Introduction
Can you identify critical points in your life that have changed it dramatically? What about critical points in the world’s history? Can your life, or the situation in the world, change back to what it was before the specific critical point? Do you still need to work on the problem even after the dramatic change?
The concept of a critical point is something that can be seen in many sciences. For example, in physics, there are critical points when water changes its state – once it falls below 0 Celsius, the water becomes an ice, and once it rises above 100 Celsius, it becomes a gas. An example of the critical point from history could be an invention of the phone. We can reach any person within a couple of seconds nowadays, whereas it was unthinkable before 1876. We can come across a concept of a critical point in the popular literature as well. For example, a book by Gladwell (2000) talks about the “tipping point”, which is defined as “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point” (Gladwell, 2000, p. 12). The examples of tipping, or critical points that Gladwell uses include the rise in popularity of Hush Puppies shoes in the mid-1990s and the drop in New York’s …show more content…
In psychology, such theories are called “lay theories”. Other examples of lay theories include theories about willpower, which hugely affect our ability to self-regulate (Job, Dweck, & Walton, 2010; Job, Bernecker, & Dweck, 2015) and perceptions of self as either flexible or stable, which hugely affect our wellbeing (Rabinovich & Morton, 2016). The idea is that the lay theories that could be seen as abstract at the first look could have important implications for our everyday decision. The lay theory of critical points also influences people’s daily lives. However, it might have implications on the perception of social progress as well, for example, whether one decides to engage in collective
Can you identify critical points in your life that have changed it dramatically? What about critical points in the world’s history? Can your life, or the situation in the world, change back to what it was before the specific critical point? Do you still need to work on the problem even after the dramatic change?
The concept of a critical point is something that can be seen in many sciences. For example, in physics, there are critical points when water changes its state – once it falls below 0 Celsius, the water becomes an ice, and once it rises above 100 Celsius, it becomes a gas. An example of the critical point from history could be an invention of the phone. We can reach any person within a couple of seconds nowadays, whereas it was unthinkable before 1876. We can come across a concept of a critical point in the popular literature as well. For example, a book by Gladwell (2000) talks about the “tipping point”, which is defined as “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point” (Gladwell, 2000, p. 12). The examples of tipping, or critical points that Gladwell uses include the rise in popularity of Hush Puppies shoes in the mid-1990s and the drop in New York’s …show more content…
In psychology, such theories are called “lay theories”. Other examples of lay theories include theories about willpower, which hugely affect our ability to self-regulate (Job, Dweck, & Walton, 2010; Job, Bernecker, & Dweck, 2015) and perceptions of self as either flexible or stable, which hugely affect our wellbeing (Rabinovich & Morton, 2016). The idea is that the lay theories that could be seen as abstract at the first look could have important implications for our everyday decision. The lay theory of critical points also influences people’s daily lives. However, it might have implications on the perception of social progress as well, for example, whether one decides to engage in collective