ODER BLOCKER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We as Americans (and as general consumers), we are constantly berated with advertisements that are attempting to get us to buy their products and pay for their services. It does not take a long session of television watching to realize that every single one of the advertisements are peripheral routes to persuasion (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). In this route of persuasion, the way in which a person tries to get you to change your attitude to what by the argument they present, but by the extra things that they present, like nice music or free food. One of my favorite examples of this is almost any and all of the old spice commercials. The point of the commercial is get customers to go out and buy their body wash isn't it? Then why am I watching as a man listens to an absurd self help tape about how he is the best at certain things? I assume that if I use the Old Spice body wash that my life will suddenly become awesome like that guys? Oddly enough, the commercial does make me want to buy Old Spice body wash (if I were to buy body wash), because whenever I think of body wash now, I think of either that nerd turned into awesome dude or Terry Crews flexing his pecs at me and yelling at the top of his voice telling me that the body wash/spray blocks BO as things explode around him. However, I do think that this is a much better alternative to the opposite, which would be them attempting to use a central route to persuasion (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), in which they would present a logical argument as to why Old Spice body wash is the product that should be bought because of its obviously better properties opposed to others (or other things that it may be able to do for me). When I (and I'm sure 99% of Americans) watch television, we aren't watching it to be educated and be lectured about why a product is better than another (which is what infomercials attempt to do), we watch television to be entertained, and when Terry Crews is blowing crap up all over the place and raiding other products commercials, it makes me entertained enough to want to write an entire blog about it and have other people read about it.

Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). Communication and persuasion: Central and peripheral routes to attitude change. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Silence For An Entire Day (PO Blog)

