Hello my dear AP Psychology students. When I was doing my usual snoop of the Times for psychology articles this week, I came upon a lot of awesome articles and I want to blog about all of them! Just this morning I read a piece called "For the Love of Money" (click here to read) written by Sam Polk, a former hedge-fund trader who eventually quit and founded a nonprofit called Groceryships. You have to read the article. I was about to go all into it but then realized that it wasn't the article that I chose for the week. But- I still encourage you to read it. If you did read it- what do you think? Do you think wealth addiction should be considered a real addiction? Do you believe it is destructive to society? (Side-note: If you have seen Wolf of Wall Street, I doubly encourage you to read this article. It serves as a great accompanying piece.) The second article that I urge you all to read is "Why Can Some Kids Handle Pressure While Others Fall Apart?" (click here to read). This corresponds to what we're talking about in class pretty perfectly. If you read this one: Thoughts? Where do you fall on the spectrum?
And now, for the article we've all been waiting for- "Stop Trusting Yourself" by David DeSteno. Trust is a weird thing. It's all nice and well to trust other people, but sometimes they let us down in order to benefit themselves. Many people don't like this drawback of trust and prefer to rely on themselves most of the time. What is your take on trust. Do you believe 'the only person you have to count on is yourself'? Recent findings suggest that you can't really trust yourself more than others. Gasp!
According to this understanding, trusting yourself actually involves two people (yes, they're both you): present you and future you. Present you might have the best intentions, but future you can't really be trusted. Can you always count on 'future you'? There are two cognitive glitches that result in the misplaced trust in ourselves. Psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson identified the first: "our predictions for how much we'll want something in the future are often swayed by how we're feeling right now." Has this ever happened to you- you're really full when people are shopping or ordering food, but later, when it comes time to eat, you're starving but without food because you said "I'm sooo full"? You're not alone. We have a tendency to give too much weight to extraneous momentary feelings; this isn't too great for our future trustworthiness. What do you guys think of this first reason? Does it resonate with you? The second glitch: "your mind tends to discount the value of future rewards, meaning that as the time between you and a potential reward shrinks, your desire for it grows."
We have a cognitive bias to trust ourselves for some odd reason. We like to think of ourselves as trustworthy-always- and when our actions don't live up to that ideal, we erase the failure. I thought that coin flip test they brought in was crazy--how 90% didn't even flip it and gave themselves the preferred task...and then they viewed themselves as fair but condemned others for doing the same thing! Have you ever done something like this? Be honest.. Final thoughts: How trustworthy do you find yourself? As for my thoughts, I think that I can always trust myself. I'm totally one of my best friends; we get along swimmingly. I trust myself- past, present, future. (Is this belief perseverance mixed with overconfidence? Nah. I don't see it..)
This is definitely interesting. I do think overconfidence and intuition play a major role in us trusting ourselves and our decisions. I remember when we were learning about depth and perception in Unit 4, and we discussed the quirky choice-blindness, I found it so fascinating how we trust ourselves so readily. I definitely agree that when our actions don't live up to our ideal trust, we definitely attempt to erase memory of them and instead focus on all the occurrences when trusting ourselves proved useful. Can you remember a time recently when trusting yourself proved wrong? Or is it easier for you to recall a situation when intuition and trust helped you?
ReplyDeleteThis was mind-blowing. My present self seems pretty cool, but I've always been a bit skeptical about my future self. How trustworthy do I find myself? I think it depends on what we're talking about. Sometimes my present self is like, "Alyssa. You're going to be active and move and stuff. You are going to exercise more and eat good stuff." And my present self is like really into this but future Alyssa really lets me down sometimes. In other situations like when I have an assignment or a test to study for sometimes present Alyssa is like, "Yeah..but its due in a few days..I don't need to worry about it now.." It's really future Alyssa who saves the day. I'm going to end this comment before I start worrying about a split personality disorder (something I'll know much more about when I read this next chapter...).
ReplyDeleteAll the articles where great. But I enjoyed the first one the most. I do strongly believe that there is something called wealth addiction. We see rich people all time still do stupid things just so they can make more money. Theres no stopping point when it comes to money. No one says once i make that amount of money ill stop working because that is a decent amount of money to live off. Having and receiving money is definitely an addiction along with many other addiction that people don't always think of as one. It might not be so bad for your health if you are addicted to wealth but in the long run it can hurt you. Stress, anxiety and many other things that money can couse is not good for you. So do not let yourself get stuck up in the addiction to money.
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