While we were going over the effect of group influence in class, I couldn’t help but connect back to my past experiences. In one of the courses I’ve taken earlier in college, the class had a choice to do a project alone or in a group with a maximum of three people. I was taking the class with a friend of mine, so we chose to work together along with another student who sat near us.

I found out pretty quickly that I would’ve been better off doing the project by myself. The social loafing phenomenon made it so that no one in the group did much work until two weeks before the project was due. We coordinated the work and even met up twice, but we were still scrambling at the end to have our project completed.

Social loafing is the tendency for an individual in a group to exert less effort toward attaining a common goal, like completing a project, than when tested individually. I know that if I had chosen to do the project myself, I would have felt much more pressure to get my work done well ahead of time. The fact that I was in a group made it so that I did not feel the pressure to have the project completed alone. I thought that because he work could be divided evenly between all members of the group, I really did not have to do much. We could all get it done in less time if we all focused on it. In the end, I realized that I was very wrong about this assumption.

I took that experience with me, especially for classes that require a group project. I make sure to get as much work done as early in possible in a group, even if it ends up being just myself doing the work early on. That lightens the workload and allows for a much better project overall. When possible, I choose to do the project by myself, just because I know I can spread out the project over time to get it completed to my standards.

In class, we discussed mirror neurons, and the role they play in learning. Mirror neurons make it so that anytime we watch someone else complete a task or do something, parts of our brain act as if we ourselves are doing that task. This explains how humans and even monkeys are able to complete tasks such as solving a simple puzzle on the first try if they watch someone else complete the task first.

I find mirror neurons extremely interesting when we consider the phenomenon of sports. No matter what culture you look at in any time period, sports usually has played a significant part in that culture. This can be explained by mirror neurons. While watching any sport, parts of the brain fire as if they belonged to the person playing that sport. The saga of a buzzer-beating three-pointer or a last-second touchdown are not only watched by people, they are in part experiences by the people watching. When you consider this, the resulting multi-billion dollar industry that has formed around sports of all kinds all over the world makes a little more sense. People become so invested in sports because part of what goes into watching sports are the same feelings that go into playing sports.

I am further interested in what attracts particular people to become interested in sports while others do not feel that interest. Do different people have differing levels of mirror neuron activity or strength? Or is it simply that a lack of interest in sports will result in a lack of interest in the feelings produced while watching sports. I would find it very interesting to see if people who are not interested in sports have the same level of mirror neuron activity as people who are deeply invested in sports. Perhaps the brain could be shown to model its activity after what interests an individual has.

I have two nephews, one who is turning three in May and one who is turning one in June. I help watch them while I am home for breaks, so I have been able to see them grow up a lot. While discussing infant and childhood development, I was able to connect a lot of the class material to experiences I’ve had with my nephews.

One example is that I have noticed their ability to recognize faces at an extremely young age. My older nephew was watched more by my mother than my younger nephew has been. I could see the difference in how my younger nephew reacted compared to my older nephew when they were both young. My older nephew would become immediately happy when he saw my mother, while my younger nephew did not have that connection with her, since they did not spend as much time together, so his reaction was not as strong. This reaction is fueled by infants’ ability to recognize the faces of people from an extremely young age. I also saw how my nephews would act around family members they had never met before. They appeared much warier to those family members than to anyone they had spent a significant amount of time around, because they did not recognize those faces.

I have also seen the development of schemas, although only in my older nephew. I have seen him countless times trying to assimilate new information into existing schemas and eventually accommodating for the new information if needed. For example, one of my nephew’s first books was about animals, with an entire section of it devoted to birds. He assimilated all birds under the name of the first type of bird he learned: a hawk. He called every bird in that book a hawk the first couple of times he looked through it. As he continued to look at the book, and we continued to correct him on all the different types of birds, he began to accommodate new schemas for those new species of birds. What was once a hawk was now a hummingbird, a cardinal, a goose and so on.

For me, having seen some of the childhood development material first hand through watching my nephews develop helped me understand the material much better. I was able to immediately connect it with a past experience.

It is part of being a human to look for connections between objects in our everyday life. We are rational beings, and if we see two things that look like they are related, we will assume they are. This can lead to untrue assumptions which are called illusory correlations in psychology. An illusory correlation is any instance when there is a perceived relationship between two objects when none exists. For example, if I wore a green shirt and had a good day, I could perceive a connection between wearing green and having a good day. In reality, there is no connection between wearing a green shirt and having a good day, so that is an illusory correlation. Here is a website with many more examples of illusory correlation.

I grew up in the actual city of Philadelphia (not in the suburbs) in a particular neighborhood that had a large mix of races, Mount Airy. I have had a lot of experiences with people of minority descent, particularly those who are black, and I have many friends who are black as well. I see illusory correlation all the time in reference to race.

The other day, I had a conversation with a friend of mine who I had never talked about with race before. We were just talking about general things when I brought up where I grew up, and he was taken aback. He asked what it was like to grow up around so many black people and said I must have been very afraid of my neighbors. I have dealt with this situation before at Penn State, so I described that I had a very nice and carefree childhood and didn’t even realize the difference of races in my neighborhood until I was much older. My friend grew up in Northern Virginia from a predominantly white neighborhood, so I was not very surprised to find out he thought this way. He didn’t quite get that a neighborhood with a large amount of minorities could be a safe neighborhood to grow up in, so I told him about all the many birthdays, block parties and cookouts we had with our neighbors. I told him about my best friend from back home who is now attending UPenn. I told him all about my great childhood and explained that a lot of it was so great because of my exposure to different races and cultures. He told me that because of what he saw on the news, with the media focus on violent crime in predominantly black neighborhoods, he assumed that their was more violence when a neighborhood had more black people. We went on to discuss what the real cause of this was, whether it was the media or more socioeconomic factors, but we never arrived at a clear conclusion.

My friend held the illusory correlation that black people committed more crime than other races, and neighborhoods with more black people were less safe because of his exposure to the news. This correlation does not stand up to actual science, which shows us that any race is at an equal disposition to commit crime. I’ve found through some research and in class that many illusory correlations deal with race, and they are very much like the one my friend explained to me. Hopefully, others holding these false assumptions can learn to move past them just like my friend did.