Stereotypes vs. Subjective Recognition

Here is a little post for the weekend. We will be in Berlin to help my mother presenting her company at an international fair. Well, and because we want to see the fair too ;). I'll try to take some pictures and share them as soon as we are back and I find some time to do so. I wrote todays post around Christmas when I was visiting my mom. It's about prejudices.

Enjoy and if you want to leave me a note in the post section ;).

Ever since I started studying psychology I find myself stating facts somewhat like that:

“People who live in the eastern part of Germany tend to have a stronger in-group-behavior than people from other parts of Germany.”

During my seasonal holidays I was confronted with some well imprinted stereotypes:

• the kids these day are all overweighted 
• people who are beautiful have more success in live 
• you can recognize a typical women from the eastern part of Germany easily because of the typical hair do. 

In general these three statements are all stereotypes and therefore not true. The first one can be explained easily. This statement is repeated very often in the media. Normally we tend to believe a statement when we have heard it from three different sources (more or less, the theory behind it is quite complex). Having heart it so often we tune in into the stereotype “kids are fat” and we start to recognize all the little fat girls and boys everywhere we are, in the supermarket, in the gym, at the swimming pool, at the ice cream restaurant, …..

Thus our conclusion based on our knowledge and experiences is: “yes the kids these days are fat”. If finding the truth were that easy we wouldn’t need scientists for that. Of course it’s not the truth. A statement close to the truth is “the result of a study showed that more kids were overweight than the study from 19XX recorded.”

Maybe each of the three statements above can be experienced but I seriously hope that nobody believes in them right away.

What’s your favorite stereotype?

I like number two and three ;).

The world seems to need NLP

Since I started reading a book about NLP (neurolinguistic programming) I figured out that many people in my office are learning and practising it already. Until now it's a very interesting area. I'll give you a summary about the book once I finished it.
Until then you can watch a video of Derren Brown a magician from UK who uses NLP and hypnosis to acheive very interesting results.

Stay tuned ;)

About habits

Some posts ago I've posted a quote from Steve Covey where he pictures the correlation between thought, action, habit, character, and destiny.
I always admired people who have a set of good habits e.g. the colleague who is always happy, people who can find challenge and excitement in nearly every task, or the guy who is exercising every morning.
So where do all these good habits come from? Is there a magic source somewhere?
According to the knowledge of psychology habits are actions that have been trained repetitively and thus are carried out automatically.
From this it follows that you can create a new habit by doing an action often.

Well that is the theory and does that work in reality too? I'm trying to answer this question with a rather short experiment. I decided to workout every day at least for 15 minutes. Until now I stuck to that rule for more than two weeks. According to scientific studies the action will turn into a habit after 3 to 4 weeks. I'll inform you whether it worked or not.

Do you want to change a habit, create a new one?
You can find a brief how to at zenhabits.
If you really want to go into the topic read My Bad Habits written by Professor Ian Newby-Clark.