I Have Too Much Time On My Hands

I posted the same complaint on Facebook as I did on LJ - i.e. re brain-dead, barn-fed chickens. I am such a child sometimes - and for all my whining about being time-starved, I clearly have enough of it to muck about on FB til late.

RB = Self    MP = Old school friend    AR = My sister

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MP: Rebel - do an essay on civil disobdience.

RB: It's getting close - how can one mention obedience without mentioning conformity (former is an individual thing; latter is a group thing)? Civil Disobedience - the very next stage, I swear !!

MP: Can you be obedient to one person who is advocating civil disobedience?

RB: ....and indeed can I remain civil while she does??

MP: Short answer - no.

RB: Plus side ::: think I have broken through the 'wall of despair' or pain barrier; Minus side ::: not without head banging the desk. Do you have to cover any aspects of psychology on your course, Mandy??

MP: Relating to children, we touch on it - Maslow Hierarchy of Needs, ring any bells??  Pavlov and his dogs, stages of develoipment, egocentric - toddlers go through this stage but do teenagers go back into it I wonder?

RB: Definitely Maslow, though we have been doing that in Ethics than in Psychology (lecturer of Psych not keen on Maslow). Teenagers revert back to toddlers because of hormones and accelerated growth.


However (re Pavlov), I am sure that at the ring of a bell, I could eat a strawberry meringue ;-)

MP: We get a touch of the Maslow's in the evening class - tired and wet so we don't want to function properly. Psychology experiment - what happens if I sit in a completly different seat in my evening class? Will a room full of adults start arguing over who's sitting in 'my' chair instead of their own?

RB: LOL - an experiment conducted by Bear et al (1984) - is porridge involved??

AR: Is that the same Bear et al (1987) that did a later study - the question of digestive waste in the woods?

MP: That study failed to take into account the falability of the pooper scoopers being used at the time.

RB: Methological Evaluation


1) There were more chairs were used in the classroom than in the original experiment.


2) In classroom experiment, there wasn't an offer of either a) porridge b) beds, so the experiment could not be replicated accurately.


Ecological Validity


1) No one can evaluate how human beings would react in a classroom situation - compared with bears in a small cottage, in the woods.


2) In the original experiment, the bears had become enraged in incremental stages - this can not be replicated with human beings without porridge/beds in the equation.

AR: But we still want to know, do bears sh*t in the woods?

RB: Locks (1989) concluded that indeed they must NOT have 'been' in the woods - as the smallest bowl of porridge was still warm enough to be deemed be 'just right.' This is backed up by Bear et al (1987), in a follow up experiment as to whether a diet of solid porridge would cause waste excrement to stick to fur. This possibility would give the bears a time delay, resulting in D. Bear's porridge being 'just right' and B. Bear's porridge being 'too cold.' The conclusion is that if they DID indeed defecate in the woods, Locks (1989) concurs that they didn't do so in the original experiment of Bear et al (1984).

This experiment would be difficult to replicate at college as there isn't enough trees nearby in order to conduct a field experiment in the direct vicinity - however, there IS a convenient graveyard next door :-)