• How The Mind Really Works: 10 Counterintuitive Psychology Studies

Cognitive dissonance is the first counterintuitive that states the mind finds it hard to hold two contradictory beliefs, so we unconsciously alter one to make it fit the other. An example would be classic study showing that student find boring job with lower salary interesting. The second one is Hallucinations are common, one third of normal people hallucinate a day, which make us not very different from people with mental illness. Third counterintuitive will be The Placebo Effect, it states that our mind tricks us to feeling relief from a pain after taking medicine without the medicine even kicking in. Obedience to authority was fourth in the study, despite of our thoughts of being independently open minded people, an officer can make the majority of people things that wouldn’t have done independently. The following on the list is Choice Blindness, coming as fifth, research shows that in some circumstances we have little or no awareness of choices we’ve made and why. So rationalization is used to help us cover our track. The sixth is that Fantasies Reduce Motivation, people use fantasy to help achieve goals but it can also cause to lay back if you can already taste the future of your fantasy. Number seven on the list is Brainstorming Doesn’t Work. psychological research shows that people tend to forget or question their own ideas when there are many ideas being thrown around in a group, it is better to think alone and present it for further review. Don’t Suppress is Eighth, suppressing thoughts is counter productive. It only makes the thought come back stronger than before, distraction is a better solution. The ninth  counterintuitive is Incredible Multi-Tasking skills. People can read and write, in a study of multitasking two people were trained for sixteen weeks and by the end they were able to read and categorize words from their reading simultaneously. The Tenth and last one is It’s The Little Things, Major event in life such as graduation, getting married, the birth of a child usually affects us through the daily hassles and uplifts it brings, but it shows that little things like getting enough rest, good relationship with family and friends is what make us happy.

This was a good reading, I found some interesting studies like the first one which talks about cognitive dissonance. Yes sometimes we have to make changes to fit two different beliefs but the example given in the article wasn’t convincing enough for me. Most people I know would take a boring job for a low salary, it’s usually the opposite.

• Avoiding the Curse of the Oil-Rich Nations

Countries with oil based economy eventually end up with the most troubled economy. Oil is a capital-intensive industry, it creates few jobs and wipes out many jobs. The benefit of oil is more state concentrated, oil producers focus more on bribing or doing for politicians. This can also lead to conflict, cause if the government can finance itself with oil money it doesn’t need to tax citizens,

But these countries might have a way out of this “curse”. An example would be the Alaska permanent fund founded in 1976, where the money is invested each year and every Alaskan get a share of dividends. The dividend check is considered as taxable income.

Oil-to-Cash can help the citizen depending on their needs, it can create programs that aim to improve citizen’s social welfare. The advantage of cash payout is its convenience for porn governed countries to do well, and there are fewer chances to play politics or corruptions.

This is a good strategy to help boost the lifestyle of the poor but that is only if the governance is good. So I disagree that Oil-to-Cash is a solution for countries filled with corrupt politicians. Especially if we are dealing with cash, it is very easy to steal money because it can operate of books.

• How to Change the World

Social entrepreneurs are key for social change, they are the driven, creative individuals who questions the status of society and its laws. It tells the fascinating story about individuals who with their non profit organizations  helped change the life, educated, saved the life of millions of people.

My summary for this article is not long because I believe I have to read the book, the article was more like another summary. But it is definitely a topic that I’m interested in writing about.

The Marshmallow Test

It seems counterintuitive how a marshmallow can base off how if you were better at life than others.  In the 1960’s Marshmallow test was instructed but Walter Mischel who was then a professor at Stanford.  He put nursery school students and put them into a room individually and gave them a treat.  But there was a catch to it.  Mischel told each child that they could eat the treat right that second, or they can wait fifteen minutes until the experimenter returned.  If they did wait they would be given another treat.  Overtime, he found the same children that he used in this experiment and came to a conclusion that this had real life consequences.  He concluded that the children who had waited to receive another treat had the ability to become healthier, get better grades, enjoy higher success, and be able to prove to be better at staying in relationships.

This had changed how educators view success and how to be successful.  They realized that, “it’s not just intelligence that matters, but self-control and patience and being able to tam one’s impulses-from the desire to eat the marshmallow to the desire to blow off an exam or have an affair.”

