• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

modify individuals’ perceptions of themselves: See, for example, Swann, William B., Jr.; Milton, Laurie P.; and Polzer, Jeffrey T. “Should We Create a Niche or Fall in Line? Identity Negotiation and Small Group Effectiveness,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 79, No. 2, 2000.

Unable to separate: See, for example, Harter, Susan. “Self and Identity Development.” In At the Threshold: The Developing Adolescent, Feldman, S. Shirley and Elliott, Glen R., eds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

“imaginary audience”: See Elkind, David. “Egocentrism in Adolescence.” Child Development, Vol. 38, 1967.

Asian girls were subtly reminded: See the Tufts University experiment cited in Vedantam, Shankar. “With Subtle Reminders, Stereotypes Can Become Self-Fulfilling.” The Washington Post, December 11, 2006. Along similar lines, “Exposure to words related to the elderly makes people walk more slowly; words related to professors make people smarter at the game Trivial Pursuit.” See Haidt, Jonathan. The Happiness Hypothesis, New York: Basic Books, 2006.

parents and teachers to influence: See, for example, McNulty, Shawn E. and Swann, William B. Jr. “Identity Negotiation in Roommate Relationships: The Self as Architect and Consequence of Social Reality,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 67, No. 6, 1994.

“called me the ‘happy freshman’ ”: Interview.

classmates viewed them as nerds: Interviews.

“it’s a lot better than being a nobody”: Interview.

group polarization is not so different: See, for example, Myers, David G. and Lamm, Helmut. “The Group Polarization Phenomenon,” Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 83, No. 4, 1976.

“a pattern of thought”: See Merriam-webster.com.

the responsibility is shared: See, for example, Moscovici.

“the mindless sinking of personal identity into the group of Us”: See Wrangham, Richard and Peterson, Dale. Demonic Males, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996. Wrangham added, “That it also produces irresponsibility and deeply unpleasant behavior is only relevant from the point of view of Them.”

in the midst of a crowd: See, for example, Billig, Michael. “Social Psychology and Intergroup Relations,” European Monographs in Social Psychology, Vol. 9. Billig also notes Freud’s description that a group consists of “a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego.”

a susceptibility: Many psychologists refute Gustave Le Bon’s concept of a “mental unity,” however. See, for example, Baumeister, Roy F. and Leary, Mark R. “The Need to Belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation,” Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 117, No. 3, 1995: “Wegner (1986) noted the irony that traditional theories of the ‘group mind’ tended to assume that all members would essentially think the same thing, because much more far-reaching advantages could be realized through a group mind if each member was responsible for different information, thereby enabling the group to process considerably more information than any one person could.” I address this issue in Chapter 14.

“crowd contagion”: See Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power, New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1960. Cited in Goleman.

“Usually one person starts making fun”: Interview.

“The human brain takes in information”: See Berns, Gregory. Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2008. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Gregory Berns. Iconoclast was fascinating and fun to read.

the group and the individual: See, for example, Bettancourt, B. Ann and Sheldon, Kennon. “Social Roles as Mechanisms for Psychological Need Satisfaction Within Social Groups,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 81, No. 6, 2001.

“the satisfaction of one tends to come at the expense of the other”: Ibid., which cites Brewer, M. B. “The social self: On being