Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology, recalls a card game with her father:
At age 89 my father's memory was fragile – he was showing his years. One day we were playing cards and I began to think that I should let him win. I soon realized that, if I saw someone else behaving that way, I'd tell her to stop being so condescending. I might even explain how negative prophecies come to be fulfilled, and I'd go on to explain that much of what we take to be memory loss has other explanations.
For instance, as our values change with age, we often don't care about certain things to the degree we used to, and we therefore don't pay much attention to them anymore. The “memory problems” of the elderly are often simply due to the fact that they haven’t noted something that they find rather uninteresting. And then, while I was weighing whether to treat him as a child because part of me still felt that he would enjoy winning, he put his cards down and declared that he had gin.
Langer's post is part of a larger collection of pyschology-related stories. BPS asked many psychologists to recount how their discipline has helped them in real life. You can read their submissions here.
The Dish 