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!" 
Kohn researched the truths behind proverbs. Conclusion, some are true and some are not.
Cry and you cry alone: true. Bad cycle, people do not want to be around a sad person.
Spare the rod and spoil the child: very wrong.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease: true, request more, get more.
Actions speak louder than words: true, people give more credence to behavior (20 times).
Beauty is only skin-deep: bias against attractive people, good assumptions are made about them, and they
are happier and have higher self-esteem. Better everything.
Beauty is as beauty does: beauty goes the other way around, describing positive things for pictures.
Marry in haste, repent at leisure: true, young couples marrying are more likely to divorce.
Familiarity breeds contempt: wrong, familiarity breeds liking, people like faces they remember more or
have seen more often.
He who lives by the sword dies by the sword: assuming it is a gun, it is true. People shoot their close ones
more frequently than they shoot intruders.
You¶re never too old to learn vs. You can¶t teach an old dog new tricks: people learn through all stages of
life, however, people over 60 have difficulties remembering texts. Stimuli to brain activity brings elderly
back years to their previous marks.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder vs. Out of sight, out of mind: Lovers¶ absence intensify the feeling,
negative feelings makes the heart grow colder.
Birds of a feather flock together vs. Opposites attract: similar people like each other, race, intelligence etc,
same level of attractiveness

!#


Obedience is a psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose. Obedience serves
numerous productive functions and could be used for both malicious and educative acts (Nazi Germany).
Experiment with 15-450 volts, high authority from Yale lab with no special power, 26 out of 40 continued
to the end. Many expressed high nervousness during the experiment (bizarre laughs) and sighs of relief
after it. Experimental feedback from the experimenter to the subjects, ³you have to proceed; the experiment
requires that you continue´. Learned not to harm others, still they obeyed and acted against their own
values. Observers through a one-way mirror uttered disbelief during the experiment. The experiment¶s
conditions that made it successful were: high reputation (Yale), good purpose (learning strategies), both
subjects there voluntarily, some kind of obligation to the experimenter (gotten paid to come), the teacher
got that role out of chance, vagueness over what the experimenter wants from his teacher, the shocks are
painful but not harmful, the learner plays along to level 20, the teacher must publicly respond to demands
of two persons each mutually exclusive, personal experience against the experimenter¶s weight of scientific
authority, little time for reflection, the conflict of not to harm others versus the tendency to obey those
whom we perceive to be legitimate authorities.

!

 $
Mock prison in Stanford with male college students acting as guards and prisoners after being arrested at
their homes. They get deinvidualized and are forced to follow strict rules. Guards were aggressive and
exerted mastery and control while prisoners were passive and exerted hopelessness and depression. All
assumed their roles quickly and readily, giving up their identities. Act of rebellion occurred on the second
day. Guards executed punishment involving intimidation and harassment and made a privileged cell for the
good prisoners. They made prisoners obey petty, meaningless and often inconsistent rules, also forcing
them to engage tedious and useless work. Guards behaved obnoxiously. Prisoners almost exclusively talked
about prison topics with each other. They did not get to know each other and thereby not sympathizing with
them; they did not have respect for each other. Prisoners were controlled of their freedom of action and
thought. Four prisoners were terminated from the experiment after extreme anxiety symptoms and one from
psychosomatic rashes. Some guards were kinder while some performed acts of hostility, cruelty and
degradation. The guards become the prison and they do not want to be sadistic and do those things. They
want to have their own will. Do nothing except what is required. Do not feel, like or want anything. A
guard shares his thoughts each say, and they get worse by the day. Institutional pressure of a prison
environment could radically transform educated young men. We should not underestimate the power of
situational forces. In a mock hospital where patients who acted mentally ill, showed symptoms
indistinguishable from actual symptoms of mentally ill people such as depression, uncontrollable weeping
and stealing from each other. The mock staff acted just as the guards in the prison, dehumanizing and
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taking advantage of their powerless victims. Allow ourselves being imprisoned by accepting roles other
assign us or remain passive as prisoners and thereby not having to be responsible for ones actions.

