chapter 16 blog

Stereotyping in Everyday Life
What are stereotypes?
How are illusory correlations related to stereotyping?

Attribution
-Process of Attribution: We observe an action, we ask why it happened, we make a judgment about the incident example would be what was the intention, we make a guess also referred to as dispositional attribution.
-Def. of Fundamental Attribution: The tendency to over estimate the internal attributes of another person's actions.

Stereotyping in Everyday Life
-Def. of Stereotypes: Generalizations, or assumptions, that people make about the characteristics fo all members of a group, based on an image about what people in that group are like.
-Illusory Correlations vs. Stereotyping: Illusory correlation is the phenomenon of seeing the relationship one expects in a set of data even when no such relationship exists. Illusory correlation is when people tend to overestimate a link between two variables. Stereotyping is very similar to the fact that you are making those same assumptions and associations among certain groups.

Blog Time Personality

--The one online activity I thought made the most sense was the big 5. It took all aspects of a person's life and made a survey. No wonder when it compiled all of my information it came up with such an accurate reading. I was amazed that is for sure.
With personality though I think it derives from your environment. Your social life, home life, and work life have all played a role in molding your personality.
I also noticed that I have used quite a few defense mechanisms in my life. Most of these would include: Rationalizing/Intellectualizing, Repression, Displacement, Projection, Reaction Formation, Denial, and Daydreaming. Of course I haven't done all of these a lot it is just that I know I have been through them before.
The traits video was kinda different. The beginning was intriguing and how it explained was pretty thorough. I thought that one would be the most helpful.

Blog Chpt 8

I had some difficulty with this chapter. Memory is so intensive and complex. I actually forgot a lot about this chapter after I went through. I personally think I have short term memory. But moving on, this was still a pretty interesting chapter. I never really thought that memory has that many parts to it. You wouldn't think it anyway. I thought before hand that it was kind of a one way street, you could say. Now knowing more about it I feel a little accomplished. Of course I didn' t do the greatest on the test because I honestly didn't absorb the information very well. I still attempted though so I suppose that counts. Anyway, as I said this was an alright chapter. I wish I could have learned it a little better but I am sure I could if I tried to another time.

60 Minutes

1) In Cl ass discuss how the show affected what you understood and believed about eye witness testimony
2) Does the information impact the way you may try to remember events as you explain them to others

When I was first reading this article I felt as though the victim of rape was pretty smart to focus her attention to her rapist. I would probably try and be in that same mind set so I could catch him and make him pay. What goes around comes around. Continuing, she seemed so sure of her eye witness testimony and it seemed so accurate in my opinion as well. However, later finding that another man resembled Cotton was kind of a toss up. Supposedly everyone has someone else that looks almost like a twin to you, but who would've thought. Cotton got smart and asked for DNA, which it is a shame he didn't think of that earlier in his sentence. Turning out he was innocent and that someone else actually did it was fascinating. The rape victim's testimony wasn't necessarily wrong it's just the fact the resemblence of her rapist and Cotton was similar. If I were in her position and later found out that my testimony was wrong and I chose the wrong guy, I probably would be very upset. Not only did you not find your rapist but you put an innocent man in prison for all that time. I don't think I'd be able to cope with that situation. It's so depressing.
The fact that our memory is suseptable to being manipulated makes me think about the times I have tried to explain what someone looks like to someone who doesn't know who I was speaking of. Sometimes the one I was trying to explain stuff to was asking questions that suggest and it would seem as though that was right. When really it wasn't all of the time. It definitely opens up another view of how simple our memory can be when you really break it down. It's simply complex but it's complexity isn't always in every view.

Applied Cognition

Short Term Memory, Recognition, Mnemonicizer, Human Memory, Interference
A lot of these experiments teach little things about us we definitely don't realize. The one I liked the most is the Recognition one. Mostly because it took me three tries and I swore I knew the correct one. However, I didn't. In this chapter it discussed quite a bit about these types of things and the experiments, I think, helped out more. Some ways I can apply what I have learned in my life is for instance being more observant. Our minds are pretty efficient at what they do however when we see things often we don't always pay attention to the little things. I could use that a lot in studying. Analyze the work more carefully and pay closer attention to the details that may have importance. Also some people are better at visual things than other sensational things. When I give directions for instance I try to include landscapes that stick out.
In a general overview I thought these online activities showed a good representation of all the parts dealing with memory.

