Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance refers to the internal tension which arises when we opt to engage in a behavior which conflicts with our prior beliefs and values. In order to reduce this tension, most people resort to either justifying the behavior by altering their prior values, creating a belief which allows them to justify the behavior, or stopping the behavior altogether. This tension is not uncommon to have. For example, I studied very much during my first semester of organic chemistry. Out of all of the classes I was in, I spent the most time working on Ochem. I used a variety of techniques to try and master the material to a point where I felt comfortable with it. The second exam of the semester did not go so well for me even though I put in so much effort and hard work. Before and even during the exam, I truly believed I was going to do well. When I got the exam back and saw the grade, I did get upset and had much cognitive dissonance, so much so, I came up with multiple beliefs as to why this could be. The first was that it had been the professor’s fault for not teaching the material well, giving such a hard test, and then being super picky when grading it. This was easy for me to believe because most people did not do very well either. Another justification I made was that it really does not matter in the long run because I am only taking the class to get credit to go to medical school; I will not need to apply what I learned (or apparently did not learn) in the future. Although this second realization is kind of true, it really influenced the rest of my semester because it caused me to not study as much for the class. Why study about elimination reactions when really I should be learning more practical things, like how to do taxes? Safe to say, I ended up doing well in the class. Another common example is when I sometimes go out and do community service. While I value the importance of donation drives, I do not enjoy spending 2-3 hours working in the heat. In this case, I tend to convince myself that working in the heat is not so bad.

I have mixed emotions about cognitive dissonance. On one hand, it promotes lies which we tell ourselves. In the video for example, the $1 participants lied to themselves and to others about how enjoyable the task was. I think this is something to be avoided. In addition, altering a past belief is not a healthy thing to do, unless it really is for the better. In my case, I solidly believed I had studied and worked hard enough to prepare for the exam. I am not going to completely rethink this because of a single test score. I also think cognitive dissonance allows us to justify unhealthy behaviors. For example, smokers who justify their behavior by saying it is okay as long as they do not drink or as long as they stick to a certain limit. On the other hand, when it does not result in the justification of unhealthy behaviors, it allows us to regain our emotional equilibrium by promoting a sense of behavioral control and understanding.


Week 13 First Impression Prompts – Social Psychology

Hand writing on a notebook

Here are the two prompts for this week. Regardless of which prompt you choose, use the tag “Social Psychology.”

Option 1

The Implicit Association Test (which can be accessed through this link) is a tool to identify biases which may be outside your conscious awareness. The results of this test cannot determine whether or not you are racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., but they are useful to help you understand yourself and how you interact with others. For this post, you must take two separate IAT tests from the link above. You do not need to share your results if you don’t want to, but you need to talk about the experience of taking the test and getting the results, comment on whether or not the results were surprising, and discuss how this test can be useful for college students or your future career.

Option 2

Would you enjoy a task more if I gave you $1 to do it or $20 to do it? Many of you will probably say you’d rather have the $20, but research suggests you will probably enjoy it more if I only give you a single dollar. Watch this footage to see:

Describe a time in your life when you think you experienced a change in beliefs due to cognitive dissonance, and argue whether you think this is a good thing we should promote and utilize or a bad thing we should try to avoid.

I look forward to seeing what you write!

Header image: CC by Flickr user Caitlinator

Week 12 First Impression

This week in psychology, we will be discussing the topics of stress and emotion. The prompt that I chose to respond to was Option 1 which dealt with Dan Gilbert’s TED talk on “The Surprising Science of Happiness.”

This is not actually the first time I’ve heard of Dan Gilbert, nor is it the first that I’ve been given an explanation, however rudimentary, of his work. Last semester, I took a fascinating course on ancient and medieval philosophy that focused primarily on Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Augustine. Our primary goal in this course was not only to examine the history and ideologies of these thinkers, but, more specifically, to gain an understanding of what happiness is and how it might be achieved. While talking to my professor about this topic he referenced Gilbert’s book, “Stumbling on Happiness,” and some of his ideas about affective forecasting. This talk wasn’t really about affective forecasting, our ability to predict how we’ll feel about things in the future, but I was already familiar with some of the data and evidence used by Gilbert.

