Gamification. Is it really a silver bullet? 🤔
Gamification is often considered some kind of a silver bullet to motivate people to do something that would otherwise be deemed as boring. How does it really work and when should one avoid it? 🤔
Psychology
Social development – born to be social
Today I’m going to discuss how we become a part of the society. When we are born, we have quite a different moral code we follow, as I described in my earlier post. Other aspects in us are in a continuous development as well, we are dynamic beings who develop over time. And this development doesn’t take place in a vacuum. We are what our surrounding world makes of us, but then again we have the power of influencing in what surrounds us. It’s a two-way street. 😊
We people are inherently social. When we define ourselves the first things that pop into our minds might be that we are of a certain gender, nationality, occupation and so on, and so on. All these labels through which we identify ourselves are social groups. For it is the social that gives us the sense of who we are. I’m like these people, not like them, and so on. (more…)
What is good (and evil)?
Today's post is all about what good means.😇 Normally, one would take evil into account as well, but since this blog is ought to be about positive subjects, the evil has only little room here. 😉
When a friend does something good to you, let's say gives you a gift, how do you know it is a good deed? Why is it a good deed and is it universally good?🤔Whether something is good or not is part of the social layer of the reality (see more here). As Nietzsche nicely put it: moral is only in our judgment – actions aren't good or evil per se. (more…)
Understanding the social
This week’s topic is the social layer of the reality. I like to think that there are different “layers” in the reality we perceive. For instance, there’s the physical reality that exists out there regardless of us humans, there will be atoms, molecules and so on. Another layer is what our perception adds to the physical: we perceive colors, we hear music and so on, although all this is just light or sound waves in the physical layer. The reason why I’m writing about the social layer is because understanding its existence and how it works really changed fundamentally the way I see the world.😊 This discovery also convinced me to study more social psychology which has been a journey of growing as a person. I strongly recommend it!👍
To open up my idea of different layers, let me give an example: Color red. First of all, colors don’t exist in the physical world, different physical objects only reflect light differently and these differences are interpreted by our eyes 👁 and brains as colors. So the concept of red only starts to exist once we hit the layer of perception of the reality. Then again, red can have different cultural meanings. It might be linked to love 💗, Christmas 🎅🏻 or stopping 🚦 in case that we see it in traffic lights – these all depend on the culture and conventions. It wouldn’t be too hard to imagine a culture in which the light making cars stop would be a blue one. I.e. what red means to us is already part of the social layer of the reality. Hopefully this example illustrates well the point I’m making. (more…)