The Hawthorne experiment is a study that showed the world an important psychological effect: increased attention to innovation, interest in novelty, and a general change in the socio-psychological environment improve productivity more than the technical aspects of the production process.
The Hawthorne Experiment took place between 1924 and 1932, when attitudes toward workers in manufacturing were very different from what they are today. The author of the study is American psychologist Elton Mayo.
Research progress
The Hawthorne experiment consisted of a set of socio-psychological studies conducted by a team of scientists led by Elton Mayo at the Western Electrics factory in the USA. The main goal was to establish the relationship between the physical factors of the labor process and labor productivity.
The company administration noted a deterioration in the performance of relay assemblers. Research aimed at identifying the reasons for the decline in labor productivity has not clarified the picture of what is happening. Then the administration decided to invite E. Mayo.
Initially, the objective of the experiment was to determine the effect of illumination of the workroom on labor productivity. Experimental research at Hawthorne took place over 8 years. Throughout the study, Mayo manipulated various variables:
- degree of illumination of workplaces;
- isolation of different teams;
- salary amount;
- indicator of comfortable working conditions.
Elton Mayo
The scientist was born in Australia in 1880. It was initially assumed that Elton would become a doctor, but upon entering university, he did not show much of himself, which is why he was sent to Scotland to study psychopathology and medicine. His scientific views were shaped by the teachings of Freud and Durkheim.
After graduating, Mayo moved back to Australia, where he began teaching psychology, ethics and logic at the University of Queensland. During this period, the scientist became interested in management and began publishing articles on this topic.
Mayo subsequently moved to the United States, where he became a professor at Harvard University and was appointed head of the industrial research department.
Unexpected discoveries of scientists
When the study parameters were changed, the labor efficiency coefficient in the experimental group increased relative to the control group. However, when the parameters were equalized, performance decreased. Although its indicator was still higher than initially.
This behavior of female employees aroused the interest of researchers. This situation prompted scientists to determine another factor - the fact that female workers were involved in the experimental study:
- awareness of the significance of what is happening;
- increased interest from others;
- engagement concept.
These indicators had an impact on increasing staff productivity, even in the absence of other favorable factors.
Social leadership concept
Mayo created the concept of so-called social leadership. In it, a decisive role is given to the ability to interact with others and respond to their attitudes and aspirations in a way that contributes to the establishment of cooperation. Following the results of his Hawthorne experiment, Mayo placed his main bet in the formation of social harmony on the so-called enlightened managers. In his opinion, it is they who are capable of scientifically objective and impartial leadership. Emphasizing their transformative role in society, he contrasted the centralization of power in politics with its democratic dispersal among managers. This dispersal of power was seen as a supra-class approach and was contrasted by Mayo with a class approach, which was associated with political forces.
The result of the experiment is the Hawthorne effect
While interpreting the results obtained, E. Mayo made the following assumptions, which became fundamental to the Hawthorne effect:
- Within the work collective, there is simultaneously a formal and informal conglomerate.
- The dominant role among the staff belongs to the informal structure. There is an option to use it as a method of influencing the ability of colleagues to work for the benefit of the company.
- Social relationships that arise in industrial production cannot be positioned as something unnatural that complicates the formation of a person in society. On the contrary, the social life of employees in the field of large industrial production acquires its constructive system and relevance directly in their professional sphere.
- Industrial work is a group functioning. It eliminates the traditional individualistic view of the employee as a “selfish” person who only pursues selfish goals.
- The behavior of a particular employee in the social structure of the company, affecting his social authority and position, satisfies his needs for personal livelihood security. This factor is equivalent to the size of the salary. And from the perspective of the social life of employees, it is more significant than wages.
- An individual employee’s understanding of the conditions of personal activity, his well-being in the production process, all indicators that cover the “psychology of industrial activity” are defined not as a “fact”, but as a “sign”. In other words, not in the form of proof of the real situation of the conditions of production labor, but in the form of a coefficient of his personal, psychological or social position in production.
Stage 4. Group of assemblers
A small group (14 assembly workers) was studied.
Firstly, the reasons were found out why workers deliberately limited production standards , admitting in interviews that they could do more.
Additional research found:
1) a low pace protects slow workers , thereby protecting them from criticism from management or dismissal;
2) if they do too much, the company will cut markups;
3) management accepts the low informal norm as satisfactory, putting pressure only on those who cannot cope with it.
Leadership styles, reasons why workers disobeyed orders from managers at different levels, and the structure of interpersonal relationships were also studied.
