http://personal-view.com/talks/discussions/tagged/psyhology/feed.rss Tue, 05 Nov 24 19:48:18 +0000 Tagged with psyhology - Personal View Talks en-CA http://personal-view.com/talks/discussion/903/choosing-your-next-camera-fighting-with-temptation Sat, 10 Sep 2011 04:29:17 +0000 Vitaliy_Kiselev 903@/talks/discussions

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Although Carolyn has no direct memory of the experiment, and the scientists would not release any information about the subjects, she strongly suspects that she was able to delay gratification. “I’ve always been really good at waiting,” Carolyn told me. “If you give me a challenge or a task, then I’m going to find a way to do it, even if it means not eating my favorite food.” Her mother, Karen Sortino, is still more certain: “Even as a young kid, Carolyn was very patient. I’m sure she would have waited.” But her brother Craig, who also took part in the experiment, displayed less fortitude. Craig, a year older than Carolyn, still remembers the torment of trying to wait. “At a certain point, it must have occurred to me that I was all by myself,” he recalls. “And so I just started taking all the candy.” According to Craig, he was also tested with little plastic toys—he could have a second one if he held out—and he broke into the desk, where he figured there would be additional toys. “I took everything I could,” he says. “I cleaned them out. After that, I noticed the teachers encouraged me to not go into the experiment room anymore.”

Footage of these experiments, which were conducted over several years, is poignant, as the kids struggle to delay gratification for just a little bit longer. Some cover their eyes with their hands or turn around so that they can’t see the tray. Others start kicking the desk, or tug on their pigtails, or stroke the marshmallow as if it were a tiny stuffed animal. One child, a boy with neatly parted hair, looks carefully around the room to make sure that nobody can see him. Then he picks up an Oreo, delicately twists it apart, and licks off the white cream filling before returning the cookie to the tray, a satisfied look on his face.

Most of the children were like Craig. They struggled to resist the treat and held out for an average of less than three minutes. “A few kids ate the marshmallow right away,” Walter Mischel, the Stanford professor of psychology in charge of the experiment, remembers. “They didn’t even bother ringing the bell. Other kids would stare directly at the marshmallow and then ring the bell thirty seconds later.” About thirty per cent of the children, however, were like Carolyn. They successfully delayed gratification until the researcher returned, some fifteen minutes later. These kids wrestled with temptation but found a way to resist.

The initial goal of the experiment was to identify the mental processes that allowed some people to delay gratification while others simply surrendered. After publishing a few papers on the Bing studies in the early seventies, Mischel moved on to other areas of personality research. “There are only so many things you can do with kids trying not to eat marshmallows.”

But occasionally Mischel would ask his three daughters, all of whom attended the Bing, about their friends from nursery school. “It was really just idle dinnertime conversation,” he says. “I’d ask them, ‘How’s Jane? How’s Eric? How are they doing in school?’ ” Mischel began to notice a link between the children’s academic performance as teen-agers and their ability to wait for the second marshmallow.


Read the rest at: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer#ixzz1XXJVJRl0]]> http://personal-view.com/talks/discussion/902/choosing-your-next-camera-logic-and-emotions Sat, 10 Sep 2011 03:05:29 +0000 Vitaliy_Kiselev 902@/talks/discussions decisions and satisfactory choices.
Whether purchasing a new car, a desktop computer, or a pair of shoes, people generally
believe that serious conscious deliberation increases the probability that they will make the
right choice. This idea applies especially to choices between products that are complex,
multifaceted, and expensive. Whereas most people are willing to buy a new set of towels
without much thought, they are unlikely to buy a new car or outfit a new kitchen without
deliberation.

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A second pervasive idea is that the quality of a choice benefits from sleeping on it.
Rather than (or in addition to) thinking consciously, people usually feel that unconscious
thought is useful for making sound decisions.





Ap Dijksterhuis, «On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect»
Read the rest at: http://www.unconsciouslab.com/publications/Dijksterhuis%20Bos%20Nordgren%20Van%20Baaren%20-%20The%20deliberation%20without%20attention%20effect.pdf

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