Sunday, January 23, 2005

"If Hitler Asked You to Electrocute a Stranger, would you? Prabably".....

That is the title of the article I just finished reading for my sociology class (by Philip Meyer). It was interesting and reminded me of when I learned about Stanley Milgram in psychology. I believe I'm totally entranced by the human psyche and the perplexity of our mind. The thing I like about psychology is learning about the explanation for things that happen or weird quirks that humans have. If you've never heard of Stanley Milgram, I highly recommend reading about his experiments on obedience or just looking up the article I headed for this entry, I guarantee you'll be englightened. Sad to say, I regret selling my psychology book, now I'll never know if I would have read that textbook for fun.

I have this theory about horoscopes. It's highly possible that someone out there has written ariticles about such things, but I was just having some random thoughts a while back pertaining to this topic. I was talking to someone a while back and we came across the topic of horoscopes. The question arose as to why God would create horoscopes if there wasn't an imp of truth to them? I mean sometimes the things that they write in seventeen magazine seem so correct and the predictions are so accurrate right?

One day in psychology, during one of my prof's infamous class demonstrations, he called on a chinese gal to be his experimentee of choice. He told our class that he could read someone's "type" by just looking at them. My professor started "reading" the girl and he said something about how she came from a family who wanted to her to succeed in life, they wanted to her have a prestigious job in the future, work hard, get good grades, and yada yada. After everything had been said and done, he asked the girl if the stuff he'd said was correct. Slightly surprised, the girl nodded her head and proceeded to return to her seat. When she had returned to her seat, my prof admitted to not actually being able to "read" people, in actuality he was making generalizations about 80%+ of the population of all people. So if my prof had 100 students in his class, 80 of them would probably have nodded their head just like the girl had.

I think horoscopes are just like that. They make 12 or so generalizations that apply to the majority of the population and cause people to believe that there is some truth to them. I think they also tend to pose ideas for you to fulfill the horoscope to further ones belief in them. Magazines can write anything and the chances of that prediction applying to such a large population is pretty high and then will that girl or guy go on believing that horoscopes are reliable and accurate?

well that was my random entry for the week. Hope you have a wonderful week, stay warm, and enjoy the great outdoors!


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