An overview of some really important (and interesting) psychology studies.  I’ve listed some of the excerpts from the site. If you want to learn more about said phenomenon, then click on the link above, and you can find the relevant entry. Yay for learning! and the Internet.

6. Why We All Stink as Intuitive Psychologists: The False Consensus Bias

Many people quite naturally believe they are good ‘intuitive psychologists’, thinking it is relatively easy to predict other people’s attitudes and behaviours. We each have information built up from countless previous experiences involving both ourselves and others so surely we should have solid insights? No such luck.

7. Why Groups and Prejudices Form So Easily: Social Identity Theory

People’s behaviour in groups is fascinating and frequently disturbing. As soon as humans are bunched together in groups we start to do odd things: copy other members of our group, favour members of own group over others, look for a leader to worship and fight other groups.

9. Why We Don’t Help Others: Bystander Apathy

In social psychology the ‘bystander effect’ is the surprising finding that the mere presence of other people inhibits our own helping behaviours in an emergency. John Darley and Bibb Latane were inspired to investigate emergency helping behaviours after the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964.

Product also includes some well known favorites, such as the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment.

And now for something completely different:

Bye Bye Planet

/sigh

I discovered Domestic Tension, a performance art piece about the psychology of violence, this morning. The artist, Wafaa Bilal, is spending a month living in a room in an art gallery that has a webcam mounted on a servo that users can control on the project’s website. The camera has a paintball gun attached to it that users can choose to shoot at their leisure. The artist has been shot tens of thousands of times and has sat, through it all, chatting with the users on his website as they decide whether to let the bullets fly. The psychology of it is fucked up. I couldn’t help cursing like crazy at an individual screaming in the chatroom about nuking baghdad and “push button wars” that kept trying to zero in for a shot. I ended up moving the camera to a far wall and emptying out some ammunition, harmlessly, against it to give Bilal a few more minutes of peace. I felt victorious, until my arch-nemesis in the chat began rambling about Dahmer and the Oklahoma city bomber loving to eat meat the color of Bilal. What the fuck is wrong with (some) people!

The artist, incidentally, eats only food given to him as a gift. I might have to send him some spirulina to help him heal after all those paintball hits.

Check it out: Domestic Tension