Equilibrium Price, Optical Illusions, Trolley Problem, and Star Trek!

                Hello everyone. I hope you all had a nice Valentine’s Day on Monday. My boyfriend goes to a different school, so the day was a bit lonely, but I did see him the previous weekend. Anyway, there’s a lot I want to tell you about my classes. Where to start?

                In economics, we’re starting to combine all the information we’ve learned so far. That means using concepts like the determinants of supply and the determinants of demand to make predictions of how an equilibrium price will change. For example, if scientific research came out saying that chocolate could cure cancer (wouldn’t that be nice?), the demand for chocolate would sky-rocket. However, the amount of chocolate produced will not increase right away. This means that with increased demand, the price of chocolate will go up, adjusting the equilibrium price.

Stare at the top picture for 20-30 seconds and
then look at the black dot!
(It may help to open the picture separately.)

                Next up is psychology. We’ve been studying a lot about the brain functions recently which has been pretty similar to biology, but this week we ventured into the world of sensation and perception. Rather, what do our senses detect and how do we perceive them? In yesterday’s lecture, we specifically focused on the functions of the eye. We analyzed how biologically the eye can see things, but then we talked about how our eyes can sometimes deceive us. This leads into optical illusions – my favorite. I’ll post one on the right side of this blog. To do this, stare at the picture above (that looks kind of like the American flag) for about thirty seconds. Then look at the black dot in the white rectangle below. If it worked, your eyes should have reversed the colors. Pretty cool, huh?

                Personal Values comes next. It’s hard to summarize what we’ve been talking about because there have been so many different moral dilemmas brought up in class. I guess I’ll talk about the Trolley Problem. This states that there is a trolley which cannot be stopped and it can go in one of two directions in the fork of the track. In one direction there are five people tied down to the track; in the other direction, only one person. You somehow have been placed at the controls of the track and can decide which way the trolley goes, but that’s all there is time to do. A utilitarian would say that you are morally obliged to switch the track to killing one person, but there are lots of different ways to view the problem. The article on Wikipedia is actually very thorough. It goes through several different scenarios and discusses possible outcomes. Take the time to think about what you would do.

                Last is managerial communications. We did our first pieces of academic research about our projects. As a refresher, my project is focusing on motivational differences between a paid and volunteer worker. An article I read was about testing the performance of students in a Star Trek game. The students played the game three times: the first being volunteer, the second paid $5, and the third was paid $0.50 per ship destroyed (the objective in the game). The first thing I thought reading this was, “I wish I was part of that study!” I’m a dork, I know. Anyway, they found that students did not have higher success when being paid. I’m a bit skeptical though. It was a game. People will do better if they’re into it and not necessarily try really hard for $5. I think the experiment could use some improvements, but it’s still a very interesting study.

                Well, I started off this entry by talking about Valentine’s Day, so I guess I’ll wrap up by wishing you all a happy President’s Day next Monday. Have a good week and thanks for reading.