A reflection of my social psychology course-
Free will had long been ingrained into my conceived notion of the workings of the universe, life and ultimately our sociality as human beings. Then a schism occurred between my rationalization of the world and my ironically god-fearing, god-loving religious beliefs. It was a change in my psyche, my mind perception, my production and narration of semantical meaning that gave me purpose in this life. I was cast away to what feels like a void of nihilism and here in the depths of my insignificance I have seen who God really is.
He was just the first single-cell organism and now he is the force between our synapses. He was the chimpanzee primate engaging in reciprocal-altruism by sharing food and being repaid at another feeding (Frans de Waal, 2019); now he is also the human primate making fundamental attribution errors. He is the best of us and the worst of us. He is our sociality and the complex nature of the relationship between our biology and psychology.
With that being said, this course has given me a way to put these existential thoughts into some types of categorization and also let them be dictated. I am one step closer, although on an infinite journey, to finding the interlacing between our psycho-biological interactions that is ultimately the theory of everything. My perception of the world now is seemingly detached but through this lens, I see the amalgam of variables presented in this book and more. I look at people and see the physics behind how fast a man is able to walk and then see how fast he is walking. I also think about what this will do to his heart rate, and combined with his emotional predisposition, perhaps as a derivative of their emotional development in adolescence, wonder if when he sees the girl walking past him drop her books…will he stop to help her or continue walking?
An equation or code was in that situation, and is currently, being written and executed as dependent upon itself and itself being reality. What if I, God the author of this code, were to change the variable of say, the race of the girl or the type of home the man grew up in? The unfolding of events may have occurred differently. It is with regard to these infinite complex interactions of variables that are incomprehensible to our primitive brains, that we create free will. It is much like our perception of probability when flipping a quarter. To us, it is probable based on our expectancy yet to the quarter, it is only an outcome predestined by the predicating factors of initial velocity, friction, gravity, and more beyond my capability of knowing.
I say all this to say that I did not want to pick one topic from this book because I feel that would be too general and vague. I think the point of social psychology is seeing that there is a plethora of variables in any given being and trying to convalesce it into the reasoning and meaning of who and what we are. It is in this research and my studies in this class that I have been able to provide myself with some sense of purpose, albeit hard to find sometimes, even if it is just to self-validate against my fear of going to hell for being unable to believe in an anthropomorphic higher power.
In addition to semi-stroking my ego’s rationalizations, I am now increasingly on guard about my own avatar’s social variables that are seemingly inept. The confirmation biases I tend to engage in, the aggression I have and what seems most notable in regard to my depressive states…my self-fulfilling prophecies. As more and more of these variables become exclusively defined and identified in my own life I see more clearly about what I can do to be better and to do better.
With respect to distance learning, this course has provided me with a unique desire to actually read the text. Literally as I type this, I am debating on returning this rental textbook or just to buy it so I can go over the learning on my own. I have not struggled at all and this only leads me to conclude that if I find some type of meaningful relationship with the material, as I already had with this class, I can presumably have the same successful outcome in any other course.
Is there a word for just liking the syntax and linguistics of a sentence structure? Even if it’s technically grammatically incorrect, it just feels better.
