His Majesty's Psyche

1. Two nights ago, part of my dream was that my Hum class was supposed to be the defense attorneys for King Henry VIII. We had to defend his religious, political and personal actions. Tom & Ida in particular were freaking out because they couldn't agree with his actions enough to force themselves to defend his majesty. Haha. Thank goodness I only have 5 more episodes of Season 2 left to watch!

2. I just finished a pretty good book titled Sway. It's about irrational behavior, a mix of psychology & business because it not only examines why people make irrational decisions when the rational decision seems obvious, it also relates it to consumers and businessmen. It cites many examples of experiments where people misjudge people and items simply because of the surroundings that they've been placed in. For example, Joshua Bell, a world famous violinist, wore street clothes & took is $3.5 million Stradivarius violin down to the DC metro to do street performances. He played the same pieces that he would play on his world tours, but very few people stopped to listen, or even looked at him. They dismissed him as just another street performer simply because he wasn't dressed in a tuxedo & he wasn't playing in a great concert hall. The pedestrians didn't think that he was worth the time for them to stop and listen or worth a $1 donation. So throughout the book, one of the reoccurring themes is loss aversion. People hate losing, so the bigger the loss, the authors claim that the more likely it is for people to engage in irrational behaviors. For example, you have a setback on your drive by 10 minutes. So, you're more tempted to weave in & out of lanes in order to get past slow drivers to make up for the lost time. If you lost 15 or 20 minutes, you would probably think even more seriously about speeding and driving recklessly. But the authors caution us against weighing our losses so heavily because in the grand scheme of things, 10 minutes isn't really a long time, especially if you could prevent yourself from getting in an accident and saving your life. So everything should be viewed in the grand scheme of things. I think I have trouble with that concept. Maybe it'll be something I can work on so I don't freak out when I lose hundreds of dollars at a time in a fiscal quarter when I should be thinking in millions.

3. So as I was reading about the labels that people give to others, I was thinking about how it's pretty hard not to generalize or simplify people whom we meet. First, when someone asks you to give a description of a person you just met, you would probably only be able to describe a few things that stood out about them, or the overall feeling that you got from the person by using just a few words. "Oh, he was pretty neatly dressed and courteous. He kept the conversation going, so I found him pretty easy to talk to. Nice guy." I think we automatically pinpoint a person whom we meet for the first time to a few details in addition to the overall feeling we got about him/her because it's the only way for us to intake the info in such a short time. Perhaps that's why later on (in addition to other factors such as the person being more comfortable around you, etc. of course), when we interact with that person more, we find that our 1st impressions were untrue. Or we discover things about the person that we didn't and couldn't pick up on at first. Perhaps he has a tendency to laugh at everything even when it's not funny, but at first, you thought that his laughter was just being friendly. I wonder if it's possible to not judge a person at all when you first meet them. I think it's pretty hard because we're always looking for people who can relate to us, so we tend to like people who made us laugh at the first encounter, or wore something that we liked or told a story that was similar to something that happened in our own lives. I guess that's what separates true friends from just friends in the long run, because we are able to accept the differences in our true friends and recognize them as individuals with unique talents, characteristics, opinions and experiences.

4. I have yet to write something about love or relationships. I feel like I'm wearing rose colored glasses, which would probably prohibit me from writing. . .rawly (err I couldn't find a better word lol). Maybe after a few months, I'll write about long distance relationships.