freud

Lecture 3:Sigmund Freud

In this lecture, it introduced the biography of Freud and his personality briefly. It outlines his theory in broad way, and gives the scientific assessment of Freud.

At the core of Freud's declamation, the most interesting ideas involve the existence of an unconscious:

1. unconscious motivation: there are desires and motivations that govern your behavior that you may not be aware of.
2. unconscious dynamics or conflict which lead to mental illnesses, dreams, slips of the tongue and so on.

Consciousness v.s Nonconscious:

• Consciousness works on this higher level. It reduces the continual bombardment of sensory stimulation to only two categories:
• the relevant and noticed
• the irrelevant and ignored
• Consciousness also empowers our mental processes to analyze, compare, and interpret whatever we've extracted from the stream of experience. And it enables us to respond flexibly to experiences by integrating what we know from the past, what we perceive in the present, and what we anticipate from the future.
• Consciousness enables us to recognize our own mortality because we have that awareness of past, present, and future -- a mixed blessing if ever there was one.
• Nonconscious works on lower level, deal with learned skills which become routinized and automatic.

How to study consciousness:

• structuralism:consciousness was to be studied in terms of its contents---what's on your mind
• functionalism:consciousness was to be studied in terms of its function--what consciousness does for us.

According to Freud, there are three distinct processes going on in your head and these are in violent internal conflict. And the way you act and think are products, not of a singular rational being, but of a set of conflicting creatures. And the triad are:

1. id(本我): the primitive, unconscious part of the personality where drives and passions originate; present at birth,works on "The Pleasure Principle".
2. ego(自我): our conscious sense of self-identity, moderates between the id and superego, our primitive impulses and our sense of moral obligation; works on the "Reality Principle."
3. superego(超我): a combination of the conscience and the ideal self, the internalized rules of society's moral standards, it restrains the id.

The id and superego do their work without conscious knowledge.

The human mind can act in ways that are contrary to the individual's best interest or that so much can be swept under the rug of consciousness, with so many important ideas and feelings kept out of sight.

The mind can be a double agent: spy and counterspy at the same time; revealing and concealing, knowing and not knowing, aware and confused.

Freud believed there were five stages of personality development, and each is associated with a particular erogenous zone:

1. oral stage(口腔期):dependent and needy.
2. anal stage(肛欲期):compulsive, clean, stingy.
3. phallic stage(俄狄浦斯期):excessive masculinity,a need for attention or domination. (Oedipus or Electra complex can occur)
   
4. latency stage(潜伏期):sex is repressed, children participate in hobbies, school and friendships
   
5. genital stage(青春期):the healthy adult stage

Defense mechanisms: defending yourself against the horrible parts of yourself, mental processes employed by the ego to reduce anxiety.

1. Sublimation(升华): it is you might have a lot of energy, maybe sexual energy or aggressive energy, but instead of turning it to a sexual or aggressive target what you do is you focus it in some other way.
2. Displacement(转移):it is you have certain shameful thoughts or desires and you refocus them more appropriately.
3. Projection(投射):it is, I have certain impulses I am uncomfortable with, so rather than own them myself, I project them to somebody else.
4. rationalization(合理化): it is that when you do something or think something bad you rationalize it and you give it a more socially acceptable explanation.
5. regression(退行): it is returning to an earlier stage of development.

Freudian theory is often so vague and flexible that it can't really be tested in any reliable way. It is falsifiability which coined by the philosopher Karl Popper---If one theory couldn't be proven wrong, they're not interesting enough to be science.Though many of his ideas have been rejected, the general idea of Freud's actually been so successful both in the study of scientific psychology and in our interpretation of everyday life.

Why would an unconscious evolve? The answer is deception which is the result of evolutionary pressure. In order to become a better liar, you need to believe the like that you're telling. The best lies are lies we tell ourselves. So that certain motivations and goals, particularly sinister ones, are better made to be unconscious.

"Introduction to Psychology" Notes (1) —— Brain

I start my exploration on psychology field from online Yale open course "Introduction to Psychology". It was teached by Professor Paul Bloom and tried to provide a comprehensive overview of the scientific study of thought and behavior. As the first step of a long journey, it is lucky for me to have such chance, guiding me through this discipline systematically, bringing me back to the university virtually, allowing me to experience the teaching style of the famous scholars in western world. The only pity is lacking of interaction with them.

