Psychology in Everyday Life: The Psych Files

We often like it when things are explained to us clearly, but would you believe that sometimes it's better if you're just down-right confused? You could actually learn more if at some point in the learning process you feel like you don't know what's going on. In part 2 of my interview with researcher and professor Jeremiah Sullins, we talk about much more you could learn if you spend a little time being absolutely perplexed at what's going on. You may have heard of this as "desirable difficulties", well here we dig in and find out when it's good for teachers (and students) when everything is not completely clear.

Why do you vote the way you do? Have you read through all the various candidates position statements, or do you just kinda go with your "gut"? Jeremiah Sullins, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harding University has looked at this question in great depth and he's found some really interesting answers to this question. I think you'll really enjoy hearing about his research into your voting behavior.

In a previous episode I talked about the kinds of dynamics that can occur in groups (social loafing, diffusion of responsibility) that can make them ineffective learning experiences as well as just not fun. In this episode I interview Dr. Karen Christian who has watched how many study groups in action and she has uncovered quite a few things that study groups need to do differently so that everybody actually learns and gets ready for an upcoming test. She's got some very useful suggestions for teachers and students.

How do you "apply a little psychology" to tough jobs like building an online community and to creating a product that people will want to use frequently? In part 2 of my interview with author and Feverbee founder Richard Millington we talk about two key theories from psychology: self-determination theory and Robert Cialdini's persuasion techniques. I think you'll find these real world examples very practical.

What do you do with a background in psychology? A lot of things. How about running an online community? I found Richard Millington, founder of Feverbee, talking about how he applies psychology to his business of helping organizations build strong, active online communities. As you've probably seen in your travels about the web, there are a lot of communities (such as those on Facebook) and sometimes you join them because you're interested in the person or the product the company sells. Then what happens? A lot to times nothing because that "community" isn't really a community. It's just a Facebook page that an employee created because he/she felt they "had to" because everyone else is doing it, but there's no actual discussion going on. What's an online community supposed to do? It's supposed to be interesting and helpful to its members. A community is supposed to "connect like minded people" and maybe even get them excited about a product and perhaps even, in the best case scenario, communities get their members to be so excited about the cause or the product that some of them become "evangelists" - real fans who spread the word. But how do you make this happen? What can you do to make a community active? Let's hear how Richard Millington effectively uses a little psychology in his work as a community builder.

Is it possible that some people who we think are mentally ill are actually victims of demonic possession? One psychiatrist says yes. Another psychiatrist says no - believing this is true is a matter of not carefully thinking about what you see and hear from others. In this episode I break down the claims made by Richard Gallagher and a counterpoint to Gallagher which was written by Steven Novella. Along the way we'll learn about logical fallacies such as the "argument for incredulity" and the "argument of ignorance". I think you'll find this fascinating and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

Do you think you're using the words "control group" correctly? You're probably not. In fact, you're probably also getting these terms wrong as well: "truth serum", "lie detector", "bystander apathy", "personality type", Oxytocin, "closure" and even the "scientific method"! In this episode I review some of the points made by Scott Lilienfeld and his colleagues regarding scientific terms that you're probably using incorrectly.

Cell phones: they're here and they're not going away. So now it's time to "stop worrying and learn to love them". If you're upset about how addicted teens are to their phones I'll give you a few ideas that, hopefully, will make you feel better. After all, cellphones aren't going away. Quite the opposite. They're only going to get more powerful and more ubiquitous. The "pull" of the phone is irresistible. In this follow-up to episode 258 I want to talk about how adults and parents can feel less distressed by a teen's behavior. I hope the ideas in this episode help. How can we feel better about something (cell phone use) we can't do a whole lot about?

What is change blindness? How could you miss some of the most obvious things that change right in front of you? Millions of people watch a video of kids playing basketball and they miss the fact that a gorilla walks right through the scene. A gorilla? And people missed it? Yup. We often miss lots of things that happen right in front of us because our attention spans work in strange ways. And because what happened isn't what we expected to happen. Let's learn about change blindness.

