Predicting People's Behavior - How accurate are we?

 Figuring other people out is not a bad thing. It’s actually an adaptive trait we have, which should definitely be enhanced in various ways. Trying to figure out others in order to predict behavior and adjust yourself accordingly is reasonable, but the problem starts when people actually believe that their predictions are infallible and live in a sort of mind reader delusion or thinking that their judgments cannot contain any error.

 Self-delusion can be pleasing and sufficient for a modest mental activity. Actually, self-delusion can be seen as a very effective coping mechanism. People alter their ideas to model a world where they can have the illusion of control. There are many biases people use to make sure that they maintain that illusion about the world. But let’s talk a bit, before that, about one of the other mechanisms, a sort of magical thinking where people actually consider that they can read the minds of others with great precision. This mind reading is also correlated with a sort of Know-it-all behavior as we will see further. Also, we will analyze the cognitive biases that fuel this inner circular belief system. I will not debate right now whether there is this paranormal possibility or not, as I am only approaching this problem from an epistemological point of view.

First, I want to mention the problem called The Problem of OtherMinds which regards our inner life and, most importantly, other people’s inner lives. As an epistemological problem, this is concerned with how our beliefs about mental states other than our own might be justified. On the other hand, there’s also the problem of us being able to form a concept of mental states other than our own, which is perhaps the key to solving the first. We could go for the most extremist point of view on the matter, which is metaphysical solipsism and consider that no reality exists other than our own mental activity or state and that the external world has no independent existence. But the solipsist’s tragedy is the fact that they will have to convince people that they are a figment of their imagination, the solipsist’s imagination. But we managed to distance ourselves from the sub-main point, which was the fact that according to The Problem of Other Minds, it is rather difficult to perceive the inner world of other people, let alone draw conclusions based on what we might perceive. Even philosophers agree, that embracing one Philosophy of the Mind or other, will not entirely solve this. But let’s get back to the main point: self-delusion in prediction.

It seems that people who self-delude themselves have a problem with comprehending the fact that people have minds, other minds, different than their own minds. Also, extending one’s mental product to other people’s minds greatly influences our perception of reality and our inner self, in a biased way. The problem with mind reading is not the attempt to read minds and predict behavior, that is normal after all, but the fact that some people are so sure of their own predictions and false knowledge they might produce they might engage in disastrous behaviors and ways of thinking. 

Here are few theories that may explain people’s need to actively try and read other’s minds and predict their behavior:

Egocentric judgement

“Later researchers elaborated on Piaget’s initial findings and theorizing to show that young children do not reliably distinguish between what they know and what others’ know (Perner, 1991; Wimmer & Perner, 1983), do not provide sufficient information to identify ambiguous references in communication (Deutsch & Pechmann, 1982; Sonnenschein & Whitehurst, 1984), and rarely distinguish between the way an object appears to them and the way it would appear to someone else (Flavell, 1986).” (Whole article here: http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/nicholas.epley/EpleyCompass.pdf)

It seems that this egocentric judgment can be still seen in humans as they rarely find out that other’s perceptions differ from their own, thus diminishing their mind reading power.

Attempting Mind Reading As A Coping Mechanism

We all have coping mechanisms in order to tolerate stress or avoid sadness and conflict. I’m not saying that coping mechanisms are bad, but some people might use them as an escape from reality. Reality is not just the exterior world, but also their mind and the things that they are willing to acknowledge about themselves. This means that  they will live with a distorted view about themselves and the world. Predicting and trying to read the minds of others while flirting, for example, has been proved to be a difficult task for both men and women. It seems that women usually misread that the men are less interested in them, while men believe that women are much more interested in them compared with how interested they are in reality.  This might be a coping mechanism for both sexes. Women might use the less interested coping mechanism in an attempt to diminish their expectations in order to avoid disappointment as men tend to be less committed, while men might use this self-delusion to stroke their ego and avoid acknowledging failure. Some people have this so rooted in their personality, they would be lost without it and they will constantly live in denial, being unable to see when others prove them wrong. This can be extremely distressing for those around them and counterproductive for them as they cannot reach authentic self-knowledge and not even a correct image regarding the outside world and people, as they model everything to be a part of their coping mechanism puzzle. We can say that they are the people who constantly live in a cognitive dissonance related to almost everything that would shatter their inner world.

