Cell phones: they're here and they're not going away. So now it's time to "stop worrying and learn to love them". If you're upset about how addicted teens are to their phones I'll give you a few ideas that, hopefully, will make you feel better. After all, cellphones aren't going away. Quite the opposite. They're only going to get more powerful and more ubiquitous. The "pull" of the phone is irresistible. In this follow-up to episode 258 I want to talk about how adults and parents can feel less distressed by a teen's behavior. I hope the ideas in this episode help.

How can we feel better about something (cell phone use) we can't do a whole lot about?

What is change blindness? How could you miss some of the most obvious things that change right in front of you? Millions of people watch a video of kids playing basketball and they miss the fact that a gorilla walks right through the scene.  A gorilla?  And people missed it?  Yup.  We often miss lots of things that happen right in front of us because our attention spans work in strange ways.  And because what happened isn't what we expected to happen. Let's learn about change blindness.

Why do we find it so hard to put down our phones? I'll give you 5 reasons drawn directly from psychological theories on how we learn, how teenagers are strongly affected by reward and how we are all drawn in by mystery.  There is of course no easy answer for how to get teens to put down their phones but I'll share what I'm doing with my teenagers.  

I grew up eating baloney without ever giving a thought to where it came from.  But psychology is all reflecting on who you are, why you think the way you do and why you do what you do.  So let's explore our eating behavior: why do we think it's weird or wrong when we hear that in some cultures people  eat cat meat or insects or bats.  Is it really that different from eating cows and pigs?  How are we influenced to think that some foods are okay while others aren't...?    

What if you could study for your psychology test in 24 second sound bytes on your iPhone? Now you can. I recently contacted Parviv - the founder of an app called Clammr. Typically, people use Clammr to stay on top of the news, listen to podcasts or "top tweets" and other humorous audio clips. I thought it would make a great test prep tool. So check it out: download Clammr on your iPhone and search for Psych Fest Prep. You can choose from 7 major psychology topics and start studying!

What if you could study for your psychology test in 24 second sound bytes on your iPhone? Now you can.  I recently contacted Parviv - the founder of an app called Clammr. Typically, people use Clammr to stay on top of the news, listen to podcasts or "top tweets" and other humorous audio clips. I thought it would make a great test prep tool. So check it out: download Clammr on your iPhone and search for Psych Fest Prep. You can choose from 7 major psychology topics and start studying!

Hints:

Put your email address in the Settings>Edit Profile page. When you tap the thumbs up icon on important terms you'll get an email with links to those terms you can listen to again.

Set "Skip Heard Clammrs" to OFF (under Settings>Preferences.

I hope this helps for your next test. Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions!

London needs help and only a person trained in psychology can fix this. There are just too many Londoners using their subway (the "tube") and instead of standing side by side as they go up the escalator, people are doing what they always do - they stand single file on the right of the escalator so that people in a hurry can pass on the left. That's a fine social norm when there aren't that many people, but if London transport is going to be usable as the population grows they're going to have to get people to behave differently.

How can we break such a strong norm? It's not just London's problem. When you go up the stairs which side do you stand on? The right of course, and you expect the people coming down the stairs to stay to their right. When someone doesn't follow the norm we can get pretty annoyed.

So what can we do to create a wide scale change in behavior? We have to apply a little social psychology.

What comes to mind when you think "nursing home"?  Not so good, right?  Let's change that.  Let's use what we learn from psychology to create exciting places for seniors to live.  We've got the tools provided by Maslow's Hierarchy and by the Self Determination theory.  Here's one way we could revolutionize the "senior years".

Passengers on an airplane spring to action when a stewardess needs help - but a neighborhood in New York City does very little when a woman is attacked. What's different about these situations? How can we take what we learn from the airplane and apply it to the attack? Lecturing the neighborhood residents probably won't help. Can we do anything to the way the neighborhood is laid out to encourage interaction among residents and a greater sense of interdependency among them? That's what we explore in this episode of The Psych Files.