Why we do what we do. How psychology determines our everyday life

Droemer 2018 - Everything is psychology!

Jens Förster is head of the "Systemic Institute for Positive Psychology in Cologne" and is Professor of Social Psychology. In positive psychology it is criticized that the psychology of the 20th century focuses too much on psychopathology, ie on the mental disorders and not on the spectrum of functioning mental mechanisms. Rather, positive psychology is about using knowledge of the human psyche to enable "normal people" to live better. Forster's new work "Why We Do What We Do" shows exactly what the title promises.

"Everything is psychology. Every handshake, every buying decision, and every boring political debate reveals much about the actors as soon as you look at things psychologically. "
Jens Förster

contents

• Droemer 2018 - Everything is psychology!
• Thinking, feeling, behavior
• Personality and environment
• Emotions control motor skills - and vice versa
• Willingness to take risks
• motivation
• Elementary or social?
• Motivation from the inside is stronger
• Promotion and prevention
• expectation of success
• self-efficacy
• To reach the goal
• The post-action phase
• Unconscious goals
• The fast unconscious
• Awareness
• Conclusion

Thinking, feeling, behavior

The 500 pages are divided into three parts. First, it's about what psychology is. Then Förster goes into the cornerstones of psychology: thinking, feeling, behavior. The third part deals with topics, areas and problem areas of everyday psychology.

According to psychology Professor Jens Förster, we never see an objective environment, but influence it through our perception. (Image: ra2 studio / fotolia.com)

The book is as scientific as it is understandable to laymen, and, which rarely occurs in psychological textbooks, to transfer directly to everyday life, so valuable to understand your own thinking, feeling and behavior and to direct in a positive direction. Starting with buying decisions, over conflicts in the profession, the (far from objective) judgment of persons, meaning and dangers of stereotypes to the manipulation of opinions. Förster also addresses big questions: life goals, relationships, intelligence, happiness, communication, helpfulness and aggression.

Personality and environment

Förster shows that thinking and behavior are based on an interplay of personality and environment. But we never see an "objective" environment, but distort the environment through our perception. So what we see as the environment is a construct. But Förster is not a social constructivist for whom there is no real environment, but empiricists. For him, psychology is an empirical science that, although it can make statistical statements about the behavior of people in studies, but can not predict the individual's behavior.

Already in the first part, Förster analyzes how thinking, feeling and behavior develop. He emphasizes that reward motivates and differentiates between positive and negative learning. Positive education ignores unwanted behavior in children and promotes positive experiences, while negative education penalizes unwanted behavior and so the absence of punishment is a learning objective. In later life, positive education is shown to be idealism, self-fulfillment, but also a willingness to take risks, while people who learn to avoid punishment tend to remain dutiful and risk-averse.

According to Förster, humans are neither rational nor economic, but are easily manipulated. Prejudices and stereotypes, according to Förster, have evolutionary roots and determine our perception. Test subjects, for example, rated politicians, partners or products more positively when cheerful music was playing in the background. If you do not know where a good mood comes from, think quickly that the subject of the judgment is causing it, even if it is not. If the participants were previously warned that the music could put them in a comfortable mood, the mood influence on the ratings, however, remained off.

According to Förster, we let ourselves be quickly manipulated by moods and opinions. Often influences that have nothing to do with the subject matter of the assessment are effective. (Image: svetazi / fotolia.com)

Emotions control motor skills - and vice versa

Expressive patterns and motor skills are strongly linked to our emotions. Physical expressions alone could change, amplify, or mitigate emotions. Folding one's hands in prayer leads to greater self-control, spreading the finger of a finger makes us perceive the aggression of others more intensely, straighten ourselves up (power position) increase the risk of risk, lead to the release of testosterone and lower the cortisol level. Washing one's own hands alleviates guilt in unethical behavior, Förster said.

In a good mood, we tend to think of positive and, in a bad mood, of negative events. If we are in a good mood, we are reminded, according to Förster, of success rather than failure.

The mood serves us as information: "We feel it directly, and it is often triggered (...) by external events. However, using it uncritically as information leads to judgmental errors. (...) Did my son just compose a great song, and I use this good mood as information for the assessment of the Federal Government, I act against all rules of reason. "(87). But that's exactly how judgments go, explains the psychologist.

Willingness to take risks

In general, people are willing to take more risks if they feel good. Positive mood is usually the result of a safe environment, Förster said, and this security is leading people to become more confident and more creative. It creates an upward spiral, so the Broaden-and-Built Theory: I'm in a good mood, then I come up with great idea, this makes me feel better, I remember more and my mood continues to rise. But bad moods are a signal that danger lurks. In such situations we should not experiment and avoid mistakes.