http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/group/busslab/pdffiles/CognitiveBiases.PDF

Attempting to Read Minds In Order To Manipulate

This is probably why the term reading minds and the whole idea was invented in the first place. People like to manipulate other people, it’s that simple.  But this need may have an underlying issue.  A person who likes manipulating loves being in control or feeling superior, which is connected to a need to raise self-esteem. Actually people who overly-predict, plan, or constantly try to read the minds of others are actually looking for some stability in an attempt to control and cope with reality. But, as I mentioned several times in this article, this is just an illusion of control.  

Cognitive Biases used by in mind reading attempts and over-prediction  

The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight  - It seems that people show an asymmetry when they start thinking about how much knowledge they have about other people and how much other people can tell about them. It seems that six studies suggested that people believe that the knowledge of their peers is greater than their peers’ knowledge of them. So we believe that we know more about other people than they know about us and the term for this is “naive realism”.  http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/81/4/639/

Mind Projection Fallacy – this occurs when people are sure that the way they see the world reflects the way the world really is and they can even go as far as thinking that there are imagined objects in reality. Here’s an article that explains this phenomenon in detail. http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/prob.as.logic.pdf

Confirmation Bias http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/c/confirmation_bias.htm – this is probably one of the main tools used in mind reading self-delusion.

Youarenotsosmart.com http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/23/confirmation-bias/ made this simple:

“The Misconception: Your opinions are the result of years of rational, objective analysis.

The Truth: Your opinions are the result of years of paying attention to information which confirmed what you believed while ignoring information which challenged your preconceived notions.”

The confirmation bias is actually derived from your ability to filter the information around you. This means that you are prone to see information that confirms your beliefs.  I will give you an example: women, when thinking they were pregnant, started seeing everything that was related to motherhood. They started seeing a lot of pregnant women, children, articles in the newspaper related to that, etc. This doesn’t mean that the universe was trying to tell them something, it just means that they were focused on filtering information based on their interest. The same applies with mind reading: we get an amount of information about a person but we filter it through our own preconceptions. This is why preconceptions are bad in the first place, they keep us from thinking clearly and seeing the whole picture. Whenever that person shows behavior that is against our preconceived idea about them, we ignore it or attribute it to some other instance like being an exception. But when they show a certain behavior that confirms our theory, we obviously believe that and our theory gets stronger. How many times have you actually tried to find counterarguments to your strongest beliefs? Whenever I believe something the first thing i do is try to find arguments on the internet or in books that support that idea. Later, I wake up and start looking at different opinions. The same happens to people when trying to read the minds of others. It seems that the “most likely reason for the excessive influence of confirmatory information is that it is easier to deal with cognitively” as it is easier to see how the data you receive supports your position rather than denies it.   http://www.skepdic.com/confirmbias.html

Overgeneralization – well isn’t this the mother of all fallacies? Overgeneralizations actually means  recognizing those qualities in a person or a thing which we have seen before and extending those qualities to the whole population. When it comes to the logical fallacy called hasty generalization this means that people will make an inductive generalization based on insufficient evidence and without considering all of the variables. Statistically speaking, your conclusion does not represent the whole population, although you use it like it does.

Selective perception - is the personal filtering of what we see and hear so as to suit our own needs. Much of this process is psychological and often unconscious. Have you ever been accused of only hearing what you want to hear? In fact, that is quite true. We simply are bombarded with too much stimuli every day to pay equal attention to everything so we pick and choose according to our own needs. This leads to the Halo Effect, which means that you will evaluate or judge people, events, places, etc. only by a single trait or experiment creating a prejudice in your judgment. People will often try to perceive further interaction with somebody based on one element or a very few elements. http://lilt.ilstu.edu/rrpope/rrpopepwd/articles/perception3.html

Psychological projection or projection bias – this is a defense mechanism where people deny their own attributes that they see in other people or the outside world. It reduces anxiety by allowing the expression of these impulses without letting the conscious mind recognize them. People who unconsciously believe that they have failed will often blame others for self-failure, for example.

