Personality Traits

In Psychology Big five personality traits model is considered to be one of the most comprehensive models to define an individual. The five personality traits are defined as

• Openness
• Conscientiousness
• Extraversion
• Agreeableness
• Neuroticism

Apart from that, I feel one more personality trait that is important to comprehend is laziness. Let's look into each one of them.

Openness

Openness is about how people are open to new ideas. For example, you meet with people who would

Stanford Prison Experiment : An inquiry into Human Behavior.

Stanford prison experiment was conducted by Prof. Zimbardo in Stanford Univeristy in 1971. The experiment was done to find out how one behaves if someone is put in the context of a different role. Is it our personality trait which governs the behavior all the time or do we get impacted by the context and circumstances. 

The experiment was conducted by simulating a prison situation and dividing a group of people randomly in the role of prisoners and guards. Prisoners had to stay in the prison for 24 hours and the guards were rotated in shifts. The experiment was supposed to run for 2 weeks but was terminated in 1 week itself as the prison turned out to be behaving like an actual prison. Guards started behaving

Problem Solving

Problem solving is an important skill.We face problems on daily basis and we need to solve them consistently. You solve one problem and other problem usually appears on the horizon. I am not using the term problem in a negative sense. There is a problem at hand to solve when we desire to change the existing state of situation to a new state. A problem is a gap between what is currently there to what we desire it should be. Solving is the process or action that helps in changing the state from current to desired. 

At a given point of time, everyone usually deals with multiple kinds of  problems. Before we can venture into problem solving, it's important to define the problem and understand the exact nature of

Core Beliefs

What is a core belief ? In simple terms, it's the belief that makes your core. It's a self impression that decides your action and reaction. How the world views you, may not be same and usually it's not the same. Core belief is a self impression about one's self. At some level it boils down to specifics in terms of, if you think you are beautiful or ugly, stupid or intelligent. There are many more attributes about yourself for which you will be carrying the impression. Again a word of caution, the impression may be far from reality but these self impressions get wired in us. They are wired as part of our upbringing.

Psychology in Stock Market

It would not be an exaggeration if we say that Stock market is more of a psychological game. The primary tenet on which the market works is the concept of demand and supply. The demand and supply is determined by the sentiments of the crowd against existing conditions. Also market loves extremes. On bad news, it will hammer a stock as if there is no bottom till it bottoms out. On the way up, it's taken to dizzy heights for no rhyme and reason. It's often said that in the longer term market acts as per the fundamentals of the company. But sometimes that longer term might be beyond the life time of an individual. I am not saying to ignore the fundamentals but just trying to bring out a point that fundamental is just one of the elements affecting the price action. So look for everything, the long term, medium term and short term before deciding your action.

The other often said statement is that History repeats itself and it is fairly true and has been proven

An Inquiry into Root cause of Conflict

We see conflicts all around us. Conflicts in families, societies, nations and conflicts within. What is conflict and why it happens? Human history is full of conflicts. Some of the conflicts have been running for centuries and had also resulted in loss of multiple human lives. Some of these conflicts still do not seem to be dying down any soon. 

If we look closely, we see that there are two fundamental reasons of conflict:

• Perception of threat
• Desire of something which belongs to others

Milgram Experiment : An inquiry into Obedience

Milgram Experiment was conducted by Stanley Milgram, who was the Professor of Psychologist in Yale University. It is considered as one of the most important experiments in the area of Psychology, which looked into the question of obedience and role of authorities. The experiments were done in 1961 and published by Milgram in 1963 and further in 1974 book, 'Obedience to Authority- An Experimental View'.

Personality Mapping

Each one of us is different in many ways. Some of this differences come because of our culture and the way we have been raised. The difference also comes because of the various other choices we make in our life on day to day basis. We react to same situations differently. We consider aspects of morality and ethics in different ways. Even twins become very different in terms of their approach to life. On the contrary, people from two opposite part of the world sometime behave in a much similar way. You will find honest people in all part of the world, no matter how different are their circumstances or how differently they have been raised. There are great mathematicians, scientists, psychologist, linguists in all part of the world and there are people of immense learning everywhere. 

So is it possible to map people on certain dimensions in a framework, which is uniform across the world. Can we build a model which helps in mapping people on a framework? It's not about

What makes someone good or bad

It's a very common conversation we do and hear all around us. 

"He/She is bad or he/she is good."

When we judge a person, most of us have a tendency to categorize people in two buckets. Either they are good or they are bad. It's quite possible that good people may become bad with time and bad may become good, but at a given moment we categorize them in black and white. Why we have a tendency to do that? Can people be categorized into good and bad? Can we put everyone in the world in two categories, either good or bad? How do we define if someone is good or bad? Are we eligible enough to make those judgements?

Whenever we want to pass a judgement about someone, we conveniently put across the absolute truth. 

"He is bad or he is good."