Is the grass greener on the other side of the fence?

Green’s Theorem connects the circulation of a vector field around a closed curve with the behavior of the field across the region enclosed by that curve. It provides a way to replace a line integral around a boundary with a double integral over the interior region, making it especially useful in plane geometry, fluid flow, and vector calculus.Although Green’s Theorem is often introduced using simple regions without gaps, it can also be applied to regions made from several simple parts. This...

The confirmation bias is the tendency to focus on information that confirms our existing beliefs and ignore information that is inconsistent with our expectations. For example, if you think that your professor is not very nice, you notice all of the instances of rude behavior exhibited by the professor while ignoring the countless pleasant interactions he is involved in on a daily basis. Have you ever fallen prey to the confirmation bias, either as the source or target of such bias?

During the 1950s, the landmark Robbers Cave experiment demonstrated that when groups must compete with one another, intergroup conflict, hostility, and even violence may result. At the Oklahoman summer camp, two troops of boys—termed the Rattlers and the Eagles—took part in a week-long tournament. During this time, their negativity culminated in derogatory name-calling, fistfights, and even vandalism and destruction of property. However, this work also revealed that such tension could be...

Social traps are negative situations where people get caught in a direction or relationship that later proves to be unpleasant, with no easy way to back out of or avoid. The concept was orignally introduced by John Platt who applied psychology to Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons", where in New England herd owners could let their cattle graze in the common ground. This situation seems like a good idea, but an individual could have an advantage. If they owned more cows, the larger...

Social psychologists have documented that feeling good about ourselves and maintaining positive self-esteem is a powerful motivator of human behavior (Tavris & Aronson, 2008). In the United States, members of the predominant culture typically think very highly of themselves and view themselves as good people who are above average on many desirable traits (Ehrlinger, Gilovich, & Ross, 2005). Often, our behavior, attitudes, and beliefs are affected when we experience a threat to our...

Green’s Theorem establishes a relationship between a line integral around a closed plane curve and a double integral over the region enclosed by that curve. It applies to a vector field F(x, y) = 〈P(x, y), Q(x, y)〉, where P and Q have continuous first partial derivatives on an open set containing the region.Let C be a positively oriented, simple, closed, piecewise smooth curve, and let R be the plane region bounded by C. Green’s Theorem states that\begin{equation*}\oint_C P\,dx+Q\,dy =\iint_R...