The group within itself was divided into subgroups ( cliques ), but not according to professional, but according to personal characteristics. There were outsiders, leaders and independents, and each clique had its own norms and rules of conduct.
Criticism of the Hawthorne experiment
A reviewer of Mayo's experiments, Stanley Milgram, noted that the productivity of the company's employees increased not at all as a result of involvement in the experimental study. He suggests that employees positioned the researchers as agents of the management of the enterprise designing downsizing.
During the control experimental studies, the Hawthorne effect could not be recreated. Based on this, there is an opinion that the Hawthorne effect discovered by Mayo is a subjective phenomenon. The results of the experiment were obtained randomly.
What was Mayo's big idea?
Mayo's main idea was to take into account the aspirations of man, to direct them to the service of self-organization and self-regulation of society, conducive to spontaneous cooperation between people. Mayo proceeded from social needs related to maintaining the balance and stability of society. He proposed his own approach to solving this problem, called the sociological approach in his works. He relied largely on personal experience in managing social processes in the sphere of production.
Cold reading
Cold reading refers to a certain set of techniques used by psychics, mediums, fortune tellers, illusionists, etc. Cold reading is used to create the impression that the person using it knows a lot of information about another person, despite a very short acquaintance. And the practitioner is really able to learn a lot. This is done by analyzing a person’s physical data: gender, age, clothing style, race, religion and sexuality, place of birth, level of education and other data. Basically, practitioners use guesswork: if the stated assumption finds verbal or non-verbal confirmation, then “probing” the person in the same direction continues. If there is no confirmation, then the guesses are discarded and others are found. Skillful cold reading practices can have a very powerful impact on people.
A striking example of cold reading is fortune telling on the street. Many people have found themselves in situations where a person comes up on the street and says that he can tell fortunes, predict the future, remove the evil eye, damage, etc. Stopping only for a minute, the person addressed begins to listen from a complete stranger to the details of his biography, a description of some moments of his life, personal events, and so on. The person is surprised and begins to experience a kind of awe and reverence before the “magician”. Often, “readers” use their cold reading skills for the purpose of deception and extortion. Therefore, if suddenly a stranger begins to surprise you with his “magical” abilities, do not give in to provocations and remember that, most likely, this person is a very good psychologist and “reads” you like an open book, and all his “magic” is just a honed skill . Be carefull.
You can find out more about cold reading at this link.
5
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
In 1943, psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed that human behavior is determined by a wide range of needs
. He broke these needs down into five categories:
Physiological needs: needs for food, drink, shelter, satisfaction of sexual and other physiological needs
Security needs: needs for safety and protection from physical and emotional influence, the need to guarantee the continued satisfaction of physical needs
Social needs (communication needs): needs for affection, belonging to certain social units, love and friendship
Esteem needs: Needs for internal esteem factors, such as self-esteem, autonomy, and achievement of intended goals, as well as external factors, such as social status, recognition, attention, and respect from other people.
Self-actualization needs: the need for growth, realizing one's potential and self-actualization, striving to achieve all that one is capable of.
Maslow arranged these categories in a certain hierarchy, with the most pressing needs at the base, and higher individual needs (recognition, self-expression) at the top.
According to Maslow, man is “an animal that constantly wants something.” When the needs of the lowest level are satisfied at least partially, a person begins to strive to satisfy the needs of the next level of the hierarchy.
Currently, most people who work and receive a salary are quite capable of satisfying their physiological needs, so requests from higher levels are becoming an increasingly powerful motivational factor. For example, when a person has acquired a sufficient number of basic necessities, he seeks to insure against possible losses. Such a need for security
and others like her can be satisfied by wages high enough to allow savings, as well as by health and social insurance systems, pension and job security programs.
Above the need for security is the desire of people to communicate with each other, to love and be loved, to experience a sense of belonging to a team. As Hawthorne's research has shown, these social needs may be more important to workers than financial considerations. People also have a need for recognition - they need to feel that their personality is valued as an integral part of a whole. In addition, they need respect based on achievements in competition with other people
All these needs are closely related to the concept of status, which means the “weight” or “importance” of a person in the eyes of others. The ability to satisfy such needs can serve as a powerful motivating factor at work.
Maslow identified the need for self-expression
as “the desire to become more than you are, to become all that you are capable of.” This need is of the highest order, and the most difficult to satisfy. People who “make it” to this level work not just for money or to impress others, but because they recognize the significance of their work and experience satisfaction in the process itself.
