Angry with myself

I'm very angry with myself. I just realized how bad I'm doing for my chemistry. I should have done so weeks ago, after doing somewhat terribly for my first test. But I did not. I continued to play my time away. For all my time at home, none was allocated towards studies, or anything usefull. For all my time at college, I eat them all up by lazing around, and none was allocated towards studies, or anything usefull. I now regret that.

I wonder if it's too late.

I wonder if my CGPA can still be saved. It's going to take a plunge this time around, I'm almost entirely sure of it.

I don't want that. I want to save my grades by outperforming the finals, yet I don't know just how much I can do that.

I hope my will can help myself away from games and procrastination, at the moment.

If you want to instill something, don't do it the hard way

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

In a later experiment Aronson and Carlsmith (1963) viewed cognitive justification to forced compliance in children.

The experimenter would question the child on a set of toys to gauge which toys the children liked the most and which they found the least tempting. The experimenter then chose a toy that the child really liked, put them in a room with it, and left the room. Upon leaving the room the experimenter told half the children that there would be a severe punishment if they played with the toy and told the other half that there would be a moderate punishment.

Later, when the punishment, whether severe or moderate, was removed, the children in the moderate punishment condition were less likely to play with the toy, even though now it had no repercussion.

When questioned, the children in the moderate condition expressed more of a disinterest in the toy than would be expected towards a toy that they had initially ranked high in interest. Alternatively, the desirability of the toy went up for the children in the severe punishment condition.

This study laid out the effect of overjustification and insufficient justification on cognition.

In overjustification, the personal beliefs and attitudes of the person do not change because they have a good external reason for their actions. The children threatened with the severe punishment had a good external reasoning for not playing with the toy because they knew that they would be badly punished for it. However, they still wanted the toy, so once the punishment was removed they were more likely to play with it. Conversely, the children who would get the moderate punishment displayed insufficient justification because they had to justify to themselves why they did not want to play with the toy since the external motivator, the degree of punishment, was not strong enough by itself. As a result, they convinced themselves that the toy was not worth playing with, which is why even when the punishment was removed they still did not play with the toy.

Therefore, research has proved:

1) That we shouldn't threaten children with harsh punishments. We want to raise children with values, not fear of punishment.

2) The law should not over-punish crimes. We want people to not want to commit crime, not people that would not do so only because of the law (because if the law is the only thing holding them back, then people who believe that they will get away with enforcement will still commit crime). We want to live with people that desire for our good, not with people that are holding back only because of fear of punishment.

3) That religion is ineffective in producing moral people. Religion only instill fear and does not produce people with a genuine set of personal values. Basically, true religionists are not harming us not because they are genuinely nice people, but because they just fear the repercussions.