If people know too little about the influence of moods on their own behavior, then they could slide into a downward spiral. Then a failure expectation leads to over-cautious behavior, which in turn leads to real failure, which contributes to an even worse mood that leads to further failures and deterioration of sentiment.

From a positive mood, an upward spiral can quickly emerge, increasing both creative thinking and risk-taking. (Image: Visions-AD / fotolia.com)

motivation

At the beginning of motivation, according to Förster, there is a need or a goal. There are approach motives to get closer to a desired goal, as well as avoidance motivations such as giving up smoking or avoiding the boss out of the way.

Having goals does not mean tackling them. For a motivation, the point is crucial, what the will leads to action. Technically, this would be the precissional phase that ends with the decision either to pursue the goal or not. This is followed by the postdecisional, pre-actional, actionary and postagenetic phases.

Some motives are physiological: food, drink, bowel movements or sex. Motifs in the narrow sense, however, are socially oriented and dependent on the personality. This includes power and connection to a community.

First of all, elementary needs such as eating, sleeping or security have to be satisfied, before people opt for more demanding motives such as creative thinking, self-realization or moral action, Förster said.

Elementary or social?

Simply, this difference is not. Even very hungry people would not eat everything. According to Förster, the physiological needs are also associated with social and individual motives. Our environment enhances certain activities and we store their value in the memory. This value, however, arises in turn in the social context, which often does not reach our consciousness.

Forester asks, for example, if our choice to study medicine is based on helping others or on our parents being doctors? The cultural aspect also plays into it: in a society in which physicians enjoy high prestige and income, the motivation for such studies is higher than if their work was considered normal.

Does anyone want to become a doctor because he wants to help people, because parents want it, or because doctors have a high priority in society. The motivation to do one thing is crucial to your success. (Image: Feodora / fotolia.com)

The value of actions, according to the author, increases with many positive inputs. But even externally entered values, interests and goals we often feel as our own.

Motivation from the inside is stronger

Really intrinsic motivation is a much stronger drive. Anyone who studies medicine because it is fun for him, is more motivated and in a state of deep concentration, it is more likely, if someone is enthusiastic about a task and this fits in with their own abilities. This condition reduces stress and is also healthy.

With boring perceived tasks, people would be motivated with additional stimuli. As a result, foresters hate both under-demand and over-demand. In the meantime, slight overstraining promotes great motivation.

In addition to the fun, importance is added as a motivational factor. Visits to relatives with Alzheimer's at the retirement home were not necessarily fun, but were considered important. Here goals with the focus on security and obligations, as well as goals with the focus on growth of the self-realization are characteristics of a stable character.

Promotion and prevention

Positve reinforcement or withdrawal of positive promote self-realization. People who are in the promotional focus can be better mobilized for activities in which they can realize themselves, people in the prevention mode better on those in which they have to show responsibility, so Förster.

For example, people with a PhD focus could be better off with a better chance of doing sports. People with a prevention mode could be more motivated by the negative consequences of a lack of exercise.

Unconditionally, goals could be set if positive affective values ​​were linked to an activity. This would be more interesting. For example, relocations or tidying up in studies were rated more attractive when words such as love, holidays or the sun appeared on the computer.

Which stone am I pulling? Am I putting on stability or risk? Promotion and prevention often underlie other motivations. (Image: Kenishirotie / fotolia.com)

expectation of success

Another factor in motivation, according to Förster, is the expectation of success. No matter what the value of a goal is. With zero expectation of being successful, we would not tackle the goal. So decide on an action if something is important, interesting and promising at the same time. Neither would we tackle a goal where we expect to reach it, but we are not interested, nor would we fix ourselves on a goal that interests us, but in which we think we can not achieve it.

self-efficacy

Knowledge about one's own abilities is often just pseudo-knowledge. Thus, failure expectations would produce self-fulfilling prophecies. People would be able to do too much if they put aside the negative view of themselves, the author emphasizes.

To reach the goal

If the decision has been made, start planning. Now the advantages and disadvantages would be hidden - for doubt there is no more space and you concentrate on the goal. The more concrete the plan is, the more important it is to clarify when, where and how it is implemented. Who has concrete plans, hold on to the goal, if he encounters resistance. Goals should be specific, measurable, responsive, feasible, and timed.