Maslow's hierarchy is a very useful way of classifying human needs, however, it would be a mistake to perceive it as some kind of rigid scheme. It is not at all necessary that the needs of each level be fully satisfied (and sometimes this is not possible) before a person develops “higher” motives. In fact, at any given moment a person is driven by a whole set of needs.
Psychology as the key to a perfect game
There's no denying that spending time on truly excellent gaming projects is definitely cool! What makes us all different is that we all enjoy certain gameplay genres, but what brings us all together? We all love interesting and addictive games! Well, here, more than ever, psychology
- an integral part of many areas of activity, including the gaming industry. Developers always use various psychological techniques to drag us into the brainchild of their industry for a long time, and also force every gamer to buy loot boxes, which we so endlessly “adore.” And we’ll talk about how developers achieve this effect, and why we get stuck playing games for hours and days on end. No, there will be no abstruse theories or speculations about a global conspiracy here. Here we will talk in simple language about what attracts us to the world of games and why. Greetings to all Stopgame City residents! Go!
I worked on the text, sound and video for so long that I completely forgot about the insert “video created for SG.ru”. I hope no one kills me!
Cognitive flow or hypnotic immersion in gameplay
"
NOW, I'LL JUST UPCLATE TO THE NEXT LEVEL AND FINISH!
HERE'S ANOTHER ONE AND THAT'S ALL! THIS IS DEFINITELY THE LAST! SO IT'S ALREADY 6 AM? » ©Night RPG Player
Notoriously addictive, various MMOs, survival and RPGs
– do not allow our brains to relax.
But they force you to spend all your energy, forcing us to sit at the keyboard until you reach this very level, or complete this very quest. I have such a bitter experience. Before the session, I went into The Forest
and spent 5 hours building a house.
The result was amazing! Those bags under the eyes were second to none! And the house turned out nothing like that, but the bags... never do that. Partly, this is due to one of the following points - the absence of a linear task
, since you connect your leveling and your own goals with each other, and it turns out something like “
now I’ll quickly cross half the island, refresh all the animals, cut down the entire forest and I’ll go to sleep... in the game, because this is the only way to make a save... and real sleep is for weaklings
.”
Simply put, excitement is imposed on the players, which is why we cannot let ourselves out from behind the monitor. MMOs
a long time ago , although playing through that unfortunate
Firewatch
more than 6 times is something incredibly strange (especially when some people talk about its lack of replayability).
This phenomenon, when we lose control over the time we spend playing, has been given the term “ Cognitive Flow
” in psychology. This definition is raging throughout the world of psychology, but let's not deviate from the topic. This concept was first proposed by an American psychologist of Hungarian origin. The information is borrowed from inf. source Wikipedia Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (English: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Hungarian: Csíkszentmihályi Mihály; September 29, 1934, Fiume, Kingdom of Italy) is an American psychologist of Hungarian origin, professor of psychology, former dean of the faculty at the University of Chicago, known for his research on the topics of happiness, creativity, and subjective well-being. , but is best known for his idea of “flow,” a state of flow that he has studied for several decades. Csikszentmihalyi is the author of several bestsellers and more than 120 articles for magazines and books, many of which have been translated into different languages, including Russian. He is considered one of the most widely cited psychologists of our time in several fields related to psychology and business. In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csikszentmihalyi introduces readers to the theory that people are happiest when they are in a special flow state—a Zen-like state of complete unity with the activity and situation. The state of flow can be considered the optimal state of intrinsic motivation, in which a person is completely involved in what he is doing. Probably everyone has experienced this feeling, characterized by freedom, joy, a sense of complete satisfaction and mastery, when some needs, including basic ones, are usually ignored. A person forgets about time, hunger, his social role, etc.
In an interview with Wired magazine, Csikszentmihalyi describes the flow as follows:
Be fully involved in the activity for its own sake. The ego drops away. Time flies. Every action, movement, thought follows from the previous one, as if you were playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you use your skills to the limit. To achieve a state of flow, it is necessary to find a balance between the complexity of the task and the skill of the subject. If the task is too easy, the flow state cannot be achieved.
The flow state also involves some kind of focused attention; It has been observed that mindful meditation (disinterested witnessing), yoga, and martial arts seem to improve a person's ability to achieve a flow state. Briefly, flow can be described as a state in which attention, motivation, and situation come together to produce a kind of productive harmony or feedback.
