Potpourri

0:00Psychology take away. You need a dose of the real. Life's a third. We know the deal. And you're here. Don't let it get you down.

0:13Turn that frown.

0:17Upside down, upside down, down, down. Okay, we're upside down again, Ralph. We are. And today, we're going to be doing something a little bit different than what we have done. We're going to do some upside down psychology takeaway, right? Right. We're going to stand on our heads and broadcast. No, actually, what we're going to do is give our viewers and listeners a short kind of introduction

0:47to a number of topics that are new but have not yet hit the major things in psychology. Right. So we're looking at things that... These are things that are not covered in your Psychology 100 textbook, right? Yeah. And we know that they're important, and they're going to be more important over the next, say, five or ten years. Mm-hmm. But they're not yet in the forefront. Yeah. I like that first one that you found.

1:20The Pratt folding fact. Yeah. Now, I'm going to be speaking at a conference this Friday, and I have my handout. There's a wonderful handout here. And it's supposed to be on one page because I want it to be, you know, just very professional looking. So I printed it and didn't press the right button, didn't press the do both sides button. All right. So now I have a page one and a page two.

1:50Okay. So two pages rather than one. Yep. So I was going to, you know, run another 50 copies, but I thought, gee, that's an ecological waste. And then I heard about the Pratt fall effect, and I'm just going to confess to my audience that I made an error. But you should have a one page, but you end up with two pages. Okay. So the Pratt fall effect, you know, what it surprisingly does is everybody would think

2:27that, you know, you have the old slapstick comedy where somebody steps on a banana peel and falls down, that's the Pratt fall, and you would say, okay, well, I give a handout that's two pages. It should be one.

2:44Surprisingly, that increases trust. It doesn't decrease trust. Well, when I read about this, that's what I learned, that people are going to trust me more because I'm fallible, right? Right. Instead of the infallible Dr. Carroll. Yeah. They're going to say this, you know, this guy is human. Uh-huh. Little do they know. Little do they know. It's all AI, right? Okay. So that was a new one that I had not heard of before, but I'm going to put it into effect.

3:15What's another one that you found, Ross? Well, everybody thinks that when you hear somebody who's talking very fast and they're really trying to make a good point and they're just talking so fast that they're really intelligent. They're really intelligent. That turns out not to be true. So if you talk and you occasionally pause and seem to collect your thoughts and then go on, that gives you more credibility than talking like an auctioneer.

3:46Okay. Hey, there are a lot of people in our cohort here, other podcasters, who are masters at talking quickly, right? Yeah. And sometimes people say, oh, he must be very smart. He talks very quickly. But people who take, you know, deliberate tastes and occasionally pause and seem to be collecting their thoughts are more trustworthy.

4:17This would be different from the person who is deliberately slow. Yes. So there is the difference between being turtle slow and being motor mouth. Yeah. So, yeah. Avoid turtle slow.

4:47Did you get that feeling like you wanted to kill me? No, but I was tempted to push your chair back away from the mic and say, Jim is excused for a few moments. Okay, good timeout. The other thing that I thought was really interesting was people who have a clear and well-known to themselves sense of who they are are more likely to behave ethically.

5:27Now, why might that be? Well, I think people who don't have a good self-concept tend to, how should we put it? They tend to go for moral disengagement, okay? And moral disengagement means that for a variety of reasons, people say, well, I was just following orders or everybody else is doing it or whatever their rationale is for behaving the way they

6:06did. And that's moral disengagement. You say, it's not my fault, you know? Yeah, so you kind of put your morality over to one side when it's expedient. Yeah. Shell and I were watching a movie, a PBS series last night about Edmund Hillary. Remember him? Mm-hmm. First guy to get up to the top of Mount Everest. Well, in this particular episode, we have his brother, who was a conscientious objector in

6:45New Zealand during the Second World War, who went to prison because of his objection to the war and objection to killing. And lots of other people, I'm sure, objected to war and objected to killing, but they went out and, you know, did their own, quote, duty. No, you know, he did not. His ethical framework and his behavior and his self-concept all lined up. So this would be somebody who would not be morally disengaged, right?

