Alright, well we'll be bringing in lots of things related to this. Let me start with the broad question that helps me out to figure out some of the things and where you're at. Let's start with this.
When you think about the word psychology, what comes to mind? So raise your hand and tell me, when we think about the word psychology, what comes to mind? Somebody said the brain.
That comes to mind? All right, give me another one. And behavior, right, just human behavior mostly?
Is that what you were thinking? Why we behave? Yeah, go ahead. Psycho. Oh, go ahead.
I missed that, what is it? Soul. The soul, so behavior and soul.
Someone had a funny one over here, what was it? Psycho. Oh, it's the word psycho. Yeah, the word psycho, which we will spend a little bit of time figuring out that word and talking about it. Perspectives.
Oh, perspectives, like different ways of looking at things and different perspectives, that's a good one. Yeah. Which one?
Sleep patterns. Oh, sleep patterns. Wow, guess what, we're gonna spend a lot of time talking about sleep.
That'll be a cool thing, and some of you will spend some time in here practicing that. Laying back on the couch and talking to some guy about problems. That's psychology, yep.
And mind games. No, that's not it at all. That was kind of a joke.
The way people think and how it affects what they do. Yeah, the way people think and therefore how that affects what they do. Wow, that's psychology. What is that?
Oh, yeah, so just in general, the way we think about things and all of our thought life is going to fall into that category. Personality. Personality, you guys are getting all the right answers.
That really kinda stinks. I'm not even sure I can lecture much more than that. Perception and reality.
Yeah, perception and reality. For example, is your perception the same as mine and do our realities match up? That's psychology.
A hierarchy of human needs. And a hierarchy of human needs. Wow, way to go.
One more time. Nature versus nurture. Yeah, nature versus nurture. We'll talk a little bit about even related to twins and how our behavior comes about. Go ahead.
One more time. Yeah, and mental illnesses. Wow, those are great.
Great answers. Let's start with this. If that comes to mind, I think I think you guys are kind of on the right track there.
This class is going to be about, ready? What is the field of psychology? What is primarily related to almost all of these comments had one thing in common, what was it?
The word of course, psychology, and then what did you say? The mind, that was almost one of the commonalities. Humanness is probably another one in there.
Psychology is clearly about human behavior, but it's also, by the way, about animal behavior. There's a lot of cool things we learn and we use with animals that help us understand things. Like for example, we're gonna learn, we've addicted certain rats to certain chemicals because it's a whole. a whole lot better to addict a rat than it is a human and then study them. So we have rats that are addicted to things like pleasure.
You know anybody addicted to pleasure? Addictions to chemicals and we have found the most shocking things ever. When we take a rat and addict it to a little tiny piece of electricity that flows through their brain and when they push a bar, it stimulates this part of the brain that we all have and rats share and in common and that is this pleasure circuitry and it goes like this.
You push this and the rat pushes it and their brain goes like this. Ah, that feels good. I like that feeling. And they push it again and they go, ah, that felt really good, I like that feeling. Because we're stimulating this pleasure center and they get to push a bar all the time.
And we have learned something deeply disturbing about that addiction. Everybody know what's disturbing about it? They will choose to push this bar that stimulates the pleasure circuitry in our brains and then we're gonna study, by the way, in this class, what are some things that push our pleasure circuitry.
Because we do things and take certain chemicals, like drugs, that influence. and touch the same part of our brains as this rat does. The most disturbing thing I think I've seen when it comes to addictive research with these animals is when they stimulate that pleasure center of the brain, it is so deep and so powerful that they chew.
if given the option with food and water, they choose that over food and water. We have to end the study, or they will starve themselves to death, or die of thirst because they want pleasure first. I'll describe for you what the brain is like for animals in particular. Rats which model over to human being and human behavior and that gives us a great insight into human addictions. So we're going to talk about addictions in here and what they mean and why some of you are kind of borderline.
Dealing with what that rat's dealing with. Because some of us have spent time doing and attempting to put things into our bodies that are influencing and changing the chemical makeup of our brains. And like me...
If you're like me, I was a non-Christian. I grew up as a non-Christian, I went to college as a non-Christian, and there were just things that I put into my body and tried things, and one thing, deeply thankful for, is that A, God God called me to himself some point in college, that was a cool thing, but that I didn't get addicted to the same chemicals that I was putting into my body that my buddies got addicted to and my brothers got addicted to. What's the difference?