Since I found this golden mine in internet I keep thinking of the word "Zeitgeist" which I learned from you at the first time. If I could choose, I would name the zeitgeist of the new internet age as "open, share and collaboration". Yes, we are blessed to live in such an internet age, the ways to learn, share and communicate are fast changing, the cutting-edge technologies change our life dramatically. What makes me the most depressed is that I can't share the benefit of it together with you.

I know I digress again. Let me come back to what I learned from this course. As usually, I scribbled down the notes during the course. This course explores a very wide range of topics including the brain, children, language, perception, morality,sex, memory, madness, love, emotion, dreams, personality, individual differences, mental illness and happiness. In the end, it escalates my interest in human's mind and strengthens my feeling there is so much more remain to be understood. So, let me retrospect the start of this journey -- "unlocking the mysteries of human mind". Meanwhile, I try to collect those related theories and findings which I encountered and were scattered around here and there in internet. For trace.
...

Lecture 2 - Foundations: This Is Your Brain


Dualism theory is claiming the duality of people: material bodies + immaterial souls.
Arguments from Rene Descartes:

1. We are not mere machines: Humans are capable of coordinated, creative, spontaneous things; Human can choose while machine can not.
2. The body and the mind are seperated: He used the method of doubt to duduce the argument "there's something really different about having a body that's always uncertain from having a mind" and to support this idea.

Dualism is emmeshed in our language, common sense and culture.

Nowadays, the scientific consensus is that dualism is wrong, that all of mental life including consciousness and emotions and choice and morality are the products of brain activities. Several reasons to support this conclusion:

1. Dualists fail to explain a lot of things like how a physical body connects to an immaterial soul.
2. Physical things can do a lot and this opens up the possibility that humans are physical things, in particular, that humans are brains.
3. There is strong evidence that the brain seems to correspond in intricate and elaborate ways to our mental life.

The basic structure of brain:

Neuron -- The basic unit of brain:

• 3 major parts of Neuron:

1. dendrites: get signals from other neurons (excitatory or inhibitory)
2. axon: transmit electrical signals from a nerve cell to other nerve cells or to muscles
3. myelin sheath: serve as an insulator to protect nerves, help the transmission work quicker

• 3 kinds of neurons:
1. Sensory neurons: take information from the world
2. motor neurons: telling the muscles what to do
3. interneurons: connect the two and do the thinking
• Neuron working mechanism is all-or-nothing: fire or not fire.
• 2 ways to encode intensity:
1. expressed the number of neurons firing
2. expressed the frequency of firing.

Synapses - The infinitesimal gap between the axon of one neuron and the dendrite of another.

Neurotransmitters - The chemicals sends by an axon through the gap and affect the dendrites so that neurons communicate to one another chemically.

2 sorts of drugs：

1. agonists: to increases the effect of neurotransmitters,either by making more neurotransmitters or stopping the cleanup of neurotransmitters
2. antagonists:to slow down the amount of neurotransmitters,either by destroying neurotransmitters or making it hard to create more

Brain is not wired up like a personal computer because:

• it highly resistant to damage
• it works extremely fast
• itworks through massively parallel processing

Subcortical structures: very low-level internal structures, underneath the cortex.

• Medulla: responsible for heart rate and respiration.
• Cerebellum: responsible for body balance and muscular coordination.
• Hypothalamus: responsible for feeding, hunger, thirst, and to some extent sleep.

Cortex is the outer layer:where all the neat stuff takes place. It is divided into different lobes:

• Frontal lobe （额叶）: involved in motor function, language, memory, impulse control, and many other functions.
• Parietal lobe（顶叶）: receives and processes sensations, perception, and integrating sensory input.
  
• Occipital lobe （枕叶）:responsible for visual interpretations and for combining visual images with recognition.
  
• Temporal lobe （颞叶）:associated with audition, speech, and memories
  

Less than 1/4 of the human cortex is devoted to projection areas, the rest is involved with language, reasoning, moral thought, etc.

Brain can be divided into:

• Right hemishphere: controls the left side of the body, parallel processor;
• Left hemisphere:controls the right side of the body, sequential processor
• Corpus callosum: major pathway between 2 hemispheres, connect them.

Some functions are ‘lateralized’： language on left, math,music on right.

