[reprise85]

Originally Posted by Disco King

The doctor was actually asking me if I am comfortable taking meds from day one, and seems open to a lot of treatment possibilities and wasn't telling me that I would just be all better if I slept more and ate right or anything like that. I just didn't want to get on meds right away, but then I decided to give it a try and I'm on sertraline right now. Been on it just over a week, since my visit to the doc. I'm supposed to see her again next week.

I dunno, I haven't noticed that much of a change yet. I'm guessing it's too early for the effects to be noticeable.

very glad to hear this. yeah, give it some time for sure.

Sounds like it was a good paper. Have you got any feedback yet?

Yes, he corrected about 10 little grammar things (semi-colons etc), other than that said it was great and a good start to a promising honors thesis. it ended up being about 75% about game theory and then basic evolutionary ideas of why we are deceptive (impression management - for social position, mating, and material resources and to avoid conflict were my main ones). And then I kinda got into when children learn to lie and what they lie about and some studies that show that kids who lied in certain experiments had higher IQs and better executive functioning and better immune system functioning and another diary study where people claimed most of their lies were for pro social reasons, which were true but i also made the point that it also was protective of the liar, because it avoided conflict. etc etc etc.

Next week I have my thesis proposal, and my thesis idea isn't even all that clear. I wanted to do some sort of experimental design that would have to do with implicit biases and policy preferences (had a bunch of different ideas, but couldn't decide on which I wanted to do), but my supervisor said it'd be hard to get the funding for an experiment. So, instead I may have to do a metastudy on experiments that already exist. That sounds boring as fuck but I already suspected that I wouldn't be able to do an experiment at the undergrad level.

Problem is, I would think that I would need to have a narrower scope and look at implicit biases in one specific issue (like how priming gender affects people's opinions on this issue or how priming race affects opinions on that issue), but my supervisor is actually saying that it should be more broad. I don't see how that will work. Like, I'm just going to write about biases and politics in general? How will I synthesize all these studies when they are all talking about different issues? It seems like I actually need a research question, because the question "how do implicit biases affect politics" is just way too broad. I dunno, I don't really trust my supervisor's instincts on this, but she's the expert.

I will be doing a literature review, but not in the sense of metastudy or trends or anything. I'm doing deception but it's my own narrative, using studies to prove my points or at least show why they may have merit. Basically deception is nature's basic orientation is my main idea I guess.

My university is big into undergrad research and I probably could get approved to do an experiment but I don't really have something I could do easily, without some kind of diary study or by using confederates so I'm not even going to try. Maybe she wants you to do something more like what I'm doing? Because you could write quite a bit just explaining what implicit biases are, the evidence for different kinds, the ones that affect people the most at this period in time, etc. I mean implicit bias is a super interesting topic, I'm sure you could find an angle like you said. Maybe she'll be able to be clearer in your meeting.

I also didn't have to do any kind of formal proposal, it just kinda worked out how it's worked out. That sounds nerve-wracking. But you got this.