Social Psychology Commons^™

Personality And Social Psychology Connections Is In Development Stage, Donelson R. Forsyth

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

When will technology, in all its varied forms both complicated and simple, begin to give back some of the minutes, hours, and days that it has stolen from us? Slogging through emails, developing online teaching materials for courses, readying a manuscript for online submission, searching for information on the web, formatting a survey so that it prints nicely, and navigating through digital libraries and journal article repositories wastes more time than a Dean’s introductory remarks at a meeting of the full faculty, the paperwork required by a detailed-oriented IRB, or an eighth-year students’ dissertation defense.

Seeking to counter the trend …

Autokinetic Effect, Donelson R. Forsyth

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

The autokinetic effect is an optical illusion. It occurs when a perceiver staring at a stationary pinpoint of light in an otherwise completely dark visual field believes that the light moves from its fixed position. This “self-motion” (auto-kinetic) is caused, in part, by the nearly imperceptible movements of the eye known as saccades. Ordinarily the visual system compensates for these naturally occurring motions of the eye, but when only a single light is visible with no frame of reference, the light appears to wander in unpredictable directions and at variable speeds. This illusion was first noted by astronomers when viewing …