I wasn’t as surprised as I might have been by the idea of synthetic happiness because, as I previously mentioned, I already have had experience with Gilbert’s work, but I found this talk fascinating nonetheless. The idea of happiness is so crucial to our perception of reality, but so incredibly vague that I enjoy most any attempt to clarify it. I agree that most people in our society have a strong preference for what we consider natural happiness that comes from getting what we desire when we want it and I’m curious if this same idea of natural happiness is different in more communal societies. I found Dr. Gilbert to a reliable source primarily because most of his message was based on facts and research rather than just unsubstantiated claims. I appreciated that he not only gave examples of previous data but also demonstrated to the audience the deficiency in our ability to effectively predict our happiness in certain scenarios. The message of this talk is interesting and certainly reasonable as nothing Dr. Gilbert said was outrageous or unrealistic. The key to creating this synthetic happiness seems to be accepting reality for what it is and being willing to let go of certain paths and possibilities. In order to create this happiness, it seems to prudent to make concrete commitments that you can grow to be happy with. I don’t mean to suggest that anyone should rush into commitments, rather that they shouldn’t hesitate to do so because of alternate possibilities.


FIP- Stress

In her TEDTALK, Kelly McGonigal discusses how believe that stress if bad for their health leads to even worse health than stress itself. She proposes that if we changes how our minds interpret health, we can change how our bodies react to stress. If we are taught to rethink our stress responses as things that help us to perform tasks can make us more motivated, confident and we can perform better. If we think of our stress as helpful, the stress on our hearts can be less and prevent stress related heart attacks and other complications. McGonigal also talks about how stress makes us social. Oxytocin is a hormone that is released when we are stressed and stress makes us want to be around people who care about us when we are stressed. Oxytocin is released and oxytocin can help heal damage on the heart that is related to stress. So oxytocin can help us reduce harmful effects of stress on our health.  In my life, I can use McGonigal’s ideas on how to view stress to help me calm down and be more effective when I am stressed. I can view stress as a positive thing that keeps me motivated to succeed.


FIP- Motivation

I chose to come to Austin College because I heard many great things about the academics here and how each person can receive an education that is personalized to them and their academic needs as well as their lifetime goals. Austin College is also away from my home but also not so far away that I can’t visit when I need/want to. For me, instincts are what keep me motivated during times of low academic motivation here at Austin College. The want to succeed and do well is intrinsically planted within me and my home life and academic life have helped me to realize that I should keep up with college in order to succeed in life.


FIP – Stress

This week in Psychology, we were given a Ted Talks video to watch, in which health psychologist, Kelly McGonigal, discusses the important role that stress plays in our lives.

 

Whenever someone mentions the word “stress”, people tend to think about the negative ways in which it impacts our lives.  Kelly McGonigal, however, offers a different perspective on stress and proposes the idea of it being a good thing to have.  She talks about the psychical symptoms that stress can often cause a person to experience, such as an increased heart rate and sweating.  These uncomfortable symptoms couldn’t possibly be benefiting our overall health and well-being, could they?  Dr. McGonigal goes to explain how, yes, these psychical reactions to stressful situations are actually working to help the body during these times.  It is only society’s skewed perception of stress that makes it potentially unhealthy for us int he long run.  Multiple studies discussed in the Ted Talk showed that regardless of the amount of stress someone was under, how they viewed their stress is what ultimately affected their health.  In one study, participants were asked how much stress they had gone through that year and also how much time they had spent helping people either in their family, friend groups or in their community.  For the next five years, records were kept of deaths that occurred of the participants.  At the end of the study, results showed that for every significant, stressful life event that occurred, increased the risk of dying by 30%.  This fact would seem to favor the idea that stress is bad for your health.  The study also found, however, that those who helped others around them, experienced no increased risk of death.  This further proves the theory that thinking about your stress in a positive light can change the way it affects you and your body.  Once the psychical symptoms of stress are viewed as your body’s way of helping you, it truly does change the way, in which, stress impacts your health.  Applying this concept to my own life can definitely work to benefit not just my health, but my mental state.  Thinking about my schoolwork and other things in life can become overwhelming at times.  But focusing on my stress as something there to help me through these times will most likely assure me that what I’m feeling is normal and will ultimately lead me to live a longer and healthier life.


Stress

I elected to go with Kelly McGonigal’s TED talk about making stress your friend.  I was highly surprised about the fact that stress if used the right way can actually help your heart.  How oxytocin works is something I new at least in part but I never knew it could work so effectively during stress even going so far as to help heal your heart from stress related damage  Kelly was highly competent in her explanations being a psychologist at Stanford University.  I can definitely use this information to help with my stress because I definitely have plenty of it.  It can help me focus whether I am stressed out at class.  It is also highly helpful when I am dealing with either my son’s or my medical issues.  So I look forward to applying this to everyday life in the hopes that it can potentially help my health versus stress always hurting it.


