Psychologyspeaking topic
“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues.”
— Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (1955)
practice with this topic
Set the timer (5-30 min), take 20 seconds of prep if you like, start talking. Jot your thoughts onto the sticky-note board.
similar topics
- Hearing your own voice on a recording, you say 'that's not me'; it sounds strange and foreign. Yet that's the voice everyone else has always heard. So which voice is the real you: the one inside your head, or the one the world hears?
- Social identity theory: why do we claim a team, a city, a group as 'us' and define ourselves through it? How much of our identity is made of the groups we belong to?
- The forgetting curve: we lose most of what we just learned within the first 24 hours. So is forgetting a malfunction, or the brain's way of clearing out what it doesn't need?
- Social facilitation: when others are watching, we get better at some tasks and worse at others. Why does an audience affect our performance so strongly?
- Chunking: why do we memorize a phone number in groups of three and four instead of digit by digit? How does packaging information let the mind hold so much more?