“Videri quam esse” (“To seem to be, rather than to be”)
I'm strange but i like to be a good strange, My name is Clarence, born in 1988, Pisces and I'm a student of Sociology and the child of the internet. I usually feel like my life has no meaning and i want to die but sometimes it seems like life is worth living for and i love everything in it. If it seems odd to read think what it might be like living it. I like reading philosophy, fiction and tech news.
This Blog is where i collect all the the weird and interesting links from around the net, its not meant to be that serious and just fun. If you stop by here you can enjoy comics, tech, current events, sociology, a little pornography (or erotica if you prefer to call it that) and more weird stuff. Please feel free to tell he what you like and dislike about the site and more of what you want to see.
Please feel free to talk to me by letter in my ask or by following me on other social networks but please just throw me a message WHO YOU ARE.
By the By it goes without saying you should make sure children don't read most of this.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
How to Deal with Mistakes and Failures in Life
Remind yourself that:
1. This is not the end. You are going to survive. There’s no point in pretending that life is always great. At times we trip and fall, or we make some bad mistakes. Allow yourself to heal, then get up and start again. Take one or two small steps … and know you’re going to survive!
2. Everybody makes mistakes along the way. You’re only a failure if you give up and don’t try. Accept that you are human … and move on with your life.
3. Positive thinking leads to positive results. If you think you can succeed then there’s a good chance that you will. The mind is very powerful – we create what we believe.
4. Success is closer than you think when you are down. Mistakes can be our teachers; they don’t mean all is lost. In fact, you’re one step closer to getting what you want.
5. You are not your mistakes. Don’t fall into the trap of defining who you are by different things you do – or by your failures and mistakes.
6. There are very few mistakes which are truly devastating. Mistakes are merely setbacks – a few clouds in the sky. Get up, keep pushing forwards and move towards your dreams.
7. A failure is sometimes a blessing in disguise. Not getting what you want can sometimes be a stroke of luck. It makes you reconsider and try some different things … And these can often lead to better opportunities.
8. You have the power to determine your own happiness. – You can hold onto the pain and the failures of the past – or you can choose to let them go and fix your eyes on what’s ahead. It’s up to you to choose what will become your destiny.
Shame: A Durkheimian Take – The New Inquiry
The fact that addiction is a clinical condition that is straying into more and more areas of life is itself an interesting sociological phenomenon. It’s not that the field of psychology does not or should not exist, but efforts to cram more and more into this field represents a form of societal dishonesty that rivals the psychic dishonesty of addicts refusing to come clean.
(Source: mlarson)
A friend asked me to put some common fallacies in context. Here goes:
Anchoring- ‘When I’ve had cabbage on food before, it always tasted good. Therefore, if I always get food with cabbage on it, it will always taste good.’
Gambler’s Fallacy- ‘Every time I’ve bought a cabbage, it’s always been fresh. So the next cabbage I bought will HAVE to be a bad cabbage, even though the chance of getting a fresh or bad cabbage is 50/50.’
Reactivity - ‘I know my mother-in-law hates cabbage, so when she comes over, I’ll make it look like I hate cabbage.’
Self-fulfilling Prophecy- ‘God, Maji made me this stupid cabbage soup for dinner, but I knew she was a horrible cook, so I knew the soup was going to taste horrible. And what do you know, it did, even though everybody else liked it!’
Halo effect- ‘Maji likes cabbage, so obviously she eats healthy. I bet she exercises a lot too!’
Mob mentality- ‘Oh man, it seems like everybody’s eating cabbage these days. I should probably have some too.’
Reactance- ‘Maji’s such a bitch! She told me to eat all this cabbage, but I’m just gonna sit here and not eat any of it! That’ll show her!’
Confirmation bias- ‘The last two times I ate cabbage, I found money in the laundry. I bet if I keep eating cabbage, I’ll keep finding money in the laundry! Screw further research!’
Planning fallacy- ‘Yeah, I can totally eat this cabbage in five minutes… oh man, has it been an hour already?’
Just-World Phenomenon- ‘Are you saying that bimbo Stacy choked on a cabbage last night at the party? Uggh, that slutknewshe couldn’t eat a whole cabbage… she totally deserved it.’
Self-Serving Bias- ‘When I make a really good cabbage soup, I bet it’s because I’m so damn good at cooking. When it’s bad, though, it’s just because the cabbage wasn’t fresh, or the stove is broken.’
Bias blind spot - ‘Yeah, I’m a perfectly sane human being. Now eat my cabbage soup: it’s fantastic. Freshest ingredients possible; after all, I’ve been having nothing but spoiled stuff for the past couple of weeks, so according to the odds…’
(Source: how-unfair)
So I felt the need to do this today…
I was just quite upset that someone would think jealousy is a good trait. Not being jealous is most likely a sign of someone who is comfortable with themselves and I find it a shame that most people would think of them as unfaithful. Since when was lack of jealousy a good thing?
I think this seriously needs to be a well known thing…that jealousy is NOT a sign of true love, and that it is actually a sign of insecurities and possession. I feel like this applies to way to many of the relationships i’ve seen and its ridiculous.
Thanks sociology of marriage and family!
from: Invitation to Psychology - Carole Wade, Carol Tavris
We are all susceptible to the hindsight bias, which refers to our tendency to overestimate our powers of prediction once we know the outcome of given event. For example, research has shown that on the day after an election, when people are asked which candidates they would have picked to win, they almost always believe they would have picked the actual winners- even though the day before the election, their predictions wouldn’t have been nearly as accurate.
