Category: Posts

All non–archived posts, regardless of topic.

The Secret History of Soft Drinks

26 December 2013 / Sinead

An odd-sounding title for today’s post, but it turns out that soft drinks have a far more interesting history than I expected. While soft drinks can be seen as a kid’s alternative to alcohol, or as a vilified sugar deliverer, many have a deeper history than that. Surprisingly, many started their lives as medicines.

Firstly, I’ll start with the most popular one- Coca-Cola, a drink so popular and prevalent that in some parts of the world it is the generic term for all soft drinks. Its history is also brought up a lot for fans of interesting facts; anyone with a liking for trivia has probably heard “Did you know Coca-Cola used to have cocaine in it?” quite a few times. So I figured I’d try and find out why it used to contain cocaine.

Halo 3 and The Minimal Group Paradigm

18 August 2012 / Sinead

I’ve spent a large proportion of this summer gaming when I meant to be doing psychology work, so I figured I could at least combine the two so it looks like I’ve done some work!

I first got the idea of this combination when I was playing Halo 3 online- while the game is good, an annoying part of the online experience is that people on the opposing team will in many cases jump away and lose a point for committing suicide rather than lose a gunfight and have the other team gain a point. Even though these two options have the same outcome mathematically, many people will choose to take the deliberate loss rather than let someone else gain any status. While this seems like an irrational decision, the principle is common in real-life as well.

Crowds and Myths

13 January 2012 / Sinead

The weird thing for me about crowds is that while much of psychology focuses on how complicated individual humans are, they are even more confusing and complicated when they are put together into groups- there is an entire branch of psychology (known as, not surprisingly, crowd psychology) dedicated to understanding the difference between people as individuals and in a crowd.

The media, psychology, and sociology, have many stereotypes of crowds- most of these lead to the conclusion that crowds are irrational, suggestible and even dangerous, a sort of hive mind run by its collective not-quite-conscious. Most of these views, and the theories behind them, are taken from examples of destructive crowds, such as riots and demonstrations. (Annoyingly, the example of a riot and crowd behaviour used in my A-level textbook was actually about Bristol- not the best side of the city…).

However, looking at studies and observations of crowd behaviour, it is only a minority of crowds that become so destructive; non-violent crowds are researched much more rarely, which doesn’t seem fair.

One of the biggest stereotypes is that crowds are fuelled by their anonymity, as people lose their identities and rationales in the process of deindividuation– this is a popular notion, described in detail by social psychologists like Zimbardo. However, while this does sound like a good explanation, and is useful in some circumstances, it fails to take into account that most people in crowds aren’t anonymous- they normally go to events with friends or family, meaning their actions will be seen so they would be accountable for anything they did while part of the crowd.

A new theory of how people behave in crowds, and to me a more useful one, is Convergence Theory. This theory says that crowd behaviour is not caused by the crowd: instead individuals take their behaviours into the crowd, meaning crowd actions reflect beliefs that are already there. Using this theory, crowd behaviours stop being irrational violence, becoming a more sensible reaction to popular views.

So if convergence theory is true, then the media shouldn’t be so quick to declare crowds as violent and irrational and should instead look towards the reasons behind the crowd, for that will probably provide a much better picture of what behaviour to expect and why.

Is Psychology just common sense?

29 December 2011 / Sinead

When I tell people I’m studying psychology, one of the reactions I sometimes get (mainly, I’ve observed, from older people) is confusion: many seem like they can’t see the point of psychology as a subject. In this case, they will often say psychology doesn’t need to be studied as it is just “common sense” (something I apparently have nowhere near enough of).

Although I haven’t yet tried it, an easy way around their confusion could be to just asking them what common sense actually is, because it’s surprisingly difficult to get an agreed-upon definition.

Does Photographic memory exist? Pt.3

14 December 2011 / Sinead

Today’s topic of choice is another group of people with amazing memories- Mnemonists. Unlike the people with developmental disorders that I talked about a few weeks ago, mnemonists don’t often have physical brain differences to explain their memory abilities (apart from a small difference in the area linked to memorising long lists of numbers, which seems more of an effect than a cause).

Instead, their memories are so strong due to practice, and the use of Mnemonic techniques. Almost everyone has used some kind of mnemonic before; for example, SOHCAHTOA (for remembering when to use sin, cos, and tan in a triangle), or Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain (for remembering the colours of the rainbow).However, the method used by mnemonists are much more detailed and involved than this.