Why did my brain avoid, why did I take some things, illegal drugs, and I didn't find my brain getting addicted? But they did. One of my best friends, probably my single best friend growing up, I go away to college, we did the same kinds of things.
I eventually find Jesus, Jesus better yet he finds me. And my life turns differently and two, three years later I find out and this friend comes back to visit me and he's just different, he's addicted to cocaine and he struggled over the next five, six years with an addiction that was very painful. So we're gonna talk about addictions in here, we're gonna talk about things like the brain, we'll talk about why this happens to some of us and why others escape it and what does it mean for us to to be prepared and ready with pleasure circuits that like to be stimulated. So that's one thing.
Let me ask you this, and I'll start with another question related to psychology. This is one. How many of you all like to watch people? I'm assuming, let me just raise your hand if you like to watch people. It would be weird to ask anybody, raise your hand that don't like to watch people, but maybe you shouldn't raise your hand.
Most people say, I love to watch people. Tell me why you like to watch people. And go ahead and raise your hand and tell me why you like to watch people.
Go ahead, yeah. Oh, and so you see some people acting and there's similarities between how they behave and how they act, that's a good one. Sure, so you get to watch their behavior and you can kind of gauge your behavior and say would I have done that in that situation and would I act differently?
Ah, do you think you could watch, is it, how many say it's interesting to watch people, tell me your name? Sabrina. Sabrina, Sabrina said it's fun to watch people because you can kind of guess what their personalities are like by watching their behavior.
How many think that's true? How many think you could watch people and get a gauge about what they're like on the inside? Ah, that's interesting.
Tell me why. What else do you like to watch people? I like watching interactions and how they treat different people.
Oh sure, so we like to watch maybe a situation in which they're having to interact with somebody and how they're treating them and it gives us insight into them. Is that right? Oh, that's a good one. I like to watch people because it kind of allows me Oh, so people, same, I think this is very similar to Sabrina's, we get this idea that, I don't always tell you why I behave the way I behave.
You don't know how I'm thinking right now, do you? I don't know how y'all are thinking. You might be going, get me out of here. This is bad, or you might, I don't know that. But I could watch your behavior, and if you're looking at me like this.
Then I might get a sense, oh, maybe you're not that happy. And it may be, I don't know if you're not happy with me or you're not happy with your roommate or the guy sitting next to you, I don't know. Maybe you're triplet, I don't know who you're angry with.
So I watch and take cues from your behavior that help me understand intentions. Yes? Motives, your heart, your personality. Ooh, that's interesting.
Okay, where do you like to to watch people, I bet we know the answers, but go ahead. At the CAF, that's an awesome place. The mall. The mall, how many are mall watchers, you're like, I go to the mall and watch people, yeah.
I'm gonna tell you what's weird about this, ready? If you go to the mall to watch people, I find that interesting, but let's find some other places, first of all, go ahead. I was gonna say, I don't like watching people eat, if I'm around people that are dancing to, what they do with their hands.
So tell me your name. John. John doesn't like watching people eat.
How many of you like John? Like I don't like to watch you eat. It kind of freaks me out a little bit.
Where do you like to watch? At Disneyland. How many say Disneyland?
That's like one of the most expensive human watching behavior places you can go. I know, give me a hundred bucks come on in, you can watch people. And that's not even get you in the door. Go ahead Richard.
Best part is watching people's faces during the fireworks show. Firework, watch their faces during the fireworks show. Instead of watching the fireworks.
I'm joking. Yes, I think people on the stripping buggies, that could be dangerous, eh? It's a little awkward at times.
No, I went to school at UNLV before I knew Jesus. I'm sorry, I did, man. You can imagine what that was like.
Ah, bad. Downtown LA, that's a good place to watch people. Specifically at the California Pizza Kitchen to watch people.
That's really cool. Restaurants are good places then. Anybody else?
At a sports event. At a what? Sports event.
Oh, sporting events. Oh, that's a good place. I enjoy that too, because people are interesting.
Oh, we had you, go ahead. At the airport. At airports.
How many say airports are awesome and free most of the time? Okay. So now we got places, any other places you gotta just, you gotta tell me which, go ahead.
Heavy metal concerts. Heavy metal concerts, yes. I go there every weekend and watch people.
Heavy metal concerts, that's awesome. Starbucks. At Starbucks, nice, way to go. So you guys, okay, one more.