The Case of Clive

This is really odd. I never really thought something that extreme could happen. Alzhtimers is similar I would assume. However, to remember for a bit but forget it in seconds is just weird. I can't imagine what it would be like. In his case he wrote stuff down every now and again, but he didn't remember doing it even though he knew it was his writing and he must have wrote it. I think I would probably be in worse condition than he is. You'd think that he would become somewhat insane knowing that you are pretty much reliving every moment, over and over again. That would seem unbearable.

Blog Chpt 7

I thought that this chapter was relatively interesting. Didn't find it any more interesting compared to others. The only thing I really thought had a great deal of thought was the behavior section. The behavior modification stuff. There are many different kinds of ways to manipulate what ever it is you want to manipulate.

With the conditioning and relating it to myself, I'd say it depends. I know we would use I believe it is called classical conditioning for training our animals.

However, I grew up using observational learning and my parents used operant conditioning to train me, more or less.

Illusions

Stepping Feet, Motioned Induced Blindness, Stereokinetic Phenomenon, Rotating Snake Illusion, Snake Illusion Ab Lib, Pinna-Brelstaff Illusion, Motion Aftereffect (waterfall illusion), Spiral Aftereffect are all of the illusions I looked at.
I learned that the ones that seemed like they were moving when you didn't look directly at them, they were stationary. Most of the illusions dealt with the color coordination, the speed at which it spiraled if it did, and any other moving objects within the illusion.
What surprised me is how distracted, sick and dizzy it can make you. The spiraling ones really got me. They are so distinguished it just makes you want to hurl after a while of looking at it. 
I don't necessarily think these illusions change much on how we sense and perceive the world in any drastic way. It does however get you to look at things in another view. 
These experiences won't really effect me on a day to day basis. I don't see many illusions like these on a daily basis.

Sensations & Perceptions

Size Constancy, Benham's Top and Fetchner Colors, Induced Motion, Emmert's Law, Figural Aftereffect, Proximity and Similarity, Good Continuation, The Effects of Shadows. 

I learned pretty much the same things as I did with our other illusion outline we had to do. This one actually wasn't very good in my opinion.

What surprised me was how many different things can influence a picture. For instance the size constancy sensation and perception experiment was really good. 

What I experienced won't influence me very much for the simple fact I don't see weird illusions like these all the time. 

Some induced motion ones are possible, but in general this won't change how I view the world in any drastic life-changing way. 

The one, like I stated just a sentence ago, induced motion animations are probably more likely in every day life than any others. 

Chapter 5 Blog

I actually didn't find this chapter as interesting as the previous one. Nevertheless I did find a few intriguing things throughout it. One was that teratogen is an agent that causes most birth defects. I have always had some interest towards the genetic side of things for personal reasons and for knowledge. I also thought Piaget's Theory was pretty nifty. Despite the fact that most theories prove out to have their flaws, it is the simple fact of how he thought of such things that interest me. His ideas were complex and thorough for the most part. How did he come about this despite the few corrections needed? The last thing I thought was cool was the Harry Harlow experiments with the rhesus monkeys. I remember this being brought up in my last year's sociology class. The fact that warmth and attention have such a huge part on any mammal rather significantly is astounding. It can question so many things. From analyzing the mental and emotional state of a creature, how every mammal is related and evolution sprawling off from that. I could come up with so many questions from such a simple experiment Harry Harlow brought to light.

