An observer once said that a baseball player must think about his technique at the moment of hitting, to which baseball star Yoji Berra responded with characteristic brevity: “How can you think and hit at the same time?” This tells us that our attention is limited.
Attention can be focused on only one thing
object, action or thought.
Where do we turn our attention?
Attention is what allows us to process information about the world around us. We become aware of things only when we listen to them, when we pay our attention to them. Attention is often compared to a flashlight, which we point at objects in order to distinguish them from an infinite number of other objects. After we have focused the beam from a flashlight on this object, we immediately begin to realize and interpret what appears to our gaze.
Our motives, expectations, and intentions also influence where we direct our attention.
Signals from the outside world and other objects that are in our field of perception can also control our attention. For example, a loud bang forces us to turn our heads towards the intended source of the sound, and a flashing picture in the corner of the screen instantly attracts our gaze. This type of attention is spontaneous and it is controlled by external stimuli.
We can manage our own attention. This type of attention is called voluntary and intentional . For example, when we are at a lecture, we force ourselves to listen to the lecturer’s speech and look at the board where he writes some formulas. Or when we are looking for a book in the library, we consciously pay attention to the titles of the books written on the spines. We can use voluntary attention to filter out information that is not meaningful to us. In this case, we focus on finding a specific shape, color or word. For example, when we are looking for a meat dish on a menu, we will look for either a picture of meat or the words “chicken”, “pork” or “lamb”, while we will ignore the rest of the information (prices, weight, ingredients).
Causes of the phenomenon
The internal locus of control develops as a result of education aimed at the formation of an independent personality who takes responsibility for his actions. Such upbringing, as a rule, requires persistence and skill from parents and teachers, because it is much easier to force a child to do something, instead of pushing him to make an independent decision. The manner of raising their children to be inclined to recognize and use their own personal power was characteristic of the nobility. For noble upbringing, the concept of honor was of great importance, inextricably linked with the ability to be responsible for one’s words and actions. In the modern world, such education is more often received by the children of entrepreneurs, politicians, psychologists, teachers, as well as all those who are carriers of such qualities or understand their importance for the child.
Check your attention
Watch a short video in which two teams will pass the ball. You need to count how many passes the team in white had.
I hope you completed this task, but did you notice the bear moonwalking in the background? If not, watch the video again.
But in the picture below, a person manages to do three things at the same time: eat an apple, read something on the computer screen and talk on the phone. How he does it?
A man eats an apple, speaks on the phone and looks at the monitor. How he does it?
The essence of the phenomenon
“Locus of control” translated into Russian means “place of control.” It can be internal (internal) and external (external), and shows to whom or what a person attributes responsibility for what is happening to him. If a person tends to see the reason for what happens to him in his own actions and personal qualities, then they say that he has an internal (internal) locus of control. If there is a tendency to see the decisive force in other people and external circumstances, then they talk about an external (external) locus of control
Attention and automaticity
Several things can be done at once only if they are brought to automaticity.
Automation is a very useful property, but it has a number of disadvantages. If you swap the gas pedal and brake pedal in your car, warn you about this and display a special reminder indicator on the front panel, in a critical situation the reflex will still work and you will press the wrong pedal.
Interference phenomenon
When you perform two tasks at the same time, neither of which is automatic, the efficiency of each task decreases as a result of competition for attention.
Psychologists call this phenomenon interference.
The more predictable, automatic, and unconscious a task becomes, the more effective it becomes at performing it simultaneously with other tasks, and the less it competes with them.
Habit Formation
You've probably at some point on a Saturday morning accidentally arrived at your work location when you were planning to go somewhere else. You did this out of habit, which was formed through the repetition of a certain sequence of actions.
- A person cannot avoid the formation of automatic reactions.
- This impossibility does not depend on repetition: no amount of repetition can teach one not to form habits when using a particular interface regularly.
- Habit formation is an integral part of our mental apparatus. It cannot be stopped by willful action.
If you go back to the Saturday morning example, after you made a wrong turn, you might suddenly realize that you were going to drive in a completely different direction. This awareness places the current task of driving in your locus of attention and allows you to interrupt the automatic sequence of actions that directed you to your place of work.
When you repeat a sequence of actions, the only way to prevent a habit from forming is to keep what you are doing in your locus of attention. It is very difficult. As they usually say, our attention “walks.”
- Any sequence of actions that you perform regularly eventually becomes automatic.
- The set of actions that make up the sequence becomes like one action. Once you start doing a sequence that requires no more than 1 or 2 seconds of time, you will not be able to stop and will do everything until the sequence is completed.
- You also cannot interrupt a sequence that takes more than a few seconds to complete unless it has become your locus of attention.