The attention is so perfect that I forget about time, about my body, about the environment, about other people. I am not aware of anything except my hands. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975) This happened in 1970, he described it as a powerful motivation to do something. This happens because your attention is focused on the task at hand. Thus, we focus on a specific action and are almost, if not completely, not distracted by the surrounding environment. Often, this is due to the player's motivation to continue playing. As a result, time control is lost and performance efficiency improves, because the task is perceived as worthy of a reward. But this motivation fades away if the level is too difficult or we simply don’t know where to go next and get lost. Well, everyone has experienced this at some point. Just remember the last time you got sucked into a game. You, I am 100% sure, were in a state of cognitive flow. Making all players experience this state is the goal of every developer.
Now let's think about it and list the points that must be introduced into the game to achieve this effect:
Freedom of action, a task specifically formulated by the game or its complete absence
Many popular projects can serve as an example.
Often, they give freedom not only to actions, but also to almost any ideas and fantasies. You can count Watch Dogs, Withcer, Just Cause
or
GTA
.
Do you want to punch someone or cause a riot with total destruction? Please! First of all, this attracts players due to the inability to perform such actions in real life. If you are capable of this, then you are probably reading an article at the police station right now because you simply decided to fight with people in the middle of the street. Sims
series to the list , because you can do almost everything in this game universe.
Even become a rocket scientist
who earns money to expand his apartment by fishing and selling paintings.
Multifaceted people are certainly good, but in The Sims it's just too much. Almost any game that presents us with its open world and a large list of possibilities can be added to the list. Alas, the stone simulator is not included in the list, although it deserves due attention from the gaming community. Freedom of action is good, but if we didn’t know where we needed to go, how to defeat the boss, or, in general, there was no navigation through the game world, we would hardly be happy about it, and the motivation to play would sink into oblivion. If in a game with an open or semi-open world, you find an interesting task, focus on some event, or, even better, come up with a goal for yourself, be prepared to be stuck for at least another half hour. Yes, we are on our own In this way, we are drawn into the game, but it is the developers who contribute to this, since it is they who create such environments in which you get stuck for a long time. Examples? Examples! Let it be the same GTA with a wanted level: “ I can hold out for more than 10 minutes with 5 stars, shooting with the weakest pistol!”
“or Fallout: “
I will go through this storyline with a minimum number of kills, and even without any weapons”
!
Usually our fantasy world does unrealistic things! We imagine what we really want, so if you have a creative mind that's rich in trash or imaginative ideas, then open world games are sure to keep you hooked for a long time. Variability of possible actions or events is the key to creating an interesting project. But just imagine the face of that naive gamer who would like to collect all the guns in Borderlands 2.
The game uses a system of procedural generation of weapons, and there are millions of different types. That is, there are at least 5 weapon manufacturers, and each of them has different variations: level, main characteristics, effects. Of course, the developers of Border spaces themselves do not know the exact number
Interactivity/feedback of the game with the player himself
Surely, you already understand what I'm talking about now. That's right, I'm talking about giving the player the opportunity to change the course of events, which in most games also determines the ending. Why didn't I write "giving player choice" in the subtitle? In some projects, the gameplay is designed in such a way that you yourself do not know that you are given a choice, and you only find out about it towards the end of the game. The main thing is that the game has the effect that everything depends on you. One of the well-known psychological effects relates to this point -
Hawthorne effect
The Hawthorne effect manifests itself in the fact that a person’s awareness of his participation in any experiment generally leads to a better result. If the player feels that his actions in the game are as important as food for people, Russia for Russians or Batman for Gotham (Edward Pattinson as Batman is strange (but not bad)), then he begins to behave a little differently, increasing the efficiency of its activities. The Hawthorne effect is also called a phenomenon in which any innovation leads to improved results
, because
it makes people enthusiastic. How does this work in games? Let's start with the fact that it doesn't always work and isn't used everywhere, but mostly occurs in shooters. How is this expressed? In providing a choice to the player, in differences in the outcome of events when performing various actions. It is this moment in games that can arouse enthusiasm in a gamer. He needs to kind of get it into his head that everything depends on him. And the name for this is “ Locus of Control
”.
I will explain using the example of two types of people. A person with an internal locus of control is able to realize that all the actions that happen to him depend on and happen precisely thanks to him, while a person with an external locus of control is not capable of this and tends to blame the entire space around him for even the smallest incidents, but he deserves all his merits appropriates to himself. Personally, I have an external locus of control, but I struggle with it and even succeed at it. What is your locus of control? Write in the comments! So, the goal of the developers is to convince the player of any locus of control that all game actions depend on him and, if successful, he would be happy and satisfied with himself, increasing his motivation to play. Well, such phenomena have not yet been proven scientifically, but psychologists explained and argued all these two definitions as best they could. But let's Firewatch
?