I see myself as someone who is not very assertive, but at the same time I am not a quite individual. On the contrary, I have been told on many occasions that I am a very loud person. On multiple occasions I have been asked to keep my voice down when I was already talking at what I thought was a reasonably low volume. Additionally, I have a self-schema (Markus, 1977), which are beliefs that people have about themselves, for being loud not very assertive, but that when I do speak up that others hear me, and I feel that I am a good communicator with my words, that I am able to articulate my words well enough for others to get the point. So in order to go against what I see myself as, and how others see me, I decided to go the complete opposite side of the spectrum, and I was completely silent for an entire day by not speaking or writing anything anything that would communicate a message to others. I decided to do this on a dat when I would be interacting with my family, my girlfriend and a bunch of strangers. So I spent a good deal of the morning and afternoon with my family, where we ran errands together, and even went to lunch. The errands were not too difficult to get around, especially once my family just accepted that I wasn't going to talk to them. This in itself was a pain to get to however, because my nonverbal behavior (Darwin, 1872) which is expression of how one feels through means other than talking, isn't very effective. When my family began to think that I was upset with them because I wasn't talking to them, I tried to tell them that I wasn't through hand gestures (a moment in time when I wished I knew sign language) and making facial expressions, only for my family to become confused and just give up on trying to get any sort of concrete answer out of me that didn't consist of a head nod or shake. We then went to lunch at a place called Jack Allan's Kitchen (which was quite delicious), and was honestly kind of awkward to be almost non-communicating when your only source of entertainment while your waiting for you food is to talk to the people at your table. My family began to accept and work with my limit communication abilities around this point, and I began to learn how to communicate things a little bit better, and facial expressions accompanied by hand gestures, as I found out first hand, are almost necessary to have the people your trying to communicate with understand your message. I probably looked something like a fish flailing about on land during lunch just so I could attempt to convey my messages to my family. Ordering the food itself was pretty easy, all I had to do was point at the thing on the menu and nod when the waitress wanted confirmation. However, I feel like this portion of my day, the part spent with my family, was the least stressful and demanding part of my day. The difficult part came later when I went with my girlfriend and her family to a wedding for one of their neighbors (who is around my age, which is still mind blowing). I had to break the no communication rule in order to text (which I felt was a lesser offense to calling) my girlfriend, and only asked what time I needed to be at her parents house for us to drive over. Not gonna lie, being able to communicate like I'm accustomed to felt very good after a solid five hours of flailing my hands and contorting my face, especially since it was acting within my self-schema (Markus, 1977). When I arrived at my girlfriends parents home, it was one of the most nerve wracking things I have ever experienced, because even though I have spent a fair amount of time with her parents, and I am positive that they very much like me, me being completely silent goes against their impression they had formed about me, which coincides with impression formation (Asch, 1946), where people take information about a person and form an impression of what kind of person they are, and what to expect of them. They probably had formed an impression that I would be happy given the occasion of the day (I like weddings) and would be very talkative. When they didnt get this reaction from me, my girlfriends father (who is more of an assertive, straight forward guy), immediately asked me what was wrong, why I wasn't talking and if I had lost my voice. I did my best to try and communicate that everything was fine, but my non-verbal communication (Darwin, 1872) was still so bad that I was helpless to try and express and debunk all of those ideas. Additionally, I realized at this point that there was social norm (Hamilton, 1964) expected of me here. Social norms (Hamilton, 1964) are basically the rules of how someone acts when around others. When the father asked me how I was, it was expected of me to respond with some kind of verbal response instead of giving him a thumbs up and a smile. Needless to say, it was incredibly awkward. The worst was having to deal with my girlfriend, who is very perceptive and intelligent, so when I was not talking to anyone, but was attempting to communicate with my flailing motions, she would constantly ask me if what I was doing was for an experiment or for a class. I didn't really know how to respond to this, since I couldn't let her know that the assignment was for a class, so I was completely non-communicative at these questions, which made me feel more awkward, but ended up for the best because my girlfriend then began telling everyone I interacted with that I was not talking for an experiment. While incorrect, it was fantastic to have someone give an excuse for my behavior external to me. This can be seen as a situational attribution (Heider, 1958), in which actions of an individual are explained by things external to the actor, such as conducting an experiment. The opposite was seen by my family and initially her father, that my silence was due to some personal attribution (Heider, 1958) in which the actions of a person can be explained by something internal to them like their mood or a personality trait. My family thought I was upset about something, and my girlfriends father thought something was not right with me, which demonstrates a fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977). This error states that people are too quick to assume that peoples behavior is due to personal reasons and to not take into account that the situation may be the cause of the behavior. Overall, I did not enjoy not being able to communicate verbally with others, because it was just so difficult to get across what I was trying to say to others, and at the same time, people expect you to be able to talk to them and explain to them the reason behind your actions, and when you can't, they have to make up their own, because people like to have reasons as to why things happen, we don't like to have unexplained phenomena. If we did, there wouldn't be science, because that is what science is, attempting to explain things. Self presentation also is something that I find is so much easier to do when you act in a manner that you are comfortable with, which is typically the one within your self-schema ( Markus, 1977) because once you go outside of that, like me not being able to communicate well, it made me very uncomfortable because I am not accustomed to people not understanding what I am trying to say. This exercise helped me see that if individuals act within what they believe themselves to be, then they will be most comfortable in most situations than when they try to act outside of what they believe themselves to be, which makes me appreciate what good actors do all the more since they are able to act as someone different then themselves, but still appear to be natural in that role. That is why I believe Leonardo DiCaprio should get a dang Oscar by this point.

Word count = 1415

References

Asch, S. E. (1946). Forming impressions of personality. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 41, 258-290.

Darwin, C. (1872). The expression of the emotiuons in man and animals. London: John Murray.

Hamilton, W. D. (1964). The genetical evolution of social behavior: I and II. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7, 1-52.

Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York: Wiley.

Markus, H. (1977). Self-schemata and processing information about the self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 63-78.

Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The false consensus phenomenon: An attributional bias in self-perception and social-perception processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13, 279-301.

I promise I'm Not As Racist As It Says.

