Thank you for taking the time to listen to the second episode of the show. Here are a few references and further reading sources for you:
Lyubomksky, S., Sheldon, K. M., & Schkade, D. (2005). Pursuing happiness: The architecture of sustainable change. Review of General Psychology, 9(2), 111-131. doi:10.1037/1089-2680.9.2.111
Diener, E. (1984). Subjective well-being. Psychological Bulletin, 95(3), 542-575. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.95.3.542
Diener, E. (1994). Assessing subjective well-being: Progress and opportunities. Social Indicators Research, 31(2), 103-157. doi:10.1007/BF01207052
Diener, E., Suh, E. M., Lucas, R. E., & Smith, H. L. (1999). Subjective well-being: Three decades of progress. Psychological Bulletin, 125(2), 276–302. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.125.2.276
Lykken, D., & Tellegen, A. (1996). Happiness Is a Stochastic Phenomenon. Psychological Science, 7(3), 186–189. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.1996.tb00355.x
Stay tuned for the next episode and please share your experiences on your journey to become happier, in the comments section below.
Welcome to my podcast: Overdosing on Intellect! This is the first episode of the show, in which I talk about social media. Please subscribe to the show and get notified whenever a new episode is available.
References to the studies I mentioned during the podcast:
Gwenn Schurgin O’Keeffe, Kathleen Clarke-Pearson, Council on Communications and Media, The Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents, and Families, In Pediatrics, Volume 127, Issue 4, April 2011, Pages 800-804, https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2011-0054.
Edson C. Tandoc, Patrick Ferrucci, Margaret Duffy, Facebook use, envy, and depression among college students: Is facebooking depressing?, In Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 43, February 2015, Pages 139-146, ISSN 0747-5632, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.10.053.
Lauren E. Sherman, Ashley A.Payton, Leanna M. Hernandez, Patricia M. Greenfield, Mirella Dapretto, The Power of the Like in Adolescence, In Psychological Science, Volume 27, Issue 7, May 2016, Pages 1027-1035, https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797616645673.
Amy L. Gonzales and Jeffrey T. Hancock, Mirror, mirror on my Facebook wall: effects of exposure to Facebook on self-esteem, In Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, Volume 14, Issue 1-2, February 2011, Pages 79-83, https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2009.0411.
Megan A. Moreno, Lauren Jelenchick, Rosalind Koff, Jens Eickhoff, Depression and Internet Use among Older Adolescents: An Experience Sampling Approach, In Psychology, Volume 3, September 2012, Pages 743-748, https://doi.org/10.4236/psych.2012.329112.
Welcome to my podcast: Overdosing on Intellect! This is the first episode of the show, in which I talk about social media. Please visit the episode notes page on my website for more information.
Life is tough, but it is also beautiful. It can put you in pain for some time and make you feel happy some other time. It can give you a reason to cry some time, but it can also make you laugh. As you can see, there are a lot of sides to life and the way to experience them is to stay alive. Having heard a lot about a book by Matt Haig, I started reading “Reasons to Stay Alive.” It is not a long read (in fact less than 200 pages on the version available through my city’s library). Although I wish he would have talked more about his journey of recovery from the elephant in the room, i.e. anxiety and depression, I enjoyed every bit of it, especially because it comes from someone who has had a first-hand experience of how tough life can get. There is a section in the book that lists 40 reasons to stay alive and I wanted to share those with the readers of my blog along with some comments of my own (my comments start after the dashes). So, here it is:
Appreciate happiness when it is there.
Sip, don’t gulp. – When we are gulping through any drink, we are not enjoying what that drink has to offer, it is as if we are in a hurry to be done with the glass. But when we are sipping it, we give time to our organs, whether internal or external, to understand what that drink really is.
Be gentle with yourself. Work less. Sleep more. – We are living in a world today that work is defining who we are. Think about your answer to the question “Who are you?” Aren’t we answering with our job title any time we are asked that question? The reason most often being that we spend a lot of time working, we forget how else we can be defined. Maybe we could go on that vacation we’ve been dreaming about for a long time or get that good night’s sleep we’ve been craving for the last few weeks.
There is absolutely nothing in the past that you can change. That’s basic physics. – Then why worry about changing what’s already been done.
Beware of Tuesdays. And Octobers.