OK. In the case of “ fire clock
”, if you get into the atmosphere of the game, you will feel like you are in Henry’s shoes, and the feeling that everything depends on you will not leave your mind until you go to the desktop. Brief and, I hope, clear. Using shooters as an example, the system works in the same way. It is also important to clarify that this effect is also used to get some money out of your pocket for the coveted donation. When playing online games, at first you will probably not have any problems with the game, and you will probably have a lot of confidence that you are the king of eSports. The “obstacles” will be minor, and the game will praise you, in some cases, even giving you free donated currency or weapons for a while. After your upgrade, the game becomes more difficult. PvP battles are won by those who have a wider wallet or more experience and hours in the game. Thus, such a system forces you to buy “gold” for our indestructible currency. A similar trick has never worked for me, since I don’t play shareware games (Okay, okay, a month ago I still bought 5 packs of Hearthstone on sale. Alexstrasza and Vargoth dropped out, but I could have gotten something better!) , and paying for something in a game you’ve already purchased, from my point of view, is wrong. (Yeah, yeah. I wrote the text even before I bought this pack. Oh well. I’ll leave it for self-irony).
Returning to the topic of providing choice, there are many examples:
Shooting a hostage in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.
If you shoot a hostage with a bag on his head in the head, as required by the assignment, then the ending will be standard, but who could have known that this hostage turned out to be Mason Sr. (the father of the protagonist), from the first part of Black Ops? So, if you don’t shoot him in the head (even in the heart), then in the end he will enter Sergeant Woods’ room. Well, with my crooked little hands I initially didn’t hit Mason in the head and on the first try I lost the alternative ending. By the way, this mission is one of the very first, so if you wanted to change the course of events, you had to replay almost the entire game.
Kill count in Dishonored.
I didn’t play the second part, but I remember for sure that in the first, it depended on you how many people you would kill throughout the game. The more deaths, the stronger the plague spreads to Dunwall. This is argued by the fact that rats, which are carriers of the plague, eat corpses, thereby the dead body spreads the same plague during the process of decomposition. And if I'm not mistaken, there are 3 or 4 degrees of plague levels and the same number of game endings. I opened only two of them - without killings and with the maximum number of them.
Fallout 3
Another “gazebo” project, but released somewhat earlier than the above, Fallout presented us with the “Karma” system, which opened and blocked certain abilities, determined the attitude of people and all speaking humanoids towards you. So, the entire capital Wasteland can find out about you if at the beginning of the game you push yourself a little and explode an atomic bomb, half buried in the ground, in the settlement of Megaton, not far from your 101st shelter. Looking for your father? I’d rather blow up the city, look at the possibilities! Well, the endings also depended on the level of your karma and on your actions in the reactor. Yes, the karma system was in early versions of Fallout, we know, you don’t have to say it.
Firewatch dialogue and end-game choices.
The choices you make with Delilah, your only interlocutor in the game, affect her attitude towards you and sometimes open up additional response options. I think everyone who wanted to play it has already completed it a long time ago, so spoilers are not a big deal. There was a point in the game where Delilah asked you to describe your appearance other than the aspect of your character being white and wearing beige shorts. For example, if you tell her: “I have a thin, thin mustache, tired eyes and a black business jacket,” then in response you will hear the words: “I didn’t know that the cream of society lived in Boulder,” and at the end of the game, when you If you find yourself on her tower, then at your workplace there will be an approximate portrait of you - a man with slicked hair, sad eyes, a thin mustache, a jacket and shorts. Again, at the end, you have to choose between staying at the tower during a fire or getting into the helicopter and flying away. In general, the endings are almost no different. In one case you will fly away, and in another case you won’t. Logical? Logical! Well, and the most important thing is that the course of the game’s plot does not change, but each time you play through the dialogue with different answers, it can give rise to more and more new topics for conversation. It seems to me that they could even make a separate video for Firewatch. Well, that's all with examples.
The balance of difficulty level and player skills is also important, because if you can’t even remember where A is on the Xbox controller and where X is, then you’re in the world of Dark Souls
there's definitely no way for you. On the other hand, if the game is too easy to complete, then this also reduces the motivation to play.
Well, returning to the topic of psychology, let’s discuss another psychological effect:
Zeigarnik effect
It all started when a student at the Berlin Institute, Bluma Zeigarnik
, and her supervisor for scientific and psychological research
Kurt Lewin
, decided to visit a coffee shop for the sake of a scientific experiment, where they noticed an interesting detail.
