The Psychology of...

This is part two of my "How to Be an Evil Villain" series although part 1 was suspiciously erased completely from my blog. This is no lie. I must be on to something. My first post was about gaining influence over other people, which I intend to rewrite eventually. But in the meantime, here is the second lesson on becoming an evil villain. One of the most essential parts of being a villain is that you need to make other people think you are the hero, or at least neutral. Comic books make it painfully clear who is bad and who is good but the real world is not so easily sorted. We have words like "terrorist", "dictator", and "bully" that help us discriminate between the good and bad but the ugly part of this is that no one, including the terrorists and the dictators and the bullies think they are the bad guys. A lot of "evil" behaviour is carried out by people who truly believe that they are doing the right thing and what's worse, th...

Much of the study of education and psychology revolves around learning. How we obtain and encode, and then retrieve and implement information is vital to both fields. In my studies in both areas, one of the theories that had stuck out to me the most was Bandura's social learning theory which is essentially the idea of  'monkey see-monkey do'.  People learn by observing and imitating others ie. my daughter cleans up her mess because she sees me clean up my mess . Classical conditioning is another example of a learning theory that illustrates that learning is associative and often automatic or subconscious ie. my daughter associates cleaning up her mess with getting a treat so she cleans up her mess . I'll mention one more learning theory and then we can move on from here I promise. Cognitivism is the idea that humans are more rational. That there is more to our behaviour than just copying others or being programmed by rewards. The idea is that our brains are more like c...