Trait ascription bias – this is quite interesting as it shows people’s capacity to flatter themselves at an unconscious level. They see themselves complex and different from the other world, like a unique snowflake as Palahniuk described this. However, they see others as definitely much more predictable and simple in behavior and thought. Obviously, there is an explanation for this, we can analyze our inner world and access it better than we can do it with others. But, unfortunately, this is the source of prejudice and stereotyping which is not a lucid view upon the world.

Overconfidence Effect – this refers to “someone's subjective confidence in their judgments is reliably greater than their objective accuracy, especially when confidence is relatively high.” Actually there were studies that showed how people rated their answers in quizzes as 99% certain but were wrong 40% of the time. In short, overconfidence seems to be an example of miscalibration of subjective probabilities and probably another coping mechanism.  http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_overconfidence/

Wishful Thinking – there are many mechanism involved in wishful thinking and some might say that it is quite an adaptive cognitive bias. However, when it really alters our perception of the world, it becomes a really bad cognitive bias. What wishful thinking actually means is the fact that we tend to believe to be true what we wish to be true. There have been quite a lot of studies showing that subjects will usually predict positive outcomes rather than negative outcomes (just search the internet and you will find quite a few). Wishful thinking is also a well-known logical fallacy.

Availability Heuristic – Mind readers like to predict, a lot. Actually, that’s what they do. Of course, predicting is important and good when one has elementary statistics knowledge and doesn’t use anecdotes as proof. This is a mental shortcut that uses the ease with which examples come to mind to make judgments about the probability of events

Illusory Correlation - Illusory correlation is seeing a relationship that you expect in a set of data that has no relationship, for example false associations like overgeneralization and stereotyping.

The Focusing Effect - This bias occurs when people exaggerate the important of one aspect, event, trait, piece of information which influences the way they can accurately predict future outcome. This can also be extended to perceiving their well-being. When trying to mind-read people, there is also the tendency to take one trait and form a global opinion with that trait in mind. Also, the future opinions can be flawed by a certain focus a person has based on a preconception. It’s just like using a magnifying glass on some aspects and drawing conclusions based on our exaggeration. There is an interesting article that quotes a few studies in this direction for those interested: 

http://www.morgenkommichspaeterrein.de/ressources/download/125krueger.pdf

Anecdotal evidence – I know a person who...I met somebody who... A friend of mine... – this is the form of anecdotal evidence and it’s an attempt to use personal accounts as an argument supporting some views of a group, experience, circumstance, etc. That’s wrong because you cannot extend your knowledge about those only based on your experience since you probably haven’t met a statistically significant amount of people.

Attentional bias -  a person does not examine all possible outcomes when making a judgment about a correlation or association. It also seems to be an attention bias towards negative information regarding people, things or situations. It seems that people dislike loses more than large gains and they are prone to attribute causality to negative events rather than positive events. More about this and some studies regarding this can be found here http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/jtcreprints/beingbadisnt.pdf

Choice-supportive bias – we tend to think that our choices are better than they actually were. We also attribute positive features to the choices we make and negative features to things we did not choose. 

Illusory superiority  or the above average effect– another cute cognitive bias very familiar to those involved in great self-delusion. It means that people will overestimate their positive qualities and abilities and underestimate their negative qualities in relation to others. You can probably imagine how many errors a person who thinks they can predict behavior and read minds can do when having this illusion. Actually, thinking that you are a mind reader with accurate descriptions is itself an illusory superiority. This reminds me of the Downing effect that describes the tendency of people with a below average IQ to overestimate their IQ while people with an above average IQ will underestimate their IQ. I guess Bertrand Russell was right when he said: The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

Psychologist Fallacy – well it seems that this fallacy exists. It’s pretty similar to the fallacies described above and it refers to projecting your own mind’s properties into the external world. An observer presupposes the universality of their own perspective when analyzing a behavioral event. This makes us judge people based on our own set of rules, which may or may not be correct.

