Psychology: Some more psychological facts

bystander effect cocktail party effect diffusion of responsibilities dreams Inception Incorporation of dreams in reality psychological facts psychology tuning voice

Psychology: Some more psychological facts

Hey folks,

You might have read my previous post about the psychological facts, so here are some more facts about the psychology. I continued reading the whole article on the Quora, and it really amazed me, so I am sharing some more of it. Hope you like them.

Topic #1:
 Inception (only sort of) or Incorporation of Reality in Dreams

You can alter someone's dreams as they are dreaming.

What the brain does, ever so often, is include stimuli happening in reality in whatever one is dreaming. Say you throw water on someone who is sleeping and she wakes up all of a sudden and narrates what she saw in her dreams. More often than not this gushing of water is incorporated elegantly in the dream. This served as inspiration for a sequence in Inception where  [1]

a sleeping Cobb is shoved into a full bath, and in the dream world water gushes into the windows of the building, waking him up

This happened in reality.

 And caused this in his dream.

Freud had also mentioned this. Alfred Maury in Le sommeil et les rêves narrates how a bar falling on his neck while sleeping became a guillotine in his dream and he woke up suddenly. This was related by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams.

Also sounds happening around us make their way into our dreams. Optimistically, you can think of introducing characters in dreams by saying some names while someone is sleeping. This is exactly what Berger set out to do.[2]

Berger (1963) assessed the effects of meaningful verbal stimuli on dreaming. These stimuli were the names of the subjects' friends (provided by the subjects) that when presented while the subjects were awake had elicited the largest galvanic skin responses (GSRs). Dream incorporation was judged to have taken place on about half of the occasions. Of the 48 dreams that were judged to have been affected by the stimuli there had been 31 incorporations on the basis of assonance alone - for instance, 'Gillian' had been voiced as 'Chilean', 'Jenny' as 'Jemmy', and 'Mike' as 'like'. Only on three occasions had the named individual actually appeared in the dream as themselves.

Anyone up for a little game of Inception?

Topic #2:

Bystander effect 

You might want to believe that if you are in an accident or emergency, you would have a greater chance of being rescued if you are in a crowded place. But countless experiments and incidents have proven exactly the opposite.The greater the number of observers, the less likely it is that one of them will help you. This is due to a phenomenon called Diffusion of responsibility whereby a person is less likely to take responsibility for action or inaction when others are present.

[image from Overcoming the Bystander Effect]

If you have ever worked in a group project in school.or college you probably have experienced this first-hand. There is almost always that one guy or girl who refuses to contribute to the project till the very end. 

A darker example of this phenomenon is the group dynamics in a gang rape.[3]

These factors are diffusion of responsibility, deindividuation, and modeling, all of which can be applied to the dynamics of gang rape. Thus, no one individual in a gang rape believes that he is solely to blame for the victimization taking place.

This effect goes even deeper[4]

Topic #3. 

Cocktail party effect

Even in a noisy, crowded place if someone says your name, you can tune out other noises and focus on that voice. This effect is also true for other information that might be important to us. This effect changed the way psychologists thought about auditory input and attention. 

Do we listen to everything first and then filtering takes place? Or filtering of supposedly useless input takes place even before we hear things? 

This effect led to the concept of attention models which is important in psychology

---

[1] With 'Inception,' Chris Nolan's head games continue
[2] Experimental Modification of Dream Content by Meaningful Verbal Stimuli
[3]Gang Rape: A Psychological Perspective of Group Dynamics
[4]10 Notorious Cases of the Bystander Effect - Listverse

23:41

Psychology: Some awesome psychological facts

psychological facts psychology quora the paradox of choice the spotlight effect

Psychology: Some awesome psychological facts

Yea, you read it right. Its about psychology. I've been reading on Quora and found this interesting topic with lot many answers. I mean, I really felt some of them, but never knew the exact reason of feeling the same.

So here are some of the psychological facts that may get you into thinking why you've done something instead of something else [hehe, confusing..!! Even I got confused while writing this. So deal with it, its really gonna be little more difficult to understand certain things in this article.] 

Topic #1:

The paradox of choice - which I believe is both the blessing and the bane of our generation (Gen Y).
 
To put it simply, the paradox of choice states that the more choices one is given when making a decision, the less happy they tend to be about the decision they make (even if the selection is objectively better). This is driven by many factors, namely:

• Additional effort and psychological stress associated with evaluating multiple options
• Increased opportunity cost(the way in which we value things depends on what we compare them to. It's thus easier to imagine the attractive features of rejected options, the features we did NOT choose)
• Greater "buyer's remorse" (with so many alternatives, it's easier to imagine how another choice would have been better)
• Increased expectations from options ("with 87 options I have to find the perfect option for me")
• Finally, we are more likely to blame ourselves when our choices don't meet our expectations ("I had all these options, it's obviously my fault, I should have picked better" vs. "I was only presented with 2 options, not enough to make the right decision")

In affluent societies, youth is presented with an overwhelming selection of options whether for small less significant decisions (e.g., 87 types of toothpastes) or for more significant decisions (e.g., university degrees, career paths). I believe theparadox of choice is one of the underlying reasons why so many of us (including myself) are increasingly indecisive and anxious about these so called "life decisions". But that's a different topic...

Topic #2:
People don't notice you or your screwing up as much as you think they do.

The belief that people are constantly scrutinising your behaviour and the resultant paranoia and self-doubt that arises from it is called the spotlight effect. 

Even if you do something embarrassing, like spilling a drink down your front or falling flat on your face, other people don't notice/criticise you as much as you think they do.

In an experiment conducted by Thomas Gilovich et al, test subjects were made to wear embarrassing T-shirts and asked to estimate how many people giggled about it behind their back (read: noticed that they had an embarrassing T-shirt on). The subjects overestimated the number of people they thought had observed their clothing- their predictions were twice as big as the actual number.

So what can you learn from this? Take a deep breath and look around. You are surrounded by hundreds and thousands of people who are more or less just like you. Nobody is paying specific attention to you, waiting for you to slip up so that they can make fun of you.
Get over it.

This also means that the positive things you do will be forgotten over time, but oh well...the spotlight doesn't shine on any of us no matter what we do.

Hope you enjoyed [what...?? Are you kiddin' me..?] the article..

Keep learning. Keep sharing, Keep Improving.
.....Later folks. :)

23:22