(from left to right: Maneerat Sartwattanarod, Vicky Nway, Lucasz Saczek) In the course of their undergraduate thesis for the Bachelor of Design at Raffles International College in Bangkok, I have had the pleasure to coach and mentor a particularly gifted group of students. To gain insight into their work for the public I have conducted interviews with Maneerat Sartwattanarod (Thailand), who has developed pharmaceutical packaging design for the visually impaired, Matthew Spaulding (USA), who has explored entomophagy, the innovative and original…
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It is all about inequality, isn’t it? A Critique of Rawls’s Theory of Justice
John Rawls (left) and Immanuel Kant (right) Introduction Inequality appears on the global stage as the evil of our time. There is hardly a single researcher or scholar who does not agree on the correlations between inequality and unjust, deeply dysfunctional societies, such as studies by Richard Wilkinson and Thomas Piketty investigate. For example, inherited wealth is a distributive problem of justice as much as inherited poverty is. Many nations struggle with the fact that the rich get…
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The Google Classroom: How it works, what it is and what it isn’t
Above: The clean GUI of the Google classroom. Besides standard themes, the header can be customized, as shown here. Students can also invite themselves via a Class Code. Some background The first e-learning platform I ever encountered was the Open Source project ‘Moodle’, which had been used for the University of Oxford’s undergraduate and professional training courses. However, when we tried to install and use Moodle for my college, we found it to be somehow cumbersome…
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Strengths and Limitations of Behaviorism for Human Learning
The Evidence from Research on Behavioral Theories Pavlov’s work on classical conditioning (Pavlov, 1927) and Skinner’s concept of operant conditioning (Skinner, 1953) have provided the blueprints for evidence-based applications in behaviorism. Behaviorism has since proven effective, for example in the diagnosis of patients with mental disorders by operationalizing the acquisition of new behavior (Barrett & Lindsley, 1962), improving item-recall for dementia patients (Dixon et al., 2011) or for conditioning students in military and technical education…
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Emotional Intelligence: Pop-psychology Without Evidence
The figure of Hannibal Lecter, here represented by actor Mads Mikkelsen, would be a perfect example of emotional intelligence. What compelling evidence exists for Emotional Intelligence (EI)? The concept of emotional intelligence was heavily popularized by the publications of psychologist-journalist Daniel Goleman. Goleman claims for example that EI accounts for 80% of work performance and life success and is directly linked to career progression (Goleman, 1995, 1998). However, not all types of emotional intelligence appear…
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Troubled Schools: Theory, Evidence-based Interventions and Assessment
Let’s take a school with a teenage population that is troubled by poor examination performance, high levels of truancy and high incidents of bullying. Which would be reasonable options to improve students’ emotion regulation and social functioning? 1. Adolescent Psychology The goals of an educational psychologist addressing such a scenario include the implementation of programs aiming to improve the emotion regulation and social functioning of students and to prevent future development of mental disorders. Adolescence…
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Cognitive Approaches in High-Performance Sport Psychology
Introduction Cognitive theories of the 70s were predominantly based on an information-processing approach (Lachman, Lachman & Butterfieled, 1979), or more simply put ‘minds are bundles of computations.’ (Edelman, 2008, p.181). This view has changed fundamentally over the past decades. The current embodiment approach to cognition proposes a direct link between thinking and skilled action which is critical to sports performance (Moran, 2012). Executive functions are vital for novices to learn novel skill-sets under the oppositional…
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Domestic Violence against Women in Thailand
Domestic Violence: A Brief Description Based on an international landmark study by the World-Health Organization (WHO, 2006; Garcia-Moreno et al., 2006), domestic violence in Thailand ranks high in the categories of sexual violence and combined sexual and physical violence, with higher prevalence in rural areas (Garcia-Moreno et al., p. 1265). A survey by Mahidol University’s National Institute for Child and Family Development in 2012 reported a sharp increase in domestic abuse encompassing 30.8 % of…
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The Psychology of Credit Debt
How do people end up in debt? The following essay on the psychology of credit debt is structured into two parts. The first part investigates why people spend more than they have and the second part asks how a team of social psychologists could develop an effective public campaign against falling into credit debt. Part 1: Why people spend more than they have We can identify a plethora of decision-making processes to why people spend more money…
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Prejudice in Everyday Life: The Example of White Skin Preference
Why prejudice and stereotypes might be inevitable When we talk about stereotypes and prejudice we could argue that they are, to some extent, inevitable. Our natural tendency to draw generalizations from particular social instances based on real group differences (Wright & Taylor, 2007, p.435) and conflicts (Sherif, 1966) creates stereotypes, both positive and negative. Who can honestly say to be entirely free of prejudice? Preconceived negative judgment of others appears unavoidable, especially under social conflict and social…
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