Aniihya wrote:
While I am not socially engaged, I am interested in people and would love to study psychology if my government wouldn't put so many barriers up. I would have to go to the other side of the country to go to uni.
For what it's worth
My IQ was 129 aged 12 and educationally speaking by the standards of my country I was predestined to follow an academic stream. I did, hated it and after even the courts told me I was to clever to learn a trade I guess I just lost interest and left school around 15. Many years later I did learn a trade off my own back.
Got into tobacco through peer pressure and alcohol pretty much the same. A legal repeat prescription was my ticket into illegal street substances after Rohypnol was banned in the Netherlands and the substitute offered was utter crap at making me feel as the Rohypnol did. Been using and abusing ever since with the odd dry period inbetween.
As for correlation.
Had the Belgium culture not been what it was I would have learnt a trade. Belgium calls them 'waterfall children'. The ones that have to drop a stream because they just can not hack it at the higher level. Many of them due to societal and family induced pressure to perform according to IQ. And many of them drop out all together.
Had my doctor not prescribed me Rohypnol at the time I never would have scoured the streets of Amsterdam (I lived on the edge of the RLD at the time) to find it on the black market and when supply dried up I might never have gotten into speed which would never gotten me mixed up with the crowd that sniffed coke and of whom half were binge drinkers.
Matter of fact most of that crowds were drop outs. And the one thing we all had in common is that we felt alienated from the society we lived in. That our lives had traumatised us enough to find our luck elsewhere in the world. We probably all had reasonable IQ's otherwise we never would have gotten where we did surviving in a foreign country on the margins of society. Some of the Dutch melted in as they got older but the foreigners, like myself, did not know enough of their own troubles to even start fixing them. Other drunk or drugged themselves into early deaths.
I'm not WEIRD, I'm just WID
Quote:
The over-sampling of American college students may be skewing our understanding of human behavior, finds an analysis by researchers from the University of British Columbia. In a forthcoming issue of Brain and Behavioral Sciences, anthropologist Joe Henrich, PhD, and psychologists Steven Heine, PhD, and Ara Norenzayan, PhD, review the available database of comparative social and behavioral science studies. They found that people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies — who represent as much as 80 percent of study participants, but only 12 percent of the world’s population — are not only unrepresentative of humans as a species, but on many measures they’re outliers. http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/05/weird.aspx
14 May 2015, 9:42 pm
