wedding day!

Today my sister gets married, and I’ll be emceeing the reception. So many of my friends are getting married, or have recently gotten married that it seems like it’s the socially expected thing to do. From my social psychology studies, I’ve learned that all of us engage in what’s called social comparison. According to the social comparison theory, we’re always comparing our own situation and status to that of others, in order to gauge how well (or not so well) we’re doing in life. Such comparison is unavoidable and happens naturally. Healthy individuals are able to accurately gauge their own situation; whereas, unhealthy minds seemingly become frustrated and down when they cannot accept their own situation in comparison to others. Often such people don’t actually realize how good they have it, and are blind to the fact that they still have good lives – they have food, shelter, friends… whereas millions of people around the world go hungry and starve every single day.

motivation, will, passion… how?

In all my years of schooling from elementary to university today, I don’t think anyone’s ever taught me the proper way to study. That’s a little ironic, seeing how all these teachers expect you to learn everything, without even teaching you how to encode the material into your memory in the first place. Sure there are techniques you can try like study cards, rewriting notes, etc. But because these techniques work so differently for each individual, is that why they never teach us how to learn, because everyone has their own style of learning?

One thing I find that really does work in getting things to stick is to remind yourself of your passion or motivation for studying. It’s like what chef Gordon Ramsay does when he’s trying to motivate people to be good cooks: he gives them a good kick-in-the-pants wake-up call to remind them why they became cooks in the first place.

Now if only someone could again remind me as to why I’m studying about referred pain in the spine…

the Catholic version of seeing Dr. Phil

As someone with a psychology background, I love listening to how Dr. Phil doles out no-nonsense advice to people, often in a very short “quick fix” approach. For example, someone will have a problem, and then Dr. Phil gives that person advice that only takes five minutes to dispense, but still makes a whole lot of sense! Of course, more serious and pressing problems might require much more than five minutes to sort out, but any advice is better than none! Wouldn’t it be nice if we could also experience that kind of counsel from a knowledgeable person without having to go see Dr. Phil? Wouldn’t it be great if we could have free access to such help? Well, this kind of free counselling already exists for Catholics. It’s called confession.

When we go to confession, yes we confess our sins, but once that’s done, the priest considers what was just confessed and will offer his advice on how to best deal with the problems in one’s life. On numerous occasions, I have gone to confession seeking counsel on various concerns in my own life. Frustrations, temptations, bad habits… the priest is definitely one of the best resources, freely accessible, to go to for help. That is certainly why Christ instituted this sacrament – he wants us to come back to him, in good times and in bad.

psyche tip of the day

People do dumb things. I do, you do, everyone does. When stuff like that happens, we often wonder, well, why did that just happen? Why did that person have to lash out at me like that? Why he ignore me? Why was she so nice to me? Why did he not show up on time? Why is she always behaving like that?

Social psychology’s fundamental attribution error theory to the rescue!

It is far too easy to explain another’s behaviour by attributing it to their personality. In other words, it’s too easy to say that the reason why “he did that” is because “he’s just a cold person”. Naturally, as humans we want to do the easiest thing before the hardest thing, and so we gravitate towards easy thoughts that just come naturally. Unbeknownst to most, a great deal of human behaviour can actually be attributed to external factors. In other words, maybe that guy “did that” because of the fact that he just lost his job, for example, and that has been troubling him all day and he’s under tremendous pressure from his family to find another job. As another example, perhaps the waitress was rude not because that’s the way her personality usually is, but because her boss made her work overtime and hasn’t given her a break yet.The point is that whenever you try to explain another’s “mysterious” behaviour by blaming his or her “odd” personality, don’t forget that there may be a lot of other things, unknown to you, that are going on in that person’s life. And now you know all about the fundamental attribution error! Now go and impress your friends.

(So you might be wondering, why the psychology talk? Well, hey, I need to use my degree somehow!)

Facebook “friends”

If you’re like the typical computer user, you’ve got a Facebook account. (If you don’t, kudos to you!) It often intrigues me how a lot of Facebook users can have hundreds and hundreds of “friends”, yet a lot of those people don’t even keep in touch. And how does one become a friend? If I shared one lecture with someone and barely said a word to them, and all of a sudden they request me to be their friend, what good is it now that I can find out all I want about someone I barely know, or even want to know? If you’re a Facebook user, go through your own friends list and see how many of those people you actually regularly stay in touch with. Why bother keeping them on your list? Surely it’s not to make your number of friends appear larger so that others will somehow come to the misguided conclusion that you’re Mr. or Mrs. Popular?

happy V-day!

Yes it’s that day again, and it feels like just another day, except for the fact that lots of my classmates were wearing red today, and the fact that one of them made us all cupcakes inside ice cream cones, which were awesome, and the fact that another classmate gave us all $30 worth of Tim Horton’s donuts, which was awesome. I wonder, do women really get mad if the guy forgets of this day? I mean really, it’s the media and advertising everywhere that’s pressuring guys to remember the day… is that really going to make the woman happy? Wouldn’t she be happier if the guy remembered her, not because of society pressuring him to spend money to remember her, but simply because he loves her on his own whim? I mean, if a woman gets mad at you for not conforming to media pressure to spend your money, is that something that should really be worth worrying about? And do people actually buy heart-shaped pizzas?