Six cups

Today I drank way too much coffee; six cups, or something there about. The reason was that I was distracted. The first two were drunk during my first Motivations meeting (it sounds like a self-help group, but it’s actually a social psychology concerned with understanding human motivation, why it happens and when it doesn’t.)

The second two I drank as the result of an impromptu job interview. Last night when I got home from work there was an e-mail from the secretary of the research masters course saying that somebody was looking for a teaching assistant and where I should send an e-mail to if I was interested. I decided to respond, but because I was tired (and had had a tequila shot – a drink that apparently doesn’t agree with me terribly much I’ve discovered) I decided to keep it brief. I said something along the lines of:

I might be interested in the position, could you tell me more and what would you like to know about me?

That was sent around one o’clock in the morning. I didn’t get a reply this morning, but instead found out one of my class mates (who had responded earlier) had been invited in for a talk. I and another class mate decided to tag along. I can’t tell you why, it seemed like a good idea at the time. They ended up telling the two of us that weren’t invited that they had probably already found somebody for the teaching position, but that they did have two other openings that they were just starting the search for. Were we interested? I barely noticed the third and fourth cup going down, seeing as the potential position that was being offered was quite definitely quite interesting. The woman asked when I could start and that she would look into it. She didn’t even ask to see my CV.

The last two cups happened after the job interview, a few beers and dinner (we had to celebrate our possibly good fortune). The reason I didn’t notice those two going down was A) a few beers and B) a good conversation.

Now I feel a bit ill in my stomach and woozy in the head, despite it already being two hours ago that I had my last cup. Still, that fails to distract from possibly a very good day. The motivations class was very promising (possibly the most interesting class to date), the job possibility is exciting and the dinner (well, the conversation, the dinner itself was a bit of a disappointment) was a nice way to finish it off.

Besides, the slight sick feeling gives me a perfect excuse not to study tonight, so I might just curl up with a good book, some odd music and wait till the caffeine wears off enough that I can get some sleep.

For today I feel I’ve already done enough. Tomorrow is another day.

The Fundamental Attribution Error Post Rationalised

The Fundamental Attribution Error: The error of attributing to other people’s character what we would attribute to circumstance it we did it ourselves. Apparently we do it a lot. I don’t actually have any trouble believing that. I do believe that since I’ve learned of the concept, however, I’ve tried to do it less. I try to take into consideration more often that people might be tired, hungry, upset, drunk or yet something else. There’s only one problem with that, of course, in that it introduces even more uncertainty into every action. Not only do I have to keep track of people’s character, I have to keep track of what might be influencing their character as well!

That’s probably why the F.A.E. occurs in the first place, because it’s just too demanding for us to be able to keep track of everything; or maybe it would be better to say that there’s no need to. Yes, we might be making an error but is the correction of that mistake worth the amount of brain matter we would need to devote to correcting it?

That is an evolutionary question. What is more valuable, the brain space or the absence of this error? And of course that question has already been answered. We have the error, so it would seem that our brain space is more important. Or could we say that we’re still evolving towards a state where we will no longer have the error? That the error was much larger before, but has been shrinking as we’ve been evolving into ever more social beings?

“And now for something completely different” – Monty Python

I’ve bought a new notebook today. It’s thick, has a hard cover and is unlined. I decided that I needed to start writing by hand again. Some time ago I had a notebook full of my own poetry that I had spent literally hundreds of hours on. Then I lost it. I left it on a train. Since then I haven’t written any poetry.

This book won’t exactly be a book of poetry. I decided to call it a book of beginnings. The reason being that since I seem to have trouble writing anything to completion, it might at least be a good idea to keep a lot of those brain farts in one place. Then, if I do want to finish something I’ll know where to look for something to write on.

At least, that’s what I say now. It was such a spur of the moment thing and it happened such a short time ago that I haven’t yet post rationalised it into something potent with symbolic meaning.

In a few weeks you’ll probably hear me proclaim that I bought it because otherwise the world would have ended.

It will probably be just as true as what I wrote above. That’s the great thing about spur of the moment things. They aren’t really rational. The rationality comes later, when we try to understand ourselves.

Susan Blackmore said something along the lines of: We don’t actually actively think in the moment, we only think about the moment afterwards. You could imagine it as if your conscience was running after you shouting, “of course it’s obvious why I did that!”

The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance

In 1959 two experimenters, L. Festinger and J. Carlsmith did a very interesting experiment that you’ve probably already heard about. They took a group of students and made them do an incredibly tedious, useless and uninteresting task. Then they asked those students to tell other people how the task was so much fun, so that those people would also participate. They offered to pay them a reasonable sum for the lie (20 US) or a paltry sum. Then they asked if the participants enjoyed doing the task. The researchers found that those who were offered a reasonable sum to lie still said they didn’t enjoy the task. Those people who had been offered the paltry amount, however, suddenly said they enjoyed the task a great deal more than other groups.

The reasoning for this shift went as followed: when a person has two conflicting views or positions (they have internal dissonance) they will try to resolve that conflict by moving those views closer to each other. The people that were well paid for their lie didn’t have this dissonance, as they believed they were well rewarded for their deception. For those paid near to nothing, however, no such excuse would hold. They couldn’t tell themselves they had lied for the money and they couldn’t unsay the things that they had said, so instead they had only one option left and that was to move their viewpoint and decide that obviously they weren’t lying and the task was actually enjoyable.

It’s a bit like when you try to get something, can’t get it and then talk yourself into believing you didn’t really want it anyway.