Does Photographic memory exist? Pt.2

30 November 2011 / Sinead

Part 2 is about how memory is affected by developmental disorders such as autism, Down’s syndrome, and especially savant syndrome, and how the abilities of people with these disorders could be linked to savantism.

People with autism spectrum conditions can often have memory and expertise that is described as “very deep but very narrow”. In other words, they concentrate obsessively on one small area and learn everything they can about it, even if that area is not needed or used. (For example, I once read about an autistic boy who loved to memorise camera statistics and model numbers, but had no interest in using a camera).

Does Photographic memory exist? Pt. 1

18 November 2011 / Sinead

Photographic memory is one of those concepts that is understood and shown by pop-psychology and the media a lot more than it is shown by academic psychology. Just think of how many films, books and TV shows you’ve seen featuring a character with perfect factual recall or full memory of almost every experience they’ve had.

But in real life, photographic memory cannot be easily found – scientists and researchers are still debating whether it actually exists. While people have often come forward saying they have an exceptional or photographic memory, they are found to be mistaken, and there are only a few cases where a person could genuinely have a photographic memory.

From my existing psychology education, I know of three reasons why someone can have a much better memory than average. For each of these, I have mini-theories of whether these could turn into photographic memory if it exists, and how they might work. The first condition, Hyperthymesia, is below the cut.

Where have all the genii gone?

31 October 2011 / Sinead

The title of this might sound a little unexpected, but to clarify,when I say genii, I’m not talking about very smart people. Rather, I’m on about polymaths – people who are experts, and even innovators, in many different areas. The obvious example for most people is Da Vinci, and it’s very difficult to name anyone recent who is like this- my question is, why is that?

Using my random theory from a few weeks ago, one idea for why less people are innovators and polymaths today is that we are forced by our culture and education to specialise what we want to do way too early in life. The idea of the connections is that as soon as we start narrowing down what areas we focus on, we increase the strength and regularity of the connections dealing with it, which makes connections for other areas weaker as they are used less. The fact they are weaker then means it is more difficult to use them, so they are used even less.

In England we have to start specialising from the age of 14, when we choose our GCSE options. Then, we pick A-Levels, which narrows us down again because the university admission system and syllabus criteria mean that when we pick one subject, we often have to pick others that are related- for example, people studying Chemistry will almost always want to, or be forced to, study Maths, Physics and/or Biology as well. Then there is university, where we have to choose just one subject to gain our knowledge and expand our thinking in.

Applying the theory to our education system means that from early adolescence teens are already made to focus down on a few areas, creating generations who excel at one subject, but cannot diversify or innovate as they cannot connect their subject to the majority of the other potential knowledge that is around them.

It’s blog-voting time again :)

4 October 2011 / Sinead

I’ve now finished the series of histories on some of the most famous psychologists, although it only scratched the surface of just how many influential psychologists there have been over the years. The only problem now is, I don’t know what to write about next. So, it’s over to you guys- what would you like to see next?

Option A- could be that you ask (either by comments, formspring, email etc) questions about psychology in general or specific parts, and I attempt to answer them?

Option B- I could write about some of the “unsung heroes” of psychology, the people that have done loads of studies and found interesting things about people, but for some reason have never been that well known.

Option C- something else entirely, so if you have any ideas, feel free to tell me them! =)

History of Psychology – Now for my favourite psychologist…

28 September 2011 / Sinead

I’ve been looking forward to writing this blog for ages, as it’s on one of my favourite psychologists; the humanist Abraham Maslow. The reason I like Maslow so much is that he was different from the psychologists before him: he did not use psychology for looking at people’s symptoms, but instead for looking at the healthiest and most whole people- for example, he studied only the healthiest 1% of college students in most of his experiments.

Maslow continued Rogers’ optimistic approach to psychology, seeking to understand what drove the most successful and productive people. His theory was that people were driven by needs at 4 different levels, which correspond with the 4 ways of seeing the world that Existential Psychology talked about. Unfortunately, I have no idea if this was coincidental or not. These levels formed his moderately famous Hierarchy of Needs, where the lower needs have to be met to enable later needs to develop and be met. However, there are flaws with this theory, such as why people who temporarily reach self-actualisation are able to ignore their other needs…a good example of this is the stereotype of the “starving artist”.