Laws of Psychology

This post was on my agenda yesterday, but I could not do it as yesterday was a real busy day. I went home in the evening, slept for 2 hrs, had dinner at 8 and then I don’t remember anything till I hear the alarm at 6:30 in the morning. I realize I had been sleeping with lights on and so was my laptop.

The busy schedule doesn’t stop me from keeping my reading in pace. I finished “The tipping point” and now have started “The goal”. Tipping point had some nice points about making it big in one’s life. Few things which kind of attracted my attentions were few laws of psychology in that book which are worthwhile posting here. I start with a question – “If I have to send my letter to someone in New York and I post that to some random address in Omaha with a small chit saying - Please help in making this letter reach to its destination. Assuming everyone getting that letter helps the cause by posting the letter to someone he knows is nearer to New York, how many times the letter will go to a new person before reaching to the right person in New York.” I tried to be as clear as possible in asking the question and my first guess was 50 times. I don’t know what you guys will guess but certainly you won’t be guessing 6 which in fact is the right answer, commonly known as the chain of 6. This means everyone in this world is connected to each other by not more than six people in between. At first go, this didn’t make much sense to me but, while browsing orkut today I found this law to be true. I was randomly browsing profile of some people and they were connected to me by less than 6 links.

Next is the law of immunity which according to the author is something which makes u immune with abundance of something. He gave the nice example of his getting immunity with email. When he first opened his email account he used to write 2-3 pages of email to all those who wrote to him. But with time, he started replying one liner and at times ignoring people even close to me. This law made sense to me as will make sense to many others. On further giving thought on this, I learnt there might be exception to this law. Can u think of some exception? I can be certain of at least one exception – talking to someone whom u like, every time u talk to that someone, u feel same happiness same enthusiasm.

Last but not the least, people are more responsible when they are alone rather than in group. If an accident takes place, and there is just one person there, then the injured person has more chance of getting help at earliest as compared to 100 people at the location. Sounds weird to u guys, then let me tell u this has been proved by conducting experiments. With that I sum up, ‘The Tipping Point” was good.