Not All Who Wander Are Lost: An Orientation to Copernican Revolution Activities

You did a quick orientation to Copernican Revolution activities. You practiced filling it out. You have a certificate and a verification code. Your teacher will have a way for you to turn it in. If you goofed, your teacher can let you redo it. My hope with this activity is to let you practice the mechanics with a 2 minute activity instead of possibly goofing and needing to redo a 20 minute activity for credit. Our activities, even this one, are ways for you to get first-hand experience with concepts you’re learning about in class.

There’s the science of Psychology you’re learning about in class, but people also have all sorts of thoughts about the topics of Psychology - how we think, feel, and behave. We call these everyday ideas people have, folk psychology. Though it might sound funny, we can use the science of Psychology to study folk psychology! In fact, the story you completed is based on a famous study of folk psychology - The Maxi Task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). It’s about Theory of Mind. People have the belief that other people have beliefs. We realize those beliefs can even be wrong. And people act on their beliefs even if they’re not true.

Hopefully you realized Jade would go to get her teddy bear from where she believes it is and not where it actually is. Using little stories like this one, Developmental Psychology has discovered 3 year old children don’t get it. They answer “red dollhouse” because that’s where the teddy bear actually is. By 5 years of age, almost every child gets it. They answer “blue dollhouse” because that’s where Jade believes it is.

This is just the beginning of folk psychology. Adults aren’t perfect at understanding how people work either. For example, in Social Psychology, we see systematic errors in adults thinking due to the false consensus effect - people fail to realize just how diverse people’s perspectives actually are and instead we falsely believe more people are more like us than they really are (Ross, Greene, & House, 1976). That is, we see a consensus when it doesn't exist. During your class, consider all the things you learn about Psychology. How much matches your folk psychology (sometimes called, “common sense”) and when do you discover people are quite a bit different than our intuitions?

I write essays like this one for people learning psychology so I avoid getting needlessly complicated. But some of you might be psychology researchers who would like to use this site for your studies, or teachers who would like detailed activity information (like scale construction, reliability, and validity). At the end of most essays, you'll see a link to a detailed scholarly guide.

Before you close your certificate of completion, please copy the text of your verification code and screenshot your certificate.

Carefulness Ratings (0 to 100)

When you're answering activities, there will be some silly questions. For example, in this activity, I asked you to agree or disagree with the claim, "I am a teddy bear named Tara who lives in a purple house." Clearly you're not. They're my way of checking your responses are careful. It's important so when I give you feedback about how you compare with others, it will only be feedback based on people who responded carefully. Activities are meant to be fun extras for class, it's unfair to students who genuinely do them if those who are careless get credit too. So your certificate includes a Careful Response rating at the top.

Please don't over-think items like these.

Even if your name is Tara, you're not a teddy bear so obviously the correct answer is "strongly disagree."

Most teachers give full credit for a 70% or higher. But if you ever do an activity twice and were careful, but still don't score that high, please let your teacher know.

Demographics

The next to last page of nearly every activity asks you about demographics. Your answers do not impact your results. And they almost never appear on your certificate. So why ask?

In Psychology, when we describe a study, we always have a "participants" subsection of the method where we describe who participated. You'll notice when reading essays about activities how I explain what results mean. I create those tables with normative data - a fancy way to say how people typically respond. Sometimes, if it's possibly interesting, I'll show you the typical responses of people across different demographic groups (e.g., gender, ethnicity, age).

Verification Code

Your teacher will likely ask you to copy and paste the verification code (at the very top of certificate) into an assignment on your class website (e.g., Canvas, Moodle). When you copy the code, include everything - in this case start with ORIENTATION (in all caps) and end with END~CODE.
The code embeds a lot of information including your username, date and time you did the activity, and your careful response ratings. Altering even a single letter, number, or symbol means the code won't verify. So please just use copy & paste. If you're a teacher, you can send me an email from your official school email, including a link to a page verifying you're a teacher. I can send you a code-breaking method.

Many teachers ask you to submit your certificate too.

Certificate of Completion

To avoid losing your results, take a screenshot or print-to-pdf before leaving the certificate. It's generated just for you. Once you close the window or navigate away, it can not be recovered.

You get to provide a name you would like on your certificate. It doesn't need to be the same as your username (which your teacher needs to know). For example, I usually put either my social media handle, lace.up.skatie, or my first name, Katie, without my last name. Perfect if you would like to post your certificate pic to social media without providing identifying information.

Psychology journals, to me, are kinda' like teen magazines and BuzzFeed. Like you would read an article in Teen Vogue and you have to do the quiz, obviously. So when I began studying Psychology and reading journal articles, the first thing I would do is complete any measures included. They gave me a lot to think about. Actually, I still do them and they still help me understand the psychology and myself. I hope they help you too! I have created many activities, probably many your class isn't covering. If you would like, here's a complete list of online activities. And in case you're exploring on your own, not in a class with a teacher, I wrote explanations to help.

Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The “false consensus effect”: An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13(3), 279–301.

Wimmer, H and Perner, J.  (1983).  Beliefs about beliefs: representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception.  Cognition, 13(1), 103-128.

Please remember your results with any activity are not who you are. Your results are a 'snapshot' of a moment when you did an activity. It's just one measure, a single thread, of the many strands of who you are. Any result is a guess with statistical error. And it's possible the measure is flawed in a way so it doesn't work for you. Please do not think of your results as definitive dogma. Instead they're a starting point for our self reflection. Please keep in mind too, self-reflection can feel uncomfortable. "Bad" feelings are not actually bad. They're information. So, even if your activity result is inaccurate and flawed, you might ask yourself what your feeling is trying to tell you? Trusted teachers, friends, and therapists can be helpful. I wrote an essay elaborating with concrete examples how we can appreciate uneasy feelings about our activity results.