Psychology in Daily Life
Dairy
10/23/2014 Thursday 20:00-21:00 Doing laundry. I had so many clothes to wash.
10/25/2014 Saturday 10:00-11:00 I was volunteering at a consignment warehouse.
10/26/2014 Sunday 12:30-13:30
I was sleeping. A good nap!
10/27/2014 Monday 8:00-9:00 A friend called me. She was upset, telling me that she withdrew from her double major.
10/29/2014 Wednesday 13:00-14:00 I was taking the class of Introduction to Psychology.
10/30/2014 Thursday 18:30-19:30 I was in the Haunted Room in Nugent Hall. Amazing!
10/31/2014 Friday 19:00-20:00 I was having dinner with my friends. Some of them cook really well!
11/01/2014 Saturday 16:00-17:00
My friends and I were on the way from downtown Chicago to the Fashion Outlet. One of my friends was driving, and his GPS navigator gave him a wrong route.
My friend’s experience on Oct. 27th reflects her belief perseverance, which means people tend to stick to their initial beliefs even when evidence contradicts them. My friend is a smart girl. She entered a very good university and majored in ACCA, a hard major which has a lot of classes and tasks. At the end of her freshman year, she decided to double major in finance, believing that she could succeed in both majors. However, her advisor suggested she not do so, because many ACCA students before her tried to double major but few of them accomplished because of the heavy tasks for ACCA. But she stuck to her decision. A half year later, she felt too tired to keep on and finally withdrew from finance. This is an example of belief perseverance because my friend stuck to her belief that she could finish her double major, even though convincing evidence of students who gave up before showed that it was very difficult. My friend’s experience on Nov. 1st is related to hindsight bias, which refers to people’s tendency to overestimate how well they could have predicted something after it has already occurred. Though he felt that the direction was kind of strange, he chose to believe his navigator. However, after it was proved that we were going the wrong way, he yelled: “I knew there was something wrong! We should have picked the other way!” This is an example of hindsight bias because after the result had already occurred, he felt he could have better predicted the result and taken a right direction. But this is probably an overestimation. When I was a little girl, I once played in the yard after a rain. Then I saw a “puddle” with clear rain water in it. I could see pebbles lying at the bottom, and they looked so easily touchable. So I believed that it must be a shallow puddle and wanted to step in it. However, after a jump into the “puddle”, I was almost submerged. It was not a “puddle” at all! It was a deep pit filled with water! This experience of mine is related to naïve realism, which is the belief that we see the world precisely as it is. When I saw the pit, the water and pebbles in it gave me an illusion that it was shallow. And I easily believed that it was a puddle as that was what I saw, whereas the fact turned out to be opposite. In this way I let my naïve realism fool myself.
During the summer vacation in 2008, my family wanted to go somewhere for vacation. We consulted a travel agency and they offered us two good choices: to go to Chengdu, Sichuan, or to go to Haiyuan, Ningxia. With no hesitation, we chose Haiyuan. The reason was that we thought of Wenchuan, a city in Sichuan province which suffered a severe earthquake in May, 2008, immediately when we heard the word Sichuan. But actually, Haiyuan is in the same seismic zone and is also at risk for earthquakes. Our judgment was related to availability heuristic, which is a heuristic that involves estimating the likelihood of an occurrence based on the ease with which it comes to our minds. When we heard Sichuan, though Chengdu was not damaged by the earthquake, we still considered it to be dangerous because the city is in the same province as Wenchuan, where a serious earthquake did occur. So our heuristic told us there was a higher probability that Chengdu would suffer an earthquake rather than Haiyuan, which was simply an illusion.
A couple of days ago, I was talking with a classmate who was an international student from India. When talking about majors, I asked him, “Are you in computer science?” He was a little bit surprised. “I major in finance” he said. “Why do you think I am in computer science?” Well, the reason was that I used my representative heuristic, which refers to the heuristic that involves judging the probability of an event by its superficial similarity to a prototype. I knew that India has a strong reputation for developing software, and some people from India have become very successful in the computer industry, like Satya Nadella, the new CEO of Microsoft. Therefore whenever I meet a student from India, I will call to mind Nadella and think that this student is likely to be good at computers, too.