However, there has been a new study conducted by a cognitive science graduate student at the University of Rochester, named Celeste Kidd.  Kidd had spent most of her childhood working in shelters for homeless people and families and she believed that it helped her understand what children in their situation would do, given the marshmallow test.  She is “fairly sure those kids would eat the marshmallow right away.”  But Kidd believes not only because they were weak but also because there was lack of trust.

Kidd made her own version of the marshmallow test and had a group of children split into two.  In the first group she promised to give them better art supplies if they waited 15 minutes along with bigger and better stickers than the ones they received at first.  She did the same with the second group however only carried through with the first.  She came back with brand new art supplies and bigger stickers but told the second group of children that there weren’t any new art supplies or stickers.  When she gave both groups marshmallows, nine out of 14 children in the reliable condition waited 15 minutes to receive another treat, while only one of the 14 children in the unreliable condition waited those 15 minutes. This shows that in Mischel’s study, he focused on determination and how childhood decisions and explain adult decisions.  Kidd’s study focused on a situational attribute.

How To Make Doctors Worse

It seems counterintuitive that someone’s economic standing can affect someone else’s performance rating.  As cruel as that sounds, doctors in Massachusetts General Hospital had examined performance rating for physicians.  The outcome came to be that doctors who treat patients who are economically underdeveloped, they receive lower performance ratings. It turns out that patients who have higher incomes are the most difficult to treat and please.  This turns out to be a larger conflict than it once started out. Medicare wants to measure these performances to their payment; meaning that doctors who are paid less when treating poorer patients, they will be more hesitant to treat those patients.

Yet, politically correcting this imbalance will be difficult and physicians who only have a handful of these patients will make them feel that they are being punished for the patient overall discrimination.  However, these physicians are in the same practice group, so why is the mystery that some are getting lower ratings than other physicians?

Free Heroin to Battle Addiction

It seems counterintuitive to being giving the worst drug addict daily doses of heroin in a government funded clinic.  In Vancouver, there are clinics where they provide drug addicts with doses of their drug every day.  They say that if they make the patient comfortable by giving them doses 2 or 3 times a day, it is less likely for them to “end up in an alley dead with a needle in their arms or much less likely to sell themselves sexually for money to buy drugs.”  This ultimately ends up helping those addicts but also for the civilians around them.  They won’t have to break into someone’s car to steal something, or to rob a store to get money.  They argue that if you simply give them the drugs, then they are keeping the society out of harm.

Kevin Thompson is a former heroin addict who visit the clinic about three times a day to get his doses.  When Kevin was interviewed after his fix, he confessed that getting free heroin is the best way; it’s either having the government clinic provide you with the drug or having a guy like Kevin breaking into your car, or non intently hurting someone. Some of these programs have been run in Europe for years.  Dr. Scott MacDonald says that by providing them with the drugs, it will make their lives come into order again.  There is a possibility for the drug addicts to become clean, forcing them to flush the drugs. This is a treatment, where drug addicts cannot have any success in rehab centers.

Free Heroin to Battle Addiction

It is counterintuitive that instead of Vancouver trying to fix the heroin problem by getting the users to quit, they are fixing the problem by giving away free heroin to users. The city says that they are fixing the problem by making the drugs available so users won’t have to rob or commit crimes to get drugs. This doesn’t fix the drug problem it it just prolongs it.

Giving the users this free heroin isn’t helping their addiction, it just keeps them from getting drugs off the streets. Users are still addicted and using a very hard core drug but now its supervised. Heroin is a drug that affects a persons health greatly. In the videos you can clearly see that these users look sickly, pale, and malnourished. The government doesn’t care about their health, as long as they’re not out robbing and looting. They people in the video even go as far as saying that the users were acting normal while on the drugs. Heroin is a hallucinogen and causes its users to see things that aren’t real. They may seem normal, but they are high and aren’t functionally normally.The city needs to help its users by giving them rehab so they can no longer use. After they stop their health will return and they will be able to function normally in society.

Principal Encourages Cheating

It is counterintuitive that the school would rather cheat for better PSSA scores, than actually help better the students education in order to achieve better scores.