I wonder if I’m now doing the same thing with my solitude? I have always hated being alone and yet lately I’ve been shouting ‘I like being by myself. I like having my own time. I like my time to myself.’ Is this not a classic example of me trying to reduce my internal dissonance? Since I’m having trouble finding people I really want to hang out with, am I not perhaps trying to convince myself that I’m not really interested in hanging out with people? And then, once my internal views have shifted I start to avoid people (believing that that is what I really want – which it is, of course, it’s just not what I used to want) so as to continue my supposed solitude.

I wonder if my studies of social psychology will actually help me gain a better insight into my own behaviour, or will just lead to me second guessing my intuition and ending up with a worse understanding of how I fit together.

There’s research out there that claims that psychologist are no better than other people at figuring out what makes other people tick.

But then there has already been research that counters that research.

Round and round she goes, where she stops nobody knows.

Exams, funerals and economics

And suddenly I’m hearing from all sides (well, two sides, so at least it’s in stereo) that I’m not just mumbling to myself, that people are actually listening and that people are actually out there paying attention. To what, I’m not exactly sure, but they are. Maybe it’s because of what Pyrrhus said, it’s because this is the only way they can keep up with what’s going on in my life. I’m not exactly sure what’s so interesting about my life that people want to know about it, but who am I to judge (after all, I wouldn’t want to switch my life for anybody else’s right now. Hell, I have enough trouble keeping track of what’s going on in my life, imagine having to figure out how somebody else’s fits together as well! Too much work, I’ll just be content with what I have.)

Yesterday I had my first exam. It went alright, I think. Not terrific, but then it’s been a very long time indeed since I’ve had to sit and write. Annoyingly part of this exam was knowledge based as in ‘does X mean A, B, C, D or E?’ (yes, a five pronged multiple choice question, so that guessing was even less effective). I not only dislike stamping facts into my brain most of which I’m going to have forgotten the day after the exam, I also severely dislike wasting space in my internal memory, when I’ve got an external memory out there to define these terms for me exactly. If I’m not sure what X means, I’ll look it up!

That’s what the internet is for, and libraries and tutors and notes. They are my external hard drives where I keep extra information that isn’t directly essential. My brain is where I store the overarching ideas, the concepts and the information that is directly relevant to what I’m doing at that moment in time. These kinds of tests are from before the era of mass communication and easy information, when it still took a great deal of time to find these exact definitions. As you might have guessed, my professor is trailing behind the modern times a bit.

As they say, “Science advances from funeral to funeral.” (which is probably paraphrased from Max Planck, whose original quote went something like this, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”)

I guess that holds true for technology as well. People cling to what they are used to. That’s why the paperless office is only now slowly becoming a reality (as the generation of people that grew up reading from screens starts taking a solid stake in the working world). Even when technology allows for things to happen easier, people find it mentally easier to do things the way they’ve always done.

I think economists are correct to an extent when they say we are rational beings, but they forget to calculate the mental costs of every action. Often we don’t do things differently because we already know the method we’re using. Better the devil you know, you know. Yes, blind typing is a great deal quicker than ramming away at the keyboard with two fingers, but do you know how much anguish and mental trauma switching over would cause? (well, neither does the person who’s ramming away with his or her two fingers, but they can obviously well imagine).

I quite enjoyed that

I haven’t written a blog entry in a while. I just haven’t felt like it, to be honest about it. Still, I really shouldn’t let that affect me. I should think about what it will be like in a years time, when I look back at this big hole in my blogging during what will have been an important part of my life. So without further ado, I hereby am starting the blogging process again. Hopefully I’ll even enjoy it. It used to be about sharing my experiences with all of the people out there, but after my sporadic blogging of late I doubt that many people will have stuck around. So instead I should just accept I’m writing mainly for myself and the few die hard readers that have chosen to stuck around.

Thanks die hard readers.

So what has been going on? As you know from my last few posts I’m back in university. This was something I spent about a year building up to (mentally probably more than physically, I left everything to the last minute, as usual physically). The first group of courses are just about ending. I somehow managed to survive and even do well. (I hesitated to use the word excel, but I don’t think I can really say I’ve been excelling. Maybe that will happen later, but for now I will stick with ‘do well’.)

I got an eight for the presenting part of a course (a 15 minute presentation got me part of the way there, a few questions did the rest). An eight is equivalent to an 80%, which is pretty crap by American standards, but then they grade more harshly in the Dutch system so if I manage to keep an eight average I will graduate cum laude. That is the goal I’ve set myself, by the way, to graduate cum laude. Since I worked so hard to get into this program, I thought I should at least try my utmost to finish it at that level.

For the rest I’ve largely been keeping to myself. I’m down to only two days a week at the café. When I first started at uni I was doing three days a week, but that was destroying me. I just had no time for anything but working and studying. Now that I think about it, I probably already discussed that before. I always type these posts in a word document off line. I somehow feel I can be more honest that way. It’s an extra level of abstraction, thereby creating a bigger distance between myself and the text that I make available for general consumption. Of course it’s the same text, but it doesn’t feel the same. Maybe it’s because Word somehow feels more like a letter, or an essay, and typing something into a web page more like a chat, or a forum post.

Anywho, I’m rather enjoying a lot of time on my own. It’s quite different to all the socialising I used to do, but it somehow seems to be part of the Holland experience, this solitary thing. It’s probably also part of the reason I haven’t blogged a great deal, I guess I’m just not in a terribly sharing kind of mood.

I imagine it’s just a stage.

And maybe one that is just starting to pass, as this blog entry could possibly attest to.

Did I ever mention that I always write my titles at the end?