For younger adults who do not have the opportunity to use current skills, or develop new skills, cynicism and lack of interest in the work can result (Stern et al., 1990).
I really think a lack of skill development is a big reason people become disengaged at work. Growth opportunities really matter, especially early in a career.
‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well’”
This is a good reminder that effort and standards don’t change just because the job is small or overlooked. The work still matters.
Not surprisingly, Butler found that students struggled to keep a balance between work and school and that work often had a negative effect on schoolwork.
This doesn’t surprise me at all because balancing work and school is something a lot of students deal with, including me. It makes me wonder how many students feel pressured to work even when it hurts their academic performance.
This means that we need to study the problems of today, not those of yesterday.
I like this point because it reminds me that work today looks very different than it used to. Studying old workplace problems might not fully explain things like remote jobs or work–life balance issues people face now.
the percentage of people reporting that they would continue working has averaged approximately 70 percent since at least 1973.
I find it interesting that around 70% of people would still choose to work. This makes me think work is more than just a paycheck for many people. I’m curious what factors (purpose, routine, social interaction) play the biggest role in that choice.
Fortunately, we form impressions of people quickly and effortlessly, without much conscious analysis of what we are doing. We do these things by engaging in an automatic analysis of our environments, based on our past experiences and knowledge of the world. Automatic thinking is thought that is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless. Although different kinds of automatic thinking meet these criteria to varying degrees (Bargh et al., 2012; Hassin, 2013; Hicks & McNulty, 2019; Payne & Gawronski, 2010), for our purposes we can define automaticity as thinking that satisfies all or most of them.
It’s crazy to think about how hard life would be if you couldn’t make new memories. Every situation would feel unfamiliar, which makes me realize how much we rely on memory without noticing.
People with this disorder lose the ability to form new memories and must approach every situation as if they were encountering it for the first time, even if they have actually experienced it many times before.
It’s crazy to think about how hard life would be if you couldn’t make new memories. Every situation would feel unfamiliar, which makes me realize how much we rely on memory without noticing.
Schemas are useful for helping us organize and make sense of the world and to fill in the gaps of our knowledge. Think for a moment what it would be like to have no schemas at all.
What stood out to me here is how schemas basically act like shortcuts for our brain. I can’t imagine trying to make sense of everything from scratch without them.
Rodin’s famous sculpture, The Thinker, mimics controlled thinking, where people sit down and consider something slowly and deliberately. Even when we do not know it, however, we are engaging in automatic thinking, which is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless.
I like how the book compares The Thinker to controlled thinking because it makes the idea easier to picture. It’s interesting that most of our thinking actually happens automatically without us realizing it.
Rodin’s famous sculpture, The Thinker, mimics controlled thinking, where people sit down and consider something slowly and deliberately. Even when we do not know it, however, we are engaging in automatic thinking, which is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless.
I like how the book compares The Thinker to controlled thinking because it makes the idea easier to picture. It’s interesting that most of our thinking actually happens automatically without us realizing it.
People are good at sizing up a new situation quickly and accurately. They figure out who is there, what is happening, and what might happen next. When you attended your first college class, for example, you probably made quick assumptions about who people were (the person standing at the lectern was the professor) and how to behave.
This part about quickly reading situations connects to the Detecting Deception slides from the Media Options. Both show how people make fast judgments based on little information, though those judgments aren’t always right.
More generally, people are extremely good at social cognition, which, as we saw in Chapter 1, refers to the ways in which people think about themselves and the social world, including how they select, interpret, remember, and use social information.
This part stands out because it shows how naturally people process social information. It makes sense since we’re always judging situations and remembering details, even without thinking about it.
They are increasingly being used by doctors to diagnose diseases and by companies to choose job applicants
Reading about companies using technology to choose applicants reminds me of the Advertising-Priming Demo video. It shows how people’s decisions can be influenced without them realizing, which connects to how hiring tools might affect choices.
it just a matter of time before computers take over the world? It’s not hard to envision a dystopian future where robots roam the earth and outsmart human beings (think of movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Matrix, or The Terminator series). Indeed, the physicist Stephen Hawking warned that, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race”
This part makes me think about how movies shape our fears of AI. It also connects to the Barnum Effect video since both show how easily people can believe dramatic ideas, even if they’re not fully based on reality.