Throughout this reading, I found that there were a lot of similarities between this reading and a lot of the terms/vocabulary I used in my AP psychology class. For example, naturalistic observation is observing an animal/species in its natural environment without causing any distractions just observing g how it would usually act on its own. The next term that stood out to me was a retrospective case study which is “A type of longitudinal case study design in which all data, including first-person accounts, are collected after the fact. The events and activities under study have already occurred, and the outcomes of these events and activities are known.” Studying why something happened or looking at the cause and effect after the event has occurred. Finally, the last term that stood out to me was a correlational study. In correlational studies, there is no such thing as causation there are only relationships between two entities. For example, +1 being a perfect positive correlation, 0 being no correlation, and -1 being a perfect negative correlation.  

When thinking of naturalistic observation what first came to my mind was Jane Goodall and her observation of chimpanzees in the wild. She observed their behaviors from afar without drawing attention to herself causing the monkeys to likely change their behavior. In the reading, the example that they gave relating to retrospective case studies was studying why people protested/what caused people to protest and discovering the link between the two. For correlational studies what stood out to me during my psychology class was that the reason why correlation does not lead to causation is that there are extremely strange correlational relationships such as eating watching the movie Nemo can lead to children taking longer to become potty trained strange studies like that.

The article discussed six different psychological phenomenons but the one that stood out to me the most was Chicken. In this theory, each side tries to push the other as close as they can to the edge to make them submit first. A game is played that is just like this in which two people drive cars as fast as they can towards one another and the first person to turn away is the chicken. You are trying to push the other person as close to the edge as possible without getting physically harmed. The reason why this stood out to me is because it relates very much so to my term paper. My term paper is on the psychological principles during the cold war and the effect that it had on the war. This phenomenon of chicken was very much so apparent during the Cold War it was all about who was going to blink first/submit first. A prime example of this was when Russian ships approached and crossed the blockade surrounding Cuba. The Russians were playing Chicken with Kennedy trying to get him to make the first move and attack the Rusian fleet but he did not do so. Who was going to make the first move and turn the cold war into a hot war?

The first article that was assigned to us for reading was extremely interesting to me. It argued that prescription drug laws violate patients’ rights to self-medication. It began by discussing two ideas called risky refusal and risky access. Risky refusal is where a doctor can strongly recommend that you get a procedure or take a certain medication to help with an ailment. Doctors do not have the ability to force you into doing anything. Whereas risky access is where a patient feels as though they need medication to help with their ailment whereas a doctor believes that is not the case.  The author believes that this is in violation of the Kantian principle of treating people as rational autonomous agents. He believes that if a patient has the ability to not take medication then another individual should have the option to take medication if they want to. I completely disagree with his viewpoints. The main reason being that if drugs were made over the counter people would have the ability to abuse them or misdiagnose themselves. This would cause another major problem in the US, a country that already struggles with drug use. In addition, these drugs could be sold on the black market if made more accessible leading to more misuse of the drug.

The next article discusses how preventing immigrants from coming into our country is unjust. They believe it interferes with liberty and maintains this problem of global poverty because people are unable to escape. The author compares this to someone already living in the US and preventing them from moving to another state. The only issue that I have with this argument is that the woman is a US citizen who pays taxes and works. Whereas with illegal aliens they are not taxed on their income and are not guaranteed to work. I am all in favor of legal immigrants and understand how hard it is to come into the US legally.

In my IAT test, I found that I had a strong automatic association between Shameful and High-fat Food and Acceptable and Low-fat food. I do not find this information surprising to me because I am a health nut who enjoys fitness, healthy foods/clean eating, and living a healthy lifestyle. However, after craving junk food such as Oreos, ice cream, or any type of dessert I feel somewhat upset at myself for giving into a weakness like that. After eating junk food I do not feel as physically alert/awake as opposed to when I eat healthy food. In addition, my performance in athletics also drops when I put unhealthy food into my body. There is of course nothing wrong with indulging yourself in unhealthy food every once in a while but when I eat it too often is when I start to get upset with myself and try to deny those cravings.

In the Hoyt & Murphy reading it discussed in depth what stereotype threat is and the effects that stereotype threat has on people. Stereotype Threat is a situation in which they feel at risk of falling into stereotypes about their in-group. The example that was discussed in depth in this reading was that of which black men were distributed a test by a while male and they were told that blacks typically do worse on these types of assessments as opposed to whites. When they told them this they performed much worse. Whereas when they were not told this information they performed much better on the test because they did not want to fall into the trap. Another example of this. Another example of this was shown at a STEM event in which the event discussed how masculine traits would foster more success in this field/how it was a male-dominated field.  What they found is that many women dropped out of the program/felt discouraged to attend the event or enter into a STEM field. This also plays into this idea of implicit biases in which you have unconscious feelings towards a specific gender, race, or ethnicity. In positions of leadership, there is an implicit bias against women and implicit bias for men because leadership roles are associated with masculine traits that most men possess.

I thoroughly enjoyed this reading and loved how it related to psychology. I am absolutely fascinated by human behavior and the way in which the mind works. The article discussed a lot of very interesting topics but the one that stood out to me the most was false identification, impression management, and blue lies. The reason why false identification stood out to me is because it strongly relates to another psychological principle of the same race effect. In high school, we learned about this pertaining to a rape case in which a black man raped a white female. Due to the fact that African Americans are a minority group in the US, unfortunately, play into this psychological principle in which it is hard to decipher between two similar-looking black men. In the example, I learned in high school a white woman wrongfully convicted a black man or raping her. In the example they use in the text, they discuss the words hit vs. smashed to estimate speeds at which the cars were traveling. The ones who were asked what was the approximate speed of the car when it smashed into the other said that the speed at which they hit was faster than those who were asked what was the speed at which it hit? The reason why impression management stood out to me is because the example they used in the text related to implicit biases and combating them. When a black aide was in the room people said that blacks were not dumber than whites and that inter-racial marriage was most certainly acceptable. Whereas when there was a white aide in the room more people said blacks were dumber than whites and inter-racial marriage was not ok. Showing that when the black male was in the room they were trying to combat bias. The last principle that stood out to me was blue lies. Blue lies are told by people in an attempt to help themselves or their group to be seen by others as to how they see themselves.