At the US Open. You've been to the US Open, tennis or golf? Which one? Surfing. Oh, oh, surf.
That's weird. Surfing? I didn't even enter my mind that that was.
Okay, I'll tell you what, so we like to watch people. You're good at it. That's what this class is about. In fact, this class, if I had to say what psychology is, and I wanted to put two words down, which you don't, again, have to remember, because it's pretty straightforward. I would say psychology is about watching people.
And you've told me that you like to watch people in certain places, you like to watch for certain things. So psychology really is about watching people. It's about finding and sometimes learning things. Can you figure some things out about people by watching them enough?
And I believe the answer to that is of course we can. We can figure out some intentions, some motives. We can watch and see, ooh, that's interesting. When that person did that, this happened.
I don't ever want that to happen to me. Or we get to understand a little bit more about maybe somebody that we might wanna get to know better. and we can watch them.
We'll learn in here. Are there certain personality traits that we can figure out by simply watching and being observant of people? The answer is all kinds of things.
So psychology is about watching people. I would imagine that most of you cannot remember the day when the light turned on and it dawned on you that you like to watch people. I bet none of you could remember that day when you went, I didn't like watching people before today, but now I do. I don't think that happens, why?
Why is that not the case? Because we, when have you noticed people, if you were watching people, when did they like to start noticing, when do you notice that they like to start watching people? Almost as babies, bring a baby into a room where there's another baby, and that baby oftentimes does what? That baby kind of looks at the baby or other people and is like, oh, that's somebody just like me.
Which is weird that a baby a year old can go, oh. Oh, adult, adult, adult, baby. I like the baby. I want to watch the baby. That baby's just like me.
How do they know that? What is it that they know that they're picking up? You, by the way, have come out of the womb with one of almost everybody in this room, and it's not exclusive because there are some people who don't have this. The vast majority of us have popped out of the womb. And the first thing we like to do is, once our...
as our eyes begin to settle and we stop crying or doing whatever we do, is we find one part of a human being very fascinating, and it's their eyes. In fact, when we take newborn infants, couple of days old, and we begin to give them tests, we find out what captures a baby's attention? It's the human face, it's particularly the eyes. Is that a surprise?
Doesn't seem like it's a surprise, but when you stop and think about it, it's like, well, God made us and designed us. And somehow or another, we're kind of come out prepared to focus on people. We come out prepared. To focus on faces.
What's most amazing is you focus on things and on people and we're making it extremely explicit in this classroom, but guess what you do? You think about people, you make decisions about them, and you orient your life based upon unconscious cognition and thinking about people. In other words, you've made up things just like that little baby did.
That baby came out and goes, that's a baby. Well, he's making a decision, a determination that that's somebody little. You make decisions about people without thinking about making a decision about people. Have you ever noticed that before? You probably have just like that baby done some pretty cool things.
How many have interacted with a stranger, somebody you've never met before, well gosh that would be easy being here in college for the first time I guess, that you've never seen before. Let's say it was somebody off campus a couple of nights ago. How many could remember clearly interacting with somebody that you've never seen before, maybe a staff member, maybe a faculty member, and that's been let's say 24 hours and can you still recall their face? Think about a waiter. I'll tell you, I had a waiter last night, I was at a restaurant, and there were two, a guy and a girl, and I could pretty much, I think, if you gave, how many if I gave you a lineup, if you saw somebody in the last 24 hours for the first time, you've never seen them again since, you could pick them out of a lineup, do you think?
I'm gonna be good at that. Wow, there's something deeply interesting about that from a psychology perspective, and that is, You have a brain that somehow or another begins to pick up faces and is pretty good at picking up these things, and you do it without thinking. So why is that important?
Because we've learned some things about that. If it was so good, if we are so perfect at this, like, like we kind of seem to be, there are problems with faces. Your brain responds to individual people.
We're gonna study this kind of thing in this class. Watching people we're good at, we start from the very beginning, and we can pick out things and their behavior, and we can learn things about them, whether or not to be afraid of them, or worried about them, or whether or not they're friendly. And we do this without thinking, but there's some problems.
What is one way I can get you to forget a face? that you saw 24 hours ago. Give me one thing, one way I can get you to forget that face that you just saw for the first time 24 hours. What can I ask you to do? Ooh, what if I showed you, that's a good one.