Illusion of validity – describes the state in which consistent evidence persistently leads to confident predictions even after the predictive value of the evidence has been discredited. Here’s an interesting article about its persistence in clinical environment: http://implab.hu/wiki/images/e/ed/Einhorn_Hogarth_1978.pdf

...and many, many more cognitive biases, but this article is already too big.

The mind-reading tendency is common to all people, some more than the others. However, the problem with this behavior is the fact that once people have moderate success with it or delude themselves that way, they will use in their everyday life. Unfortunately, they are unable to perceive other’s mental states directly and will have to infer them and there is a great chance that they will commit some error every time they do it. There is a variety of tools they can use such as: observations of behavior, second – hand reports, or simply intuition.

Obviously, none of these are precise and not even summing them up will lead to an infallible conclusion. Mind reading mistakes can lead to miscommunication, misunderstanding, social conflict, and poor decision-making. Also, let’s not forget that people can be imprecise when reading their own mind (their past mind or their future mind), which is very sad considering their attempts to read other people’s minds. An authentic understanding of self is another philosophical issue that is hard to be solved, so considering this fact and other circumstances how can people actually believe that they can actively read minds? 

Well, in the end we must agree that people like control. Information is control for people, although if we analyze it we will see that having information about something is just an illusion of control. Also, the fact that our information might not be precise and we are using it as a base for having control is just a recipe for disaster, both in communicating with other people and personal development. In the end, our demeanor should be directed towards being less wrong not being superhumans who read minds and predict behaviors so that they feel less confused.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/l/list_of_cognitive_biases.htm

http://kidsthinkingcritically.wordpress.com/thinkingerrors/jumping-to-conclusions/mind-reading/

Epilepsy - a short overview

Source

Epilepsy is a deterioration of the nervous system that produces sudden and intense seizures. These seizures are caused by abnormal excessive or synchronous neuronal activity in the brain.  It is a common chronic neurological disorder and it seems that about 50 million people worldwide have it. During these seizures speaking and sight are impaired and sometimes the person is not even conscious. People who suffer from epilepsy have regular seizures that occur during their life; unfortunately, without a correct treatment, they become more severe and more frequent. Even people who take the treatment correctly may suffer from seizures during their life.

However, one mustn’t consider that all people with seizures suffer from epilepsy. Sometimes seizures can be the result of a certain traumatism or another disease. Epilepsy’s causes are mostly unknown although there are a few factors people should consider. Also, they should remember that it often starts during childhood or after the age of 60.

There are two types of seizures involved in epilepsy – localized seizures or distributed (generalized seizures). Partial seizures are also divided into two types of seizures: a simple partial seizure or a complex partial seizure. The simple partial seizure happens without affecting the consciousness while the complex partial seizure will affect it.

Localized seizures are characterized by abnormal excessive or synchronous neuronal activity in a certain part of the brain and they can generalize and affect the whole body creating a secondary generalization. They all involve loss of consciousness and they are divided according to their effect on the body in: absence, clonic, myoclonic, tonic-clonic, tonic and atonic seizures.

Source

Risk factors that may lead to epilepsy:

-         having somebody in your family with epilepsy

-         a serious brain traumatism (fracture or a profound cerebral lesion with the loss of consciousness or amnesia)

-         cerebral tumor

-         encephalitis or meningitis

-         lead poisoning

-         Alzheimer’s disease

There are a few types of epilepsy that can cause seizures:

Benign centrotemporal lobe epilepsy of childhood or benign Rolandic epilepsy

–        occurs in children between the ages of 3 and 13 years;

–        simple, partial and often nocturnal seizures in brief episodes;

Benign occipital epilepsy of childhood

-         occurs in children with ages between 3 and 5 with late onset between 7 and 10 years;

-         convulsions involving one half of the body or hemiconvulsions

Temporal lobe epilepsy

-         the most common epilepsy of adults

-         seizures begin in late childhood and adolescence and they are complex partial seizures preceded by aura  

West syndrome

-         infantile spasm

-         onset between three months and 2 years with the most common cause to be tuberous sclerosis

Juvenile myoclonic epilepsy 
-occurs between ages 8 and 20 with myoclonic jerks and tonic-clonic seizures but also some absence seizures.

