As human beings, each of us is more alike than we are different. In fact, we all share 99.9% of the same genes, according to the National Human Genome Research Institute. Despite all of this sameness, we pay a lot of attention to differences… but only some differences are socially significant. The rest, we don’t […]
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is psychological construct. In psychology, constructs are ways to describe patterns of behaviour or experiences so that they can be explored, investigated, and discussed. It’s a way of putting a name to things that don’t exist in a
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is deindividuation. Every human is a unique individual with self-awareness. Deindividuation is a process by which people start to lose that self-awareness when part of a group. Oxford Reference defines deindividuation as: “A psychological state characterized by loss
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While the terms sex and gender are often used interchangeably, they actually have distinct meanings. The distinction between the two was first proposed by a sexologist in the 1950s, and it’s now widely recognized, including by large organizations such as the World Health Organization. This post will look at what the differences are between the
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is herd behaviour. Are we people or sheeple? It turns out we’re actually a lot more sheeplish than we might like to think that we are, and herd behaviour is exhibited across a range of different contexts. Kameda
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week, we’ll look at the Stanford prison experiment. The Stanford prison experiment was a social psychology study carried out at Stanford University in 1971. Researchers randomly assigned Male student volunteers to be either “prisoners” or “guards” in a mock prison
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is pluralistic ignorance. Pluralistic ignorance is a type of social group bias in which members of a social group privately disagree with a certain belief or behaviour, but they publicly go along with what they perceive to be
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is the just world fallacy. The just world fallacy, also known as the just world hypothesis, is a common type of cognitive bias – a shortcut that the mind unconsciously takes when considering the world around us. Do you
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Introversion and extraversion are personality traits lying at opposite ends of a spectrum. Some people fit with one extreme or another, but many people fall somewhere in the middle. While societal expectations might make it seems like introversion is rare, it’s actually not. Introversion & extraversion – what’s the difference? Much of the difference between
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While there is debate over the roles of biological susceptibility and psychosocial factors in triggering the onset of mental illness, it’s also worth giving some thought to how the illness experience is shaped by social factors vs. biologically-based symptoms. Once we are ill, we experience symptoms that are influenced by neurophysiological processes, regardless of whether
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