If I showed you someone who kinda had similar characteristics, give me another thing I could do to make you forget that face. I'll show you a whole bunch of faces, which by the way has lots of consequences when we do such things as we give someone who's been an eyewitness to a crime and we say, which face was it? Which was the waiter who served you? Pick them out.
We're pretty good. at it, but here's one thing we can do. We found it was very surprising.
You know what it was? It was we begin to ask the people who saw this face, we say, okay, good. You can recall this and they're pretty good at it because we showed them a face the day before and we brought them back in the lab and we showed them, which one did we show you? And they're like, that one, good. They're very good.
I'm very good at it, you're very good at it. Unless we have this person describe that face to a sketch artist. And we go like this, we say, all right, I'll tell you what, you saw a face yesterday, here's what I want you to do, we got a police artist up here who draws faces, I want you to go ahead and start describing that face for me. Tell me everything about that face.
And they start to do something very weird, they use a different part of their brain. You see, this first part of this face kind of pops in, the part that starts to describing this face, this kind of logical, rational part of our brain starts to go, okay, well, this guy had short kind of hair that went up like this, it was kind of brown, his eyes were like, it's almost like they were olive shaped, and then the person goes, tell me more about the face, about the olive shape, and then they begin to describe it, and guess what happens? The longer they go, the more the face disappears from their memory, and the face that is the end of the day, begins to not resemble and they forget the face that they had originally.
What consequence does that have? In psychology, we're fascinated by that very kind of thing because it has huge consequences for us. There was a woman, her name was Jennifer. There's a movie about Jennifer.
She made the movie, agreed to the movie called What Jennifer Saw. Because Jennifer did something that was wrong. Jennifer tried to remember a face.
It was the face of the guy that broke into her apartment and for eight hours attacked her and assaulted her and she, her life felt threatened and for the entire eight hours that he was there, she survived by saying, I'm going to remember his face because he's in here, he's attacking me. If I survive, I'm putting him away forever. How many have heard of the story of what Jennifer saw? Jennifer did this, so she sat in this place and the way she survived was she memorized his face and that was the wrong thing to do.
Isn't that weird? Why was it wrong? Because Jennifer went like this.
She started to use this part of the brain. She looked at his eyes and calculated it and start to sear it in. And it's funny how the brain is made up and it's quick.
If we would have just said, don't think about his face, Jennifer. you've seen it and we'll have you recall it later and we'll bring you some pictures and we'll see if you can pull it out she probably would have been a whole lot better off but what she did was she just went through it and she kept calculating it's not weird it seems odd it seems counterintuitive and so she does this by the way over and over again and she's just thinking I'm gonna put him away if I survived he's going to prison that's and guess what happens she survives and they get the police and she starts to describe it and they give her a lineup of different faces and she goes like this I think I'm not sure but I knew I was gonna put this guy away, it's that guy. And she pointed to a guy named Randall Cotton and based upon her eyewitness testimony, they convicted him of assault on her and they put him in prison.
That's not the end of the story, of course, because two years later, another guy gets picked up for a very similar crime. They take a DNA test, and lo and behold, she had the wrong guy. She picked the wrong guy.
This guy didn't even look like this guy. The guy that the DNA matched, who later on confessed, was the guy who was really guilty. And the person that she put away, Randall Cotton, was released from prison. Solely put there on her eyewitness testimony and to the first, when the movie and the show was coming out, here's what Jennifer, she kept saying, I can't believe it, it's him.
I know it's him. He's the one, how could I mess that up? So we're gonna talk a little bit about how did Jennifer mess that up? What happens in our brains? How do we process?
How do we do our thoughts? How do we know what other people are like? How do we know if people's harming us? How do they know if they're gonna hurt us?
How do I determine if you're friendly? How do I determine if this person is? is somebody I should be afraid of or worried about. And so what Jennifer did, by the way, is they convicted the second guy. She's learned and had a hard time meeting with the guy that she convicted.
They've gotten together, she's apologized profusely. He's been gracious about it, I mean, pained, and you know, three, four years of his life. But what was powerful was the documentary that talked about her experience, and psychologists have spent time going, all right, how do we take and understand used material like this to help us understand other things, like crimes, victims of crimes.
And psychology says, all right, here's this, we're going to study and figure out how does the brain process this? What makes us easy to pick out a face and then what makes us mess up like that? I can give a one person over here smiling and they could take their face and you could be smiling and everybody else, I'll say on this side of the room, you give me the most angry face you can, it's like I'm going to kill you bad. I'm gonna kill you, I don't like you, and then we'll have the Muehlhoff kids smile, and everybody else will be frowning over here. Got it?
