increasingly convinced that broad statements of the form "people generally do X in situation Y" are a complete waste of everyone's time unless they're knowingly uttered purely for the sake of entertainment, in which case i'm a big fan

every time a non-psychologist asks me a Q like "what does the literature say about how people..." i'm torn between saying "you'll have to be more specific" and making up some bullshit story on the spot.

i usually go for (b) because despite appearances, i do enjoy having friends

i think the most remarkable thing about how social scientists operate is that when we actually stop to think about what we're saying, it's blindingly obvious there are 8 million moderators to every statement, but somehow we're very sure we can do the mental integration over them

i should probably cut this thread off now before i lose any more friends