4-Point Weekend #135
Reflections on a psychology degree
Hi everyone,
I hope you have been enjoying the holidays!
This week we have a special post for you.
As some of you may know, I recently completed grad school. I happened to be flipping through my notes from undergrad and found some gems. This week’s post consists of thoughts, ideas, and concepts taken solely from my initial degree in psychology. Enjoy!
1) Bottom-up processing
In cognitive psychology, we are taught that there are two ways for us to process information: top-down or bottom-up
In bottom-up processing, we let the stimuli (ie events) shape our perception, without any influence from previous knowledge or experience. We therefore more focused on the here and now of the stimulus.
In top-down processing, we use prior knowledge and experience to make sense of what is happening to us. We use different shortcuts and assumptions to interpret and assign meaning to the stimuli - often, whether it is good or bad.
An example I like to use is driving in the car while listening to music. When you are playing music from your phone and selecting everything you will hear, you are exerting top-down processing in your choice. However, when we listen to the radio or even play our phone on shuffle, we are more bottom-up in that the music is coming to us instead of us going to it - you with me..?
So, why does this all matter? Well, we have more control than ever over our environment and the choices we make throughout the day. But why then is a song you like more enjoyable when it comes on the radio at random without our influence? My point here is that I believe being in hyper control of our conditions might not be the key for happiness and enjoyment, and sometimes letting things happen switches off our need for control.
My suggestion is therefore to once in a while put the music on shuffle - let the server order for you - let your friends pick the venue - and enjoy the spontaneity of life when we operate from the bottom up.
Source: Adopted from PSYC 241: Cognitive Psychology
2) The Joshua Bell Subway Experiment
Have you ever wondered how much beauty or brilliance passes unnoticed in our daily lives? Gene Weingarten’s Washington Post experiment with world-renowned violinist Joshua Bell offers profound insights into how context and attention shape our perceptions.
In January 2007, Bell, a Grammy-winning violinist, performed for 43 minutes in a Washington, D.C., metro station during the morning rush hour. Armed with a $3.5 million Stradivarius violin, he played six classical masterpieces, the kind of performance that usually commands sold-out concert halls and tickets costing hundreds of dollars. Yet, as commuters hurried to work, only seven people paused to listen for more than a moment. Bell collected just $32.17 in tips from over 1,000 passersby.
The experiment underscores an uncomfortable truth: we often miss the extraordinary because of where or when it appears. When people saw Bell in the metro, dressed in a baseball cap and casual clothes, the environment didn't signal “world-class performance.” They were focused on their routines and schedules, not on savouring the moment.
This experiment invites us to consider how we allocate our attention and how we design environments to enhance recognition and appreciation. We notice what we pay attention to. Here, a brillant musician gets little reconigition because people are foucsed on other things. Weingarten and Bell remind us of the importance of environment in shaping perception, and that poor reception may not always signal poor work.
Source: Adopted from PSYC300W: Critical Issues in Psychology
3) Do we know what makes us happy?
As an undergrad, I took an amazing class taught by Dr Lara Aknin called The Science of Happiness. Among the many counterintuitive things she taught us about happiness, one that stood out was how bad people are at predicting what will make them happy. In the literature, these predictions are called ‘affective forecasts’, which are our guesses of our reaction to future emotional events.
Are inaccurate forecasts bad? Well yeah, kind of. They may lead to us wasting our lives, wasting resources, and of course being less happy. To sum up, they lead to us making bad choices - and having insight into our emotional reactions can lead to better choices.
So why does this occur? Dr Aknin suggested there was something called impact bias, which is the tendency to overestimate the intensity and duration of any one event on their future thoughts, behaviours, and feelings. Essentially, we think certain things will have a much larger impact on us than they really do. Dr Aknin also taught us 3 causes of impact bias, which I think are relevant:
Focalism - the tendency to focus on one event or detail and ignore the rest.
example: a parent of a sick child may only think about hospital trips and neglect family dinners.
Underestimating sense-making - we don’t appreciate how good our brain is at normalizing or rationalizing experiences, which at times can lead to reducing the impact of emotionally charged events.
example: you land your dream job, but after a while, it begins to be mundane and the glamour diminishes. OR, you fail an important exam, at first, you feel devastated but begin to rationalize it through lack of studying and the emotions wear off.
Immune Neglect - we don’t anticipate our natural tendency to make the best out of bad outcomes and find the silver lining.
example: I failed my driver’s licence but it is cheaper to take the bus.
By being mindful of the biases that can impair our affective forecasts we can make more appropraite predictions of our future happiness. A skill many of us would be thrilled to develop.
Source: Adopted from PSYC391: The Science of Happiness
4) Featured quote
“Most people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, frightfully objective sometimes ــ but the task is precisely to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others”
-Danish Philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard
Source: Adopted from PSYC325: Learning and Memory
Thank you for your time and attention this week.
I hope you got something out of these learning reflections.
Much love,
Kyle