Welcome (to the machine)

Hey everyone! 

This blog chronicles my adventure through social psychology. I'll be sharing tidbits about my life as they relate to various concepts I learn about. (Chances are, you know this already, but who knows who'll read this in the future!) 

I'm a psych/business double major, who is torn between going into I/O and forensic psych. I love music and am learning to play a few different instruments, which would be a lovely side job one day. I am also (apparently) somewhat competitive at Ben Bag. But going back to the subject of the blog, I'll explain the name I picked.

One of my favorite concepts I've learned about in my psych classes is iatrogenesis, which means when a person's therapist actually causes them to develop a disorder. This can be something completely mundane, like misdiagnosis, which causes them to have the disorder in the technical sense of having been diagnosed with it. More interestingly, this term also describes situations in which the therapist's actions inadvertently cause the patient more harm than good.

Sticking the word "social" in front of it not only made for an unused blog web address, but also a term that could mean something like "disorders caused by social interaction." Etymologically, it makes no sense, but that's never stopped the English language before!

I picked this name because of a conversation I had over lunch recently. A friend and I were discussing the merits of raising children in a closed society free of the influence of existing social norms. (And also free of ethical obligations, considering you can't just do that to people nowadays.) We mused over whether biases like racism might appear organically in the group with no behavioral models from which to learn them, or if the innocent children would come up with their own traits to hate. I probably won't learn the answer to this question from this class, unfortunately, but I thought I'd share it anyway.

As for the title of this post, it's a reference to Pink Floyd's "Welcome to the Machine", which is a song that might be a satire of the music industry, or might discuss something more societal in nature. Here's the official (I think—you can never trust the internet) music video for it. It's pretty strange, and there's a very small amount of animated blood, if you're squeamish.

 

I might use songs in place of pictures in this blog, because I'm not a very visual person and it'd be fun to see if I can find songs that are at least tangentially related to the topic. We'll see how it goes!

I think that about wraps it up. See you around.