Schools are suppose to give students the best education possible. If the students scores are low they need to fix the problem by helping the students learn more efficiently. Cheating to get better scores isn’t helping the students learn, it just pushes them along to the next grade without the needed information they need. The school is robbing their students of an education.

Organ Donor Vultures?

It is counterintuitive that organ donors are trying to help people by killing other. The organ donation groups are falsifying examinations in order to get organs earlier and quicker.

These groups are suppose to be helping people, but they are doing it at the expense of others. The companies constantly check up on patients not to see if they are ok, but to see how close they are to dieing. They are only worried about getting their organs in time. They send doctors to families and tell them to lie and pronounce their loved one dead. These people are in fact under law legally alive. This can go as far as being called murder. After the doctors pronounce them dead the hospitals pull the plug which kills the patient. This contradicts the whole purpose of the group which is to help people.

Belgian Senate has passed a bill extending euthanasia of young children with disabilities. A shocking turn of events to advocates of pro-life worldwide. The vote ended in a landslide of 50 members voting for it to 17 against it. The majority of those against the bill were apart Christian Democrats party, a widely known Catholic party.

This is not the first time Belgium has voted toward euthanasia of young people; in another landslide vote, 13 voted to allow minors to receive euthanasia under special conditions as well as allowing euthanasia to adults suffering from the mental illness dementia. Only 4 committee members voted against the bill as it was viewed as inhumane.

Euthanasia has been allowed in Belgium for 13 years, however it was only limited to 18 year olds. Belgium is not the first European country to allow euthanasia, however it was the first country to lift the age restrictions on the procedure. It has been open to minors so long as they have a guardians consent.

The topic of euthanasia for children with disabilities has always been viewed as an ethical problem, often argued as lack of morals among the committee members that vote toward passing such bills. The usual standpoint as all lives, regardless of disabilities, should be valued. However, this is countered by Belgian Senate members as mercy killing. Why have children with disabilities continue to suffer?

What started as a “mercy killing” procedure, euthanasia has become a new method for severely depressed young adults to commit suicide legally. It has been a gray area as to what kind of symptoms or illness allows them to seek euthanasia. As in what kind of suffering is allowed: Physical or psychological.

Close call in death ruling of potential organ donor

It seems counterintuitive that doctors would rather take organs out of a dying organ donor than possibly extend his life. A California man, John Foster, was pronounced brain-dead by two doctors independent of each other, and the hospital was ready to pull the plug. When the patients daughter saw the 2nd doctor come in, spend no more than 5 minutes with the patient, and pronounced him brain-dead by simply shining a light into his eyes, she knew something fishy was going on.

A third doctor was called in, spend a little less than an hour with the patient, and noticed he still had a gag and cough reflex, both of which are signs a patient is not brain-dead. It must also be noted that the patient was on the organ donation list, and was only two signatures away from donating all of his organs.

The doctors are now suspected of wrongfully declaring the patient brain-dead in order to have his organs removed to be given to patients awaiting them. We now are alarmed that this type of malpractice is a more widespread occurrence than we may think. Doctors may be pronouncing loved-ones legally dead while they really aren’t, just so they can remove their organs and put them inside somebody else.

How Mom’s Death Changed My Thinking About End-of-Life Care

It seems counterintuitive to spend so much money on a loved one who is almost certainly going to die. Charles Orstein’s mother Harriet was sent into a coma after her heart stopped while doctors were inserting a nasogastric tube. She was hooked up to a breathing machine, had a feeding tube inserted,  and was given a constant iv drip of medication to stabilize her blood pressure. Obviously this all costs a whole lot of money, on top of the cost to even be admitted in a hospital room. So Charles started wondering if end of life care is really worth it. He was really skeptical that she wouldn’t make it out of her coma because she had survived several accidents prior, but test after test seemed to solidify the reality that she wasn’t coming back.

Charles and his family had a decision to make, unplug her and fulfill her wishes, or prolong her treatment at a chance of a recovery. Ultimately they unplugged Harriet and she went very peacefully, but this situation left Charles thinking. End of life care is a very expensive ordeal and Charles was wondering if he had make the wrong decision in keeping her on life support for two extra days while he tried to make a decision about his mother.  Ultimately Charles called an expert and asked him if he made the wrong decision. The expert agreed with his decision and said he would had still backed him if he had left her on life support for several more weeks.