The post-action phase

Attributions of control, changeability and intentionality are highly motivating according to Förster. The best is the appeal "I can do that, and I have to make an effort to do this and that for me to do it". Thus one appreciates own talents and promotes efforts, without falling into idleness. On the other hand, sentences such as "I can not do that and can not change it" are putting a brake on motivation.
Self-efficacy can best be achieved by attributing the success to oneself and by being able to achieve the same in the future. For example, people with depression showed patterns in which they saw successes as external, changeable, and uncontrollable, but failures as internal, stable, and also uncontrollable. That leads to helplessness.

Optimists, on the other hand, have a generalized self-efficacy. They often address their problems and do not let themselves be discouraged by failures, face challenges, and can therefore do many things better, explains Förster. In their childhood, they were often encouraged to solve problems and parents attributed their achievements to their talents and efforts.

How a path works depends on which eyes we look at. (Image: ferkelraggae / fotolia.com)

Unconscious goals

People became more aggressive in studies when they heard an aggressive word without them being aware of it. This would also create contrast effects: Those who unconsciously activate an action that they do not like, often automatically do the opposite.

The fast unconscious

Many thoughts run in the background, but would consciously controllable, if you draw attention to them, so Förster. The unconscious could also activate to performance as systematically distort judgments about persons, for example, when math teachers overlook girls who registered. This also applies, for example, to unconscious racism. Activations of unconscious associations happen automatically and in a fraction of a second.

They are then flawed if the information retrieved is wrong. Sometimes we have no control over the long-term memory stored. The mere reading of information such as "aggressive" activates in the memory a trace that will remain for a while.

Such associations only worked if the respective person did not know that. It's like picking up music in the supermarket and buying three chocolates instead of one, without knowing why. Consciousness helps us to control such influences.

Awareness

To activate the consciousness and to correct influences costs time and energy. By contrast, automatic processes are fast and require little mental effort. Above all, automatic thinking and behavior is characterized by the fact that we are unaware of the influence and that the triggered process can not be stopped.

According to Förster, the formerly mysterious unconscious is part of the memory. We would activate information from it, but in part do not know its sources. Consciousness, on the other hand, enables us to save things that are meaningful to us. We could not plan without it. Planning allows you to defer rewards, do something or leave it alone and know why. Such self-control causes us to control the environment to some extent.

Consciousness is shaped by our experiences of the past and influences our thinking, planning and action. (Image: agsandrew / fotolia.com)

Consciousness is the prerequisite for self-esteem. It allows ethical and prosocial behavior. Pro social behavior is hardly conceivable without an awareness of what might happen. Consciousness also means understanding oneself as someone with a past. We had to learn that in early childhood. Awareness allows flexibility. Even the unconscious, however, is quite flexible. Thus we did not unconsciously make ourselves do things that we consciously reject and whose rejection we have internalized.

Förster focuses on developmental, personality, social, motivational, advertising and organizational psychology: From prejudice about relationships, from foreign and self-perceptions to motivations and learning.

He explains how associations become attitudes and attitudes to global judgments that we do not test for their reality, though we usually think we did. In doing so, we would not necessarily correct attitudes for an insight into reality, but especially to compensate for cognitive dissonance, that is, the contradiction between behavior and attitudes. Also, attitudes could be changed by subtle, situational manipulations. According to Förster, if we are looking for something positive about a stock in the memory, then we also find something positive. Similarly, if we are looking for something negative, we would find something negative about the same stock.

Changing cognitive dissonance by changing one's behavior is difficult, as illustrated by the example of smoking. It would be simpler to trivialize, trivialize or rationalize. For example, trivializing would be comparing yourself to someone who smokes a lot more. Or with someone who takes worse drugs. Rationalizing would be for example: "If I do not smoke, I will be fat, and that would not be healthy."

Another way to reduce dissonance is to doubt scientific findings or to bring Scheinargumnete: "Helmut Schmidt has smoked like a vent and has 96 become."

Real behavior changes are more effective to reduce dissonance. If we really stopped doing unwanted activities, we would be proud and our self-esteem would be sustainable.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, for a book that teaches fundamentals, Förster is too attached to social and social psychology and does not focus on the evolutionary development of memory, consciousness or motivation. That would have given the whole an icing on the cake, especially when it comes down to physiological needs or fears. The author vividly explains hundreds of psychological phenomena that occur in our everyday lives and, more importantly, provide useful tips on how we can use them for our best. In that sense, "Why do we do what we do. How psychology determines our everyday life "by Jens Förster a book worth reading. (Dr. Utz Anhalt)

source

Jens Förster: Why we do what we do. How psychology determines our everyday life. Droemer. Munich 2018. ISBN 978-3-426-27741-6