You Just Have To Believe!!

Hey all!  What's this, two posts within one week?  Madness, I know, but I guess that's what happens when I get stuck in summer/work limbo...

Anyways, like most posts I write nowadays, this one starts with a story...  Quite a few decades back, there was a psychologist named Rosenthal who was interested in studying the power of beliefs.  Anyways, Rosenthal was able to conduct an experiment on a group of elementary students.  He started by giving  them an IQ test, just to start off.  After doing his testing, he let the teachers know that some of the students, even though they may not show it at the time, are 'late bloomers,' or students who are going to do very well in the future.

The school year goes by, and Rosenthal decides to administer another IQ test to see if there were any changes.  Well, the majority of the students had about a four point increase in their IQ, which is pretty normal.  Yet, amazingly, as Rosenthal had predicted, those that were designated as 'late bloomers' gained, on average, about fifteen points.

So, what was the secret?  How did Rosenthal know that some students would do so well?  Simply put, he didn't, which is why this experiment is so amazing.  You see, all of the students Rosenthal had labelled as 'late bloomers' were students that he randomly selected; there was nothing more to it than that.  Yet, such a drastic difference came about due to something people simply believed.  That couldn't hold for other situations, right?

Well, when Rosenthal first published this experiment (after he finally found a journal willing to publish it...), people refused to believe him.  In fact, one experimenter, willing to discredit Rosenthal's results,  agreed to  work with Rosenthal to try and test this again, but with rats this time.  So, a little bit different of an experiment, but it was essentially the same idea...  Graduate students were given rats, yet some graduate students were told that they had received 'maze bright' rats.  Again, the genius of this experiment was that there was no real difference between the rats; everything was purely random.  Yet, similar to the results from the previous experiment, the rats that were labelled as 'maze bright' ended up running a maze faster and what not.  So, even in a situation with rats, this same phenomenon seems to be present...  Madness!

So, many of you have probably heard of the term before, but this phenomenon was labelled a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The definition, according to Lieberman's lecture, is "when an originally false social belief leads to its own fulfillment."  As you can see in the previous experiments, the false social belief was that the students/rats were different than everyone else when they should have been the same as everyone else.  Yet, simply because the teachers believed that their rat/child was special, they did end up becoming special...

There have been other cases where the powers of a self-fulfilling prophecy have held true...  The most devastating example is Black Wednesday of 1932 (another example from Lieberman's lecture), when a person wondered out loud if a bank was closing due to what appeared to be a large number of people making withdrawals...  People heard this, started to fear that they would lose their money in the bank, and thus withdrew their money.  Well, as you can guess, so many people ended up withdrawing their money that the bank did end up closing, leading to an ironic end...

So yes, self-fulfilling prophecies can be quite powerful in both positive and negative aspects.  But, they can get really dangerous when they create a self-reinforcing cycle.  For example, let's say that a person believes that no one else really likes them.  This belief then leads them to be depressed or have poor social interactions with others, thus leading to others avoiding interacting with that person.  The person starts to see that this is the case, and thus their self-fulfilling prophecy that no one really likes them is reinforced.  In fact, this may lead to an even stronger belief in this prophecy, leading to even worse social interactions, and thus reinforcing the cycle continuously.  I didn't explain that very well, but hopefully y'all understand...

I guess the big idea is that what we believe has a very strong effect on what can happen...  It sounds weird, but as you can see from the experiments, there is some effect...  Part of the way it works is also that if you have a self-fulfilling prophecy, then you start to look for things to confirm your prophecy, even if the evidence isn't really there/a misconstrual (something that psychologists tend to refer to as confirmation bias).  In other words, sometimes people only see what they want to see...  So, I guess it shows the importance of realizing how much we believe may affect possibly all aspects of our lives.  It may be good to have others to keep us (and our beliefs) in check every now and then, no?  The more I look into social psychology, the more it seems that we can't really trust ourselves/think we're truly objective, non-bias observers...   Just something good to realize, I guess...  Oh well, catch y'all next time!

Under (Peer) Pressure

Hey all!  Long time, no write...  Of course, I happen to say that a lot now hahaha.  Anyways, school finished a week ago so I was pretty tired of writing papers...  I ended up writing about twenty pages in two weeks or so, which isn't that bad.  But still, I guess my brain is just fried from what seemed like a very long year...

Anyways!  For those of you that have gleamed over previous posts, you may have noticed that I like to write quite a bit about conformity.  It's so interesting to see what affects people's behavior, even if we like to think we're objective masters of observation and actions...

When I think of a school setting, one of the first things that comes to mind is peer pressure, which is something that we all can probably relate to.  The common idea is that there is something a group of others are doing and they start to pressure someone to do it.  Before you know it, the person gives in and starts doing whatever the other people were pressuring.    Ok, very generic, but you get the idea!  The idea is, peer pressure is a very clear-cut and everything, right?

Wellll, how about this...  Let's say that there's a group of people doing something, such as drinking, as per a typical party session.  Now, there are those that choose not to drink, due to things such as age or other factors.  While there may be some direct peer pressure from those drinking to get others to drink, there are still a lot of people who drink who accept that others don't want to drink.  So, let's say there is a group of eight people drinking and there is one person with them who is not.  Since they're not telling him to drink, it's not peer pressure, right?

In this type of situation, I would have to disagree and argue that this is peer pressure.  You see, there are two general types of peer pressure: explicit and implicit.  Explicit peer pressure is the kind of peer pressure that everyone knows and is the first example from above.  Implicit peer pressure is when everyone around a person is doing something, even if they aren't forcing the person to do it as well.

The danger of implicit peer pressure is that it is, well, implicit...  For explicit peer pressure, one may be able to point to the others as pressuring them and thus prevent anything from happening.  But for implicit, it's almost something that functions under the radar...  I don't know the literature on this topic that well unfortunately, so take everything I say with a grain of salt, but I believe that implicit pressure isn't something we really register as happening.  In other words, one may commit the action (in the previous case, drinking) in order to feel as if they fit in better with the group.  Yet, to attribute their behavior due to the group's pressure would be somewhat incorrect due to the group not directly pressuring the person to do so.  So, even if the pressure is implicit and does exist, people may not see it that way, leading to potentially negative situations...

I guess it's a rather basic message and what not, but important, nonetheless!  The main idea is that both types of peer pressure may exist in any form of group setting...  In other words, if there's any group where some common trait is shared/required, such as attending an elite school where being smart is normal, people may be pressured to have/get that trait.  Yet, if they are unable to do so, they may feel socially ostracized, leading to many more problems in itself...  Again, though, part of the problem with implicit peer pressure is that it is rather difficult to detect.  So, I guess ending message of the night is just to be aware of what kind of situations you really put yourself in...  Even if you don't directly see it, there might be some negative peer pressure existing somewhere...  So yeah, really general, but aren't you glad that this post is a lot shorter than most of my other ones?!