What I was interested about when we were talking about social loafing in the lecture was the fact that so many people can relate to it there’s so many examples of this phenomena happening. Social Loafing is when people are in a group they are more likely to slack off and not work as hard than if they were working alone.  Because they are in a group each person believes that someone else will work harder or pick up the slack of the rest of the group. There have been many studies that show how social loafing makes people who are working in these groups use exceedingly less effort than if they were working alone. In the example of group projects this goes away if you add in some factors like; peer reviews of how much work they did, or if they are responsible for a specific area in the project and will be graded due to their own personal performance. Once these factors go in then they are responsible for their own part of the grade and they cannot rely on the others to get them the grade they want.

Other than group projects I have also seen this in my life when I did a philanthropy where you worked in a group and did completed a few physical tasks in a competition. Groups had to do a three legged race, limbo, jousting, and tug of war. What I noticed in the groups was that you could tell by watching who wasn’t trying as hard as the others in pulling this rope. It got to the point where the teams that you would assume would have won got cut out because they all thought the biggest guy would do the brunt of the work. But because they were not working as a team they all would fall over. The other members of the team had this mentality of social loafing and didn’t try as hard as they would if it was just them pulling the rope because they assumed that someone else was going to pull them to victory. And that was their flaw in the games.

Panic Disorders are more common in people then you would imagine. According to the National Institute of Public Health there are 6 million American adults aged 18 and older who have this affliction.

Personally, in my life the experience I have with it is through my mom who has a panic disorder and has panic attacks. The first one that I remember her having I was 11 years old and my mom was in the living room crying and writhing on the floor because she thought she was having a heart attack. She kept grabbing her chest and telling me to call 911. My baby brother, who was 1 at the time, was crying, my dad was at work, and my mom was breathing heavily and telling me that she was dying. I froze. I didn’t know what to do, I had no idea what was going on or that she even had these panic attacks. So I called 911 and we all went to the ER where I sat with my brother in the waiting room while I waited to see what was wrong. It was probably the longest 30 minutes of my life sitting there in that ER trying to calm my brother down and wondering how I could get ahold of my dad, when the doctor came out. He sat down next to me and told me that my mom was fine and that they’re doing tests because she insisted but that we could go home. I didn’t understand. I saw her and the pain she felt not even 30 minutes ago and she looked so scared, she was crying, she couldn’t even get up off the floor, and the doctor said that she was perfectly fine?

I didn’t understand what my mom had for a few years, though they ket happening. But we didn’t have to go to the ER anymore and it was never as bad as it was that one instance. So learning more about Panic Disorders really helps to show exactly why that happened to my mom. She had all the symptoms that we discussed, shortness of breath, feelings of terror, chest pains, the feeling that you’re having a heart attack. It must be terrifying to go through that so that fact that she lives with it every day shows how strong of a person you can be. I admire my mom for being able to go through her day to day and not let it affect her life in a big way. Knowing that there are so many who suffer this disorder I hope they are able to get the help that my mom was able to so that they can live generally normal lives.

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-numbers-count-mental-disorders-in-america/index.shtml#Panic

Have you ever thought back on something in your life and realized that what you are convinced you remember may have been a bit different than you believe? Or not even true at all? This is known as False Memory syndrome, and it’s a lot more common then you might think. Anything can influence your memory, from looking at old pictures, home movies, stories you hear from multiple sources, sometimes dreams can even influence what you think that you remember.  In my own life I have noticed this happening to myself before.

In my family, taking home videos was overused. We have an entire box just filled with home movies from vacations, to trips to the park, going to the beach, just us kids doing stupid things, etc. So growing up it was entertaining for us to see ourselves when we were younger and the dumb things we said and did. But because of these home movies now when I try and think back on those memories I see them instead of from my point of view, I see it from the camera’s point of view and what that showed. So now I feel like I remember those memories but really I just remember watching the video of that experience.

Now another example of this is when you may have entirely fabricated memories out of thin air. Maybe you had a dream and now you’re not sure if it actually happened or not, or you heard a story about someone else and thought it was you. For example, I have a vivid memory of going to the Bug Museum in Philadelphia for a class trip in 1st grade. I remember wearing a lady bug dress, I remember looking at all the cool bugs, and I remember volunteering to “eat” a bug and that it tasted like BBQ chips. Now, even though I have this memory of this happening and can remember all the details of it, I am still not 100% sure of this actually happening. Because when I told my parents that this happened, they looked at me like I was crazy and told me that that literally never happened.

So this is where the phenomenon of false memories fits in, did it actually happen or was it just something I thought I remembered. That is what makes it so interesting because everyone has this happen to them at some point in their life. TIME magazine posted an article about false memories saying, “What’s long been a puzzle to memory scientists is whether some people may be more susceptible to false memories than others — and, by extension, whether some people with exceptionally good memories may be immune to them. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences answers both questions with a decisive no. False memories afflict everyone — even people with the best memories of all”  With that being said, you shouldn’t feel like there is something wrong with you or that there’s something wrong with your brain if this happens to you often. They are still doing studies to find out why this happens but all it’s showing is how common it is and that it afflicts everyone. False memory or not I will always believe that I went to that Bug Museum in 1st grade.

Thean, Tara. “Remember That? No You Don’t. Study Shows False Memories Afflict Us All.” TIME. 19 NOV 2013: n. page. Web. 21 Mar. 2014. <http://science.time.com/2013/11/19/remember-that-no-you-dont-study-shows-false-memories-afflict-us-all/>.

Illusory Correlation is when a person sees a relationship between two unrelated things. Almost like cause and effect. Because you break a mirror, you will get seven years of bad luck. You sweep someone’s feet, they will never get married. You stop wearing a certain jersey, then your team loses the Stanley Cup. There are so many out there that these stereotypes are categorizes as “superstitions”. Though mostly these superstitions are really just unrelated things that honestly have no meaning and no effect on each other, there are people who take them for gospel.

Though I know in my mind that superstitions are not accurate and they don’t really have a meaning, I’d be lying if I said that I don’t have a few myself. If I spill salt I always throw a little over my left shoulder to ward off bad luck. I avoid walking under ladders at all costs, even if i have to cross the street to avoid it. There are so many that people just accept as normal that you almost feel like it is okay and accepted to have all these superstitions. For example, all of my uncles have this thing where one year for every game leading up to the Stanley Cup they would wear their “lucky” jerseys and watch it together. And if one person couldn’t make it, or if someone didn’t wear their jersey then the Philadelphia Flyers would lose. But the scary thing was that it was so accurate that the rest of the family actually started believing in their superstition to the point where every time the Flyers lost we would call and yell at them for doing something wrong. The fact that everyone else in the family started believing in their delusion shows the impact the superstitions or “illusory correlations” have in our daily lives. That’s why it was so easy to relate to that subject because being a bitch Irish/Italian family we have a lot of superstitions, that everyone fiercely believes are true.

As much as I like to believe that keeping a cold spoon under my pillow will make it snow, or that wearing a jersey will help lead the Flyers to the Stanley Cup, you know logically that is not true and there is nothing that you can do to make something happen by doing these things. But if it works, then I say stick to it because who wouldn’t want to see their team succeed or for school to be cancelled for a day? In the end, it doesn’t hurt anyone by doing these things that we convince ourselves that we need to do to avoid bad luck or whatever your superstition is. I think that it helps that we all have our own little illusory correlations so it’s an accepted form of combined insanity.