Blog Time Chpt 4

When we had to check out The Nurture Assumption review of Judith Harris, I thought it was quite interesting to think about. I mean you never really think, where would I be and how would I be without my parents? What if I was raised by someone else? I know I have thought of it maybe once or twice but I never really broke it down. There are so many things that could change if you had different parents but your social life was the same. Your morals, ethics, and the way you think or act would be different. I still am debating on all that to this moment. Trying to think of any other variables I may have skimmed over that wouldn't necessarily be a major impact on who you are now. Judith definitely got me thinking. I loved that.
Secondly I got intrigued by the Twin Studies. My dad is actually a fraternal twin, he has a twin sister. I doubt they are actually identical but then again if I read that article correctly I believe even opposite sex twins can be identical in a sense. It was just odd to think that twins that look not too much alike or act alike, etc. could be identical twins due to checking their blood.
Also after being into almost the second week of my sleep activity, I've realized quite a bit about my sleeping habits. Me and another student in psych have discussed it a bit and analyzed it together. We both kinda think maybe we don't get enough REM sleep which is kind of fascinating. I have to change a few variables in my activity and such but after I check it out some more I will hopefully understand my circadian rhythm a little better. It is just so cool that our bodies are so complex. I wish I understood it even more.

Heritability

If I compare myself to my biological parents I can definitely see where I get my physical features from. Others can tell too. For example: I have my mother's teeth, smile, hair color, and face structure. From my father I have his coloring, eye color, heighth, and nose. However, if I go into environment and personality heritability, I get my opinionatedness from my step father and a few other characteristics from my grandmother. I honestly think though that I have more heritability through my environment than I do genetics. I have been impacted by many people in my life and only two people created me so I only have so much genetically. Everyone is influenced and impacted by people everyday and that's mainly why I believe I have more environmentally.
The exercises on the website given was kind of confusing. I prefer lamen's terms most of the time. When you try and break down the explanations of it though, it can really expand on heritability pretty well. You can quite predict heritability by knowing one of the geno-phenotypes. It's somewhat unpredictable and unreliable. When the exercises moved on to the environmental stuff it really opened another realm, I guess you could say. Adding education and such and having different variables to either red or blue can show you the difference which helps to understand. You can compare the two and see what each thing from the environment does to the blue and red variables.


Criteria
Instructor Rating Self Rating
Learner has followed all of the guidelines of the assignment
? 54320
Learner went beyond simple answers to demonstrate insight
? 54200
Learner has answered each of the 3 questions (statements)
? 54320

Learner’s assignment contains correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling
? 54320

Twin Studies

Twin Types—What Type Are You?

Do you know what kind of twins you are?

Basically this is about twins that were told since birth they were fraternal twins. However, due to DNA testing they found out they were actually identical. It told of how the twins' relationship was strengthened and that even though twins may seem to be fraternal they could actually be identical.

Twins Reared Apart--But Together Again

Twins reared apart from birth

This was about how twins were separated at birth, mostly due to being sent to foster or adoptive homes. One set of twins were nearly one hundred miles apart. When they did get to see each other you could tell their connection despite the fact they live with different people. It also explained why a lot of families don't adopt more than one child and how twins just sometimes get separated.

Loss of a Twin

Loss of a twin is a devastating life event

This one was talking about how someone lost their twin. It told of their grief and how it could be compared to the loss of another relative didn't compare. It just elaborated on that more.

Why are twin studies important as we study the concept of nature and nurture and their influence on human behavior?
Well simply understanding how and why twins are formed are one thing. We understand that now. The next step would to understand the mental and emotional factors of twins. Do they experience things the same way, do some genes go to one and other genes to the other and why? There are many other questions you can ask. Learning about that area of twins can greatly explain human behavior on twins, identical or fraternal.

What can twin studies tell us about Gene environment interaction?

That the genes of a human is very intense and complex. It is a challenge to understand how and why one gene went to one than the other. Figuring this out will take quite awhile, I doubt they will fully find the answers to this for quite a while.

What can twin studies tell us about Child rearing?
It can show that whether they are raised together or separate, how they are. Most times when twins are separated throughout their childhood there is quite a bit of resentment. It's the fact of more or less missing their other half in my opinion. They strive to know their twin. If they are raised together a lot of the time they are really close and are inseparable.

What can twin studies tell us about ourselves?
It can show our curiosity of the human anatomy and its complexities. Also the fact that humans would want to know if someone else out there was like them and knowing who their family is is important. It doesn't necessarily have to be about twins, what we learn of them can also teach us about ourselves.