Kurt Vonnegut was right. ‘Reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found.’ – I can attest to this through personal experience. I feel great whenever I read or write.
Listen more than you talk. – Good listeners make great speakers. Don’t quote me on that though! 🙂
Don’t feel guilty about being idle. More harm is probably done to the world through work than idleness. But perfect your idleness. Make it mindful. – Personally, I don’t like being idle, and I would argue that if you are making your idleness mindful, you are not really idle!
Be aware that you are breathing. – This is a great reminder. There are a lot of things that we take for granted in life. I think this one tops the list!
Wherever you are, at any moment, try and find something beautiful. A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window, some graffiti, a wind farm. Beauty cleans the mind.
Hate is a pointless emotion to have inside you. It is like eating a scorpion to punish it for stinging you. – Washing blood with blood is not going to work. Sometimes, educating the hater might be a good idea, but sometimes you have to leave the hater alone. You can’t teach the scorpion not to sting, for example!
Go for a run. Then do some yoga.
Shower before noon.
Look at the sky. Remind yourself of the cosmos. Seek out vastness at every opportunity, in order to see the smallness of yourself.
Be kind.
Understand that thoughts are thoughts. If they are unreasonable, reason with them, even if you have no reason left. You are the observer of your mind, not its victim.
Do not watch TV aimlessly. Do not go on social media aimlessly. Always be aware of what you are doing, and why you are doing it. Don’t value TV less. Value it more. Then you will watch it less. Unchecked distractions will lead you to distraction.
Sit down. Lie down. Be still. Do nothing. Observe. Listen to your mind. Let it do what it does without judging it. Let it go, like the Snow Queen in Frozen.
Don’t worry about things that probably won’t happen. – i.e. don’t overthink!
Look at trees. Be near trees. Plant trees. (Trees are great.)
Listen to that yoga instructor on YouTube, and ‘walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet’.
Live. Love. Let go. The three Ls.
Alcohol maths. Wine multiplies itself by itself. The more you have, the more you are likely to have. And if it’s hard to stop at one glass, it will be impossible at three. Addition is multiplication.
Beware of the gap. The gap between where you are and where you want to be. Simply thinking of the gap widens it. And you end up falling through. – I think it’s good to remind yourself of your goals, but only when you have done something to get closer to it, which will give you even more motivation to get even more closer. But, if you haven’t taken any action recently, reminding yourself of your goals is not going to make things any better and it might even make them worse.
Read a book without thinking about finishing it. Just read it. Enjoy every word, sentence, and paragraph. Don’t wish for it to end, or for it to never end. – Refer to number 2 above as well!
No drug in the universe will make you feel better, at the deepest level, than being kind to other people.
Listen to what Hamlet, literature’s most famous depressive, told Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ – There is still a lot of debate on the topic of good and bad and whether things are innately good or bad or are we making them so. I think this quote sums it up really nicely.
If someone loves you, let them. Believe in that love. Live for them, even when you feel there is no point. – That point might come later. Not every point in life starts showing itself as a point or purpose.
You don’t need the world to understand you. It’s fine. Some people will never really understand things they haven’t experienced. Some will. Be grateful. – As a social person, I’m guilty of this. I try to make connections with a lot of people and when they don’t understand me, I get upset or think about what I did or said. We have to let them be. Not everyone we meet is going to end up being our BFF or SO or even our acquaintance!
Jules Verne wrote of the ‘Living Infinite’. This is the world of love and emotion that is like a ‘sea’. If we can submerge ourselves in it, we find infinity in ourselves, and the space we need to survive.
Three in the morning is never the time to try and sort out your life. – But it might be the time for the brain to try and sort out all the inputs it has received during the day and get rid of the tiredness that comes with those.
Remember that there is nothing weird about you. You are just a human, and everything you do and feel is a natural thing, because we are natural animals. You are nature. You are a hominid ape. You are in the world and the world is in you. Everything connects. – Speaking of nature, I agree that most of the things we do are natural. They are in our nature. We are all weird and normal at the same time. Whether you want to be a weirdly normal or a normally weird person, is the choice you are going to make.
Don’t believe in good or bad, or winning and losing, or victory and defeat, or up and down. At your lowest and at your highest, whether you are happy or despairing or calm or angry, there is a kernel of you that stays the same. That is the you that matters.
