IA writer

Psychology of Everything Draft

Dear {name here},

Do you know the biggest myth that holds leaders like you back from developing a natural and effective leadership style?

Your Natural Negotiation Plan for Life

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(next: my favourite question)

🔥🚀💪

Which is why I want to help you avoid it.

Hereʼs how: 

1) The little-known, ancient formula

Psychology asks a big question: Why do people do what they do, think how they think, and feel what they feel? Psychology as a field has big ambitions, but it deals with messy, unpredictables: people like you and me. How then to approach this question?

Kurt Lewin (1936, p.12) formulated psychology’s big picture Weltformel. Lewin’s formula helps you understand the Psychology of Everything and think (more) like a psychologist. Lewin writes:

Every psychological event depends upon the state of the person and at the same time on the environment, although their relative importance is different in different cases.** **Thus we can state our formula (…) for every psychological event as B = f(PE).

Psychological science has evolved to refer to these as the following three factors:

1. B = ‘behavior or any kind of mental event’ (the psychological process you’re trying to explain: behaviors, cognitions, emotions)
2. P = ‘the person’
3. S = the situation¹

And so the formula to explain the Psychology of Everything is:

\(B = f(P, S)\)

Meet Mr. Wallace

And as you arrive, the first person you see is a certain Mr. Wallace, Mr. Wallace is was described by Stanley Milgram himself, the psychologist who did these studies as follows:

‘played by forty-seven-year-old accountant, trained for the role; he was of Irish-American descent and most observers found him mild-mannered and likable.’ \cite{milgramObedienceAuthorityExperimental1974, p. 16} ^{2 3}

Where you are > Who you are (sometimes)

Personality science talks about who we are, while social psychology talks about where we are – the situations and environmental features. Social psychology shows that sometimes where you are is more important than who you are. This is why social psychological studies gain media attention and are popularized by authors like Malcolm Gladwell.

Our default way of perceiving others is to see them as who they are and to ignore or discount where they are. This leads to systematic deviations in our perceptions.

Footnotes:

Personality psychology is considered a solid and well-engineered foundation, consistently confirmed through additional evidence and studies, while social psychology often attracts media attention with surprising findings that make us think differently about the world we live in.

In social psychology, the reliability and replicability of studies are important. While I share studies to illustrate points, I do not necessarily consider them conclusive. My work aims to make science more open, transparent, precise, and replicable.

1. Lewin referred to this initially as ‘environment’. Psychologists now refer to this as ‘situation’. ↩︎
2. The role of experimenter was played by a thirty-one-year-old high school teacher of biology. Throughout the experiment, his manner was impassive and his appearance somewhat stern. He was dressed in a gray technician’s coat. The victim was played by a forty-seven-year-old accountant, trained for the role; he was of Irish-American descent and most observers found him mild-mannered and likable. ↩︎
3. According to \cite{milgramObedienceAuthorityExperimental1974}, Chapter 6 on ‘Experiment 8’: women only always assumed the role of teachers. Milgram did not have women assume the role of students, or replace ‘Mr. Wallace’. Milgram speculates though that disobedience would increase, due to cultural norms. ↩︎