Daniel G. Brinton's success on the road to obscurity, 1890-99

James Marcia's identity status model provides a framework for understanding how adolescents navigate identity formation through varying degrees of exploration and commitment. Marcia's model builds on Erik Erikson's theories of psychosocial development, focusing specifically on how adolescents reconcile individual aspirations with societal expectations. His model describes identity formation as a dynamic process where adolescents move between different states depending on their level of...

Another way in which a group presence can affect performance is social loafing—the exertion of less effort by a person working together with a group. Social loafing occurs when our individual performance cannot be evaluated separately from the group. Thus, group performance declines on easy tasks (Karau & Williams, 1993). Essentially individual group members loaf and let other group members pick up the slack. Because each individual’s efforts cannot be evaluated, individuals become less...

People can go to great lengths to protect their self-image and present themselves in ways that they want others to see them. Sociologist Erving Goffman presented the idea that a person is like an actor on a stage. Calling his theory dramaturgy, Goffman believed that we use “impression management” to present ourselves to others as we hope to be perceived. Each situation is a new scene, and individuals perform different roles depending on who is present (Goffman, 1959). Think about the way you...

Jeffrey Arnett's concept of emerging adulthood offers a framework to understand the unique developmental stage between adolescence and full-fledged adulthood, generally from ages 18 to 25. This period is marked by extensive exploration and shifts in identity, relationships, and career choices, a process known in psychology as role experimentation. Emerging adulthood reflects the evolving cultural expectations surrounding adulthood and the dynamic process of personal transformation during this...

An outlier is an observation of data that does not fit the rest of the data. It is sometimes called an extreme value. When you graph an outlier, it will appear not to fit the pattern of the graph. Some outliers are due to mistakes (for example, writing down 50 instead of 500), while others may indicate that something unusual is happening. Outliers are present far from the least squares line in the vertical direction. They have large "errors," where the "error" or residual is the vertical...

Gregor Mendel's work (1822 - 1884) was primarily focused on pea plants. Through his initial experiments, he determined that every gene in a diploid cell has two variants called alleles inherited from each parent. He suggested that amongst these two alleles, one allele is dominant in character and the other recessive. The combination of alleles determines the phenotype of a gene in an organism.