Paper or Plastic?

It seems counterintuitive that producing more wood products, such as paper and lumber, can cut down on pollution. Paper actually combats air pollution. It’s been proven that a ton of paper can hold up to 400lbs of carbon from being released back into the environment. When paper is burned, it is turned into just carbon, than the carbon atoms pair up with two oxygen atoms and create carbon dioxide, or CO2, a greenhouse gas that is harmful to Earth’s atmosphere. So as paper is recycled instead of burned, more and more carbon is being stored in that paper rather than released into the air to be paired up with oxygen and destroy our Ozone.

Paper decomposes though, so it’s not as effective of a solution to carbon storage than we think. Wood itself is a much better storage facility for carbon. So there has been a recent push to construct buildings made of mostly wood rather than metals. So think twice before tossing that piece of paper into the trash can rather than the recycle bin.

Predictions Grab Bag

It’s both counterintuitive and not counterintuitive to make many of the predictions included in this web article. Many of these predictions follow the projections we’ve made thus far. Others travel a path of slight chance and inference. Included in the article are 20 separate predictions, two of which will be the focus of this summary.

It not very counterintuitive to predict that in the near future rival countries will make bolder moves against the United States (topic number one). One thing many people can agree on is that history tends to repeat itself, and as mentioned in this section of the article, no civilization lasts forever. Better put, no civilization has ever remained at the “top” forever. There’s always been shifts in which country is the world power. As of now it’s the US, before us it was the UK, next it could be China or even Russia. Over time, the countries who already have a distaste in America could begin to become less timid in showing such feeling.

It seems counterintuitive, however, to predict that a vaccine will rid the world of AIDs (topic number three) in the future. I’m not doubting we will have synthesized a vaccine for AIDs and/or HIV. What I’m calling counterintuitive is the thought of eradication. The article uses polio as its crutch, however, despite much of our efforts in the past, diseases like polio and mumps are making a comeback. Now a few years ago I would have been a fool to mention such blasphemy, yet in today’s world, our free world, parents feel that they should decide what is best for their children. And this includes their right to not vaccinate their children against such “yesterday” diseases. Even if that right puts the well-being of every other child at risk. So when there is a vaccine for AIDs or HIV in the near future, it may not be of much use to us, since many people will opt out of said vaccine anyways.

How to Armor Planes

It seems counterintuitive to add extra armor to planes in places where there was little or no damage on planes that have returned safely, however Hungarian-born mathematician Abraham Wald would disagree.

During World War II, UK’s Royal Air Force (RAF) lost many planes due to the Germans’ anti-aircraft guns. The logical response to their guns would have been additional armor on the planes. However, in order for the planes to remain efficient, functional, and mobile, they couldn’t just throw armor over the entire plane. If they’d have done that there would be less armor, and fuel, to go around. They needed to calculate the most vital parts of a plane, and intuition tells us to armor the parts of a plane that received the most flak, however, that in itself is flawed because it is based on planes that made it back to base. Henceforth it would make more sense to armor the parts of the planes with minimal or no damage.

Massive Online Collaboration

In no way can it be made that using a massive group of people to collaborate through the internet to achieve a resource-demanding task in short time is counterintuitive.

There have been several projects where the use of millions of people world-wide led to a more efficient completion of said project. In this video, Luis von Ahn discusses his team’s project reCAPTCHA. CAPTCHA is the box commonly used on online registration forms with characters that can’t be read by computer programs. These are used to authenticate the user’s liveliness, so programmers can’t exploit the protected process, such as buying tickets or posting to online blogs such as this one. reCAPTCHA took advantage of the fact that over 200 million CAPTCHAs were entered a day and added a second word which was a word from an older book which a computer couldn’t correctly read. By doing this, users who enter reCAPTCHAs help digitize books, up to 2 million a day.

His team later went on to create Duolingo, the free language-teaching service. This uses a similar tactic in using millions of dedicated users to achieve an otherwise expensive and resource demanding task. In just 80 hours Duolingo could translate wikipedia to Spanish, a process which would normally cost $50 million and 5 weeks of work with 100,000 people employed. This kind of massive online collaboration is mutually beneficial and an efficient use of the fact that we have access to virtually limitless and light-speed data transfer.