Elliot Aronson in The Social Animal (via psychologicalsnippets)
Much of the research confirms things we’ve always suspected. For example, in general people who are in good romantic relationships are happier than those who aren’t. Healthy people are happier than sick people. People who participate in their churches are happier than those who don’t. Rich people are happier than poor people. And so on.
That said, there have been some surprises. For example, while all these things do make people happier, it’s astonishing how little any one of them matters. Yes, a new house or a new spouse will make you happier, but not much and not for long. As it turns out, people are not very good at predicting what will make them happy and how long that happiness will last. They expect positive events to make them much happier than those events actually do, and they expect negative events to make them unhappier than they actually do.
Harvard Business Review interviews Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness. (via curiositycounts)
(Source: psychology-terms)
Social Psychology Basics
Our perception of ourselves in relation to the rest of the world plays an important role in our choices, behaviors, and beliefs. Conversely, the opinions of others also impact our behavior and the way we view ourselves. Social psychology is a branch of psychology concerned with how social phenomena influence us and how people interact with others. There are some basic aspects of social behavior that play a large role in our actions and how we see ourselves.
- Social behavior is goal-oriented. Our interactions function to serve a goal or fulfill a need. Some common goals or needs include the need for social ties, the desire to understand ourselves and others, the wish to gain or maintain status or protection, and to attract companions.
- The interaction between the individual and the situation determines the outcome. In many instances, people behavior very differently in various situations. The situation plays an important role and has a strong influence on our behavior.
- People spend a great deal of time considering social situations. Our social interactions help form our self-concept and perception.
One method of forming self-concept is through a reflected appraisal process in which we imagine how other people see us. Another method is through a social comparison process whereby we consider how we compare to other people in our peer group.- We also analyze and explain the behavior of those around us. One common phenomenon is expectation confirmation, where we tend to ignore unexpected attributes and look for evidence that confirms our preexisting beliefs about others. This helps simplify our worldview, but it also skews our perception and can contribute to stereotyping.
- Another influence on our perceptions of other people can be explained by the theory of correspondent inferences. This occurs when we infer that the actions and behaviors of others correspond to their intentions and personalities. While behavior can be informative in some instances, especially when the person’s actions are intentional, it can also be misleading. If we have limited interaction with someone, the behavior we see may be atypical or caused by the specific situation rather than by the persons overriding dispositional characteristics.
Studying social psychology can enrich our understanding of ourselves and of the world around us. (Source)
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Carl Gustav Jung (via sweethomechcago)
(Source: what-is-the-psyche)
Science and Philosophy: The "chills" you get from listening to music is called musical frission
ScienceDaily (Jan. 12, 2011) — Scientists have found that the pleasurable experience of listening to music releases dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain important for more tangible pleasures associated with rewards such as food, drugs and sex. The new study from The Montreal…
Intimate relationship is a dynamic, often dizzying dance of contradictions that is sometimes delightful and seductive, sometimes fierce and combative, sometimes energizing, sometimes exhausting. This dance requires being able to flow continuously back and forth between opal opposites — between coming together and moving apart, taking hold and letting go, engaging and allowing space, yielding and taking the lead, surrendering and standing firm, being soft and being strong. This is not an easy dance to learn. Many couples quickly lose the flow, fall out of step, and wind up deadlocked in antagonistic positions, struggling for supremacy, pushing and pulling, attacking or withdrawing. Teachers of the dance are few, and as the years go by the conventional dance steps we learned from the culture seem increasingly stiff and outmoded. How, we may wonder, can we learn to dance with grace and power?
John Welwood
(via awakeinthedream)
A psychologist at a girl’s college asked the members of his class to compliment any girl wearing red. Within a week the cafeteria was a blaze of red. None of the girls were aware of being influenced, although they did notice that the atmosphere was more friendly. A class at the University of Minnesota is reported to have conditioned their psychology professor a week after he told them about learning without awareness. Every time he moved toward the right side of the room, they paid more attention and laughed more uproariously at his jokes, until apparently they were able to condition him right out the door.
W. Lambert Gardiner, Psychology: A Story of a Search, 1970 (via anartea)
(Source: eatmeoutnabokov)
Suicide is the fourth leading cause of death among youth aged 10 to 14 years, the third among 15 to 24 years, the second among 25 to 34 years.
These data are disturbing, but we know that among LGB youth suicide attempt are even more likely compared with heterosexual peers.
Hatzenbuehler (2011) conducted a research finding that lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth were significantly more likely to attempt suicide compared with heterosexuals, a proportion of 21.5% vs 4.2%.
The data also showed that:
“Among LGB youth, the risk of attempting suicide was 20% greater in negative environments compared with positive environments (25.47% of LGB living in negative environments attempted suicide at least once versus 20.37% in positive environments). In contrast, among heterosexual youth, the risk of suicide attempts was only 9% greater in negative environments.”
The author created:
“an index of the social environment surrounding LGB youth, which was composed of 5 different items (described in more detail below): (1) proportion of same-sex couples living in the counties; (2) proportion of Democrats living in the counties; (3) proportion of schools with gay-straight alliances; (4) proportion of schools with antibullying policies specifically protecting LGB students; and (5) proportion of schools with antidiscrimination policies that included sexual orientation.”
Similar measure of LGB climate was found having a strong correlation with LGB adults’ perceptions of how supportive their communities were.
These results imply that the social environment appears to confer risk for suicide attempts over and above individual-level risk factors.
We really need to create more positive environments.
Great talents are the most lovely and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off.
Carl Jung (via janicehunter)