Psych summary

Imagine yourself as a brand-new iPhone, already loaded with some basic apps ready to go. That aligns with nativism, which holds that humans are born with most of their fundamental capacities. On the flip side, consider that you have no apps loaded at all, so a tech has to install everything. That reflects the opposing view of empiricism, in which all knowledge comes from the environment. This is a neat metaphor to introduce the question of nature versus nurture.

Some refuse to acknowledge the debate; for instance, the Intro to Psychology textbook compares the concepts to the length and width of a rectangle, then asks which is more important to determine the area. Both are necessary, and neither is more important than the other.

How much money would it take for you to have a front, upper tooth pulled? How about having a little toe cut off? What about eating an inch-long, live beetle?

Now that you’re completely grossed out, know that these are just three of more than a dozen examples from a 1937 study by behaviorist Edward Thorndike. And just so you know, these examples aren’t the grossest. In Thorndike’s study, people received a long list of situations like this and were asked to give each a price or “no sum” if no amount of money would convince them to do it. In today’s currency, the mean reply for the tooth-pulling was about $80,000 and the loss of a little toe was twice that. Eating a live beetle came in at a whopping $400,000.

On a scale of one to three, with one being below average and three above it, how do you rate your intelligence? What about your driving? How well do you get along with other people? How funny are you?

If you scored mostly threes, you’re in the majority! That’s because most of us have biases that start with the tendency to overestimate our excellence at – well –  just about everything. That can include gauging how biased we are. One study of 661 people revealed that the majority believed themselves less likely to be biased. A solitary soul admitted they thought they were more biased than average.

Can psychology provide the answer to hacking happiness? According to Bloom, it depends. 

While clinical psychology can help address when things go wrong, like diagnosing and treating mental disorders, there’s relatively less research on what helps people have a satisfying life.