Vicology

      Besides this class, I have juniors in every one of my other classes. That means I get to listen in on their conversations that I remember myself having last year. The one I hear the most at the moment is, "I can't believe I have to write an essay every week in English, it's literally the worst thing ever". Sounds familiar right? Whenever I hear them freaking out about 11 AP, I laugh internally, reflecting back on the essay-every-Monday days. I thought last year was the peak of my writing arc but looking back on this semester, I realized that there's so much I've learned about my writing style and reading beyond the surface level.     Writing blog posts in addition to in-class essays helped me recognize how to write differently in order to cater to a specific audience. While in-class essays carry a formal tone with more challenging vocabulary, I find myself writing in a friendlier tone in my blogs - replacing much of the "smart" sentences with c...

       Have you ever been in a situation where your opinion didn’t match the majority opinion? What did you do in that situation? Did you stand your ground? Or did you conform to everyone else’s opinion? Solomon Asch asked the same questions. He conducted an experiment – in what is now known as the “Asch experiment”. He showed his participants this picture…      He then asked which one of the three lines on the right was the same length as the one on the left. To test conformity, 7 out of the 8 participants were instructed to purposely give an incorrect answer. The real participant was seated at the end, unknowingly forced to give their answer last. Asch wanted to see if the test subject would conform to the majority view or give the right answer. The results were shocking. Asch’s data concluded that about 75% of test subjects conformed at least once out of the 12 trials (McLeod). Even when there was a clear right answer, participants chose to do what ...