Author: eis5358

Ever had teammates or partners in a group project that would slack off so much that you had to pull all of the team’s weight? This relates to the psychological concept of social loafing where people tend to slack off or work less hard in group setting when they feel as though their team will do most or all of the work for them. As more people are in a group, the effort put in of each member usually decreases. If other people in the group or on the team seem as though they have great ability or can do most of the work themselves or with another person in the group, then the other person or people in the group will rely heavily on their contribution and worry less about their own. People also tend to perform social loafing in order to not be the person that is the victim of it and do all the work themselves while the others do not do as much to help.

Social loafing occurs often in my life as it does in many other people’s lives. This is because it is common to work in groups for either school, work, or even sports. One area I can especially relate to this concept is working in group projects for school. I would often get assigned groups in school in which my other partners either weren’t hardworking students, or just did not feel like putting in enough effort. This was very aggravating as I would get no help when working on the project even though that is the point of group work in the first place. There was one time where I had a project and the other people in my group were not even willing to meet up to work on the project together which was an extreme case of social loafing. This is why individual work encourages people to work harder than group work because if they don’t put in effort then the project won’t get done, whereas in a group they can rely on others to do the work most of the time.

https://sk.sagepub.com/reference/socialpsychology/n538.xml

Operant Conditioning is a way in which someone learns something by rewards or consequences. Basically if someone gets a positive consequence from an action, then they will likely do it again, whereas if they receive a negative consequence, they are unlikely to do that action again. People tend to repeat behaviors that obtain positive effects and make you feel good about yourself. For example if someone sings on stage and receives a lot of applause afterwards, that person is more likely to sing again or gain more confidence than if they did not get a lot of applause or got booed. Operant Conditioning uses shaping to positively or negatively reinforce certain behaviors to strengthen them in some way. Positive reinforcers increase behaviors by adding something that someone likes such as getting a hug after they do something good. A negative reinforcer increases behavior by removing something that someone does not like. For example if you don’t complete your homework you will get a bad grade but you do the homework to avoid receiving that grade. On the other hand a punishment decreases as behavior instead of a reinforcer which increases it. A positive punishment adds an aversive stimulus while a negative punishment removes a desired stimulus, both to decrease a behavior.

My parents used operant conditioning on my sister and I when we were younger in order to behave properly and have good manners. They would yell at us or ground us if we cursed or did something bad. Yelling at us is an example of a positive punishment because we don’t want to be yelled at therefore it is decreasing the likelihood of us doing that again. Grounding us would be an example of a negative punishment as we would be forbidden to do things that we want to do such as hang out with friends or use our phones because they are removing something that we desire. We also used shaping when we trained our dog. For example in order to make her sit or wait we had to use positive reinforcement by giving her a treat. Eventually she would sit or do the command without gaining a treat which is how operant conditioning is successful.

https://www.simplypsychology.org/operant-conditioning.html

Ever try remembering a fact or idea but not being able to remember where or who you heard it from? This has to do with the idea of source amnesia. With source amnesia, a person can remember a certain idea, but cannot remember the source of that idea, therefore it can cause them to believe that something false is true or vice-versa. Source amnesia affects one’s explicit memory (processed in the hippocampus), which is your long-term memory that can be recalled easily in contrast to your implicit memory which is your unconscious memory. It is normal for a person to experience source amnesia as when time passes it is hard to remember every detail of an event. Especially after a long period of time, it is easy to forget where or when you heard something. When someone experiences source amnesia on a more frequent basis that is when it can be pretty concerning and lead to disorders like schizophrenia where you hallucinate things that are not actually happening. An example of source amnesia is if your friend tells you something that is not necessarily true, and you recall this idea years later forgetting where you learned it from and therefore believe it to be true, just suspecting that you learned it from the news or a reputable source. It is necessary in cases like these to decipher properly between facts and imaginary ideas and not allow your mind to fabricate your past.

I have experienced source amnesia many times in my life, for example there have been times where one of my friends would tell me a story and then years later I would remember parts of that story but not everything. Therefore, I would make up parts of the story that didn’t actually happen or I would actually think that that story was a part of my past rather than my friends’. This is because over time parts of memories get lost and your mind tries to piece different parts of your past together, even when all of the information is not there. A more specific example in my life of source amnesia would be one time when I had a dream about myself having a test the next day and in my dream I was stressing out over studying for it. The next day I woke up in a panic because I believed that what I had dreamed was real life and I actually had a test the next day, when really it was just a dream. Although there was not a large time passing from when I first recalled this information, because it was while I was asleep, it affected my state of mind and caused me to inaccurately discern false memories. It’s crazy how the mind works sometimes!

 

https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/psychpedia/explicit-memory

https://study.com/academy/lesson/source-amnesia-definition-lesson.html

Illusory Correlation is a type of study method used in psychology. It is when someone places a correlation or association between two things that are not actually related. People make assumptions and opinions everyday based on things that happen around them, but they may not necessarily be true. People want to make associations between things even if they do not exist just because that is the way our brain works. We find things in our everyday life that want to support these random correlations and therefore do not think about or believe anything that challenges their truth. We use our preexisting knowledge and opinions with our daily observations to make an easy rationale for something occurring. Examples of Illusory correlations are superstitions, stereotypes, prejudices, and phobias. A superstition is an example of this method because it is when people do or wear certain things in order to prevent bad luck, but they are usually irrational because they are just based on previous experiences and life events but would not actually cause bad luck. Figure 1 below indicates different illusory correlations from people making assumptions of why things happen such as kids having autism.

I undergo illusory correlation in my life just as most people do since it is natural. I have used superstitions in my life for certain situations to induce “good luck.” For example my soccer team in high school had superstitions or particular things that we did each game so that we wouldn’t lose. We did things like wearing the same color pre-wrap in our hair for multiple games, doing the same exact warmup routine before each game, and using the same warmup playlist for each game. We believed that if we did not do these things the same way every game that we would lose. We had no actual proof to backup if doing these things was causing us to win, but we did not want to risk it anyway. We were correlating two variables and saying they induced causation so we were perceiving a correlation where one did not exist, exemplifying illusory correlation.

Sources:

“Illusory Correlation .” Illusory Correlation , The Daily Omnivore, 9 June 2015, thedailyomnivore.net/2015/06/09/illusory-correlation/.

Patil, Komal B. “An Abstract on the Concept of Illusory Correlations in Psychology.” PsycholoGenie, PsycholoGenie, 14 July 2017, psychologenie.com/concept-of-illusory-correlations-in-psychology.