Medium Psychology Highlights (Issue 2)
On luck, technology, high sensitivity, and mental health
Welcome to the second issue! Last week’s preamble was enough for two editions, don’t you think? So let’s get right to the highlights!
*A note of caution: In some posts you might read that a study or experiment “proved” a hypothesis. This is a pet peeve of mine that I must briefly address: an experiment never “proves” a hypothesis. Period. As such, let’s agree that the hypothesis was supported instead. There is no shame in saying that we now have more evidence to believe something while, at the same time, admitting that we could still be utterly wrong.*
Highlights
First, can psychology teach you to be lucky? Austin Fabel shows you that luck may be more in your head than out in the world in The Research Backed Guide To Being Lucky (5 min).
I like categories—I’m silly like that sometimes—so the next few posts are roughly divided into three. Feel free to make connections that go beyond surface-categorisation.
Technology?
- In Understand psychology to guide user decisions (6 min) Tiago Guterres walks you through three of Tversky and Kahneman’s findings, highlighting how knowing about prospect theory can help you guide user decisions. Bonus: read Kahneman and Tversky’s landmark paper introducing prospect theory here (PDF).
- Attention hacking is the epidemic of our generation… (12 min) says Georges Abi-Heila. He brings together principles from behaviourism and behavioural economics (among other parts of psychology) to explain how phones act like slot machines and much more. See for yourself how technology might be hijacking your psychological vulnerabilities.
- On a different, but important, note, David Travis brings us The User Researcher’s Field Guide to Psychology (6 min). Leading you through a few fundamental principles, David illustrates how psychology can be a useful—nay, necessary—tool for anyone conducting user research.
High Sensitivity
I am a highly sensitive person. For most of my life, I had no idea that this trait even existed, let alone that it could explain so much of what I had, at one point or another, considered to be wrong with me. Reading Elaine Aron’s The Highly Sensitive Person was very transformative for me, and I applaud the semi-recent wave of posts that bring attention to this trait. Eventually, I will publish my own post on high sensitivity as part of a series on personality, but for now I leave you with three perspectives from other Medium writers:
- Angela Combs’s I’m Not Ashamed to Call Myself “Highly Sensitive” (3 min),
- Umagp’s On the outside of my box (3 min), and
- Highly Sensitive: How discovering a common character trait transformed our family (13 min) by Ross Wintle (oh how much I see myself in little Isaac!). Enjoy :)
Mental Health
Two great posts fascinated me this week by providing candid insights into two commonly used but so poorly understood labels: “OCD” and “Autistic”.
- Read Cooper Temple’s story to find out What It’s Really Like to Have OCD (6 min). I bet you’ll be more cautious before publicly diagnosing yourself as an excuse for liking to have a neat desk or checking twice to see if the stove is still off.
- Finally, My Autism Checklist (25 min) by E Price deserves its own Highlights issue. It left me speechless. Please go read it. All I can say is Thank you so much for sharing, Erika!
Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed this week’s issue and gained some insight from the posts. Come back next week for more!
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