Don’t worry about the time you lose to despair. The time you will have afterwards has just doubled its value.
Be transparent to yourself. Make a greenhouse for your mind. Observe.
Read Emily Dickinson. Read Graham Greene. Read Italo Calvino. Read Maya Angelou. Read anything you want. Just read. Books are possibilities. They are escape routes. They give you options when you have none. Each one can be a home for an uprooted mind. – And as the famous saying goes ‘you have lived as many lives as the number of books you have read.’ Each and every book gives you a perspective on life. You look at life from the point of view of a different person and you could be one of those different people one day. That day you will have at least as many options as that person had in that book.
If the sun is shining, and you can be outside, be outside.
Remember that the key thing about life on earth is change. Cars rust. Paper yellows. Technology dates. Caterpillars become butterflies. Nights morph into days. Depression lifts. – And change brings happiness. Wear that tie you haven’t tried on since you bought, change the decoration of your office, change the way you look at people, change your point of view on things you do everyday and you will see happiness dripping through your life.
Just when you feel you have no time to relax, know that this is the moment you most need to make time to relax. – ‘I don’t have time’ is basically a euphemism for ‘It’s not a priority.’ Make time for priorities. We need somethings to be able to even perceive ‘time’ and relaxing is one of them.
Be brave. be strong. Breathe, and keep going. You will thank yourself later. – I don’t know why, but this reminded me of what Ed Latimore said on a podcast I listened a while ago: Running is not always enjoyable, but neither is being physically unfit. Working out can be painful and having a non-fit body can be painful as well. The difference is that you will have a fit body if you go through the pain of working out, but you won’t see any changes going through the pain of having an unhealthy body. So choose which pain you want to experience.
I really recommend reading the complete book, not only to those who sometimes feel low in life, but to anyone, because this book can also give you an idea of what some people might be going through and will maybe help you help someone who is in need of your support. On a related note, let’s tackle the issue of mental health and make sure we are paving the way to finally destigmatize it!
You may think that I’m going to talk about how anti-social we humans have become. But, while I don’t agree with that statement, that’s a topic for a later post. This time, it is about how we have managed to pass laws and/or common norms that have made us afraid to talk to the people we don’t know, or even to the people we know! There have been times I had to think twice before stating a very neutral opinion on a topic just because someone “might” get “offended” and even ended up not saying it! Taking offence from others’ opinions has become a way of showing how educated we are, at least sometimes for some people.
Asking for trigger warnings in classrooms before professors discuss a “sensitive” topic and labeling anything you say as “microaggression” are things that are done on university campuses more often now. We, people of academia, should be able to take jokes, to discuss “sensitive” matters and to educate others on how to react to such things. What will happen if we didn’t do these? Well, I think it is already happening: We are not addressing some of the very important topics in the world. For instance, by saying “I don’t see color/race,” we are not addressing the issue of racism, we are just ignoring it while it continues to ruin some people’s lives.
Of course, it is worth mentioning that there is a difference between hate speech and free speech. These statements don’t mean that we get a free pass to spew hate on people or ideas, or give us a get out of jail free card when we do so. When we hate on someone just because they are Black or Asian or we associate someone’s feelings of superiority to their ‘Whiteness” or when we call them terrorists just because they “look Muslim,” we are spreading hate speech. However, when we are logically and rationally criticizing an ideology or we are scientifically researching a disease that is more common in the Black community than other communities, we are doing our jobs of looking after our world and the people living in it.
All this being said, education plays an important role in understanding the technicalities of the world and (healthy) discussions and debates are some of the key components of such education. So, let’s not wait to be coddled while a sensitive subject is being discussed or debated, instead let’s share our ideas of the matter with others and get into healthy debates with people with differing ideas. That way not only we are trying to solve an important problem, we are doing so by engaging in human interaction and that is another important aspect of our lives.
Having been a judge in different fairs and conferences for pre-secondary, secondary and post-secondary students, I have had my fair share of listening to students presenting their work, asking them questions both to clarify what they have said and to evaluate them, scoring them based on their research topic, methods, presentation and expertise, and giving them feedback on how they did and how they could potentially improve or do more. I have always heard from the more experienced judges that the feedback should be constructive, regardless of the student’s level and I have tried to implement that to the best of my ability. The problem with this approach most often is that some of us don’t know what constructive feedback really means!
