Medium Psychology Highlights (Issue 6)
A smörgåsbord for the psychologically curious
Briefest Announcement
See that greenish circle-y thing around my face? I’m now a Medium Member! It feels good to contribute to this community, both so that writers can earn something for their work directly from readers and so that Medium can continue to exist. I don’t know about you, but I get some satisfaction when I really enjoy a members-only post and, in a few clicks, help the author take the smallest step towards turning their passion into their livelihood. Also, this means that I can finally Highlight members-only posts! Will I also start posting some members-only stories? Only time will tell.
Highlights
To make you go “hmmm”:
- As a human, every day that passes you likely commit an error so ubiquitous it has been called the fundamental attribution error. Let Patrick Riley fill you in on why You’re a Jerk But I’m Just Having a Bad Morning (5 min).
- Will you cheat on your partner? Of course you have no plans to, but will you? We might never know, but there may be a way to predict it: as Dr. Robert Burriss writes in The Danger of a Wandering Eye (4 min), the clue might be in the eye of the beholder.
To challenge you:
- Ayooluwa Uthman’s story When Inside Becomes Outside (7 min) presents an unusual philosophical theory of consciousness. The post is not necessarily about psychology, but I think it is interesting enough to share. The more curious among you will no doubt enjoy it.
- How do we move people to effect change? And why can we be so reluctant to accept change? Saloni Diwakar looks at The Psychology behind Status Quoism (7 min), giving us an interesting perspective, not just psychologically, but culturally: her examples are focused on Bangladesh and India, not the West, something that’s still sadly rare on Medium.
- There seems to be a very positive trend emerging: people are reframing conditions that society has deemed “illnesses” and looking at them more holistically—at the challenges and advantages they may present. Read E Price’s eye-opening Autistic Superpowers (16 min) and Gil Gershoni’s I Was Always Told My Dyslexia Was a Disability. Then I Developed a Relationship With It. (7 min)
Pictorial interlude:
- I couldn’t resist sharing this little nugget: Tommy Hor Mu Yi’s Album #1 Psychology Is About Mind Reading (4 min) will make a perfect break if you’ve gotten tired of text from the previous articles, so you may keep reading all dandy and refreshed.
To help you improve:
- Better memory is probably on everyone’s wish list, especially when trying to learn a new language. Evan Deaubl is learning Japanese and he has a tip for you: Make it weird to make it memorable (5 min)
- Giving feels good. But sometimes your life experience can discourage you from being a giver. Rafael Sarandeses wrote A Guide To The Science Of Giving (7 min, members only) to remind you of exactly why giving is so pleasurable and how you can do more of it.
- I’ve highlighted posts about High Sensitivity before (in Issue 2), because I think we would all benefit if more people were aware of this trait. Aleksandra Smelianska’s What it means to be a highly sensitive person (5 min) goes beyond describing her experiences and shares eleven (eleven!) tips for feeling better as a highly sensitive person.
- Setting boundaries is often hard for me—I avoid conflict like the plague—so I appreciate it when I find some helpful advice. I have much to learn from Kira Keulemans’s The importance of boundaries and how to cultivate them. (8 min)
- Do you feel like you’re not good enough? Hazel Gale’s Transcending the (Dis)Comfort Zone (9 min, members only) will help you identify your limiting beliefs and begin accepting life rather than resisting it.
- Last but not least, Vico Biscotti encourages you to Stop Your Inner Speech For More Efficient Thinking (6 min, members only). Shh your thoughts to whoosh your mind!
Bonus
Something got me excited this week. I was just scrolling through my psychology twitter feed when I came across this tweet:
Preposterous. One of my absolute favourite psychological theories predicts (and has, for the most part, empirically demonstrated) that extrinsic rewards do sap intrinsic motivation. Now results indicate that short-term financial incentives don’t reduce long term intrinsic motivation? Blasphemy!
But what if it’s true? At the very least, the study (very well explained by the senior author in the Chicago Booth Review article; you can also find the draft here) raises important questions. Assuming the results are not a fluke, what do they mean for self-determination theory (SDT)? Even if behaviour went back to baseline, did the quality of motivation for the behaviour change? Does the effect on motivation depend on the amount of money offered as a reward? Would the effect show up in a different experimental paradigm? I hope many interesting studies spring out of this one.
In the meantime, I couldn’t resist going on Google Scholar to find out if the study has already been cited. It has! Another study seems to have found that timing of rewards matters—earlier rewards increase, rather than decrease, intrinsic motivation. However, the authors defined intrinsic motivation differently from the SDT-definition, which made me even more curious. I searched around to see what one of the authors (Fishbach) has been up to, and found two more papers: one where the authors introduce their definition of intrinsic motivation as “means-ends fusion” (PDF) and one entitled “three sources of motivation” (PDF).
I’m very excited to dig into these papers when I have time, maybe you’ll find them interesting, too. Now, while I spend the rest of my weekend trying to catch up on assignments, go have fun, you have a lot to read!
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