Psychology in Everyday Life: The Psych Files – Détails, épisodes et analyse

In my recent exploration of artificial intelligence, I stumbled upon a fascinating article entitled, “Instructors as Innovators: a Future-focused Approach to New AI Learning Opportunities, With Prompts" which introduced the concept of goal-play interaction between students and AI. The authors provided a prompt for this interaction, which I found to be an intriguing application of AI to create interactive, educational experiences for students.

I adapted the prompt provided in the article to be more aligned with psychology concepts, particularly for students learning about cognitive distortions. I experimented with various AI models, including Google, Gemini, Meta, Perplexity, and ChatGPT, and the results were truly enlightening.

The goal of this exercise is for the individual to assume the role of a counselor, while the AI embodies a person exhibiting cognitive distortions. However, I must note that the outcomes were not always predictable, as different language models sometimes altered the dynamics of the interaction.
Despite this unpredictability, I found the interactive conversations to be incredibly valuable, sparking insightful discussions around cognitive distortions and Aaron Beck's groundbreaking work in this field. I invite you to try this out and share your experiences with your students (and with me as well as I'd love to hear how you've been using - and possibly modifying - this prompt). I am continuously refining this experiment and welcome any suggestions to enhance its reliability and effectiveness.

I encourage you to engage in this thought-provoking exercise and explore the potential of AI to create engaging and meaningful conversations around psychological concepts. As you'll see, I instructed the AI to draw from content on the Psych Central site, so thanks to them for providing very clear explanations of various types of cognitive distortions. Happy experimenting!

Instructions: copy all of the text below (without the lines) and then past it into whichever AI large language model of your choice. I have tried this in the free version of ChapGPT as well as paid versions of Perplexity, Gemini, and Meta, and it works well, though differently, in each one.

#SexualAssaultAwareness

#MentalHealthMatters

#EndTheSilence:

#SupportSurvivors

#TonicImmobility

#MentalHealthAwareness

You have no doubt asked yourself this question after watching a play: "How did those actors memorize all those lines?". In previous episodes of The Psych Files I have discussed a few of the techniques actors use to do this, but on this episode I have an interview with a professional actor, Jared Kelner, who wrote a fascinating book exactly on this topic. It's called, naturally, "Line?". If you're interested in psychology, memory, and how actors accomplish the amazing feat of memorization - especially for long plays containing many many lines (perhaps for a Shakespearean play). Here are the answers. 

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!

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.

How can we use a little psychology to get you to slow down when you're driving? You'd be surprised.  Very often road signs like "Slow" or a posted speed limit of, say 20 mph does not work.  Drivers go past these signs and nothing bad happens so after a while they're ignored.  We try to make it more personal with signs say, "Drive as if your kids live here", but often that doesn't work.  How about something trickier: what if we enlisted the help of those 3D sidewalk artists?  What could they possibly do?  You'll find out.