The diagnosis of epilepsy is made using an Electroencephalography (EEG)

The Neuron - Part 1 and 2

The Neuron - Part I - Introduction 

I want to make a few posts that will help psychology students or other people interested in the brain and how it works. These are just basic so don't expect them to be extremely detailed because they are only meant for beginners (like me); also, they are not meant for learning brain surgery :) When I will finish the neuron series I will also post a map that will help you even more with your recap.

The neuron is the core component of the nervous system. It is an electrically excitable cell that processes and transmits the information through chemical and electrical signaling. It is formed of a cell body and protoplasmic processes that extend from that cell body.

There are three types of neuron: unipolar, bipolar, and multipolar.

Unipolar neurons (sensory neurons which conduct impulses into the central nervous system) have one process from the cell body which splits into longer processes. They are found in the spinal ganglia and cranial nerves.

Bipolar neurons (also sensory neurons) have two processes: one axon and one dentrite. For example, bipolar neurons are found in the retina of the eye, the ganglia of the vestibulocochlear nerve and bipolar cells that transmit motor signals to control muscles. 

Multipolar neurons have multi processes and they have many dentrites and a single axon. Their function is motor or as associations (they conduct impulses and permit communications between neurons in the central nervous system)

The cell body contains

-         the nucleus (with nuclear envelope containing chromatin, nucleolus, nucleoplasm, ribosomes and nuclear pore)

-         cytoplasm (a thick liquid between cell membrane holding all the cell’s internal sub structures which are called organelles) which contains mitochondria, Golgi apparatus, lysosome, rough and smooth endoplasmic reticulum, vacuole, vesicle and cytoskeleton.

-         cell membrane

The protoplasmatic processes have dentrites and axons. Dentrites are short and transport the impulses to the cell body.

Axons have varied length to a few nanometers to 1 meter (like the axons of the sciatic nerve); they make contact with other cells like other neurons, but also muscles or gland cells through synapses.

There are two types of axons:

-         myelinated axons and unmyelinated axons

Myelin is a dielectric material composed of 40 % water; however the dry mass is about 70-85% lipids and 15%-30% proteins. If the myelin layer is think the transport is faster.  

Axons contain two types of axoplasmic transport:

-         anterograde transport (from the cell body to the synapse)

-         retrograde transport (sends chemical messages and endocytosis products  headed to endolysosomes from the axon back to the cell) is practically the way toxins and vitamins are transported to the central nervous system 

Neuron Part 2 – Synapses

A synapse is a junction that permits a neuron to pass an electrical or chemical signal to another cell. 

Two neurons are connected through a synapse. The synaptic cleft is what separates the presynaptic neuron and the postsynaptic one. Synthesized neurotransmitters are sent in the synaptic cleft and this produces feedback at a postsynaptic level. When there is an action potential at the synaptic terminal (a bulb at the end of an axon in which neurotransmitter molecules are stored and released), it releases neurotransmitters into the synaptic cleft. The receptors in the membrane or the cell body of the postsynaptic neuron receive the neurotransmitters from the synaptic cleft.

The axon terminal contains synaptic vesicles (about 39.5 nanometers) that play an important role for propagating nerve impulses between neurons and are constantly recreated by the cell. 

In most synapses the presynaptic part is located on the axon but there are some presynaptic parts located on a dendrite or soma.

There are many types of synapses and here you can see them grouped into 5 types:

Excitatory Ion Channel Synapses – synapses with neurorecepters that are sodium channels.

Inhibitory Ion Channel Synapses – synapses with neuroreceptors with chloride channels/ typical neurotransmitters are glucine or GABA

Non Channel Synapses – neuroreceptors that are not channels but are membrane- bound enzymes

Neuromuscular Junctions – synapses formed between motor neurons and muscle cells

Electrical Synapses – the membranes of the two cells actually touch and share proteins in these synapses so the action potential passes directly from one membrane to the next (can only be found in the heart and eye)

Tomorrow we'll learn about neurotransmitters and I will post the final recap map.

