You want me to think sh***y of you???

Self-Verification is the need to have the people around us confirm what we think of ourselves, because it makes us uncomfortable not being sure if we truly know ourselves; in addition if someone thinks we are better than we think we are then it makes us feel as if we have to live up to those standards and are afraid that we are already failing them (Swann, 1987). 

My freshman year I made a friend who was very different than anyone else I knew, he was the most introverted person I had ever met; and throughout the year and half of my sophomore year I really got to know him, well at least I though I had. I saw him as a person who had a good heart but had been through a lot of trauma in his life and I tried my best to be his friend and help him through stuff. I always tried to make him feel better about himself and tell him good things but he would always disagree and like get mad at me for telling him that I thought he was a good person. He on numerous occasions told me some pretty bad things that he had done to others or thought about doing, and I would always tell him that everyone makes mistakes and not to let them define who he is. During Sophomore year the stories got more and more ridiculous, and I got to the point where I couldn't be his friend because everything I talked to him it was some crazy dramatic horrible story and I just could not deal with the drama, let alone believe what he was saying (found out he was telling my other friend different but kinda similar stuff). I have always wondered why he always insisted on me seeing him as a bad, selfish, and as he would say "f**ked up" individual and know I can kind of understand it. He was uncomfortable with me seeing him in a different (and better) way than he saw himself, I can not for sure say why but based on self-verification I can assume that it was because he didn't like the pressure I was unintentionally putting on him. 

I will still continue to see the good in people and bad situations because I have always been a pretty extreme optimist, but now I can understand why a person who I thought I was good friends with could not stand to be my friend. 

Citation:

Swann, W. B. (1987). Identity negotiation: Where two roads meet. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(6), 1038-1051. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.53.6.1038

IS THIS GONNA LAST FOREVER?!?!?!?

The video below is a great example of a kid who is severely plagued by the impact bias (and lots of pain medicine). If you have never seen david goes to the dentist then you should defiantly watch! This poor kid goes to the dentist to have a tooth removed and on his way home he begins to describe how he is feeling funny. The poor thing goes through an emotional roller coaster and exclaims "Is this gonna last forever!?". In this situation david can not get over his impact bias, specifically he can not accurately predict the duration or amount of time that he will "feel funny" and confused (Wilson, Gilbert; 2003, 2005). When in actuality the pain medicines that are making him feel so funny and confused are only going to last a few more hours.

Im sure we have all been fooled by our own impact biases, and the most recent one for me is that I have recently realized that I do not feel as strongly about high school and the people I went to high school as I did lets say a year ago, or even after graduation. I thought I would always look back and say well it was fun and I learned a lot but the people sucked and they will always suck. I was caught in the illusion of my own impact bias in that I thought that I would always feel so strongly about those people and those events when in actuality only two-ish years later I am so over it. I look back at the good times I had and all the learning I was able to do and instead of looking back in anguish I look back in either an apathetic or happy way. I have learned my lesson though I will not predict that I will always look back in these ways, because I could easily run into one of those idiots again and quickly resort back to my old feelings towards them.

And because I figured out to post videos I am going to post one more that is not related to impact bias but is to my high school... This is a guy who went to my high school (not one of the idiots) and he recently put this music video out and its incredible so yall should check it out!

References
 Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2005). Affective Forecasting: Knowing What to Want. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14(3), 131-134. doi:10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00355.x

By base-rate fallacy do you mean most young people's way of thinking?

Many young people, especially high-school and college age, don't realize the risks they take with their lives almost everyday, because they think that horrible things could never happen to them. Well they are wrong statistically people in that age range are just as likely if not more likely to die of the same things all over the world (made that stat up myself). Specifically, I am talking about drinking and driving. How many of us know people who drink and drive? How many of us are those drunk drivers? Many people ignore the cold hard facts, they ignore stats like "teen alcohol use kills about 6,000 people each year, that is more than all illegal drugs combined" (Hingson & Kenkel, 2003). That is a chilling amount of people, yet many continue to travel down that path of destruction. For many young people to ever realize what they are doing is dangerous and wrong it takes a tragic death to someone close to them. This is an example of base-rate fallacy, which is the idea that people are more impacted by emotionally dramatic events and singular cases than statistics (Kassin, Fein, and Markus, 2011). In essence, people are willing to ignore potential life saving statistics until it happens to them or someone close to them. I have been extremely against drunk driving ever since I could understand what it is, because unfortunately I had my older brother taken from me because of it. Therefore, it is hard to say if I am also adhering to the base-rate fallacy, but simply started doing so before I had the choice to listen to statistics or if I am primed to recognize the danger and pay attention to the staggering statistics more so than people who have not lost people close to them 

Word to the wise don't wait for a dramatic event to happen to you, ignore that mental short-cut and take the long road to grandma's house (a little humor to end a serious blog).

-Thanks guys hope you enjoyed it and not only learned something about social psychology but a valuable life lesson as well! 

My mom, my older brother Jay, and me a few months before he was killed. 

Citation:

Hingson, Ralph and D. Kenkel. Social and Health Consequences of Underage Drinking. In press. As 

quoted in Institute of Medicine National Research Council of the National Academies. Bonnie, Richard J. and 

Mary Ellen O'Connell, eds. Reducing Underage Drinking: A Collective Responsibility. Washington, DC: The 

National Academies Press, 2003.

Kassin, S., Fein, S., & Markus, H. (2011). Perceiving Persons.Social Psychology (8th ed., pp. 101-142). Belmont: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.