Let’s start with what constructive feedback is not. Constructive feedback is not necessarily an all-positive feedback. It is also not unduly beating around the bush before getting to a point that might upset the person. It is not faking interest and awe when what you have just heard or seen is not up to the expected level. It does not mean evaluating things you are not supposed to evaluate, either, for instance, how great (or awful, for that matter) the personality of the person is (unless, of course, this is what you are evaluating).
Now, on to the constructive feedback itself. Constructive feedback means that you are paving the way for the person to improve. Hence, commenting on things that the person can actually control and/or change. This also means that you are telling the person what is already up to the standards and what is not. Therefore, it is good to start with the strengths and move on to the things that need improvement and then summarize at the end. Speaking from experiences, students who present their findings don’t do it as a one-time thing only. They are mostly interested in doing that frequently. Therefore, the more constructive feedback they receive the better their presentation will be the next time around and the more they will appreciate your help as they continue presenting.
Last weekend, I was at a fair, judging a few projects that were presented by students who were in elementary or junior high school and I got the chance to give them feedback and see some of the other feedback sheets that they had gotten. To my surprise most of those feedback sheets had some variation of these words on them: “Great job!” and that’s it! As much as a teenager would like to hear that they did a great job, they need to know what can be improved. There is definitely something that needs to be improved and if you can’t see that as a judge, then you should probably work on your judging skills or present some sort of work and get criticized by other judges before judging someone else’s work. When I get comments from supervisors or other fellow researchers on a document I have written, whether it be a poster or a thesis or a scientific manuscript, I would like to see a “great job here” or “this is awesome” somewhere in the comments. This makes me even more inspired to continue this line of work. But, I also need to know where my weaknesses lie so that I can improve my current work or works that follow. I know that an elementary school student might be very happy to see a “Great job!” on the feedback sheet, but they are going to be our next generation of journalists, scientists, engineers, supervisors, etc. and that is why we need them to know how to fact check, how to work with the facts, and how not to give fake information or information that is not backed up by evidence. And the road to that starts from these fairs and the projects that they do during their early ages. We have a big responsibility here and that is to prepare them for all those.
All things considered, I think starting with what they did right and well, pointing out the areas that need improvement and finishing off by summarizing the points is the best way to give constructive feedback, whether we are the parents, the teachers, the fair judges or friends. As for the parts that may upset the person, it is good to follow the “is it true? is it necessary? and is it kind?” rule. If what we are trying to say will help them improve, then, why not? If we can make it less upsetting and make them comfortable before saying it, even better! Let’s bring up a better next generation, a generation that will learn from their mistakes and use what they have learned from their mistakes to improve and prosper.
We are social animals, at least as the saying goes. We interact with each other, we build relationships and bonds, we say things to each other and sometimes things don’t go the way we want them to. There are people who believe we have become less social mostly because of the technological advances and the internet, but I don’t think that is the case. Instead, I think we have changed the ways we socialize in. We used to visit people when we had the time, now we call or text them instead. We used to write letters, now we write emails and use Skype or Facetime instead and the list goes on. My focus today and in this post is not about how our ways of socialization have changed, but how we are focusing on helping each other, on noticing if someone is going through a tough time, and on caring about mental health.
A few days ago, I watched the Netflix original series “13 Reasons Why,” which is about a teenager that moves to a new town and after a while, as a result of the problems she has with some friends of her at school decides to take her own life. She tells the story of whatever has happened in 7 tapes and passes them on for those friends to listen to after her death. This series could actually be an eye-opener for many of us. There are specific signs to notice when someone has problems. There are signs that they might be thinking of ending it all. Some of these signs are: major lifestyle changes, talking about the purposelessness of life, substance abuse, and isolation from activities, friends and family. Much like medical symptoms, having just one of these might not mean that the person is suicidal, but at least it’s a red flag that needs to be taken seriously. For more information about suicide and its signs, you can visit WebMD and the AFSP websites.
Of course, there is no need to emphasize that we don’t need a person to be suicidal to help them out. It is human nature to care about others. It is an instinctual feeling that draws us towards helping someone in need. However, we have to be better listeners for that to happen. We have to pay more attention and we have to show up and be there for others. We need skills for those, but they are really easy to pick up and learn. Let’s make the world a better place!