!
 %

 
We are taught to act in a certain way, abiding certain social norms and rules. It is the wiser course of action
to go with power; we are taught not to challenge it. Developing a critical eye is vital for individuals to
counteract compelling social pressures, to resist the lure of passivity and conformity.
Resisting persuasion:
Actively monitor social interactions, think ahead. Be willing to disobey simple situational rules. Never do
anything you do not believe just to act normal. Get more information to find out the consequence of
disobedience. Practice seeing through programmed responses to authority. Be aware who is controlling
whom. Refuse to accept the initial premise that someone else is more powerful, competent or more in
control than you are. State your arguments with conviction. Learn to retain a sense of self-worth in face of
intimidating circumstances like an inner core that cannot be violated. Never accept vague generalities.
Recognize ambiguous or confused messages. Paraphrase thoughts out loud. Make creative arguments and
counterarguments. Seek outside information and criticism. Notice tricks in deceptive packaging. Focus on
what you are doing. Maintain some nonsocial interest. Do something that looks foolish now and then.
Avoid getting sucked into unwanted confessions. Avoid making decisions under stress. Relax when you
feel uncomfortably aroused. Test the limits of your options. Test others reaction by complying with their
demands.
Resisting systems:
Resist the lure of uniforms. Develop a sense of humor about yourself. Test the presence of stated or
unstated rules that unnecessarily restrict freedom of speech, action and association. Listen to criticisms of
your most cherished beliefs. Retain your sense of individual integrity. Disclose personal observations about
your surroundings. Remember that ignoring social rules is not easy. Try to encourage independent thinking
among group members. Question the importance of your commitments. Maintain outside interests and
social support. Family and friends should leave the path back home open.
Challenging the system:
Do not let your silence pass for agreement with the system. Begin assessing the power of those who hold
the reins. Appeal to the same human needs that the power-holders in the system manipulate in others. Exit
those situations in which disobedience is likely to be futile and punishable.
It takes a firm sense of social commitment to escape a system of mind control and to persist in challenging
it from without. Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

!" 

A survey says 80% of Stanford medical students are sleep deprived, getting 6.8 hours of sleep each night.
Memory is benefited by sleep. Sleep also improves accuracy in memory. For procedural memory, the deep
slow-wave stages of sleep are the most important one for improvement, especially the last two hours.
Declarative memory, by contrast gets processed during the slow-wave stages that come in the first two
hours of sleep. If somebody goes 24 hours without sleep after acquiring something it will be forgotten a
week later. Bad eating habits contribute to cognitive decline. Trans-fats are maleficent for the brain, we
make more errors with these fats. Neurons born during influence under alcohol do not mature as normal
neurons in addition to much lower neuron production. Nicotine can actually improve mental focus and have
cognitive benefits. It aids concentration in people who have ADHD. It also enhances spatial, emotional and
auditory memory. The catch is that it encourages state-dependent learning (reading in a jacket, taking the
test in a jacket). Moderation is the key to collegiate success.

!#

 
Candid camera is built on the exposure of spontaneous human behavior. Could lead to some discoveries. A
video record of how they act. Regular life ³disruption´ with unusualness. Candid camera, meaning people
are recorded unaware. Creative ideas. Lack of adequate sampling, only 1/100 is shown for maximal humor
impact not scientific purposes. It is a field that does not grow, it offers novelty but not progress. Raises
questions but perhaps not answers. Viewers¶ relative superiority over the subject adds to the entertaining
value. They laugh at the subject rather than empathize. Although bizarre, the situations are not beyond the
audience¶s understanding. The subjects¶ behavior is funny and unreasonable rather than unexplainable.
Spirit of a prank or practical joke; the wallet with a string, April Fool, instead ³Smile, you¶re on candid
camera´. Subject is grateful and relieved that the event was just a practical joke. Large budget limitation,
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cab split in two. Other forms of entertainment: gladiators (illegal vs legal). People enjoy seeing situations
that are not entirely predictable. Humor derives from a violation of cultural expectancies (more funny
within the certain culture). Candid camera avoids incidents or use of people that would be regarded as
offensive by segments of the population. Some social activities are immune as real funerals or weddings.
Too deep of a violation to the couple¶s privileged moments.