The waiters did a perfect job of remembering at least 5 orders without writing them down on paper, but storing all the information in their heads. One of these waiters, Kurt
and
Blum,
were called over and asked for the same order that one of the visitors had previously brought, but the waiter immediately said that he no longer remembered the list of orders that he had filled.
The researchers looked at each other and thought: “ How is it that the waiter remembers orders perfectly, but after he completes them, he immediately forgets them?”
"
This was the answer to their question. It is human nature to better remember information about an unfinished action. In order to finally verify this, Bluma Zeigarnik
and her classmate
Maria Ovsyankina
conducted an experiment in which they confirmed the effect of this effect.
They gave people problems to solve and after a few days they asked them for details of the task. It turned out that the people who remembered the details best were those who did not complete the task to the end. After their joint experience, it also became clear that it is human nature to strive for completion in an unfinished action. So if you can’t sit quietly in one place with the thought that you haven’t completed something, then thank the Zeigarnik effect. So what does this have to do with video games? Everything is very simple! Let's look at the example of any of the last three parts of the ancient scrolls: You complete the main quest and unexpectedly meet an interesting character, decide to start a dialogue with him or he does it (for which thanks to the scripts), after which it turns out that if you complete it side quest “ bring - give
”, you will get a pretty good reward.
And so, you run happily to the meeting place, having completed the task and received the coveted reward. You hear from the same character that his friend needs similar help, and the reward turns out to be more worthy. This can happen until you completely abandon the game or complete all the side quests (what kind of monster do you have to be to complete all the side scrolls?). That is, we came across one quest, completed it, and then they gave us a new one. Accordingly, it can be difficult for us to leave a line of quests unfinished, again, thanks to our Zeigarnik effect. Information is borrowed from inf. source Wikipedia Kurt Zadek Lewin
(German: Kurt Zadek Lewin; September 9, 1890 - February 12, 1947) was a German and then American psychologist whose ideas had a great influence on American social psychology and many other schools and directions, especially on the theory of cultural development Lev Vygotsky and researchers of the “Vygotsky circle”. Many of the issues he dealt with became fundamental for psychologists - aspiration level, group dynamics, social perception, game situations, striving for success and avoiding failure, field theory, time perspective. Kurt Zadek Lewin was born in the Polish city of Mogilno into a Jewish family. At the beginning of the First World War he was drafted into the German army and demobilized after being wounded. He continued his studies at the University of Berlin under the guidance of Karl Stumpf (1848-1936). In August 1933, after the Nazis came to power, he emigrated to the United States. Lewin later headed the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the suggestion of Eric Trist of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, he participated in the creation of the scientific journal Human Relations (1947) (Tavistock Publications). Levin's works had a great influence on social psychology, conflict resolution technology, he came up with the idea of conducting group trainings to change certain behavioral characteristics. “It is usually easier to change individuals in a group than to change each of them individually.”
One of Kurt Lewin's areas of study in social psychology is leadership theory. In 1939, Kurt Lewin led a group of researchers whose goal was to study the phenomenon of leadership. The main result of the study is the identification of three leadership styles: authoritarian, democratic and permissive. Kurt Lewin is known largely due to the works of his followers. Kurt Lewin's immediate students were Bluma Zeigarnik
(memory research, the so-called
Zeigarnik effect
), Tamara Dembo (experimental research on anger), Gita Birenbaum (research on forgetting intentions), Fritz Heider (author of balance theory), Leon Festinger (author of cognitive dissonance theory), Roger Baker (psychology research environment) and many others.
Information is borrowed from inf. Wikipedia source Bluma Vulfovna Zeigarnik
(née Gershtein; German Bluma Zeigarnik; November 9, 1900, Preny, Marijampolsky district, Suwalki province - February 24, 1988, Moscow) - Soviet psychologist, founder of Soviet pathopsychology.
The result of Zeigarnik’s thesis work, carried out under the supervision of Kurt Lewin at the University of Berlin and which became one of the cornerstones of Gestalt psychology, is widely known, where she showed that unfinished actions are remembered better than completed ones (“Zeigarnik effect”). Since 1931, she worked in the psychoneurological clinic of the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine in collaboration with L. S. Vygotsky.