7 Myths About Alcohol

When it comes to drinking, everybody has some advice: a cure for a hangover, a method to get drunk faster or a method to get rid of that nasty feeling when you are too drunk. But are those really working? It seems that most of the things we know about drinking is wrong.  

1 The beer belly

A study involving 2000 Czech people (they are known for the fact that they consume a lot of beer) showed that this claim might be a myth. After questioning, their weight, body mass index and waist to hip ration were measured and it seems that there is no link between obesity and beer drinking. However, increasing your caloric intake and consuming large quantities of beer might influence your body weight but beer alone doesn’t contribute to “the beer belly”. 

2 Alcohol warms you up

A lot of people believe that alcohol can warm you, but if you ever find yourself trying in a situation when you have to survive in the cold, don’t drink alcohol. Although it makes you feel warmer, it actually decreases your body’s temperature and its reflex of keeping the body warm. Hypothermia will install more rapidly if you consume alcohol and you will not feel it either, so consuming alcohol in cold weather can put you to great risk.

3 Mixing drinks together will make you get drunk faster

How fast you get drunk depends on your metabolism and your weight, so mixing beer with wine will get you in the same direction as drinking the same amount alcohol contained by one beverage. 

However, people who mix their drinks may have a tendency to drink more so that might be a reasonable explanation for this myth.

4 Alcohol gives you a lot of energy

It doesn’t, it only makes you numb and unable to feel your fatigue. Alcohol is a depressant so it reduces the function and activity of your body and brain. It might give you a mild euphoria and relaxation at first but if you continue drinking your mood will start to shift and you can become angry or sad. 

5 You can sober up anytime

It doesn’t matter how many gallons of coffee you drink or how many times you wash your face, you will still be drunk. Only time will sober you up, so if you are really drunk the rational thing is to wait. Doing some exercise might help your body reduce the level of alcohol through sweat but that’s not really recommended when you are drunk. 

6 Sex is better when alcohol is involved

Unfortunately it doesn’t increase your libido but it makes you more promiscuous.  When your blood alcohol content reaches 0.10 you won’t feel anything during sex, but it will reduce inhibition.

7 Mixing alcohol and energy drinks will make you less drunk

The alcohol has the same effects on you even if you mix it with energy drink. You might not feel the effects of the alcohol but they are there and this is a very dangerous thing to do. You are practically using a depressant and a stimulant at the same time which could cause cardiopulmonary or cardiovascular failures and that’s not a fun moment during a party.

For an extensive list of alcohol effects on your body, check out this interesting link. 

6 Reasons Why Your Memory Is Not That Great

If you thought human memory is amazing, you were wrong. There are some memory biases that interfere with our ability to store, retain, and recall information. Here are 6 reasons why your memory is not as good as you thought.

1 Cryptomnesia- this is a very interesting thing that happens with our memory: forgotten memory returns without being recognized by the subject. The subject then believes that they came up with something new and original. So, it’s like a hidden memory. Authors like Helen Keller, Byeron, and even Nietzsche were victims of cryptomnesia. They all wrote parts or even full stories (like Keller) that resembled something that was already written by someone else. Cryptomnesia  is also responsible for those so called past life experiences and even for some of the stories mediums tell people about the spirits they come in contact with. 

2 Déjà vu  – while some people believe that déjà vu is a premonition or a prophecy or even a past life experience, it’s only a way your memory plays with you. Déjà vu is just a recollection of a fragment from one’s past, remembering some pictures you’ve seen or maybe it’s just the feeling of knowing without actually knowing anything. It’s not a glitch in the Matrix either.

3 Cross–race effect – I’ve heard many Caucasian people state that all Asian people look the same; well, according to the cross-race effect, every race believes that people from other races look the same and they have difficulty recognizing and processing faces (and even emotions). Apparently, individual differences and prejudice contribute to biased judgments and suspect misidentifications. 