What can twin studies tell us about the concept of heritability?
Well sometimes you can see what genes are inherited from who. If mom has blue eyes, brown hair, and dad has green eyes, blonde hair, and one of the kids is brown hair with green eyes and vice versa. That one is obvious. It could also go deeper than that into the genetics. Learning about twins heritability can really show the complexity of the punic square.

I Learned...

This chapter wasn't really that new in my opinion. We've learned this before but I will say it did expand on it a little more. I enjoyed to learn the complexities of how we sleep and what cycles we go through. It really helps to explain why we sleep restlessly or soundly, and why we need sleep at all. With doing the association tests, I found it quite interesting and surprising on the whole subconscious vs. conscious stuff. I don't necessarily thinks it is one hundred percent accurate but the percent that is I find fascinating. I expanded on why I agree and disagree with the association test in a previous blog called the association test. In a general overview, I thought the test and the idea of the subconscious being portrayed in anything for that matter, is a touchy situation. You have to be careful on how you are testing it and how people will look at it. I looked at it as organizing and trying to be accurate. It was a test of what skin color you prefer over others. Its definitely nifty how the creator came up with it and all but I just think it has slight imperfections. Otherwise the test was really intriguing and a good representation for your subconscious thoughts.
Overall I thought this chapter was really informative and fun to learn.

I took the Skin Test (Light to Dark). My score turned out to be a preference towards those of lighter skin to darker skin.

I suppose this test just kind of showed how fast you place the faces of different color and the words. However, I think it is an ineffective test to show you about your unconscious mind. I personally was concentrating on getting it to the side it needed to be on and the game kept switching them. So once you could quickly do it right the first round you had to start all over again which was a challenge in general. The length of time didn't really have a play in your prejudice or unconscious thoughts about the color of the face's skin or what the word was. That is just how I see it though, your opinion may differ.

In our society there is a lot of association to certain races with derogatory terms. However, not everyone may have a prejudice. We also have to remember though, that the media of any sort has quite the impact on us. Both consciously and subconsciously. You may not necessarily agree to the statement made in the media but you still have it in your memory, which possible could play a role somehow, somewhere.

I honestly think this generation of teenagers are significantly unaware of their attitude and how it affects others. I could name multiple scenarios in my own high school where this happens. To the person, what they say is possibly meaningless but if you look at it at another perspective you could see how it can hurt someone. I myself can say I have said things wrongly and had others be affected by it and I never intended on that happening. Today the saying "think before you speak" has lost itself.

Even so, trying to be as open minded about these tests as possible I could understand why and how these tests go about and could be considered somewhat effective. I personally don't think it is one hundred percent accurate but the simple fact most races prefer their own race kind of has a play. I don't see myself as any different after taking the test. I kind of know where I stand when it comes to controversial stuff like that. I suggest people in Psych to take this one though and let me know how it pans out for you.

The Brain & Behavior

Hofstadter's Road Sign: I noticed that when I looked at the dots I saw them as switching or just going up and down. However, when I changed the object to arrows it looked as though they were chasing each other in the direction I chose. The last thing I tried was changing the colors of the dots. This was similar to the arrows because the colors switched to where it looked like they were chasing after one another. I was surprised at how something so little like color or what the object even is, could have an impact on what you see or how you see it. I'm not quite sure off hand how this could be applied to everyday life. I'm sure there is something though that could come up.

Ambiguous Figures: In this activity I found it fun to see what else the picture could be. In one of the pictures shown, it can be a skull or a lady looking at herself in a mirror. It's so odd to see how a picture can be more than one thing if you just look at it a different way. I wasn't necessarily surprised by anything just impressed at how nifty the picture in a picture thing goes. How do people come up with it? How do they do it? 

As for daily life, I would say maybe if you ever see art exhibits you would see portraits like that. All I know for sure is I wish I could make stuff like that, not gonna lie. 

The Game of Life: This game was a little challenging to get. At first I just put a random amount of green dots in a certain amount of dots. I didn't add any more from the original and I pressed the one time button to see what happens. In the end I found out that the green dots eventually just die off. However, I took the same amount of green dots and red dots as before but after a certain amount of times I pressed the one time button I added one or two green dots. I saw by continuing on that way that the green dots still survive and don't die off. That's when I actually understood the game and what it's about. It was a way of showing that if a population starts in random areas and doesn't continue populating it will die off. It makes sense but at first I personally didn't catch on to that for this game. 