So he's smiling, they're frowning. I take a picture. I got one smiler, bunch of guys angry at me, and they're gonna kill me.
I go over to this side of the room, all of you are smiling and happy, and you put on this big face, I like you, and then we got one angry, mad triplet. And she's saying, I'm gonna kill you, I don't like being used, blah blah blah. And we take a picture, and then we give it to people and we say, we're gonna time you, ready? Pick out the face that doesn't look like the other faces. When people do that, do they pick out the angry face in the midst, no sorry, the happy face in the midst of angry faces?
Quicker. Or do they pick out, in a sea of happy faces, the angry face, which one do they pick? because they look at these and by the way, there's a definite difference. People go like this, whoop, I see it right there. And they go whoop, I see this one over here.
And they do one quicker. Which one do you think is quicker? Angry faces.
Ooh, by the way, all the angry faces. tend to get mixed up and they tend to, our angry face is important to us as humans. As a face that says I don't like you, I'm gonna hurt you in bed and I got, then we humans pay attention to that.
And guess what, we tend to pick out the angry face in the midst of happy faces much quicker than this other face. Okay, all of that comes into play. This is what psychology does, it brings things together, put situations as, What will happen, are there gender differences between males and females?
Do we act differently sometimes? Do we find that behaviors are influenced simply because of the way God created us? And if that's the case, do we?
is our experience of the world the same, and in which ways are it different? By the way, there are a lot of ways it's different, and we'll talk some about that, but at the end of the day, this is kind of what psychology says. It's about watching people, but here's the interesting thing that I want you to kind of take away with today. And again, you're not taking notes right now, but psychology is a science, and so it says, this is great what they did on a candid camera, and what we can kinda now watch today is a lot of people in a lot of situations, especially in all these kinds of cool things, just like YouTube, for example, we can watch people.
But to watch people scientifically is a little bit different. There are ways in which we want to see and then explain why people behave the way they do. But to do it scientifically goes like this, ready? We have people who spent their whole life.
trying to figure out people's behavior out in public and what happens when we put it to the test to watch or to make changes. So we have learned how, for example, people have stood in lines. Now I know that sounds weird, but you can watch people standing in line.
How many, tell me someplace you've stood in line at recently. At the cab. At the cab.
A long line. Give me another one. Theme park.
Oh, at a theme park or at a cab. Line behaviors in... interesting, you probably find yourself, by the way, we've studied this and we found out some cool things scientifically and people have actually went and did this, they found out ways in which you can have people, that you can cut in line and people let you cut in line. There's a cool thing about it, anybody know the science behind line cutting behavior?
What's a way to increase your ability and people saying, oh sure, you can cut in line, what would you do to increase your chance of cutting in line? Guilt trips? Guilt trips. What would you say?
Dude, you're way at the front, I'm way at the back. That stinks, you shouldn't do that. Make him somehow feel guilty that you're way back there and that you should be up there.
Okay, give them up. We'll talk about that one. Excuse me, my parents are up there.
Oh, so you tell them that your parents are up there and that you have to get up there closer. Like walk up to somebody, just random person in line, say, Oh, hey, how are you? And like pander their friend.
So lie by going up... and saying, oh hey, good to see you, and pretend as if you, how many have ever said you pretended to know somebody, some of you, okay. That's a possibility.
Bride them. What'd you? Bride them.
Bride them. Bride them to cut in line. How many have ever tried that, does it work?
I don't know. You never know. Give me another one.
You could just be a jerk and be like. Be a confident jerk and just cut in line. Dude, this is where I'm supposed to stand.
It's my spot. You got a problem with that? Go see the guy from the Marines. Or the triplet. She will smack you.
Like, how would you make him feel bad for you? Like... I'm all alone.
My people, I'm lonely. Will you be my friend? My friends left me. Oh, I have an excuse to say it kind of mumbled in quick, like, I'm supposed to be lying to them.
And they're like, you all right? That could work. She said flirt and get in that line.
I don't think anybody's ever done that before. What would be a good line? Wow, you have such wonderful posture. I've been watching you standing in line. You're straight, that's awesome.
I love your hair. Flirt, that was awesome. Fake an injury, is that what you? You play on their emotions, fake an injury or just be injured somehow. I know this is gonna hurt buddy but, my toe is messed up.