4 Misinformation effect – our memory can be greatly influenced when we are misinformed. When doing a study on the misinformation effect, participants were divided into two groups, one group was misinformed and the other was not to be altered in any way. Then, they had to see a video of a complex event. After seeing the event, one group was misled by false information. When asked about what happened, the group that received false information adopted that information as their memory. Let me give you an example of another study.  Subjects were asked to see a car crash movie and after that they had to remember how fast the cars were going when they hit each other. The word “hit” was replaced by different words such as: smashed, collided, bumped or contacted. When the word “smashed” was used, people tended to “remember” a higher speed but when the word contacted was used, they tended to “remember” a lower speed. They were also asked a week later if there was broken glass on the pavement and most of those who were given the word “smashed” a week before, said “yes” although there was no broken glass. It seems that people’s tendency to conformity can also be applied when it comes to memory. This “social contagion of memory” was proved in a study where a subject was misled by the other person that witnessed the same scenes. When recalling again what they saw, the subjects remembered (to be true) many of the erroneous items their partner suggested before.

5 Rosy Retrospection – we tend to remember things to be more positive than they really were. This study showed that people evaluated their vacation to be more positive than it was evaluated during the event itself. “The "rosy view" phenomenon is associated with an increase in the number of negative thoughts during the event which seem to be caused by distractions, disappointment, and a less positive view of the self. However, these effects are short-lived; within days after the event, people have much more positive evaluations of the event. “

6 Positivity Effect – the positivity effect happens when we attribute situational circumstances to bad behaviour of people we like. On the other hand, we tend to attribute misbehavior to people we don’t like. What does this have to do with memory? It seems that older adults “are more likely than younger adults to pay attention to positive than negative stimuli”. In addition, compared with younger adults' memories, older adults' memories are more likely to consist of positive than negative information and more likely to be distorted in a positive direction. 


Don't be sad, here are some ways to improve your memory. 

6 reasons why you fail as a rational being

There is no sin except stupidity

Oscar Wilde

You probably think you made pretty good decisions in your life, based on critical thinking and logic. You also know that you are smarter than the average person and your reasoning skills are very good. You probably failed, but don’t worry, we all fail – it’s in our brain.  

1 Optimism bias – this is a systematic tendency for people to be optimistic about their outcome. If you are a smoker, your probably think that smoke related diseases don’t apply to you (but they do). According to these studies, people have an unrealistic optimism about their live. In this study, college students rated their own chances to be above average from positive events and below average for negative events. Dalziel and Job (1997) found that professional drivers, such as metropolitan taxi drivers from Sydney,

underestimate their risk of automobile accident. Hoch found that MBA students actually overestimate the number of job offers they will receive and their salary. 

Next time you think you drive much better than a professional driver and your running like crazy or there’s no way something can happen to you (sounds familiar?), think about optimism bias. While we’re on the subject we should also talk about wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is a common error people make when they expect and make decisions based on what they want to happen. This is also a logical fallacy in the form of: I wish X is true, therefore X is true. It can also be linked to the logical fallacy called argument from ignorance where a person will state that if x hasn’t been proved to be false, then it must be true.

2 Rosy retrospection – remember your first boyfriend/girlfriend? Ah, such great times you had together, you don’t even know why you guys split up in the first place. Stop that, that’s rosy retrospection, when you rate past events more positively than you actually rated them when they happened.  Now think about all those decisions you made that involved this cognitive bias.

3 Illusion of control – people like to believe that they have the ability to control events and outcomes even when they are demonstrated that they cannot influence them. For example, when rolling the dice people throw harder for a higher number and softer for a lower number although they know that couldn’t influence their chances. Those of you with a passion for critical thinking and logical argumentation probably know about the Gambler’s fallacy. The gambler thinks that because they lost many times, their chances of winning increase. For example if we toss a coin 4 times and it shows heads all those times, one would think that the chances of it showing heads the 5th time decreased; however, the chance is always 50%. If a lot of bad things happened to you in a long time it is false to assume that something good must happen because your chances of something bad happening haven’t decreased at all.

4 Illusory superiority and Dunning Kruger effect  – is another cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate their positive traits and underestimate their negative ones. In the Dunning – Kruger effect, unskilled people make poor decisions and make erroneous conclusions while their incompetence keeps them from appreciating their mistakes. This can also happen in reverse for competent people as they might believe that other people have an equivalent understanding. Also, the highly skilled might underestimate their abilities. So it seems that the unskilled and stupid are arrogant about their knowledge while those who actually know what they are talking about are doubtful. Also, according to the Pollyanna principle (yes, it’s that annoying positive girl from the children’s books) people tend to agree with positive statements about themselves. As you can see, we are seriously deluded.

