The ending to my previous psychology course covers the concept of happiness, and most of these details are included here. In general, it turns out that happiness is fairly heritable, but there is of course more to it than that. Here we will talk about some basic nuances that will affect your happiness, and describe how the variability in your happiness is affected by external factors. Finally, trying to connect it to watches, the argument and variability of happiness is largely a function of the company you keep, and what you are exposed to most frequently, but it need not be a source of sadness. We are the architects of our own thoughts after all.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://screwdowncrown.wordpress.com/2021/05/25/watch-collecting-and-happiness/

In the last post I mentioned "self" and touched on psychological phenomena related to the self such as: everybody notices us, we are above average, and what we do make perfect sense.

Next we move on to attribution theory, which explores how we make sense of ourselves and others, and then onto understanding how we think about other people, and what we actually like about other people - we will then try and connect this to watch collecting.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://screwdowncrown.wordpress.com/2021/05/12/social-psychology-and-watches-pt-2/

The Exercise: Tonight and every night for the next seven days, before you go to sleep, write down three things that went well and why they went well.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://screwdowncrown.wordpress.com/2021/05/27/attitude-for-gratitude-3-blessings-exercise/

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://screwdowncrown.wordpress.com/2021/04/19/the-dilution-effect/

I recently watched a TED Talk entitled "The counterintuitive way to be more persuasive" - the talk was about the Dilution Effect. In this talk, organizational psychologist Niro Sivanathan discusses this cognitive quirk that weakens our strongest cases, and he reveals why brevity is the true expressway to persuasion.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://screwdowncrown.wordpress.com/2021/05/10/social-psychology-and-watches/

I mentioned a week ago that I am taking a course on psychology, and so this covers some of the material from the course itself. I may end up splitting this into a few parts as there is a lot I want to cover! To me, social psychology is the most interesting field of psychology. Social psychology is the branch of psychology that deals with how we have social interactions and social thoughts, what we think of ourselves, what we think about other people, how we behave in groups, how we think about different groups, and so on. It's just extremely interesting because these are intrinsicallyinteresting topics - everybody is interested in themselves. It is also interesting because social psychologists have come up with some really cool findings.

For example, people in certain studies were shown photos of Tony Blair and Barack Obama, and then asked, "Who is more American," - now due to unconscious biases and stereotypes, various studies find that Tony Blair is thought of as more American because, due to the colour of his skin, many people think of him as more American.

There is also some evidence that we have a form of implicit egoism. When asked about our favourite letter, it is (more often than one would expect by chance) likely to be the first letter of our first or last name. More than that, psychologists find that the sort of people who move to Georgia are more likely than you'd expect to have G in their name, or those who become lawyers are more likely in fact to have L in their name.

Now, these studies, as of late, have generated a lot of scrutiny, and many have argued that the more sexy findings from social psychology, particularly those involving social priming, are not fully robust. In other words, through no fault, no fraud, nothing wrong in the part researchers, but just because of various failures to replicate the results meaningfully.

Is “time” a universal truth? Consider one of my favourite films, Interstellar, where Matthew McConaughey finds himself in a tesseract; this was an incredibly difficult concept to capture on film, and I think it was done really well. Effectively, this is a 4-dimensional space where the 4th dimension is time. In other words, all time is simultaneous and where we are at one particular ‘point’ in time is not a necessarily “mutually exclusive” event. As Rovelli expains it – the universe is made up of countless events – even something trivial such as a rock, is an event which takes place at a rate which we as humans cannot process!

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://screwdowncrown.wordpress.com/2021/04/28/what-is-time-2/

I was reading this book by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein entitled "Nudge" - in the book they evaluate choices, biases and the limits of human reasoning from several perspectives. They tell stories about how they trick themselves to becoming victims of the very limitations of thought that they are describing. This is telling, because the very fact that these educated, articulate professionals can trick themselves (even though they know what is happening) demonstrates how tough it is to think clearly. We fall prey to systematic errors of judgment all the time - however, one of the ways of addressing this issue is to improve our ability to identify when this is happening.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://screwdowncrown.wordpress.com/2021/04/10/nudge-improving-decisions/

Education is the starting block. As a buyer, you must find out what you like by taking yourself through the process of figuring it out, using data you have gathered yourself. Question what you read, understand all the variants, find all the alternatives and then as you do this, you will begin to find that passion within you start to form. As the passion forms, you will have confirmation of your genuine desire for this item. Conversely, after diving deep, and realising there is no passion to speak of, you might have just convinced yourself the item isn't for you; and that is ok!

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://screwdowncrown.wordpress.com/2021/03/31/watch-collectors-dont-buy-what-you-like/

The parable of the blind men and an elephant originated in the ancient Indian subcontinent, from where it has been widely diffused. It is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and conceptualize what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant's body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the elephant based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. In some versions, they come to suspect that the other person is dishonest and they come to blows. The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people's limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://screwdowncrown.wordpress.com/2021/04/06/blind-men-and-an-elephant/