This post explores some of the issues that came up in Todd Rose’s book Collective Illusions, which I reviewed a few months ago. Collective illusions (also known as pluralistic ignorance) are the social norms and expectations that we think everyone else agrees with, when in reality, most people don’t privately agree with those norms and …
Illusions of Normal: How Well Do We Know What Others Think? Read More »
Collective Illusions by Todd Rose explores the creation and maintenance of social lies that are fuelled by false assumptions, conformity, silence, and a lack of questioning. Drawing on social psychology and neuroscience, this book shows just how skewed these norms can be from the reality of what most people actually think. Collective illusions occur when …
I’m generally pretty out of the loop when it comes to pop psychology phenomena, so I just stumbled across the term toxic productivity fairly recently. While I hadn’t heard the term before, I’m at least with it enough to know that productivity talk is all over the internet. What is toxic productivity? Toxic productivity is …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is conformity. Whether we’re talking about peer pressure or keeping up with the Joneses there’s often a lot of appeal to conformity. That may be a conscious appeal, or an influence we’re not really aware of, but regardless, …
Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternative to Suicide for Teens, Freaks & Other Outlaws by Kate Bornstein was recommended to me by Skinny Hobbit. It’s written for nonconforming “freaks and outlaws,” whether that be in relation to gender, sexual orientation, or anything else that society likes to judge. It has fun illustrations, like a “get out …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is resting bitch face. Okay, so the term resting bitch face certainly doesn’t sound scientific, and it isn’t. However, it does seem to be related to an actual physical phenomenon. So, do some people actually have a not-so-pleasant-looking …
A fellow blogger alluded to this recently, and I wanted to talk a little more about the psychological phenomenon called social proof, and how it applies to blogging. First off, what is social proof? It’s a cognitive bias that means when we’re in a situation where the action we should take is ambiguous, we tend …
Social Proof and Blogging: Why People Care Who Likes You Read More »
I got thinking about this after watching an interview with Steven Pinker, one of my academic crushes, and then another interview with Jordan Peterson. Both referred to biological differences between men and women, although in different ways, and I wanted to do a post exploring my own take on sex and gender differences, and the …
Separating Out Sex/Gender, Biology and Social Construct Read More »
Last week I reviewed White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. There were some important concepts that she alluded to but didn’t clearly explain, so I decided to do a post, from a social constructionist viewpoint, about how stereotypes and prejudice develop, and why the difference between implicit and explicit beliefs is important. Our societies create categories …
Racism, Prejudice, and Implicit/Explicit Beliefs Read More »
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is the psychology of war atrocities. This post won’t go into any details of the atrocities themselves; rather, the focus is on what contributes to people becoming perpetrators. This post is based on a comprehensive paper on the …