5 Self-serving bias – You have to be honest, we all have this (I have poor grades because the teacher hates me). The self-serving bias is when people attribute success to themselves and failure to events or circumstances. Also, it seems to work even with ambiguous information which is used by people in their favor, although that information is not necessary related to them. But hey, it sounds great and you will delude yourself fantastically with it. While we’re on the subject, I will also mention the fundamental attribution error,  when a person judges the behaviour of others but when they find themselves in the same situation, they take situational factors into consideration.

6 Bias blind spot – after reading this article you are probably thinking “Hmm, I don’t have those, I’m a logical person” while thinking about situations when you acted all rational and logical. That’s called bias blind spot and you see yourself better than average and less likely to have the biases described to you. Well, the good thing is that we will always deny our stupidity.

Understanding and categorization

Categorization is the process of recognizing, differentiating, and understanding objects. This means that the subject will combine and compare sensorial information with earlier information, already in memory. From this point of view, we can define understanding as an input function as well as an activated knowledge. One should not see this process as passive but more as an active process that builds understanding from input and using its activated knowledge. People understand information when they are capable to give it a more general meaning.

The understanding process needs to be capable of using knowledge at a more general level as well as the incomplete information (which usually needs more processing in order to eliminate confusion). Most of this processing is done at a subconscious level.

Verbal Understanding (discourse comprehension)

We first learn to understand simple words, then words become sentences, sentences become paragraphs, and ultimately we are able to understand a general idea that comes from a whole chapter.

Discourse comprehension is characterized by Van Dijk and Kintsch through the following representations:

1 – microstructure: it contains a literal understanding of the text(a very basic understanding)

2 – macrostructure: contains the text’s essence

3 – super-structure: it’s a rhetoric form or a certain style used in text

4 – situational model: a set of knowledge structures linked to the real meaning of the text

This model was tested in experiments and it can help us predict the length of an understanding process. 

To read more about this you can visit: this link and this link. 

Categorization

Without categorization the world is an extremely confusing place. Man needs to group the stimuli in different categories; the elements become members of a class. Some of the benefits that come with categorization are: easy access to relevant information, ability to make predictions, etc.

What does categorization actually mean?

1 – grouping similar elements in the same category

Grouping can be done using physical or functional criteria. Physical criteria aim physical similarities between objects and form a category of similar objects.

If the objects serve a functional purpose during an activity we are using functional similarity as a categorization method. This may include physical subcategories. Regardless of the criteria used for categorization, the tendency should be to maximize the similarity inside the category and minimize the similarity between categories.

2 – coding our experience

Categories ease information access and process as we don’t use each object but a single category linked to many objects.

Any category is linked to other categories. Not all categories are as accessible and we tend to use more those with a more general level to ease the development of other cognitive processes.

Eleanor Rosch shows that there is a preference for a basic category. These basic categories are represented by one word in natural language (for example, flower, table, etc). These words have the highest frequency in spoken language and they were learned the earliest from an ontogenetic point of view. They are the most abstract categories that can be associated with a specific physical form 

3 – generating inferences

Classes of objects are the basis of inference and reason. The generative function of categorization appears in deductive reasoning as well as inductive reasoning. Through inductive and deductive reasoning one is able to predict certain behaviour.

Categories – a mental representation 

Experimental research shows that there is an alternative mental representation of categories, a prototype.

A concept and a prototype are symbolic representations. A concept is a definition that embraces necessary and sufficient characteristics for the existence of an object class. This definition establishes if an item belongs or not to a certain class.

The presence of a prototype indicates the fact that mental representation of categories is not only made through concept.

A prototype is one or more examples from a category that is given whenever somebody asks for an example from that specified category. These examples have the highest prototypical value.

An ideal prototype (but not a real one) shows all the characteristics of the category’s members (an average tendency).

For further information you can visit the websites I mentioned above.
Picture taken from here.