you can't make me (psychological reactance)

Brehm and Sensenig (1966) showed that if an individual were given two choices and there was another individual giving their opinion on the choice then the person making the choice will show a preference for the choice that the person giving their opinion prefers. However, if the other individual tries to tell the person making the choice what choice to make then the person making the choice will reject the choice that the other person is telling them to make. This is known as psychological reactance. In my childhood there was a choice that I had to make that some would consider to be rather important. I was raised Catholic by my parents, and when I was younger I would go to church with them without asking any questions because it was all that I knew. However, as I grew older I began to question why do I go to church every week. I personally felt that I was getting nothing out of it and saw no reason to continue going, but I did not want to make my parents think that I was not respectful of their choice, so instead of not going at all I began to question them about why I was supposed to be going. During this questioning my parents began to tell me that I had to go and that I did not have a choice about it. Needless to say I did not take to this very well, and in line with the findings of Brehm and Sensenig (1966) I reacted to this attempt to impede my freedom to choose by choosing the other option, which was to stop going to church.

Brehm, J. W., Sensenig, J., (1966). Social influence as a functionof attempted and implied usurpation of choice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4(6), 703-707.

It's official: I don't really care. (Need to evaluate)

After reading about the Need to Evaluate study by Jarvis and Petty (1996) in the text I realized that it was likely that I was low in need to evaluate. I believed this because after reading the findings of the study I found that I was the opposite of the high need to evaluate participants who were likely to describe their daily experiences in judgmental terms, or to hold strong feelings about political or social issues. I myself do not get very judgmental about what happened during my day, and I do not hold strong political or social attitudes. I decided that instead of assuming that I would rate low in need to evaluate that I would use the scale that was used by Jarvis and Petty (1996) to assess peoples levels on need to evaluate. People who scored a 57 or higher on the scale were considered to be high in need to evaluate and people who scored a 46 or below were considered to be low in need to evaluate, and anyone who scored between these scores was considered to be neutral on need to evaluate. I scored a 31 on the scale which put me in the low need to evaluate group, and considering that I never feel a strong desire to voice a strong opinion on pretty much any topic, unless I think that arguing a point on it may be entertaining and cognitively challenging, I believe that this is a fitting evaluation of the way that I form attitudes about such topics.


Jarvis, W. B. G., & Petty, R. E. (1996). The need to evaluate. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 172-194.

Religion careers and gender (IAT)

The IAT is performed through word and image association. There are two headings at the top of the page that you associate a random word with. Each word goes with only one of the heading choices. This task is first completed for two separate sets of headings, and then the four headings are put together. For example GOOD and BAD may be one heading set and MALE and FEMALE may be another heading set.

I chose to do the IAT for the participant observer blog. I chose to do the religion and the gender-career IATs. The religion IAT was not exactly consistant with my conscious beliefs, as the IAT showed me as having a preference of Judaism over other religions, but I do not have a preference to any religion. The gender-career IAT showed me as associating males with careers and females with family, but I do not associate either male or females with only one of these aspects consciuosly. I feel that it is most likely that the reason for the results I obtained in both of the tests was due to the fact that I did not take the time to properly associate the appropriate letter on the keyboard with the headings to assign the words to. I believe that the IAT is showing cultural associations more than anything. I do not feel that the results of the IAT changed my feelings about prejudice and stereotypes. I don’t believe that it changed the way I feel about religion because I do not claim a religion and I feel that although all religions do have a few good ideas to them they are still just human constructs that are inherently flawed. I feel that the IAT did not change my feelings on the gender and its association with careers and family, because I know that it is common for women to be associated with family and men to be associated with work outside of the house. The test that I chose to retake was the gender-career IAT because the results were the opposite of my conscious beliefs. I took more time to remember the positioning of the titles at the top of the page that I was supposed to associate the words with befoe starting the association task, and managed to change my results to my conscious beliefs. All in all I do not think that the IAT is a valid measure of a persons beliefs.

look before you think (stereotypes)

Schmalz, Kerstetter, and anderson (2008) found that in the world of sports stereotypes can play a large role in the form of the stigma consciousness in the willingness of an individual to participate in sports. That is, they found that individuals would not participate in sports that held a negative stigma associated with it. I encountered a similar situation in my life with surfing. Although it was not enough to keep me from surfing it was enough to keep me from wanting to admit to being a surfer. For those of you who do not know surfers are generally stereotyped as being lazy potheads, which unfortunatley has been becoming more and more true. So when people would find out that I was a surfer it would change the way they looked at me, but eventually I learned that I should be proud to be a part of the ever groing world of surfing. Anyone who has ever tried surfing knows that it is not easy and that someone who is lazy would not stick with it for very long. Also, while there has been an increase in the number of "shady" people in the sport comparatively there are many more people in the sport doing great things. One example is the Malloy brothers, three brothers from California, who go to Ireland every year to surf, but when they are there they also run a surf camp that brings Protestant kids from the northern part of Ireland and Catholic kids from the southern part of Ireland, which is almost like two different countries and have them surf together. For those who do not know Protestants and Catholics in Ireland do not get along at all, and though these kids live in towns only about 15 miles apart they proably never see each other. After a do of surfing together however, these kids were laughing and playing together, and there was no separation between them. In closing, although there is currently a negative stereotype of surfers I am now proud to say that I am one and try to promote a more truthful image that represents all the good that can come from surfing, such as the Malloy brothers uniting children divided by religion in Ireland.

Schmalz, D. L., Kerstetter, D. L., Anderson, D. M. (2008). Stigma consciousness as a predictor of children's participation in recreational vs. competative sports. Journal of Sport Behavior, 31(3), p. 276-297.