Why do we find it so hard to put down our phones? I'll give you 5 reasons drawn directly from psychological theories on how we learn, how teenagers are strongly affected by reward and how we are all drawn in by mystery. There is of course no easy answer for how to get teens to put down their phones but I'll share what I'm doing with my teenagers.

I grew up eating baloney without ever giving a thought to where it came from. But psychology is all reflecting on who you are, why you think the way you do and why you do what you do. So let's explore our eating behavior: why do we think it's weird or wrong when we hear that in some cultures people eat cat meat or insects or bats. Is it really that different from eating cows and pigs? How are we influenced to think that some foods are okay while others aren't...?

What if you could study for your psychology test in 24 second sound bytes on your iPhone? Now you can. I recently contacted Parviv - the founder of an app called Clammr. Typically, people use Clammr to stay on top of the news, listen to podcasts or "top tweets" and other humorous audio clips. I thought it would make a great test prep tool. So check it out: download Clammr on your iPhone and search for Psych Fest Prep. You can choose from 7 major psychology topics and start studying!

What if you could study for your psychology test in 24 second sound bytes on your iPhone? Now you can. I recently contacted Parviv - the founder of an app called Clammr. Typically, people use Clammr to stay on top of the news, listen to podcasts or "top tweets" and other humorous audio clips. I thought it would make a great test prep tool. So check it out: download Clammr on your iPhone and search for Psych Fest Prep. You can choose from 7 major psychology topics and start studying! Hints: Put your email address in the Settings>Edit Profile page. When you tap the thumbs up icon on important terms you'll get an email with links to those terms you can listen to again. Set "Skip Heard Clammrs" to OFF (under Settings>Preferences. I hope this helps for your next test. Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions!

London needs help and only a person trained in psychology can fix this. There are just too many Londoners using their subway (the "tube") and instead of standing side by side as they go up the escalator, people are doing what they always do - they stand single file on the right of the escalator so that people in a hurry can pass on the left. That's a fine social norm when there aren't that many people, but if London transport is going to be usable as the population grows they're going to have to get people to behave differently. How can we break such a strong norm? It's not just London's problem. When you go up the stairs which side do you stand on? The right of course, and you expect the people coming down the stairs to stay to their right. When someone doesn't follow the norm we can get pretty annoyed. So what can we do to create a wide scale change in behavior? We have to apply a little social psychology.

What comes to mind when you think "nursing home"? Not so good, right? Let's change that. Let's use what we learn from psychology to create exciting places for seniors to live. We've got the tools provided by Maslow's Hierarchy and by the Self Determination theory. Here's one way we could revolutionize the "senior years".

Passengers on an airplane spring to action when a stewardess needs help - but a neighborhood in New York City does very little when a woman is attacked. What's different about these situations? How can we take what we learn from the airplane and apply it to the attack? Lecturing the neighborhood residents probably won't help. Can we do anything to the way the neighborhood is laid out to encourage interaction among residents and a greater sense of interdependency among them? That's what we explore in this episode of The Psych Files.

How can we use a little psychology to get you to slow down when you're driving? You'd be surprised. Very often road signs like "Slow" or a posted speed limit of, say 20 mph does not work. Drivers go past these signs and nothing bad happens so after a while they're ignored. We try to make it more personal with signs say, "Drive as if your kids live here", but often that doesn't work. How about something trickier: what if we enlisted the help of those 3D sidewalk artists? What could they possibly do? You'll find out.

Snapchat got a pretty bad rap over the past few years, but did you know that you actually can use this video messaging app in ways that really do help students see the applications of what their teachers are learning in their everyday lives. In this episode I share my experiences using Snapchat with my psychology class. Yes it has it's limitations, but it also has some strengths that I think are worth looking at. Join me as I explore snapchat and give you samples of "snaps" I sent my students.