7:18No. He took the biblical injunction, thou shalt not kill, that's what he said, and do what their values say. Mm-hmm. Now, I think one of the things that we maybe face in today's world is there are a lot of people who hit 25, which is supposedly the age about which our brain becomes pretty solidly

7:53fixed, and who say, I don't know who I am. I don't know, you know, what I should be doing. And I'm still trying to find myself. Yeah. And a lot of people today would say, okay, well, you've got a few more years to find yourself, you know, working out by the time you're 30. Well, as a matter of fact, there was a TED Talk on 30 is the new 20.

8:24Right. And Meg, I can't remember her last name, argued that, in fact, that was not the case, that you had better start figuring stuff out, you know, earlier. But it is perhaps difficult in our society to really figure out who you are when there are so many alternatives that you can be. Yeah. You know, what are you, Ralph? Are you a woodworker? Are you a retired college prof? Are you a podcaster?

8:54Well, you're all of the above. Right? Right. And my laundry list is similar. So, you know, we take, I guess, the most salient. What are we now? I guess we're podcasters, right? For this moment today. Now, here's an interesting thing. These kind of things we've talked about here are sort of the psychological concepts.

9:25But if we look at biology, what we find out is that in neuropharmacology, the testosterone, which we always think of as increasing aggression. Mm-hmm.

9:44And what are we finding here now? Well, testosterone not only increases aggression, it does that, but it increases both your awareness of social rejection and inclusion. Okay, so it increases your edginess, like I'm rejected or I'm included, that kind of thing. So it makes you... Yeah. So I have, you know, to go back to one of the popular war movies and TV series, Band of Brothers.

10:21Okay. I have a Band of Brothers, so I feel included. Mm-hmm. Okay. But if I don't have a Band of Brothers, or one of the brothers says something nasty to me, I feel rejected. I'm sensitive to that. Okay. So... So this is linked to testosterone. Yeah. And so it also means that if my former Band of Brothers guy says something to me, which

10:52I feel rejected about, because I'm more aggressive, which is also characteristic of testosterone, I might punch him right in the nose. Okay. So, you know, aggression, rejection, inclusion, sensitivities to all of them. Okay. Now, this is a chunk of research that, as we say in the literature, we need more data.

11:22More research. Yeah. Because it doesn't make sense. Let me explain why. Which gender has testosterone? Both. Which gender has most testosterone? Male. Well, okay. Females have a little tiny bit, but, you know, the hormone is usually progesterone and estrogen. So, we would think that this might apply to men, but it shouldn't apply to women.

11:52And yet, with women, we see the same, you know, threat of rejection or desire for inclusion. So, there's probably some other variables kicking in here. Probably, yeah. Except, the other thing is that we have examples of lots of people who have an abundance of testosterone who are not particularly aggressive.

12:25Not edgy or not particularly inclusive either. Maybe. I don't know. Well, the thing is, they're not, they have been socialized to control their aggression. So, you can. So, there you go. Environment can trump physiology. Right. Sometimes. Sometimes. Yeah. Okay. One last one. Oh, two. Two last ones. Okay. Can we have two last ones? Sure. One I liked, and you and I have talked about this before, but other researchers are getting

13:01onto the track of it now. And that is brain plasticity. That is, after a person has a stroke and they can't do something with their body that they used to be able to do before, they can grow new neurons, maybe in that area, or other parts of the brain will take over, kind of equal potentiality to, you know, help them with the left side of their body or the right side of their body or their movements or whatever. Right? Right. That's what we're finding. Now, the interesting thing about that, and it's going to be kind of something that a

13:43lot of our viewers and listeners may not have paid a lot of attention to, but the politician from Pennsylvania, who is now criticizing the Democratic Party, whose name I'm blocking on, right? Maybe he is with an F. Feynman or Feinberg? No. No. Okay. Anyway, he had a stroke.

14:13Yes. And when he first came back, he was still a sitting member, and he could barely speak. Mm-hmm. And now, he's very articulate and is speaking very well. Okay. So that would suggest some sort of compensation in the brain, right? Yeah. So that's brain plasticity. So if you say to yourself, okay, I remember seeing that guy when he first came back.

