Teach of You

INTRODUCTION  In February 1999, four New York City police officers were on patrol in the Bronx when they saw a young black man standing on a stoop. They thought he looked suspicious. When they pulled over, he retreated into the doorway and began digging in his pocket. He kept digging as the police shouted at him to show his hands. A few seconds later, the man, Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old immigrant from Guinea, was dead, hit by 19 of the 41 bullets that the police fired at him. What Diallo was reaching for was his wallet. he was going for his ID as he stood on the steps of his own apartment building. Diallo's story and the officers' fatal prejudgment of him are recounted in Malcolm Gladwell's 2005 bestseller, Blink.  Gladwell and the social psychologists whose work he draws upon explore Diallo's case as an example of that gray area between deliberate violence and an accident, propagated by non-conscious or implicit biases. The officers did discriminate against Diallo, b

Milgram Obedience Experiment.  If someone in a position of authority told you to, like, stop walking on the grass, you would stop walking on the grass, right? And if they told you to help someone's grandma cross the street, pick up your dog's poop, or put your shoes on before you go into a store, you'd probably comply. But what if they ordered you to physically hurt another person? You're probably thinking, no way, I could never do something like that. But there's a good chance you're wrong. In the early 1960s, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram began what would become one of social psychology's most famed and chilling experiments. Milgram began his work during the widely publicized trial of World War II Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann's defense, along with other Nazis, for sending millions of people to their deaths was that he was simply following the orders of his superiors.  While that may have been True, it didn't fly in cour

  INTRODUCTION Why do people do horrible things? Slave owners and Nazis, any of the perpetrators of history's atrocities, how did they so successfully dehumanize other people for so long? At a smaller scale, how do bullies in the lunchroom manage to treat other kids with such cruelty and then go home and pet their dog and call their grandma and say happy birthday? Most of what we've been studying so far has focused on the individual. We've covered sub-fields of psychology like cognitive, personality, and clinical psychology, which tend to address the phenomena contained within a single person's mind. But there's also social psychology, which focuses on the power of the situation. It examines how we think about, influence, and relate to one another in certain conditions, and it's better equipped to answer this question about people doing horrible things.  Social psychology can not only give us some of the tools we need to understand why people behave brutally, it

  Does psychotherapy Work? If you saw our last lesson on psychotherapy, you might be wondering, what happened to Bernice? Has she found a way to manage her depression? Is she still wracked with anxiety? Well, it's really nice of you to ask, and I'll tell her you said hi. But for our purposes, as students of psychology, the bigger question arising from Bernice's case is, has psychotherapy helped? And just as important, How can we tell? Well, believe it or not, one of the main ways experts use is to simply ask the client and see how they say they're doing. Is Bernice out of bed and living her life? Did she make it through midterms without spiraling into a crisis? And did she take that plane trip to Baja to party with her girls?  As a clinician, that would all be useful to know, right? But the key is that we want to ask these questions in a scientifically rigorous manner so that we really know what treatment works. rather than just extrapolating from individual cases. And

  Types of   Psychotherapy Bernice has issues. And sure, we all do. But hers are getting out of hand. At times, she goes through bouts of depression that make it hard for her to even get out of bed. Sometimes, she suffers from serious anxiety around things like test-taking, flying, and lots of things, all of which are brutalizing her self-worth and affecting her performance in work and life. She's ready to get professional help. Lucky for Bernice, she has a lot of options. Psychotherapy, perhaps the predominant type of psychological treatment involves a therapist using a range of techniques to help a patient overcome troubles, gain insight, and achieve personal growth. Now, you know by now that there are all kinds of perspectives on the human mind and lots of different philosophies on how to approach it.  So it may not come as a surprise that there's also a variety of ways that experts analyze and treat ailments of the mind. They each create their own kind of experience for a p

  INTRODUCTION: I can be smooth charming and slick. I can make a very confident impression and it's hard to put me at a loss for words. Sometimes I find myself fantasizing about unlimited success power and beauty. I have repeatedly used deceit to cheat, con, or defraud others for my personal gain. To be honest, I don't have much concern for the feelings of other people or their suffering. Doesn't sound like the Hank you know, does it? These are all statements from a self-assessment measure for personality disorders that let patients describe themselves, ranking each statement in terms of how accurate they think it is. To be honest, you can't really rely too much on this kind of self-reporting to assess what we're talking about today, because while some people who are overconfident or obsessed with power or downright deceitful might tell you that they are, there's a certain subset that won't. Many of the disorders we've talked about so far are considered