An effective approach is to give the user the opportunity to cancel the erroneous command, even if some other action was taken after it.
We must create experiences that, first, intentionally build on the human ability to form habits, and, second, develop habits in users that make work easier.
Consequences of the phenomenon
In general, the presence of an internal locus of control indicates a formed and mature personality, capable of both serious decisions and taking responsibility for them. Internals are more self-confident and less anxious, and their activities are more effective. Internals are more loved and respected for their responsibility and reliability, their ability to fight and win. However, excessive confidence in one's capabilities can give rise to a number of negative aspects. Firstly, overestimating your strengths and your influence can lead to sensitive defeats with all their consequences, including psychological ones. Secondly, the tendency to blame yourself for all failures can cause inappropriate feelings of remorse, depression and depression. You must always stick to the golden mean and allow for the possibility of luck and external factors influencing the outcome of the case. But the golden mean is still closer to the internal locus of control.
Practical use
File deletion window. An example of automation.
Since errors are rare, you will usually answer “Yes” to any command that requires confirmation. Due to constant repetition, typing “Yes” after the delete command soon becomes a habitual action and, instead of remaining a separate mental operation, becomes part of the action of deleting files. As a result, you enter “Yes” without stopping and checking your own intention. Thus, a computer system prompt intended to serve as a security measure becomes, through habit, useless and only complicates the normal process of deleting files.
The point is that any confirmation request that requires a set response soon becomes useless. Developers who use these kinds of confirmations and administrators who think that confirmation requests provide security are not really taking into account the power of the habit-forming property of the cognitive unconscious.
Start screen in Windows 8.
This is another example where users who developed the habit of using the Start menu in previous versions of the system completely lost their skill in the new OS. The developers even had to bring this button back.
Below is a more positive example from MacOS, where the menu looks standardized across different programs.
Example menu of Safari and Keynote programs from MacOS
It took me about a week to master the MacOS operating system after Windows, but once I learned the basic techniques and understood their standards, I began to work many times faster than on Windows.
Do you take into account on your website that users’ attention is limited? Check it out today.
Locus of control and self-esteem
tags:
Personality, Man, Responsibility, Behavior, Locus, Control, Activity, Question Topic No. 5 (motivational sphere)
| Locus of control is a quality that characterizes a person’s tendency to attribute responsibility for the results of his activities to external forces or his own abilities and efforts | |
| external, external locus of control — a quality that characterizes a person’s tendency to attribute responsibility for the results of his activities to external forces | internal, internal locus of control — a quality that characterizes the tendency to attribute responsibility for the results of one’s activities to one’s own abilities and efforts |
| People are more likely to lack self-confidence, a tendency to let things take their course, lack of independence, and dependence. Often characterized by greater imbalance and higher levels of anxiety. | More independent and responsible; They show greater self-confidence, persistence in achieving goals, and independence in judgment and action. Patients with an internal locus of control are usually better informed about their illness, about the hospital regime, etc.; strive to take an active part in the treatment process. |
Locus of control is considered as a special type of causal attribution (R.S. Nemov)
Ilyin E.P. :
Internality (internal locus of control) is the ability to take responsibility for the events of one’s life, explaining them with one’s abilities, personality traits, and behavioral characteristics.
Eternality (external locus of control) is the property of attributing responsibility for events to an external factor (other people, chance, fate).
Causal attribution is a motivated cognitive process aimed at understanding the information received about a person’s behavior, identifying certain reasons for his actions, and most importantly, developing a person’s ability to predict them.
SELF-ESTEEM
Self-esteem
- one of the most important structural components of a person’s self-concept. Any knowledge a person has about himself is associated with his emotional and evaluative attitude towards this knowledge.
The issue of self-esteem has been sufficiently studied in domestic and foreign psychology. Along with theoretical studies that address issues of the socio-psychological nature and moral basis of self-esteem, its structure and role in the mental life of the individual, there are also studies of the genesis of self-esteem.
Psychological dictionaries define self-esteem as the value and significance that an individual attributes to himself as a whole and to individual aspects of his personality, activities, and behavior. In psychological science, self-esteem is considered as a central personal formation and a central component of the self-concept.
Self-esteem performs a regulatory and protective function, influencing the behavior, activity and development of the individual, her relationships with other people. The main function of self-esteem in the mental life of an individual is that it acts as a necessary internal condition for the regulation of behavior and activity. The highest form of self-regulation based on self-esteem consists in a kind of creative attitude towards one’s own personality - in the desire to change, improve oneself and in the realization of this desire. The protective function of self-esteem, while ensuring relative stability and autonomy of the individual, can lead to a distortion of experience.
