Psychology Archives - Thea van Diepen

One Question We Will Never Fully Answer (and That’s a Good Thing)

Thea van Diepen

“Who here has spent time thinking about the question ‘who am I?’” my professor asked the class. Most of us, myself included, raised our hands at once. “Well, I suppose I’m going to get a biased sample because you’re all in this class.” The class was Personality Psychology, and this was in my first or second year of university. I remember my bewilderment as she went on to explain that there are people who don’t really think about those kinds

One Free Thing That Can Completely Change How You See Yourself

Thea van Diepen

(Please note that this thing is only free until September 1st, not September 6th, like I first said. My apologies. After that, it’s back to $37) Occasionally, I find really awesome things. Usually, they’re shareable on Facebook or Tumblr or what have you but, every once in a while, they require a blog post. So, what is this free thing I’m talking about? It happens to be a Fascination Advantage Report, which you can get for free with a special

I Never, Ever Thought I’d Do This… part 2

Thea van Diepen

Part 1 is here. If a majority can exert influence simply by sheer number, then what is it about minority groups that allows them to influence others? What is their power? According to Moscovici, the power of a minority lies in its consistency (Moscovici, Lage, & Naffrechoux, 1969). In a variant of the study mentioned earlier, the confederates were instructed to sometimes say the slide was green, and other times say that it was green. As a result of this

I Never, Ever Thought I’d Do This… part 1

Thea van Diepen

As you all know, I’ve been working like crazy on this term paper thing. The assignment was to write a section of a chapter for a hypothetical textbook on the subject of social influence (seeing as the class is called Social Influence, this assignment was extremely on topic and reasonable. I just hated the class, which is why writing this darn thing was such a big deal for me). Now, as much as I loathed a great deal of things