5 + 5

Favorite Social Psychologists

Dr G.: cuz she uses the word 'sexy'

Dan Gilbert: Because his writing style is very engaging

Milgram: Because he's not just famous, but he's also notorious for his experiment

Zajonc: Because he has a cool/funny name (and I pronounced it 'zuh junk' for a while, which is hilarious)

Sherif: because his experiment was so environmentally realistic (robber's cave at a camp) (you could put asch here too)

Mark Leary: Because he's also a very good writer and can dumb down involved concepts and theories


Favorite Theories/ Concepts

self-perception theory- its just amazing, it shows how little access we have to ourselves, that we treat ourselves like we do others when trying figure out our emotions or motives

central/peripheral routes - I've always wondered why some people make decision based on reason and others based on weird, superficial stuff, and it always angered me and now that I know a term I can attack it

relative deprivation - it hits head on one of the stupidest parts of our existence, that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence

availability heuristic - these kinds of consistent fallacies of human reasoning are just intriguing

cognitive dissonance - it shows how we fool ourselves all the time, and don't even know it, that we don't know the reasons for our attitudes is so shocking that the only conclusion one can draw is our sense of self and control (even freedom) is all just a nice little illusion neatly held together by any number of processes like cognitive dissonance