There are many things I love about psychology and one thing is how much it brings us altogether and yet makes us all unique individuals. There’s so much about our minds that we often aren’t aware of and don’t even know is happening most of the time.
Here I’ve shared 8 things that affect most of us to one agree to another, many of which you are unaware of even when it’s right in front of your face.
We all have a capacity for evil
Most people like to think that they could never be convinced, tricked or manipulated into doing something wrong, but the 1971 Stanford prison study showed how social situations can affect our behavior. In the study led by psychologist Philip Zimbardo, a mock prison was created in the basement of the Stanford psychology building and 24 undergraduate students were selected to play the roles of prisoners and guards.
Researchers then monitored the prisoners and the guards and watched in dismay as ordinary college students began to do unimaginable things to each other. The guards for instance became physically and psychologically abusive to the inmates who in turn began to exhibit extreme emotional stress and anxiety.
The experiment was supposed to last two weeks, but the researchers ended it in just six days due to the abusive behavior of the students playing the roles of guards.
“The guards escalated their aggression against the prisoners, stripping them naked, putting bags over their heads, and then finally had them engage in increasingly humiliating sexual activities,” Zimbardo said.
These were all thought to be physically and mentally healthy college students who within days had turned into someone else.
This reminds me of the soldiers in Abu Ghraib where seemingly normal American soldiers began to ruthless abuse, humiliate and torture the detainees committing humane rights violations that included rape, sodomy and murder.
We are all susceptible to “change blindness”
In 1998, researchers from Harvard and Kent university did a study where they had an actor ask a stranger on the street for directions. While asking for directions, they had two people carrying a large wooden door walk between the actor and the subject, completely blocking their view of each other. The actor was then replaced with someone else of a different height, build and voice. Half of the subjects in the experiment didn’t even notice the change!
“Change blindness” suggests that we are very selective when it comes to visual cues and that we rely on memory and pattern-recognition more than we realize. The same study has been repeated many times, including changing a main actor on stage with someone of a different build and voice and half of the audience didn’t realize that the actor had been swapped at all.
Some of us are more susceptible to “change blindness” than others.
Delaying gratification is inherently difficult, but is worth it
This one may seem like a no brainer, but researches in a 1960s Stanford experiment gave pre-school age kids one marshmallow and told them that if they could avoid eating it for 15 minutes while the researcher stepped out, they could have two marshmallows when he returned. Most of the students tried to wait, but struggled and eventually ate the marshmallow. Those who were successful in waiting used avoidance tactics such as turning their back to the marshmallow or covering their eyes.
The children who could delay gratification in the study also turned out less likely to use drugs, become obese or have behavioral problems later as teenagers or adults. The good thing is that delaying gratification is something that can be taught.
We can have strong conflicting moral impulses
In a famous study done in 1961, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram showed just how far people would go to obey authority figures, even if it conflicted with their own morals. Part of the study was to try to understand how so many Nazi war criminals were willing to commit unspeakable horrors during the Holocaust.
In the experiment, one participant was called the “teacher” and the other the “learner”. The teacher was instructed to give an electrick show to the learner, who was in another room, every time they got a question wrong. If the teacher was reluctant to give a shock, he was urged on by the researcher. During the experiment, most participants, even though they were visibly uncomfortable and stressed, administered increasingly painful shocks, all the way up to the final 450-volt shock which was labled “XXX”.
This study was originally considered a study of blind obedience to authority, but recently has been thought of as a study in deep moral conflict, suggesting that many of us, in the right conditions, can be pushed to do things we are uncomfortable doing, even if that means hurting others.
We are corrupted by power
We’ve all known someone, most likely a co-worker, who was one person before they got promoted and then a totally different (not usually for the better) person after they got promoted. Research suggests that when we gain authority or power, we tend to change and not always for the better. Those in power sometimes act with a sense of entitlement and/or disrespect.
Many studies show that even implied positions of power can change the way many people act. “When researchers give people power in scientific experiments, they are more likely to physically touch others in potentially inappropriate ways, to flirt in more direct fashion, to make risky choices and gambles, to make first offers in negotiations, to speak their mind, and to eat cookies like the Cookie Monster, with crumbs all over their chins and chests,” say psychologist Dacher Keltner.
We seek out loyalty to social groups
In a social psychology experiment in the 1950s, an experimenter took two groups of 11 boys, all age 11 to a summer camp. He gave one group the name the “Eagles” and the other the “Rattlers”. They spent a week apart, bonding, having fun with neither group knowing the existence of the other. When he finally brought the two groups together they failed to integrate, instead they stayed in their tight knit groups, began calling each other group names, competing against the other group in various competitions, creating conflict and even refusing to eat together. This is only after each group bonded together for only one week!
This is one reason I disbelieve the thought that if everyone were the same race/color, there would be no racism. There will always be some type of prejudices against groups we perceive as different from us, even if the difference is only in name (the “Eagles” versus the “Rattlers”). It’s just the way humans are wired to bond socially. Even if we all looked alike, we would find something to separate “us” from “them”.
Love is all you really need to be happy
That may sound hokey, but a 75 year Harvard grant study that followed over 250 men around for 75 years suggests that love is all you really need to be happy and satisfied long-term. Psychiatrist George Vaillant, The study’s longtime director says, “One is love. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away.”
That is for many of us the hard part. We want to be loved, are afraid to love, to hurt or be hurt, therefore we find many, often creative ways to push love away and most of it is subconscious. We end up telling ourselves we don’t need love to be happy and that simply isn’t true. Even if it’s not romantic love, we all need to feel loved even if it’s the endless quest for love or passion for something.
We are always trying to justify our experiences so that they make sense to us
One day I’m going to sit down and write a whole post about cognitive dissonance. It’s such a fascinating topic. What cognitive dissonance says is that we are 
constantly telling ourselves lies to make sense of what is going on around us, especially when what’s going on around us doesn’t make much sense. We want the world to be a logical and harmonious place, which of course often it is not.
An example of cognitive dissonance is someone who smokes, knowing that it is bad for their health, but they justify it by saying that they enjoy it so much that it’s worth the risks, or that it’s not likely they will suffer serious health effects, or that they are going to die of something anyway they might as well enjoy smoking, or that if they quit smoking they will become an irritable, angry person no one wants to be around. So, they continue smoking because it is consistent with their idea about smoking.
Cognitive dissonance is another one of those things that is largely subconscious, but we all do it. We try to make sense of a world that often doesn’t make sense and when we can’t make sense of it we are often put into an uncomfortable, upsetting state of mind. We become unbalance and try to figure out away to become balanced again.
These 8 things are just some of the reasons I love psychology. It unites all of us, while at the same time making each of us different.
Licensed Mental Health Counselor 