Holy Moley, okay, these IAT's (Greenwald et al. 1998) are kicking my butt. The IAT's (Greenwald et al. 1998) are tests developed by Harvard that are designed to test the implicit associations you have for certain groups or stimuli. To test these things, they basically just have you make quick judgments of things to test your reaction times between certain things. My first test was the racial IAT (Greenwald et al. 1998), and the very first thing they have you do in the test is describe your demographic information including your race, age and the like, which I feel should have been placed last after all of the data was collected, because it could have very easily influenced my results due to my ingroup bias (Capozza & Brown, 2000; Scheepers et al., 2006) as a white male, of course I am going to have a preference toward European Americans if you remind me that I am myself of European decent. I also took the body weight test, which compares fat and skinny people. I definitely already knew my automatic preference towards the thin side, since I identify myself as athletic and in being athletic I am thin(ner). My racial test was a bit disturbing, as it said I had a moderate preference to the European American faces, but I could attribute that to the fact that I am white myself and have a preference to things similar to myself. I didn't like seeing that results however, as I do believe that race is irrelevant to anything besides the amount of pigment a persons skin has. I don't think that taking these tests will change how I felt about those who are a different race then I am, and it definitely won't change how I feel about people who are obese. In the racial issue, as a student I am given data, stories, news, and plenty of other information that allows me to understand, intellectually at least, that the color of ones skin really plays no difference in who the person is. However, it is my personal belief that while obesity is sometimes a side effect of things out of the control of an individual such as an injury or an illness, but this is not the case for most people. The cause of obesity in most people today (in my belief) in the United States is an increasingly sugary fatty diet and an increasingly sedentary life style where people are just “too busy” to exercise each day or attempt to eat better.

Word count - 423

References

Capozza, D., & Brown, R. (2000). Social Identity processes: Trends in theory and research. London: Sage.

Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schawartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1464-1480.

Scheepers, D., Spears, R., Doosje, B., & Manstead, A. S. R. (2006). The social functions of ingroup bias: Creating, confirming, or changing social reality. European Review of Social Psychology, 17, 359-396

Porn Viewing Among My Colleagues.

A wise woman once taught me a nice little way in order to “trick” people into revealing information about themselves without them intending to, through an attribution bias called the false consensus effect. The principle of the false consensus effect is that individuals overestimate the rate at which others will share their beliefs, and it occurs because human beings want our feelings and beliefs to be shared amongst all people, therefore making it correct (Krueger, 1998; Ross, Greene & House, 1977). I decided to test this bias on a couple guys on the lacrosse team (for their protection I wont use their names). I went to one of the players of whom it was rumored that they were once caught watching pornography on his computers and asked him (not completely out of the blue), “what percentage of americans do you think watch porn?”. His estimate was around 80% of people among both men and woman in America. Later in practice, while talking amongst a couple of guys, I posed the question again to them, and most of them gave a similar number, all above 70%. I also wanted to see if anyone would give me a number lower than what the previous people were giving me, which would indicate under the aforementioned effect that they most likely did not watch pornography themselves. After a few more failed attempts, I one person did in fact give me a different number. As one of the more known religious players on the team, it was not surprising when he estimated that only around 40% of Americans view pornography (thank the Lord there is at least one innocent kid on the team). After practice, I came home and then asked my roommates the exact same question, and got an emphatic 90% and 80% and then revealed to them that I was then aware that they watched pornography. When they asked me the percentage (which I could not find a study to give percentage), I told them around 68%, and they immediately scoffed and told me that that number could not be true, which then caused me to call them out on them performing perfectly the base rate fallacy, a heuristic that states that people are likely to ignore statistical information and more likely to believe cases they have experienced themselves, which is of course less reliable (Gilovich et at., 2002; Kahneman et al., 1982; Nisbett & Ross, 1980). In confronting them with this information, that's when they started ignoring me again and went back to watching Duck Dynasty.

Words - 426

References

Gilovich, T., Medvec, V.H., & Savitsky, K. (2000). The spotlight effect in social judgment: An egocentric bias in estimates of the slience of one's own actions and appearance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 211-222.

Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., & Traversky, A.(Eds.). (1982). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristic and biases. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Krueger, J. (1998). On the perception of social consensus. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 30, 163-240.

Nisbett, R. E., & Ross, L. (1980). Human inference: Strategies and short-comings of social judgment. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The false consensus phenomenon: An attributional bias in self-perception processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13, 279-301.

Counterfactual thinking or Hypotheticals that make you sad.