!&
One magician explains and shows the tricks behind another magician¶s illusions. The tricks are so simple
even children could master the tricks. We do not pay attention to certain evidence that, for instance,
children do. When seeing a trick: ³I experienced a sense of how strongly the mind can impose its own
interpretation on perceptions: how it can see what it expects to see, but not the unexpected.´ Sense
impressions of reality are not necessarily the same as reality. Selective perception, we see what we want to
see because we need to. We think wishfully, ignore certain kind of evidence while paying attention to
others. Selective perception of evidence is the basic method by which we construct our models of reality.
Objective models of reality are just one type of the many possible. Some people do not notice what others
notice perfectly well. People wanting to get high could get high on placebo as can people not wanting to get
high be left unaffected by drugs.

!"
%'
(
There is a downward trend in organized sports. Children prefer watching tv and doing other activities.
Organized sports has its advantages but there are some downsides to them as well, such as (good: fair
competitiveness, adult supervision, esteem if peers and brings families together, bad: put pressure on
children, too much focus on winning, more work than play, coaches know little about children and loosing
is taken seriously). Just as sports, child-directed games also have more advantages than disadvantages such
as (good: experimentation, natural adjustment, cooperation and setting the own pace with own decisions,
bad: unsupervised, unstructured, physical injury and conflicts). They filmed the differences between
organized sports and spontaneous child-directed games.

!)

Does black colored uniforms add to more violent and aggressive play. After looking at black uniformed
teams in NFL and NHL it is clear that they get more penalties. When one team switched from blue to black
their penalty rate was raised by 50%. What seems to add to this factor is that referees judge more harsh
against teams in black shirts. They made college referees judge an experimental game, they voted a
majority of penalties to the black dressed team. But this is not the whole truth since black suited players
also by wearing black shirts, play more aggressively. In a study by choosing different kinds of games the
black dressed people chose more aggressive games than those who did not wear black.

!
 
Once we have learned to expect love, favors and praise form a person close to us, that person may become
less potent than a stranger as a source of reward. But the closer the person and the more he has been a
constant source of reward, then the greater is his potential as a punisher. For the person has power to hurt
loved ones but very little power to reward. We like people who are in our proximity, have similar values
and beliefs, similar personal traits, who have pleasant and agreeable behavior, high ability. We like people
who can satisfy our needs and whose needs are easily satisfied by us. We like people who like us. General
reward-cost kind of theory: maximum gratification at minimum expense. If a person is too perfect, he or
she is not as attractive as with some kind of flaw. People like most the superior person with a flaw and least
the inferior person with a flaw (spilling coffee, interview). Increasing rewards and punishments from a
person have more impact on his or her attractiveness than constant, invariant rewards and punishments. We
like the person most who gradually likes us more and more and least the person who like us less and less,
regardless of the start. The person who has always liked us stands over the person who has never liked us
but under the person who likes us gradually more. This is called the gain-loss theory. When negative
feelings follow positive ones, they not only punish but they wipe out the reward of the earlier positive
behavior, and likewise the other way around. As a person likes us gradually more, the initially anxiety
reduces and the reward arouses. We like the anxiety reduction the most; the negative evaluations seem
essential to maximize the effect. We also like getting better comments from people that are more attractive.
In fact, we want to be liked by attractive people who did not initially like us and therefore we try to get
more liked by them. Low-involvement subjects like people who are on their side and do not care much for
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converts while high-involvement subjects prefer a convert rather than a forever-loyal person. We seem to
be forever seeking compliments from strangers and being hurt by those we love. We invest more into a
relationship that we could gain from, a generous stranger or a near lost friend. We either gain the stranger
as a friend or regain the friendship of the old friend. On the contrary, we do not care much for the greedy
stranger or the already good friend since we know we will not lose anything for not investing enough.
Commenting something negative may reestablish the intensity of a relationship. For example, a husband
telling his wife she looks ugly will make her try to look better in the eyes of her husband.