Self-esteem is a rather complex formation of the human psyche. It arises on the basis of the generalizing work of the processes of self-awareness, which goes through various stages and is at different levels of development during the formation of the personality itself. Therefore, self-esteem is constantly changing and improving. The process of establishing self-esteem cannot be final, since the personality itself is constantly developing, and therefore, its ideas about itself and its attitude towards itself change. The source of an individual’s evaluative ideas about himself is his sociocultural environment, including social reactions to some manifestations of his personality, as well as the results of introspection.
According to Burns, there are three points that are essential to understanding self-esteem. Firstly, an important role in its formation is played by the comparison of the image of the real self with the image of the ideal self, i.e. with an idea of what a person would like to be. This comparison often appears in various psychotherapeutic techniques, and a high degree of coincidence between the real and ideal self is considered an important indicator of mental health. Thus, the smaller the gap between a person’s real self-image and his ideal self, the higher the individual’s self-esteem.
Secondly, an important factor for the formation of self-esteem is associated with the internalization of social reactions to a given individual. In other words, a person tends to evaluate himself the way he thinks others evaluate him.
Finally, thirdly, the formation of self-esteem is significantly influenced by the individual’s real achievements in a wide variety of activities. And here, the more significant a person’s successes in a particular type of activity, the higher his self-esteem will be.
It should be especially emphasized that self-esteem, regardless of whether it is based on the individual’s own judgments about himself or interpretations of the judgments of other people, individual ideals or cultural norms, is always subjective.
The content of self-esteem is multidimensional, just as the personality itself is complex and multidimensional. It embraces the world of her moral values, relationships, opportunities, and abilities. A single holistic self-esteem of an individual is formed on the basis of self-assessments of individual aspects of his mental world.
Self-esteem is a subjective and very personal formation of our psyche. It is formed with the more or less active participation of the individual himself, and bears the imprint of the qualitative uniqueness of his mental world, therefore self-esteem may not in all its elements coincide with the objective assessment of a given individual. Its adequacy, truth, logic and consistency are established on the basis of real manifestations of personality in activity and behavior.
In psychology there is a distinction between adequate
and
inadequate
Adequate self-esteem reflects a person’s real view of himself, his fairly objective assessment of his own abilities, properties and qualities. If a person’s opinion of himself coincides with what he really is, then they say that he has adequate self-esteem. Inadequate self-esteem characterizes a person whose self-image is far from reality. Such a person evaluates himself biasedly; his opinion of himself is sharply at odds with what others consider him to be.
Inadequate self-esteem, in turn, can be either overestimated or underestimated. If a person overestimates his capabilities, performance results, personal qualities, then his self-esteem is inflated. Such a person self-confidently takes on work that exceeds his real capabilities, which, if he fails, can lead him to disappointment and the desire to shift responsibility for it to circumstances or other people. If a person underestimates himself compared to what he really is, then his self-esteem is low. Such self-esteem destroys a person’s hopes for his own successes and a good attitude towards him from others, and he perceives his real successes and the positive attitude of those around him as temporary and more accidental. Both high and low self-esteem make a person’s life difficult. It is not easy to live for those who are insecure, it is difficult for those who are timid to live, and those who are arrogant. Inadequate self-esteem complicates the lives of not only those who have it, but also those around them.
Adequate self-esteem is also not homogeneous. For some people it is high, for others it is lower. Increased self-esteem characterizes a person who does not consider himself inferior to others and has a positive attitude towards himself as an individual. He has a fairly high level of aspirations and faith in his abilities. Such a person is guided by his principles, knows his own worth, and the opinions of others are not decisive for him. He is confident in himself, so criticism does not cause a violent defensive reaction in him and is perceived calmly. A person who has a positive attitude towards himself usually has a more favorable and trusting attitude towards others.
Low self-esteem manifests itself in a constant desire to underestimate one’s own capabilities, abilities, achievements, increased anxiety, fear of a negative opinion about oneself, increased vulnerability, which encourages a person to reduce contacts with other people. In this case, fear of self-disclosure limits the depth and intimacy of communication. People with low self-esteem are sometimes distrustful and unfriendly towards other people.
To develop positive self-esteem, it is important that the child is surrounded by constant love, regardless of how he is at the moment. The constant manifestation of parental love gives the child a sense of self-worth and contributes to the formation of a positive attitude towards himself. Knowing a person’s self-esteem is very important for establishing relationships with him, for normal communication, in which people as social beings inevitably engage. It is especially important to consider the child's self-esteem, as well as everything else about him. It is just being formed and therefore, to a greater extent than in an adult, is susceptible to influence and change.