Just be nice to them and strike up a conversation until you get through. Oh just be nice to them and strike up a conversation. What would you say to be nice in a line?
I don't know, wow you're a really, you're a good human being. Oh, so sneak in in the middle when they're talking with somebody like, wow you guys are, I'm not sure I like doing this. Okay, well, at the grocery store, if you're in line, you're like, oh, I only have one thing, can I put it in front of you?
Yeah, I only have one item. And you have like three in your pocket, huh? I only got one, three. Yeah, so okay, good.
Going off of what she said, you did a slide, you said you were in line. Oh, just be kind of nice, like would you mind, could I please? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, begging. Okay, these are all good ones, I like it, yeah.
Get a wheelchair. That's kind of like, that takes some pre-planning, doesn't it? Like, I gotta get me a wheelchair.
I gotta get in a line someplace. The cab, that would be, yeah, well, whatever. So maybe you have?
Um, target old people. Yeah, so maybe old people who are like, you don't remember me, Grandma, but I'm your grandson. She didn't say that. She was being nice.
I made it bad. No, yeah, you can do that. You can just say, I mean, some people might go, oh, no, yeah, come on, little kid. You come on and hang out with me. Little.
Ah, so you find a little kid and you're like, come here kid, we're going to go cut in line right now. I used a puppy last week, we're going to use a kid this week. By the way, these are all interesting ways and a lot of them have been supported and there was a good answer.
All of these are interesting. interesting answers and their way in which humans respond to people and we provide aid. And the good part about this is people are, in essence, very helpful. And that's why we kinda, we do weird things to kinda like. prey on that sometimes, and most of you have never done this, but I just asked you to think as a thought experiment, what would you do?
By the way, they studied this scientifically and they had people cut in line, and they found the number one reason that people would allow them to cut in line what you looked like if you were nice, you know, if you had a baby, if someone was hurting or ailing and they needed to get up front, people were nice about it. But as a general rule, the best way to get cut in line was simply to have a reason. I know that sounds weird, but they had a reason. And so they had people standing in line and so they were waiting in like let's say in the cafeteria and they'd say, oh excuse me, do you think I could cut up here? And they would, they'd say, hey let's try these reasons.
And they wanted to find out which reasons would work and they found one weird thing. Almost every reason worked. So long as you had a reason. And so people go, I'm sorry, could I cut in line?
I'm so late, I've gotta run to this class and if I don't get up there, they're like, oh. Okay, sure, come on in, if you have a reason. And so they tried to figure out ways, like there were people standing in line at this, I don't know why they were in a copy machine place, and they were all standing there waiting in line, but you could do, let's say, in a cafeteria, and so they walked up like this, all these people were standing, trying to make, I don't know what it was, at the end of the semester, they were making copies on this machine that they needed, and there's like 15 people, and a guy walked up, and it worked to say, can I cut in line, I'm so late.
Oh yeah, sure. One guy, they tried, and he said like this, can I cut in line, I gotta make a copy. And the other guy goes, oh yeah. Yeah, sure. And they have this video on him and they go, oh, I gotta make a copy.
Give them a reason. Can I cut in line at the cafeteria because I really gotta eat fast. Oh yeah, I mean, oh yeah, sure.
Me too. Having a reason then. By the way, we've learned these things. Scientifically we're gonna talk about it and watching people this way. Psychology is about gaining self insight.
We'll learn a little bit more about the scientific. In fact, we'll spend a whole couple of days on this one, watching people scientifically and what it means, like line cutting behavior and things like that. Viewing people. how children kind of understand and recognize things. But also, what's interesting, and someone said this about psychology, it's about watching other people to gain insight about ourselves.
So we're gonna spend some time examining what that means, why that comes about, and how we can go about gaining self-insight. By the way, another cool thing about psychology, you don't have to write this down, if you want you could. I'm assuming you're filling out some things, and by the way, have you write down a prayer request?
So be thinking about that. I will, I'll be the only one praying through these and reading them. And again, you could turn. turn it in after class or you can wait until Wednesday to turn it in.
Psychology is also about applying the findings and there's cool ways. We can take how we understand, by the way, faces and apply that to this world out there related to the legal profession. Because like eyewitness testimony, how we process and know and identify people that have committed a crime or something that we've seen has huge huge consequences for people, and that's a way of applying the findings, just like standing in line could be. I could tell you For example, how to go and get people to put money into a parking meter for you. Did you, how do you get people to put money into a parking meter?