14:44And boy, he was struggling just to say, I'm back, and I can function. And now, he's speaking well and articulately, and it doesn't matter which side he's on or what he's saying. It's just to know how good he is at speaking anymore. A victory for his brain. We should applaud that, right? Right. Yeah, we see these kinds of one-off phenomenon, like Norman Cousins healing himself with humor.

15:19But sometimes it can be replicated, and sometimes it can't be. Yeah. Sometimes there are these other variables. But there are two more here. I said two more, one more ago. Anyhow, the paradox of remote work. Okay. A, I don't have to go into work anymore. I don't have to battle traffic. I can do my 40 hours from the home computer. I can stay in my pajamas. Well, I put on a shirt and tie, but, you know.

15:53Yeah. And guess what? The 40-hour week becomes a what? A 60-hour week or an 80-hour week. Yeah. And, I mean, you think that you're going to be able to relax and just, you know. But now, instead of 9 to 5 with Dolly Parton, you're 24-7, right? Yeah, and, you know, part of the problem with that is there are managers who say,

16:26I expect you to answer any email within 15 minutes. So, 5 o'clock, normally you would hang up your head and say, day's over, I'm going home. Right. But then at 5, 10, you get an email and you say, oh, I've got to answer this right now. So, your day tends to extend and extend and extend. Now, the thing is, there are people who work from home and there are people who work in the office.

17:01The people who work in the office, we're finding out, some of them burn out for reasons. But the people who work at home burn out more often because there's no way. There's no way. And so that's something that I think has to be really looked at within the industrial organizational psychology movement. But one that was interesting from a social psychology point of view was the idea of groupthink.

17:32And this goes into this, you know, kind of working remotely as well. Remember the first research on groupthink? We were looking at things like, oh, bad decisions that groups make with the space shuttle that blew up.

17:52And, of course, we should have known that the old rings were brittle and probably would, you know, fail. But the whole group wanted a launch, right? Yeah. So the engineer that knew that there was a big probability that the thing would not go well, shut up. Yeah. So because he went along with the wisdom of the group, which in lots of cases, the group will do well.

18:23But in some cases, the group doesn't do very well. Yeah. And the problem is that we tend to know that if you put together a whole bunch of people in a room, the outlier, the person who is apt to say, this won't work, this won't work, shuts up, and if they say this won't work, what they get is 40 eyes looking at them like you're crazy.

18:58Why are you saying that you're a traitor to the cause? Yeah. And so you say, okay, well, that makes sense. We have a group, and so I'm going to go along with the group. Right. But now I'm working from home, and I don't have a group, and it's just me. Groupthink still exists, doesn't it? Groupthink without a group. Yeah. Groupthink now, we were talking before we started podcasting, and I said to Jim, the classic example of this is confirmation bias.

19:35So people look at things that they want to believe, and they look at all the evidence that they can get for what they want to believe. And people look at things that they want to disbelieve, and they look at all the evidence they can get for disbelief. So they have made their own, quotes, group. Yeah. So if I'm on the side of, I want to believe X, and I find all the evidence, so I believe X. Whether there's a group there who believes X or not.

20:08If I disbelieve X, I find all the evidence, and then there's a group there whether it's there or not. So the thing is, you can say to yourself, well, gee, you know, the group is in my head, and so I believe what's in my head. Well, that would be scary in your case, Ralph. It would, yes. And so the thing is, you say, well, you know, I don't care.

20:41I don't have anybody in my head, which is even scarier. You know, we've looked at some interesting things here that are not currently in the Psychology 100 textbooks, but they might be. You know, 50 years ago, the Stanford Prison Experiment wasn't there, and now it's standard fare. Yeah. The overcrowding experiments like the rat universe wasn't in the textbook, but, you know, now it is. So we'll have to look ahead in the next 20 years, Ralph, when you and I are sitting around rocking on our front porch and see what's in the Psych 100 text, because I think we're going to see some of this stuff.

21:24We'll be right back.

21:54Well, Ralph, that was not the extra, that was another intro, but I think we can use that to say, this is Jim and Ralph saying, keep your stick on the ice, because we're all in this together.