Now that I've given you a brief overview of my life and family, I can begin with the actual purpose of my blog: applying psychology to my everyday life. Get excited! It will be fun, I promise.
I will start with the illusory correlation, since this is easily one of my favorite parts of psychology. It shows up EVERYWHERE in my life. The formal definition of illusory correlation is the phenomenon of seeing an expected relationship between variables (usually people, events, or behaviors) even when no such relationship exists. Straight out of wikipedia. It's the same definition as in my psych class, so I think it's okay.
Anyways, this phenomenon is constantly happening. For example:
"I always get sick at the end of the quarter. It's like I just finally let myself get sick because I no longer have so many things to do."
I'm not a scientist, and frankly I don't really like biology or chemistry at all, but I don't think it's possible to let yourself get sick. I've heard tons of people say this statement, including myself and my social psychology teacher. Admittedly, the middle of the quarter basically until finals is incredibly stressful. When you're finally done it feels like such a relief and you're no longer deathly afraid of getting sick. That being said, no one says "I always get sick at the middle of the quarter, because it's so stressful and I have so much to do," yet the same amount of people are sick!
Another good example of this is Christine and my theory on our car troubles. Throughout high school, she and I would switch off having car problems. First I crashed my car (a very traumatic experience that you will likely hear about later, so hold tight), then one week her car was overheating constantly (funny story, don't try and take of the radiator cap immediately after driving the car. It will explode and you will be covered in antifreeze and possibly lose your radiator cap...), then my fan belt was making incredibly high-pitched screeching noises (everyone LOVED hearing me start my car), then her heater broke and I think you get the point.
The fact is, we were convinced that if one of us had just had a car problem, the other person would always be next. In reality, we more of switched off noticing that our cars had problems, since both cars had many to begin with. But there's some comfort (and some unease) in knowing that I had just had a car problem, so it was Christine's turn to have one before I would have another.
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