Yesterday I was involved with a mandatory study about the Exploration of Adults’ Reasoning about Other People for my General Psychology class. So went to the Cognition Lab, and they put me in a small room where I had to go through a slide show of sentences and passages and rate how “friendly” or “competitive” they were. Then I had to fill out three questionnaires and watch two videos and fill out two more questionnaires in regards to the clips that I watched. The whole time I was reading all of the sentecnes that were like “John believes that Sarah knows that Edward thinks that Betty wants to marry him”, and I was straight up confused. I tried to think of ways I could make it easier to understand for myself, so I started to approach it as a script and started to read everything out loud. Things became clearer as I developed visuals for each character, but then as the study continued, my mind kept wondering to questions like, “How could they have worded this differently? How could they have made what they wanted clearer? What are they observing in this study? Is this really going to help them at all? Is this necessary? Is this the most effective way to try to gain a better understanding of their newfound theories?”
I was surprised by how much I was questioning the questionnaire, where I know in the past I would have circled my answers blindly. It was interesting but I realized how the work I’ve been doing in dramaturgy and directing was slowly seeping into other aspects of my life. Asking questions. I was so excited by how much I was challenging this study and not being absentminded about it. It also reminded me of how many different ways their are for us to obtain knowledge and that I have to remember this as a theatre artist. It was brought to light these completely different learning styles and how I’m so used to a specific learning style that I have developed in the CFA. But that as a theatre artist, I have to understand all of the other options in the world in order to grow as that artist and as a human being. They asked questions about if I talked about politics a lot, or if there was an electrical fire in my house if I could manage to re-work the interior wiring, or if I was interested in stocks. I disagreed with most of them, but now I want to go back and start to explore all the things I said no to, to get a better understanding of life in general and how things work. Then I will able to bring that rich knowledge back to my work, which I am so excited about.