Zeigarnik is one of the founders of the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University, the Department of Neuro- and Pathopsychology. Bluma Zeigarnik's outstanding contribution to the development of psychological problems was appreciated by the American Psychological Association, which awarded her the Kurt Lewin Prize (1983). In the USSR she was awarded the M.V. Lomonosov Prize, 1st degree (1978). Bluma Wulfovna Gershtein was born on October 27 (November 9), 1900 in Preny, Suwalki province. Parents, Wulf Notelevich Gershtein (1861-1936), a native of Volkovyshe, and Ronya-Feiga Orelevna Rosengard (1865-?), owned a store. She studied at the gymnasium in Preny, and from 1916 - at the Alekseevskaya women's gymnasium of E. D. Reiman-Dalmatova in Minsk. In 1918, she met Albert Yankelevich Zeigarnik (1899—?), also from Pren, with whom in 1922 she moved to study in Berlin and entered the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Berlin, while A. Ya. Zeigarnik entered the Berlin University. polytechnic. There, influenced by Max Wertheimer's lectures, she became interested in psychology. The marriage of the Zeigarnik couple was concluded on January 9, 1924 in Kaunas.
In 1924, she began to attend Kurt Lewin’s seminar, which dealt with personality psychology, in particular the study of the driving motives of the individual, the behavior of the individual in his environment, the needs and “quasi-needs” of the individual and their dependence on the social environment. Simultaneously with her classes with Levin, Zeigarnik continued to attend classes with other professors: for example, she studied in a psychiatric clinic with K. Goldstein, listened to a course of lectures by E. Spranger and on aesthetics by M. Dessoir. Around this time (1925), after conducting a series of experiments, Zeigarnik discovered a pattern that entered science under the name “Zeigarnik effect”: the memory of uncompleted actions is retained in a person much longer than of completed actions.
The experiment boiled down to the fact that the experimenter asked the subjects to solve a number of problems within a certain time. At the same time, the subject was not allowed to complete some of them, citing lack of time. Later, the subject was asked to list all the tasks that he remembered.
It was assumed that in the event of an interruption in solving a problem, a certain level of emotional tension arises, which does not receive its release in solving the problem and, in turn, contributes to the preservation of this “unsatisfactory” action in memory (in terms of the conceptual system of Kurt Lewin, under whose leadership the experiment was carried out ). It was shown that among the actions stored in memory, the ratio of uncompleted actions to completed ones is 1.9. Thus, the result differs by almost 2 times.
In 1927, B.V. Zeigarnik graduated from the University of Berlin and in 1931 came to the USSR, where she became the closest collaborator of L.S. Vygotsky, worked in Moscow at the Institute for the Study of Higher Nervous Activity at the Natural Science Section of the Comacademy and, then, in a psychoneurological clinic Institute of Experimental Medicine.
In 1940, her husband B.V. Zeigarnik was arrested and sentenced to “10 years without the right to correspondence,” and she was left with virtually no support with two sons, one of whom was less than a year old, the other six years old. During the Great Patriotic War, Zeigarnik and his sons were evacuated from Moscow. During the evacuation, she worked together with A.R. Luria and other psychologists in the neurosurgical evacuation hospital No. 3120 in the Urals in the village of Kisegach, Chelyabinsk region. She developed rehabilitation methods after severe injuries.
In the post-war period, Bluma Zeigarnik headed the psychology laboratory at the Institute of Psychiatry, which was created with her direct participation. It was during this period that the branch of psychology—experimental pathopsychology—was formed at the intersection of psychology and psychiatry.
During the campaign against cosmopolitanism, B.V. Zeigarnik was removed from the management of the laboratory (1950) and dismissed from the laboratory in 1953; reinstated as head of the pathopsychological laboratory in 1957 and worked at the Central Research Institute of Psychiatry until 1967. She also taught at the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University (since 1967).
Apart from the information that she was a classmate of Bluma Vulfovna Zeigarnik, her assistant in the experiments, no more information was found.
Alas. With MMOs
things are even more extensive.
The essence of an MMO
is to keep you engaged in the game for as long as possible. First you are given one quest, then, before you have time to complete it, you receive a new task with a more generous reward, and then night, drowsiness, bags under your eyes and 15 completed quests. By the way, this effect makes itself felt in those situations when we do not listen to the song to the end and it, as sometimes happens, gets stuck in our head for a long time. Usually listening to this song to the end solves this problem. It helps me personally. Okay, we don’t have a section with life hacks here, so let’s move on.
Color shades and their combinations
Yes, perhaps this will seem strange to some now, but a huge part of the perception of the game comes to us precisely with the combination of colors and their range.