Suppose you don't have any money and you want someone to give you money to put into your parking meter. Well, psychologists and other people have studied, well, people are nice. And so, by the way, you just ask people and a good percentage of people just go like this. Oh, sure, I'll help you out. But there's ways of increasing that.
If you have a uniform and you tell people to go put money into your friend's meter, they almost always go and put it in. It could be any uniform. It could be any uniform and people tend to obey people in uniforms. And if you go to them, hey, go put, that guy doesn't have any money for his meter, go put money in it, they're like, oh, okay.
You're a janitor, uh-huh, go put money in it. Okay, way more than if you're dressed like me. Just because you have a uniform.
That's weird, but that has implications for things like obedience and hurting people, of all things. And we'll study about how to apply those findings. And then cool part about all of this, ultimately at the end of the day, I don't think we can catch a glimpse of God in lying behavior, but we can catch a glimpse of God in how people respond and help others in need. We can find God in things like that. By the way, it's how I got started studying psychology, is I studied something called helping behavior.
behavior and altruism and you know what we did? I didn't do this particular study, but we had people sitting in a room and we had one person in there and we went like this. We had them sit there and I walk out of the room after I told them, do me a favor, take this survey, it'll take 30 minutes, you get credit for intro psychology, take this 30 minute survey, they sit in the room.
Again, this wasn't my study, it was somebody else's. But they sat there and five minutes into it, smoke started pouring in out of all of the vents into the room. What do you think 96% of the people people did almost immediately after the smoke started pouring in? They tried to get out. I don't know why the other 4% didn't.
But they would go like this, they'd go, oh. Wow, my gosh. And I remember they told me, you know, don't leave your seats, finish your question.
I was like, oh, and they'd go out, excuse me. Dude, there's like smoke, man. And they would always do that. And then we got it so only 30% of the people got out of their chairs. How'd we do it?
It's not Velcro. Now we made one change to the room dynamics, which caused about 70% of the people, maybe 60 to 70 somewhere, it just depends on the study, they wouldn't get out of their chair, even when smoke pouring in the room. What did we do?
We told them to stay, we tried to do it in both cases, stay as long as you can and don't leave, finish this. We would open the window and the smoke, no, that's good. Here's what we did, I'll just tell you.
Some of you may have figured it out. We put two other people in the room. Firemen.
Firemen, that's funny. firemen and say if there's smoke guess what there's firemen don't worry that's funny no we didn't do firemen we put two people in the room who they thought were also there for the experiment it said you three people in this room you're taking this up this experiment and sit there and take this and finish it but to two of the people weren't really part, they were part of the experiment. And we told them to do what?
Notice and see the smoke coming in, but don't leave. Look up at the smoke, we don't, you're part of the experiment, we wanna see what she does when the smoke comes in. And so all three of them are sitting there, two are part of the experiment, here comes the smoke, and the person, you know, who's not part of this experiment, they go, yeah, and they look at, and then what do they do next? They look at the other person, they go, Richard, Gabriel, and then, and then Richard Gable go like this, huh. And they keep working.
And the person goes, huh. And 70% of the people sit in their chair. Is that amazing? Could we use something with that kind of a study? Is it important to know that kind of a study?
You better believe it because we have people who are being hurt and attacked and beat up and people watch this happening and they go like this. I don't know why, I was like I couldn't move. That's what I studied for my dissertation.
Called the bystander effect. Why do people sit there when people need help and they don't do anything? That's what we do.
That's what we study. Go ahead, Daisy. I actually think about that all the time and about how often... No, all the time. We all compare ourselves as Christians to other Christians rather than to God.
There's a comparison factor that sometimes maybe we can get messed up by doing that. Maybe that's not an accurate reflection. Like, oh, well, that could. Christian did that or didn't do that.
So it's okay. So then I could take my cue from that because this person didn't do that. That's a great thought.
And so we have to be almost more careful. How do we set our thoughts, our behaviors based upon it? So all of this to say in some of these things, we find out people are extremely helpful. I was surprised and shocked when I studied helping behavior, how much people get up to aid people in need. It's amazing.
And seeing that God's in this and it's a very powerful thing. Biola University offers a variety of of biblically centered degree programs, ranging from business to ministry to the arts and sciences. Visit biola.edu to find out how Biola could make a difference in your life.