One of the things that I finds that I enjoy is the classic hypothetical situation. I enjoy thinking about them, asking other people about them, conversing about them and seeing what other people would do in or think about certain situations. Little did I know however that hypothetical situations actually have a term in social psychology. Counterfactual thinking is a term brought forward by Kahneman and Miller (1986). In counterfactual thinking, people imagine alternate outcomes to situations and events that did not happen. For example, counterfactual thinking was probably performed by players from Hendrix College after our lacrosse game. They may have imagined a world in which they had actually won the game, and for the first time ever had beaten Southwestern University in a lacrosse game. However, this was not what happened (Hell yeah). When people imagine situations where the outcome was better than what actually happened, they were likely to feel regret and sad feelings (Roese, 1997; Roese & Olson, 1995). Additionally, for players on the Southwestern roster, the story was completely different. After crushing their most hated opponent 12-6, players may have taken a moment to imagine a scenario in which the tables were turned and Hendrix had pulled out a victory for the first time ever. However, this exercise would elicit a different response for the Southwestern players. The Southwestern players would experience emotions of joy, satisfaction and relief, especially since for the first time in program history we are 2-0 and we kicked the crap out of our rival (Roese, 1997; Roese & Olson, 1995). Even though players on the awesome winning team may have endulged in such thinking, Byrne and McEleney (2000) found that people are more likely to engage in counterfactual thinking when they experience a negative outcome as opposed to a positive one when the negative outcome resulted from actions we took. So a player from Hendrix who took multiple terrible shots or gave up the ball to our defense was probably looking back at the game and kicking themselves many times over because they may have felt that their loss was due to their actions. Sucks to be that guy, but I am a happy camper on the opposite end of that with a 12-6 victory and a hat-trick on the day.

Word Count: 381

References

Byrne, R. M. J., & McEleney, A. (2000). Counterfactual thinking about actions and failures to act. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26, 1318-1331.

Kahneman, D., & Miller, D. T. (1986). Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives. Psychological Review, 93,136-153.

Roese, N. J. (1997). Counterfactual thinking. Psychological Bulletin, 121, 133-148

Roese, N. J., & Olson, J. M. (Eds). (1995). What might have been: The social psychology of counterfactual thinking. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

We all want to know a cheerleader.

I think we all know of someone who has accomplished something good in life. Something that everyone looks upon them with envy, but then at the same time wish to get to know them and or become associated with them. This phenomenon actually unfolded before my eyes about 2 years ago. My girlfriend of 3.5 years is best friends with another girl who has always been a very gifted dancer and since she was a little girl had a dream of becoming a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader. Well, once we graduated from high school, and she did not immediately go into a 4 year college, there was not much stopping her from attempting to reach her dream. Her father basically told her, “Hey, why not?”, so she drove up to Dallas, and after a grueling month of tryouts and boot camps, she was officially dubbed a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader. Needless to say, this caused her popularity with people from high school to absolutely sky rocket. As soon as it became public that she was going to be a cheerleader, her facebook began to explode with people wanting to start to talk to her, compliment her and even get her phone number and hang out with her. This to me seems like a prime example of Bask In Reflected Glory or BIRGing (Cialdini et. al., 1976). The term is used to describe how people like to increase their self-esteem by associating themselves with others who are well off. Before she was a cheerleader, she was just another girl in high school, but once she joined the team, an outside observer would believe that she was prom queen and the most popular girl in school. My view is compounded even more by how her social status is today. She was a cheerleader for the entirety of this past season, and announced her retirement from the team in order to attend a 4-year college in the hopes of becoming a drill team director. It literally seemed like the instant she announced her retirement, the status likes stopped, the constant texts stopped and the apple lost its shine, even though nothing personality wise changed about her. I can't say that I was completely immune to the draw to attempt to associate myself with her, it was a comfort to think that I was attempting to solve her relationship problems before it was cool. Psychological Hipster.

Cialdini, R.B., Borden, R.J., Thorne, A., Walker, M.R., Freeman, S., & Sloan, L.R. (1976). Basking in                                                                                                                                                    reflected glory: Three (football) field studies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34, 366-375



I cant seem to tab in the citation in order to fit APA format.

First post of the year! Yeehaw.