Category: Personality

Have self-compassion towards yourself…..

Each of us have professional or personal goals that we want to achieve.  Some might resort to underhand means to achieve their goals.  Well, what is wrong or right is clear if you use religion as your benchmark.  Yet again, whatever benchmark is a personal choice.

Most of us equate achievement with self-esteem.  You evaluate yourself positively or favorably when you achieve something.  This notion would means that you are relying on evidences of your achievement to evaluate yourself.  If you think about the hereafter, whereas you don’t know what you will get (gladtiding or not), you will reevaluate again your professional and personal goals and think carefully how to act in achieving the goals.

Again, all will come back to how compassionate you are towards yourself.   To know more, read more HERE. 

Prisoner’s dilemma

Social scientists like psychologists, sociologists and alike study the issue of trust using a game known as Prisoner’s Dilemma.  In this game, a scenario in which you and your friend are caught by the police and are interrogated.  But the results for both of you to be punished by the law would be varied depending on the confession by both of you (you and your friend).  So, which is which?

The scenario is like the following

Let’s say you and your friend rob a bank and you are not very good at robbing a bank so you get caught.  The police arrest both of you and put you in separate rooms to interrogate you.  You have no way to communicate with your friend.  The cops offer you a deal: if you testify that your friend was the mastermind and he does not testify against you, you go free and he gets five years in prison.  If you don’t testify against your friend but he testifies against you, you get five years and he goes free.  If you both testify against each other, you both get three years.  If you both refuse to testify, you both get one year.

The answer can be straight forward.  If you knew you could trust each other, you both keep your mouths shut and get one year.  But that might not be the case, right?  That’s what prompt researcher like Robert Axelrod to further study what makes us decide on whom to trust and not.  The answer might shock you.  Tit for tat.  Yup.

Can perceived parental favoritism affects personality?

Environmental influence does affect one’s personality in one way or another.  The influence can be varied from one individual to another, so different individual might display differences and uniqueness.  

Does parental favoritism affects personality?  Well, if you look at personality traits according to OCEAN, there might be different spectrum of personality traits.  So, some researchers would look at link between one variable to another in a simpler form.  One such study is about perceived parental favoritism and its relation on narcissism.  What do you think?  

Dunning-Kruger Effect: What is that?

A senior colleague and I were discussing about an issue relating how people overestimate their ability level.  Meaning, sometimes we might find people who think they know a lot but in reality, they do not know much and they do not even realize it.  Ironic, isn’t it?  But this is the reality.  Incompetent people think that they are amazing, genius (and the list goes on)

The cartoon strip is taken from The Business Times

This is dangerous in academia when you think that you know a lot and thus there is no need for you to learn or relearn something to upgrade what you already know.  There is always new thing that we can learn from one another or through reading or doing research.   Look at the diagram (taken from Marketcall), 

In psychology, it is called as Dunning-Kruger Effect,

“People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.” Excerpt from Justin Kruger and David Dunning (1999) article published in Journal of personality and social psychology.  

This is the opposite effect of Impostor syndrome.  

The personality traits: Does it really define who we are?

When it comes to personality traits, most of the time, we are looking at how different individuals from others.  But the differences are somewhat related to situation that individuals are dealing with.  In this case, our traits are transcended from being characteristics that describe us as a person to how we react to certain situations based on what we have learned through cultural norms that are imposed on us or how we impose those cultural experiences on ourselves.  Thus, there would be traits that seem to be out of place, as if we are out of character.  But we have to look closely that we need to have a space or place to be ourselves.  This is a time for us to recharge.  This is what Brian Little said.  

Self-assess to know your mental health

Most of the time, we have the symptoms of psychological distress but unlike physical health like flu, fever and such, we overlook the psychological symptoms that indicate we are not ok.  Perhaps, it is easier to “see” physical symptoms as compared to psychological symptoms.  But, the thing when it comes to psychological symptoms, it can be manifested through physical expression.  So, in this case, we can self-assess ourselves as a preliminary attempt to get help from professional people who are trained to help us with psychological distress. 

I find useful website with various self-tests for FREE (only some of the tests are FREE such as mental health assessment, anger, attention span, mental speed, romantic personality, procrastination, blood pressure quiz, and menopause quiz ) .