This has been on my mind for a long time now. Time and time again I have seen news articles about research studies that don’t really correspond to the studies they are supposedly reporting. Sometimes, the title of the news article or the main point it conveys is totally different from the one the research study, itself, tries to communicate. Other times, correlation is interpreted as causation, or a statement is extracted from the research paper without its preceding or succeeding statements that explain the conditions in which these results hold true. As a result, I have seen a lot of us, researchers, complain about the media not reporting exactly what we meant in our papers.
One of the reasons for this, I believe, is that we don’t give the media enough information about research and its settings. Obviously, someone who hasn’t been in that setting and/or doesn’t have a clue as to what it entails will not be able to explain it accurately. Unless our journalists are scientists themselves or they have been in close contact with scientific research, they won’t be able to accurately report/communicate research to the general public.
The second reason for this is that our scientists are being trained on how to do wet lab research or how to analyze a specific type of data in a computer program, but not how to talk to the people outside of their field. We are so used to using jargon in our talks and abbreviating long scientific terms in our writings that we forget that our audience may not be the same each and every time.
Having journalists that have trainings in science or have been in a research setting before could help alleviate the first issue. However, I think I can provide more insight into the second issue. One of the things that I think researchers need to know is that if others are not reporting your research or if they are reporting it wrong, you should be doing something about it: Maybe write a letter, very much like the ones you write to scientific journals about the papers they have published, albeit using a different language, to the journalist or the corresponding media outlet. You could also work on your lay-person summary skills and write your own version of what your research entails. Another avenue of action could be to volunteer to train journalists about what it is you do in the dark rooms of your lab every day from dawn to dusk.
All in all, we have to make sure the people that are most often our end product users, know what we are doing about the problems they face everyday. We might even be able to raise money to fund our next project by informing donors about the studies we undertake. I know I’m going to start enriching the tutorial section of my website with related articles and will occasionally write about my research, what it entails and how it can benefit the general public. Let’s make science and research information available to everyone!
On my way back home from a workshop today, following the same habit of listening to music while reading a book on my iPad during my bus commute, I somehow listened more carefully to the Heathens song from Twenty One Pilots. A part of it actually caught my attention a lot. That is the part that says: “Just because we check the guns at the door, doesn’t mean our brains will change from hand grenades.” I know there are a lot of interpretations for this over the internet and depending on who you think the main audience of this song is, those might be right, but I look at it from a different angle.
I have had a lot of discussion with friends who try to compare different societies to each other and trying to convince themselves that if society A (most often the society they grew up in) had all the laws and tools that society B (most often the society they immigrated to) has, it would have been the same thing; that what has made society B a good society is because they have laws that don’t allow being bad to others, or that teaches its people to smile and be nice, or has a $250 fine for anyone that might abuse the trust the transit system has on people and so on. I’m not saying that laws shouldn’t exist or that laws haven’t had any effect whatsoever on people’s behaviour in general, but in my humble opinion, that’s not the whole story.
Just because you have a law in effect doesn’t mean you’re going to turn out great. You have to be great inside, at least to some extent, for the laws to work or to make you even better. In a societal level, you have to have a lot of inherently nice/good (whatever that means) people in order for the laws to work. I recall that when a teacher in high school came in with a quiz question or two without prior notice we all were upset and we sometimes came up with plans, e.g. for all of us to return the papers blank as a protest and “because we all are doing that, the teacher can’t possibly fail the whole class!” You know what changed all our minds later on? One of the students who knew the answers to the questions! He would’ve started writing and all of a sudden the hypothesis that “the teacher can’t fail all of us,” does not hold true anymore, because at least one of us is not failing and that is when all of us started writing our answers to the quiz questions! Now, imagine in a society, all the people say: “if all of us ran the red lights, the police can’t possibly give all of us tickets!” What’ll the outcome of that society be? Everyone running a red light! But, if you have enough law-abiding citizens, that hypothesis will not hold true here, either! The type of law-abiding citizens that think about their actions and their consequences before attempting them.