TBD...

P.S. All credits go to Yale University and Professor Paul Broom.

Panning for Gold —— 《Asking the Right Questions》

For quite a long time, I'm shamed to be frequently messed up with logic during our communication. I'm shamed to use words often loaded with heavy emotional baggage and ambiguity. I'm shamed to be a passive absorber of information. In brief, I'm shamed not to be a critical thinker before. Now these shame motivate me to dig into critical thinking area, to read this book eagerly, to try best to find clarity of my mind, to try to make strong reasoning to my arugements. Nevertheless I know there will be no chance any more to show you my changes.

...

Below are my notes on this book:

We normally use sponge thinking style which emphasizes knowledge acquisition.

Pros:

1. Knowledge you have acquired provides a foundation for more complicated thinking later.
2. Rather than requiring strenuous mental effort, it tends to be rather quick and easy.
3. The primary mental effort involves concentration and memory.

Cons:

1. Decisions become accidents of association, instead of reflective judgments.

We need to shift to critical thinking style (so-called panning-for-gold) which requires us actively interaction with knowledge as it is being acquired.

Why:

1. Making personal choices critically about what to accept and what to reject: Emotional involvement should not be the primary basis for accepting or rejecting a position. To avoid it, you need to be as open as possible to ideas that strike you as weird or dangerous.
2. become more sensibly to select expert opinions on which you can rely from among the crowd of experts
3. build skills and attitudes that will enable you to make your personal judgment thoughtfully, shape your behavior and decision.

Two kinds of critical thinking:

• Weak-sense critical thinking: use of critical thinking to defend your current beliefs. It is weak becuase it is unconcerned with moving toward truth or virtue. The purpose is to resist and annihilate opinions and reasoning different from yours. It might ruin the potentially humane and progressive aspects of critical thinking.
• Strong-sense critical thinking: use of the same skills to evaluate all claims and beliefs, especially your own. It help us select from alternative opinions that we have understood and evaluated.

The list of critical questions:

1. What are the issues and the conclusions?

Two different issues:

• Descriptive issues: to raise questions about the accuracy of descriptions of the past, present, or future; to reflect our curiosity about patterns or order in the world.
• Prescriptive issues: to raise questions about what we should do or what is right or wrong, desirable or undesirable, good or bad.

Conclusions are inferred; they are derived from reasoning. Claims without support statement are mere opinions rather than conclusions. Clues to help you identify the conclusion:

• Ask what the issue is.
• Look for indicator words: consequently、suggests that、hence、therefore、points、to the conclusion that、thus、the point I'm trying to make is、it follows that、it is highly probable that、shows that、 proves that、indicates that、 the truth of the matter is.
• Look in likely locations:at the beginning or at the end
• Remember what a conclusion is not.
• Check the context of the communication and the author's background.
• Ask the question, "and therefore?"

2. What are the reasons?
An argument = A conclusion + Reasons allegedly supporting it.

"Reverse logic" or "Backward reasoning": reasons are an afterthought, following the selection of your conclusion.

3. Which words or phrases are ambiguous?
Identifying the precise meaning of key words or phrases is an essential step in deciding whether to agree with someone's opinion.

4. What are the value conflicts and assumptions?

Read between the lines to look at the full argument: Some ideas are taken for granted by authors, which are important invisible links in the reasoning structure, the glue that holds the entire argument together. They are assumptions.

Characteristics of assumptions:

• hidden or unstated (in most cases);
• taken for granted;
• influential in determining the conclusion; and
• potentially deceptive.

Value assumptions are very contextual;We hold our value preferences only up to a point.Because our minds tend to like to put things in neat compartments, you have to work hard to tolerate the complexity of a person's value preferences.

5. What are the descriptive assumptions?

Descriptive assumptions are beliefs about the way the world is.
Prescriptive or value assumptions are beliefs about how the world should be.

6. Are there any fallacies in the reasoning?

A fallacy is a reasoning trick that an author might use while trying to persuade you to accept a conclusion.

