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, ...