If you just take the “gun” away, there are “hand grenades” to be used instead. If you take those away, there are knives and the list goes on. How many laws are you going to pass in order for people to change? The answer is simple: only one! For a society to be prosperous (and I don’t mean it in a spiritual or religious sense) and to progress, you need to pass the laws in the “brains”, you need psychology and you need to put some effort into it. Voting for a new law to increase traffic violation fines or to incarcerate people who plagiarize is not the ultimate answer to the problem, it’s just the pain killer that won’t eradicate the underlying issue or the cause, for that matter. The underlying problem is the brain of the society, which as a side note is not exactly the sum of the brains of the people living in it, but something much more complicated than that. This is where we need sociology, social psychology and psychology in general and of course, to relate it to my advocacy, also science. As a friend always says, “unless you have critical thinkers, your society is already doomed!” Let’s save society A’s before they are doomed!
This subject was on my list of writings for a long time and today I decided to finally write about it. Induction is a way of reasoning. But, it definitely has downsides to it. Suppose I move into a new town and the first few people I see are all physicians. Does that mean that everyone living in this town is a physician? Of course, not. It just means that the people I have seen are doctors. However, this may lead to me forming a hypothesis that maybe the vast majority of the people living in this city are doctors, which is a legitimate hypothesis. In order to test for that hypothesis, I have to devise a study protocol. I have to randomly select a sample of the people in that city and see if they are physicians. My main focus in this post is actually the process of random selection.
Statistically, random selection means that everyone in the population has the same chance of being chosen into the sample. If you go around and ask only the people who carry a stethoscope, your sample is biased. If you go around and ask only the people who own a shop, your sample is biased. Because, there is a high chance that the person with a stethoscope is a doctor and a person who owns a shop is not. Now, this is when I have good (or at least neutral) intentions!
If, for whatever reason, I decide to mock a group of people (which I hope I won’t!), I actually try to be biased. More specifically, I use Confirmation Bias, an informal logical fallacy, in which I only seek out information that supports my hypothesis and disregard anything that says otherwise. Unfortunately, many of the new developments on the web are going this way. For example, the personalized ads on Google, suggestions on Netflix or Amazon, and the “Because you liked …, you’ll like …” principle in general is feeding the beast even more. But, that’s a subject for another post I’ll probably attend to later!
A few weeks ago, I saw the video of Jesse Watters going down to New York’s Chinatown and interviewing people. For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, here is the video:
I don’t exactly know what this correspondent’s actual intentions were, but this is an example of how nonrandom selection skews the results of a study. I don’t want to go into a detailed assessment of this video, but there are a few things I want to point out:
The host says they wanted to sample “political opinion” because China was mentioned 12 times in the first US presidential debate. What he doesn’t say is how that 12 times compares with other words or countries mentioned in the debate. Also, he doesn’t say why New York’s Chinatown was chosen.
The correspondent actually starts the interview with a cultural stereotype.
He doesn’t comment on cultural norms, e.g. the fact that some of the people call Hillary as “Clinton’s wife”. I remember I read a piece somewhere and a gentleman from China had commented on it “Please write more.” This is a cultural practice there, somehow meaning “Keep up the great work,” while this may mean “you haven’t written enough on this piece” for people from some other cultures.
He has chosen some of the people who couldn’t answer the question, apparently because they don’t speak that much English.
This is something that we see a lot in our everyday lives. I remember a few years back when there was a debate going on in Iran in terms of which soccer team has the biggest number of fans and a TV correspondent went to a stadium to talk to the fans of a specific team and the people he chose to show on TV were either the not-well-educated fans or the fans who couldn’t speak the country’s official language well. He didn’t comment on what he saw and who he talked to, but the representation was enough for many people to start mocking the fans of that team.
It is also important to comment on the population that we have selected the sample from. For example, if the population we are looking at is birds in Australia and we only choose a random sample of 10 birds from Melbourne, our sample is biased (even though the sample has been selected randomly). However, if the population we were interested in was birds in Melbourne, our sample would be acceptable. But, going back to the video above, the host starts with talking about China in general and then goes to the New York Chinatown. This is how first impressions can be important. Although they say that they have gone to the NY Chinatown for this interview, you would induce that these people interviewed are representatives of the Chinese all over the world.
And here is a video from Big Think on Confirmation Bias and the effect of first impressions to end the post. Please share your views about this in the comments below.