Each color, each of its shades has its own meaning and features in psychology, but briefly we can go over the three main ones - The red color in nature is used by some animals to scare away and protect from other living creatures. Perhaps because of this, red is the color that attracts attention the most (just think about how many logos it is used in. Most often in logos related to food. Red also characterizes aggression and physical power. Green has the most There is no calming effect on the nervous system. Do I need to say anything more about it? Blue color also has a relaxing effect on a person, but at the same time it stimulates mental activity. How does it work? I don’t know. For some reason this is an argument why lamps with a cool tint are used in offices (although at work the desire to work, no matter how strange it may sound, is not always there.) For example, we can compare GTA IV
and
GTA V
, or
Firewatch
and
Inside
. Do you know how they differ greatly from each other? That's right, in colors. Part 4 of the car thief is very, very gray, but the next one, on the contrary, presents us with all the colors of the game Los Angeles with its green palm trees, blue sky and yellow sand.
Firewatch
, in turn, is filled with green, orange and red colors, but Inside contains only dull colors that convey a tense atmosphere, since different “correct”, so to speak, color combinations affect a person on a psychological level.
For example, when you walk along a sunlit street on a summer day, the weather at least slightly lifts your spirits, but with cloudy weather it’s exactly the opposite; it’s not without reason that people talk about autumn depression, because there are bare trees, dirt on the street and cold due to the constant rain is unlikely to make you happy. However, no matter what emotions the game conveys, bad color combinations never lead to anything good. When I remember the first part of Diablo
with these nauseating locations, I shudder.
“Red, blue, green? To hell with it! We’d rather use the colors of brick, childish surprise and a white T-shirt that’s been trashed in the past.” As you already understand, Firewatch
is my favorite game, but what impressed me was not the gameplay, but the atmosphere, half of which was filled by the plot with its dialogues and endings, and the other half were color combinations neatly served on a plate with Canyons sauce Wyoming." Well, by the way, Undertale also has cool colors. Ave b/w!
Immersion and adrenaline
Almost all studios try to implement this point in games, but not everyone succeeds, since the game must correctly convey the essence of what is happening on the monitor to the player. An example is the change of day and night, atmospheric phenomena, even less noticeable little things, such as waving grass or any particles in the air. The audio is also very important. Not only the soundtrack, but also environmental sounds, NPC conversations, and so on. The topic of sound design deserves a whole article, so we’ll talk about it later. Usually, shooters add charismatic characters with an over 80 level of eloquence, or with a good sense of humor. An example is Vaasa from FC 3,
but the subsequent parts were conveyor belts and were made on the basis of the “troika”, since the Yubiks could not come up with anything better than this (the plot of parts 4 and 5, in my opinion, is another wonderful creation).
By the way, horror games have an excellent effect of immersion in the game and the release of adrenaline, as they force us to stay ready, concentrating on every rustle, corner and various objects force us to stay at the monitor in order to get a dose of adrenaline during the game. But what makes many players stay in such games for a long time? First of all, the realization that this is all just graphics, but if we see a real corpse or dismemberment, then 90% of people, I’m sure, will turn it inside out. The brain’s denial of gaming reality is the reason why we become addicted to, for example, horror films. However, there are games in the genre that are not particularly scary. When I played through the game Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs
, for the first half of the game I twitched from every second rustle behind the monitor screen. At first, the game takes advantage of the fact that it begins to create a feeling of surveillance of the protagonist, but then the moment came for the long-awaited pigman to chase me and... I just stopped to look fear in the eyes and God, it was really funny. It was so bad that I just started running around this pig and he couldn't catch me. After such a moment, of course, I went through the second half of the game in one breath without a single rustle. So for the future, don't look fear in the eye when playing horror games, because you risk losing all interest in the game, as I did. So, a person gets some pleasure from deceiving his brain. For example, we ride a roller coaster, although the risk that we will actually fall from it and hurt ourselves is an extremely insignificant percentage, but this fact attracts new visitors to the attractions even more strongly. We are ready to take tiny risks without serious consequences for the sake of receiving emotions.
Well, this is where our article comes to its lyrical end. Don't forget to write about what you liked and what you didn't like. If you liked the article, share it with your friends and don’t forget to rate the video format! We are trying just for you! Happy skating everyone, bye everyone!
games, psychology, locus of control, cognitive flow, Zeigarnik effect, Hawthorne effect
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The role of managers in modern society
The scientist, based on a process that reflected the growing independence in modern society of managers, concluded that they are turning into bearers of the morality of cooperation and democratic power, as opposed to the morality of coercion professed by politicians. The focus on the social function of managers stemmed from the belief that the power of knowledge, science and education plays a decisive role in social life. Mayo's main recommendations were aimed at training leadership with social leadership skills. Many of this scientist’s theses were later developed into independent concepts of sociology.
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