Psych 101 with a Twist

This is an introduction to my website. I am writing these posts in the spirit of the 1901 lectures by Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, to make social sciences, like psychiatry, more relevant.  Although pop psychology might seem widespread, actual social science findings are still not mainstream.  These initial blogs talk about prejudice and its cousin, stereotyping, but as you will see, they apply to many other issues. Later blogs will address ways to influence change in yourself and others. 

The initial posts will explain how stereotypes and prejudices develop and why prejudices are so entrenched.  I will try to answer the question of why we often double down on our wrong beliefs when I discuss psychological defenses and cognitive dissonance.   Later blogs will address ways to influence change in yourself and others where I primarily suggest three tools that mental health professionals often use as they work with “difficult people”:  (1) Mindfulness Meditation to cultivate mindfulness in us to improve interpersonal effectiveness, emotion regulation and distress tolerance (tenets of DBT – Dialectic Behavior Therapy), (2) Trust Building (also called a working alliance or the Trust Equation), and (3) Motivational Interviewing to learn what “change talk” is.  Motivational Interviewing, developed from Carl Rogers Client Centered Therapy, basically helps a person see a discrepancy between what one wants and how one acts.  This discrepancy, or inner conflict, motivates the desire to change.  In motivational interviewing you need to learn how to be non-directive and show empathy (to accept that the person has different beliefs without judgement and try to understand).  Unfortunately, no one is good at using the Tools at first.  Like most things in life, you need practice to get good.

There are several important underlying assumptions that give us reason to persevere:

• Prejudices and stereotypes are learned and can be unlearned. 
• We infer a connection between events or things that happen close together or repetitively.
• The type of learning that leads to prejudices seems to be classical conditioning where we associate a feeling with an event or thing. 
• We are often unaware of why we feel or react the way we do after classical conditioning.
• We often call our reactions from classical conditioning a “gut reaction” where there is a measurable autonomic response like increased heart rate, sweating, muscle tension, or gastrointestinal symptoms after a triggering event.  The trigger may be as inconsequential as seeing a black person or hearing rap. 
• The physiological response is loosely labelled “stress” or “anxiety.” The dictionary has about 3,000 words to describe feelings and emotions but they all cause a general autonomic stress response. 
• If the “anxiety” is bad enough, it motivates us to act.    
• If we can’t stop the cause of “anxiety.” we invoke unconscious mental processes called psychological defenses that reduce anxiety by changing our view of the situation. 
• Psychological defenses can cause us to double down on a wrong idea and discount valid information that might even contradict our core beliefs. Psychological defenses may range from delusional denial to more mature defenses like suppression, altruism, humor, or sublimation.  
• Prejudices are changeable once we know what we want to change (insight brings cure). 
• It is better to ‘work things out’ than ‘duke things out’ as one Fox commentator said.

I welcome your comments and questions.  I especially hope you will let me know your experience in using the toolkit or problems learning it.  These will be posted in Comments.