Managing Stress

In Kelly McGonigal’s TED talk, she discusses how a change in your perception of stress can change its physiology. It is no mystery that prolonged stress is detrimental to your health, but thinking about stress as a way that your body energizes itself could completely negate the negative effects of stress. I wanted to believe these claims however the more I watched the TED talk the less I believed in the speaker’s claim.

At first I found the speaker credible because she shared that she’s a health psychologist, but that trust was broken as she continued to talk. The studies she presented to back up her claim had little weight behind them. She discussed the death rates of people that viewed stress as a negative influence in their life, but failed to discuss why these people died. Were their deaths stressed related? There is correlation but no causation. Maybe changing your perspective on stress can ease some of your stress, but the underlying reason for that stress will still negatively impact your health. In the end, stress is a mechanism to prepare you to perform; it wears on your body over time. I believe in moderation; some stress is necessary to meet goals that you set for yourself. Reducing stress should still be a goal for those that have a lot of stress in their life, but I do agree that changing your outlook on a situation can be powerful. It can incite you to finish your work so you spend less time stressing over it. In the future, I’ll try changing my outlook on stress but I’ll also focus more on preventing excess stress in the first place.


First Impression- Happiness

I love the idea of the pursuit of happiness. Dan Gilbert’s TED talk offered a unique persepctive to the old age question of what makes us happy. His premise is simply this: we are tricked into what we think makes us happy. Before I dive anymore into his talk, Dan Gilbert is a professor at Harvard which gives him high credibility considering Harvard is one of the most prestigious schools in the world. He opened his talk like a professor would do in lecture, with a pop quiz. I found his pop quiz fascinating because it showed that, on average, parapalegics were just as happy as those who won the lottery, after one year. I can see why this is true because winning the lottery only offers temporary happiness that fades with the extreme event that caused the happiness whereas a parapalegic finds his or her happiness in everyday life. He then discusses how pursuing happiness is flawed because we have been led to believe that happiness can be found. His argument that happiness is synthesized was appealling to me. I agree with the notion that happiness comes from piecing together the things that make you happy in life. The study where students had to give a picture up and then their satisfication with the picture they kept, was measured a few days later, interested me. I interpreted the results of the study as a suggestion that wanting what you have makes you happy. Overall, it was an informative talk that I enjoyed watching. In the future, I look to improve my happiness by synthesizing my enjoyments in life rather than chase the holy grail of happiness because the former has long-lasting pleasant effects while the latter offers many oppurtonities for dissappointment.


Week 12 First Impression- Stress & Emotion

Kelly McGonigal’s Ted talk on stress was extremely interesting and made me think about stress in a whole new way. McGonigal is a health psychologist that had be teaching about the negative impacts of stress for many years. Like her, I had always heard that longterm stress can be very harmful. I have always feared becoming permanently affected by the large amounts of prolonged stress I have experienced as a pre-med student. This fear of stress is precisely what McGonigal discussed. She explained that if we change the way we think about stress, we can change the way our body responds to stress. She based this theory on a study that tracked 30,000 adults for 9 years. The participants were asked how much stress they were experiencing and how harmful they believed this was. The results showed that there was a 43% increased chance of dying in only those who believed stress was harmful. The result of this study was astonishing to me.  Can how we perceive stress really save our lives? This is a hefty claim and I think I would have to look into the study itself to make a decision on how valid the results really are or if they are due to chance. Kelly McGonigal is a health psychologist so I would assume that she is a credible source and that she did look at the study in depth and its methods before making any claims from its results.

Some of these claims, however, do seem logical if we stop to think about it. From my own personal experience, I know that when I let stress and anxiety get to me, I eventually breakdown. However, if I take a moment to organize by thoughts and step back for a moment, I can deal with the stress by planning things out and taking them on set by step. Therefore, not letting stress get the best of me can really increase my performance. McGonigal also discussed the neurohormone oxytocin. She explained that it is released when we experience stress and it motivates us to seek support and comfort in others. This seems very true. When I am super stressed, I’ll usually talk, or more often vent, to my parents about everything that is going on. I would have never imagined that this behavior is actually promoted by a hormone. As McGonigal said, its like our body has a mechanism built within the stress mechanism that aims to protect us from any harmful effects.

I think the most important take-away from this is that the way we think about our situation determines how we will react to it. We can view each challenge in a more positive light by finding our innate qualities, including biological responses, that can be used as strengths. Having a more positive mindset in each situation can definitely help us have better control over it.