Amazing. It took me an hour or two every Saturday for a period of five months, but I got it done. Totally worthwhile endeavor. Here is just a brief list of personal highlights:
From Unit 2, Research Methods: "In the United States, Republicans have tended to tout the economy’s solid growth since 2000 using average income; Democrats have lamented the economy’s lackluster growth using median income. Mean and median tell different true stories."
From Unit 3C, Genetics...: To excuse our failings by blaming our nature and nurture is what philosopher-novelist Jean-Paul Sartre called “bad faith”--attributing responsibility for one’s fate to bad genes or bad influences.
From Unit 5, Consciousness: “How strange would appear to be this thing that men call pleasure! And how curiously it is related to what is thought to be its opposite, pain! Wherever the one is found, the other follows close behind.” --PLato, Phaedo, fourth century B.C.E.
From Unit 6, Learning: Mirror neurons help give rise to children’s empathy and to their ability to infer another’s mental state, an ability known as theory of mind. People with autism display reduced imitative yawning and mirror neuron activity--”broken mirrors,” some have said.
From Unit 8B, Emotions...: Venting to reduce anger is like using gasoline to put out a fire.
From Unit 10, Personality: Recent research has provided some support for Freud’s idea of defense mechanisms. For example, Baumeister foudn that people tend to see their foibles and attitudes in others, a phenomenon that Freud called projection and that today’s researchers call the false consensus effect, the tendency to overestimate the extent to which others share our beliefs and behaviors. People who cheat on their taxes or break speed limits tend to think many others do likewise.
From Unit 12, Abnormal Psych: Recall that, biologically speaking, life’s purpose is not happiness, but survival and reproduction.
From Unit 14, Social Psychology: Social loafing is the tendency for people in a group to exert less effort when pooling their efforts toward attaining a common goal than when individually accountable.
And, finally, this quote, atttributed to George Bernard Shaw:
If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then hou and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas”
I'll be keeping this one on the shelf, as I'll be able to return to it again and again to support things that I tell my students and kids. There's objective, definitive support on everything from that fact that "playing violent video games increases aggressive thoughts, emotions, and behaviors" (677), which is something students try to categorically reject, to the idea that self-esteem comes not from praise and recognition, but from successfully completing difficult tasks.
This is definitely the good stuff!