The psychology of the Internet

The Internet is a technology that has expanded rapidly over relatively few years and millions of users are interacting with each other using the new medium without having considered how this communication differs in quantity and quality from more established information channels.

Using examples from established researches in the field of social psychology and more recent studies on various aspects of the Internet phenomenon, we can consider how human behavior is influenced by the peculiar characteristics of the new "Web-World".

The first question, the psychology of aggression in the net. It appears that the possibility of assumed anonymity and actual physical distance between web participants leads to disinhibited behavior. The normal social conventions of face-to-face meetings are left behind. Triggered by the frustration of slow responses, long waits for pagers to load and log, Internet users have a tendency often to interpret neutral messages in a negative manner, prompting an aggressive response.

                        However, there is and a positive side of Internet interaction. The most powerful attractor in real-life settings is physical attractiveness, closely followed by proximity. The physical attractiveness heuristic associates happiness, sociability, warmth, likeability, success and intelligence. With the lucky person while we more readily become friends with people whom we see frequently. So these two main factors in interpersonal attraction are translated on the Internet

Richard Wiseman

Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University in the United Kingdom. R. Wiseman has written three best selling books, one of them is “The Luck Factor”.

In this self-help book, professor has published the main principles of good and bad luck. He showed that both good and bad luck result from measurable habits; for example, lucky people, by expecting good luck, might expend more effort in their endeavour, resulting in more success, reinforcing their belief in good luck. Lucky people are outgoing and observant and therefore have many more chance encounters than unlucky people, each of which could bring a lucky opportunity. Moreover lucky people are more likely to look on the bright side of 'bad' encounters. In a mental exercise describing being shot during a bank robbery, lucky people considered themselves lucky not to have been killed while unlucky people considered themselves unlucky to have been shot.

All in all, professor exactly showed the lives and minds of lucky people.

Summary

Dreams



A dream is a succession of images, sounds or emotions that the mind experiences during sleep. Many psychologists explained that dreams may have strong influence on people behaviour.

Firstly, dreams represent concerns about people daily lives, illustrating uncertainties and ideas. Dreams may thus reveal who people really are, what they really want and how they want to attain these desires. 

More over, dreams have a problem-solving function. Dreams supposedly deal with problems people can not solve in waking life and offer solutions.

Also, dreams have protective functions helping in release of stress or traumatic thoughts. Another function is to protect sleep and to make sleep undisturbed.

All in all, dreams have very important functions for people's existances.

Summary

The mystery of memory



Memory is important to everyone in everyday life. It is the process by which everyone person encode, store and retrieve information. There are three levels of memory: sensory, short-term and long-term.

The first repository of the information the world presents to humanity is sensory memory. Sensory memory allows people to take a snapshot of environment and to store this information for a short period. This type of memory can store information info for only a very short time.

In a second stage, short-term memory holds information for 15 to 25 seconds and stores it according to its meaning. This level of memory is most often stored as sounds, especially in recalling words, but may be stored as images.

The third type of storage system is long-term memory. It lasts from a minute or so to weeks or even years. From long-term memory people can recall general information about the world.

All in all, remembering the names and other details of people who are important to everyone improves their personal, professional and social life.

Summary

“You are how you wait: Queue psychology“

Summary

Almost every day people go to shops to get food, clothes or other important things. It is fun to walk around and to discover new, useful things. But people confront with a little problem – a queue.

Waiting is an inescapable part of life, but that does not mean customers enjoy it. When shoppers are in line, they are bored doing nothing. People imagine that they are waiting 30 percent longer than the real waiting time.

So, some bussinesses increased a lot of pleasure of waiting and created a diversion from queue. It was a good idea for supermarkets to let customers listen to the music or to let see the promotional video on monitors near checkouts.

                     

All in all, every problem has a solution and it depends on the way how people look at it. Customers should be patient in line and remember that nothing is as bad as sometimes they imagine.

My Future Profession

One of the hardest task for a young person is to decide what you wanna be in the future. But for me it is quite easy, because now I'm studying Psychology in the University of Mykolas Romeris and I love it (I hope  I won‘t change my mind after first course).

In my opinion, this profession is with a light future, because Psychology is one of the most popular profession in the whole world. Why I chose exactly this profession? Well, I have two reasons...

Firstly, I want to help people. Nowadays, almost every person has many problems with his soul. Our world is so full of stress, that people are unhappy, angry. So, I think I could help them to change their feelings and minds.

Secondly, I want to learn how to hypnotize people and command them anything what I want. Haha.. No, it‘s a joke. Maybe..

So finally, I strongly believe that Psychology will be my future profession.