!!  
Pygmalion effect: self-fulfilling prophecy: people sometimes become what we prophesy for them. Negative
versus positive expectations while rating pictures. Same expectation followed in an experiment with an IQ
for elementary school students. The alleged intellectual bloomers earned higher scores 9 months later when
retesting after their teachers had seen them as brighter than the control group. The same phenomenon
applies to rats going through a maze. The subject with alleged smart rats got them to be faster and more
accurate than the subject with the alleged dumb rats. They treated the rats in different ways and the effect
was evident. This phenomenon does not apply everywhere, 37% in the field and 34% in the laboratory
(higher than 5% than can be considered chance). The example of teachers¶ expectations about girls reader
better than boys is an effect of teachers.
The Pygmalion effect can be explained by a four-factor theory:
-Create a warmer social-emotional mood around their ³special´ students (climate)
-Give more feedback to these students about their performance (feedback)
-Teach more material and more difficult material to their special students (input)
-Give their special students more opportunities to respond and question (output)
The climate factor: Psychiatrists who were told that patients picked them because of their therapeutic
compatibility were more likely to behave more warmly toward their patients. People who were told that a
boy had high intelligence were more likely to smile at him, nod their heads approvingly, lean toward him
and look him in the eyes for longer periods than they were told that the boy had low intelligence. People
credit favorable qualities of brighter children. The feedback factor: The teacher rewards gifted students
more than bad ones and react stronger to wrong responses from gifted students than bad ones. Teachers
give more feedback to gifted students than regular. Input factor: Tell teachers some students are intellectual
bloomers and they will treat them accordingly and expect more. Output factor:
Expect more from alleged smarter children, harder questions, more time, more responsiveness and prompt
them towards the correct answer. Demand more, get more. Double handicap: People go with their
expectations. Lower-income and black kids are expected less from than white higher-income children.
Whenever the expectation is proven wrong a dissonance occurs (maladjustment) and the teacher tends to
account for negative feelings about the student. The feelings towards the students became intensified when
proven correct and vice versa.

!! %#
Plan ahead: know the field, the company and the position. Evaluate your experience, review impressive
accomplishments and most outstanding personality traits. ³Tell me about yourself´ ± 60 second
advertisement (companies worked for, positions held, degrees obtained etc.). Summarize your
accomplishments and characteristics and you will create a great first impression. Vignitte strategy: prepare
brief descriptions of several of your most exciting experiences, awards or accomplishments (problem,
action you took, beneficial result). These vignettes validate your qualifications for the job and highlight
desirable characteristics such as leadership and teamwork. Practice, practice, practice. Be prepared to take
control of the questioning. On the morning: get a good night¶s sleep, review your 60-second ad and
vignettes, calm down, visualize success, have something to drink (not coffee or tea). Dress well, watches
are good (international symbol of responsibility and timelessness). Be early on time. Firm handshake and
eye contact, smile (people remember you more) and use last names (people love to hear their name). Wait
until you are asked to be seated and learn to be comfortable in silence. Be honest, turn the questions
around, establish follow-up (responses after interview), show willingness to learn. Never take longer than
60 seconds for an answer. Be an active listener. Mirror the interviewers body language. Be yourself. Ask
questions until they kick you out of the door. Interviewing the interviewer. Thank them for their time and
do a follow up (thank you note etc.). Interviews are opportunities.