If you have not seen the movie Analyze This with Robert DeNiro and Billy Krystal, then you really should. It's not just a funny movie, bit also gets a lot of things about therapy right. So many movies portray psychotherapy so unrealistically but this movie, while it takes a lot of liberties with the therapeutic process, gets some things right and gives you a pretty good idea of how therapy progresses. Through sound bytes from the movie we'll see examples of catharsis, freudian defense mechanisms of denial and minimizing, the analysis of dreams, the breaking of therapeutic boundaries, and Rogerian techniques of reflection. A fascinating movie to take apart and that's just what I do in this episode of The Psych Files.

What if you could swap bodies with someone else? What would it be like to be someone of the opposite sex? A different race? We're getting darn close to being able to do that with new techniques like the Rubber Hand Illusion, the Enfacement illusion, and now the Full body illusion. You can now virtually switch bodies with someone else and thanks to our mirror neurons and other brain systems, you can have a very different sense of body ownership. Come listen to me talk about the latest research on this topic and some potential intriguing applications to problems like bullying.

A small number of men cross dress and many movies and broadway shows feature cross dressers (transvestites), so obviously many people find it fascinating and those who cross dress typically enjoy it. Why? What does it mean about the people who do it? I was recently cast as Albin/ZaZa in the musical version of the movie "La Cage Aux Folles" so I've been doing a lot it recently. I decided to take a closer look at cross dressing and see what psychologists think about it. Along the way, I'll also look at some of the ways we determine how or if a behavior, thought or feeling is "abnormal"

Do "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation" or are we actually pretty happy most of the time? As it turns out humans are far more resilient than you think. Ever heard of the term "affective forecasting"? It's something we do every day and very often we make mistakes doing it. In this episode you'll learn more about positive psychology from the authors of a new book called Pollyanna's Revenge. Another myth put to rest: "depressive realism" - the idea that there's an advantage to being depressed - that depressed people are more realistic about the world than non-depressed people. That's not so either and I think you'll find a lot of interesting information in this episode about what affects your own level of happiness. Join me for a fascinating discussion about how we really react to the ups and downs of life.

Most performers "mark" when they're tired during rehearsals. Are they "not giving it their all" or are they getting quite a benefit from doing this? You'd be surprised at how beneficial marking can be. If you're not familiar with marking, here's a definition from the authors of a recent study on how marking benefits dancers: "Marking involves enacting the sequence of movements with curtailed size and energy by diminishing the size of steps, height of jumps and leaps, and extension of limbs. The dancer often does not leave the floor and may even substitute hand gestures for certain steps."

You may have been heard that taking a nap or going to sleep after you learn something helps you to retain it (which is true), but you may also have heard that drinking coffee helps your memory. So which is it? How can you drink coffee AND take a nap? Well, apparently you can get the benefit of both - if you do it right. In this episode we not only learn about the so-called "students' coffee" but we learn about the "coffee nap". If you do it just right you can get some great memory boosts.

A humorous way to learn about the Freudian defense mechanisms (actually elaborated by Anna Freud) of Displacement, Denial, Sublimation, Reaction Formation, and Projection. A little dream analysis thrown in. Who knows? Maybe Freud would have been good at tech support...

What was the name of that baby in John Watson's famous videos in which he attempts to demonstrate that fears can be acquired through conditioning (pairing a loud noise with a furry animal)? A few years ago we were presented with information indicating that a boy named Douglas Merrite was the true identity of "Little Albert". The data looked pretty convincing at that time. However, a few pieces of that data simply did not fit together for researchers Nancy Digdon, Russell Powell and Ben Harris. After another lengthy search into the past, these researchers determined that another child fits the description and the facts of who "Little Albert" really was and that boy's name is William Albert Barger. As is often true in life, the simple facts require fewer leaps in logic and these facts make the conclusion that William Albert is "Little Albert" inescapable. In this episode I lay out some of these facts and I think you'll be convinced as well. One of those facts: unfortunately, William Albert Barger died in 2007 so although we weren't able to talk with him, it appears that he lead a full and rewarding life. [This] dispute ... has been settled to the satisfaction of all neutral observers from journal editors to manuscript reviewers to ... textbook author who has seen our articles. The argument is settled.....I would turn to the question of why it took the field of psychology 5+ years to get this sorted out."