I don't really know how accurate this game really is, personally I believe it isn't that precise. However, it is a good animation for understanding the basics of population and the surrounding environment on a population. Also to show how we are dependent on populating for our survival, just have to make sure we don't over populate.

Free Will: You see a picture of green arrows pointing right, or yellow arrows pointing left. Which do you see is more or less the question asked here? This activity was similar to the Ambiguous Figures one, except they added a twist to it. You are supposed to think to yourself which arrow you wanted to see, green or yellow. You then press go and see what you saw first. If you saw what you wanted to you have free will, meaning you controlled what you wanted to see and didn't let anything else alter that. It's a little out of the box but still quite interesting I thought. This one I have a great favor for because I believe in mind over matter. If you tell yourself you will see a certain thing, more than likely you will see it. In my opinion a lot of things coincide with that. One example I commonly think of would be hypochondriacs. They believe they are sick and their body feels as though they are sick, but in reality nothing is wrong. We only use ten percent of our brains, so one can only think at how powerful the entirety of it is.

These activities helped me to look at the world in more than one way. To look at both sides of the story you could say. As for the unit, I learned quite a bit about the brain and neurons, where there located, what they are called, etc. Knowing now how everything works together and how everything is connected so complexly, I realize that there is so much more to the understanding of a human than I previously thought. Our brain and everything about us is utterly amazing. I doubt we will ever fully comprehend a lot about ourselves.

Saying research is unimportant is like saying humans don't need air to breathe. Every product created had some type of research done to make sure it would be effective and safe. For instance look at the medical field. We have all had to have shots in our lives, so just think what would have happened to us if scientists/doctors etc. put random concoctions together that seemed logical. That example is a little out of the box but there are so many other examples out there.

The Stanley Milgram: Obedience to Authority Or Just Conformity? article caught my attention for research related articles. It doesn't necessarily have an extreme or really significant relevance or importance to my life but it's still pretty interesting. In my own personal opinion I believe people over the years have lost open mindedness and the simple thought of being original. In this article Stanley took it to a whole other level. Milgram wanted to know how far humans will go when an authority type figure orders them to hurt another human being, this not only including those in armed forces, but the day to day ordinary people being coerced into carrying out cruel acts. It was so intriguing to me for the simple fact she analyzed the simplicity of conformity, authority, and closed minded factors to prove more than one point.

I didn't quite learn anything more than what I already knew about research and why it's important. Another thing would be the intensity of psychological research. I knew that alone is a lot of work, and time but if anything it just opened my mind to another level of what I already understood and to see another side.

Understanding Psych now

My earlier definition was somewhat similar to the correct definition of Psychology which is the scientific study of the human mind and its functions.

Psych can affect everyones lives really. It can help you by knowing how to read others and understand them. It could easily help you help yourself if you really thought about it.
I learned there are many sub divisions of psych and some of which like the biological field I find intriguing. I have always enjoyed learning the complexities of the human physiology.

About Myself

I'm Cassie Haskins, a senior of 17 years old attending Flambeau High School.


I am who I am today not necessarily by a something but more of a someone. My grandma raised me most of my life and she was one of the greatest people out there. I have always tried my hardest to be as amazing and caring as her. She pushed me to do my hardest and achieve the things I want, and she did it in a loving, supportive way. When she died it was very hard to cope with. I do miss her and wish her back, but I appreciate everything she has ever done for me and pray she's better now than she was here.


I believe studying psychology is important for the simple fact everyone is different. We are all raised differently, coming from different backgrounds and so on. The mental state of a human being can vary greatly from normal to irregular (sane to insane). Knowing how this occurs, how things affect us, et cetera, we can learn so much about ourselves and hopefully help others in need.


My understanding of psychology is the understanding of the human behavior and mentality. It's to grasp what little knowledge we have now of ourselves and expand, learning what internal and/or external factors affect us.