Unlike many of the other courses I took…

Unlike many of the other courses I took in my first year of university, I walked into my first Introductory Psychology class thinking that I already knew a great deal about the nature of people’s behaviour, simply from being around people my whole life. The course challenged some of those “common sense” beliefs and showed me that, while very good for certain things, common sense cannot always be relied upon when trying to figure why people do what they do. For example, I was fascinated to learn that, contrary to popular belief, the likelihood of being helped in an emergency actually decreases when the number of people around you increases. While seeming to be counterintuitive at first, this finding started to make much more sense after learning about concepts like pluralistic ignorance and diffusion of responsibility.

I also enjoyed learning about the differences between basic tendencies and characteristic adaptations, or the fact that while two people may have the same underlying personality traits (for example, they may both enjoy taking risks), the way that they express those traits may differ dramatically (one may turn to crime and the other to being a pilot or a firefighter). In other words, people with the same basic tendencies can, depending on various factors, many of which are unknown, express them in very different ways. Isn’t that cool?