Common fallacy list:

• Ad Hominem fallacy（人身攻击）: An attack, or an insult, on the person, rather than directly addressing the person's reasons. Why it is a fallacy: the character or interests of individuals making arguments usually are not relevant to the quality of the argument being made.
• Slippery Slope（滑坡效应）: Making the assumption that a proposed step will set off an uncontrollable chain of undesirable events, when procedures exist to prevent such a chain of events.
• Searching for Perfect Solution（追求完美）: Falsely assuming that because part of a problem would remain after a solution is tried, the solution should not be adopted.
• Equivocation（模棱两可、偷换概念）: A key word is used with two or more meanings in an argument such that the argument fails to make sense once the shifts in meaning are recognized.
• Appeal to Popularity (Ad populum 诉诸大众): An attempt to justify a claim by appealing to sentiments that large groups of people have in common; falsely assumes that anything favored by a large group is desirable
• Appeal to questionable authority（诉诸可疑权威）: Supporting a conclusion by citing an authority who lacks special expertise on the issue at hand.
• Appeals to Emotions（诉诸情绪）: The use of emotionally charged language to distract readers and listeners from relevant reasons and evidence.
• Straw Person（歪曲原理、草人谬误）: Distorting our opponent's point of view so that it is easy to attack; thus we attack a point of view that does not truly exist.
• Either-Or (Or False Dilemma，非此即彼的虚拟困境): Assuming only two alternatives when there are more than two.
• Wishful Thinking（愿景思考）: Making the faulty assumption that because we wish X were true or false, then X is indeed true or false.
• Explaining by Naming（标签式解释）: Falsely assuming that because you have provided a name for some event or behavior that you have also adequately explained the event.
• Glittering Generality（光环效应）: The use of vague emotionally appealing virtue words that dispose us to approve something without closely examining the reasons.
• Red Herring（转移注意力）: An irrelevant topic is presented to divert attention from the original issue and help to "win" an argument by shifting attention away from the argument and to another issue. The fallacy sequence in this instance is as follows: (a) Topic A is being discussed; (b) Topic B is introduced as though it is relevant to topic A, but it is not; and (c) Topic A is abandoned.
• Begging the Question（以待决之问题为论据）: An argument in which the conclusion is assumed in the reasoning.
• Hasty Generalization Fallacy（草率泛化）: A person draws a conclusion about a large group based on experiences with only a few members of the group.
• Faulty Analogy（错误类比）: Occurs when an analogy is proposed in which there are important relevant dissimilarities.
• Causal Oversimplification（过分简单化）: Explaining an event by relying on causal factors that are insufficient to account for the event or by overemphasizing the role of one or more of these factors.
• Confusion of Cause and Effect（因果倒置）: Confusing the cause with the effect of an event or failing to recognize that the two events may be influencing each other.
• Neglect of a Common Cause（忽视共同原因）: Failure to recognize that two events may be related because of the effects of a common third factor.
• Post hoc Fallacy（混淆时间先后）: Assuming that a particular event, B, is caused by another event, A, simply because B follows A in time.

7. How good is the evidence?

What can be used as evidence:
intuition, personal experience, testimonials, appeals to authority,personal observation, research studies, case examples, and analogies.

8. Are there rival causes?
A rival cause is a plausible alternative explanation that can explain why a certain outcome occurred.

9. Are the statistics deceptive?

Be wary of statistics:

• How the statistics were obtained. Ask, "How does the author or speaker know?"
• Be curious the type of average being described: mean(total value/total number), median (in the middle of value range) or mode (the most frequent)?
• Be alert to users of statistics concluding one thing, but proving another.
• Blind yourself to the writer's or speaker's statistics and compare the needed statistical evidence with the statistics actually provided.
• Blind yourself to the conclusion, compare your own conclusion from statistics with authors'.
• Determine what information is missing. Be especially alert for misleading numbers and percentages and for missing comparisons.

10. What significant information is omitted?

Be sensitive to the importance of what is not said because omitted information is inevitable for at least five reasons.

• time and space limitations;
• limited attention span;
• inadequacies in human knowledge;
• consciously deception;
• existence of different perspectives

11. What reasonable conclusions are possible?

Multiple conclusions are possible reached from a single set of reasons which depend on how you makes certain interpretations or assumptions concerning the meaning of the reasons.

Dichotomous thinking: assuming there are only two possible answers to a question that has multiple potential answers. Together with either-or fallacy, dichotomous thinking in general damages reasoning by overly restricting our vision, limiting the range of your decisions and opinions. Even worse, it overly simplifies complex situations.