Author: Lloyd Morgan
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Perceived Freedom Threats and Our Reactions
Perceived threats to our behavioural freedom or autonomy–even inconsequential and trivial threats–provoke instinctive and often unusual reactions. This reactance, as it is known, must be considered in a business context (and is often completely ignored), argues Andrew O’Connell in Harvard Business Review, noting the many unexpected ways we react to perceived freedom and autonomy threats. What’s amazing…
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Nine Diet and Lifestyle Tips for Longevity
By studying the world’s Blue Zones–“communities whose elders live with vim and vigor to record-setting age”–Dan Buettner and team discovered a set of common behavioural traits in their subjects. In his TEDxTC talk Buettner discusses what he discovered to be the myths of living longer and the nine common diet and lifestyle habits of those…
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More on the Cognitive Benefits of Moderate Exercise
“There is overwhelming evidence that exercise produces large cognitive gains and helps fight dementia”, says the Harvard University psychologist John Ratey, author of the 2008 book on the subject, Spark. While Ratey propounds the “very clear” link between exercise and mental acuity, saying that even moderate exercise pushes back cognitive decline by “anywhere from 10…
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A History of the Climate Change Controversies
After obtaining and analysing the documents and emails from the Climate Research Unit email controversy (the so-called Climategate emails), Der Spiegel “reveals how the war between climate researchers and climate skeptics broke out, the tricks the two sides used to outmaneuver each other and how the conflict could be resolved”. The result is an exceptional and…
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Task Perception (Serious vs. Fun) and Performance
When a task is described as being a serious test of skill or proficiency, high achievers perform significantly better on the task than low achievers (as one would predict). When the same task is described as ‘fun’, however, the opposite is seen: low achievers outperform high achievers. Obviously, how we perceive tasks (or describe them…
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Malcolm Gladwell’s Public Speaking Secrets
After discovering that he was to share a double bill with the “famously good” public speaker Malcolm Gladwell, Gideon Rachman decided to use the experience to learn how to improve his own speaking abilities. In his write-up of the experience, Rachman discusses the lessons he learnt from Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘public speaking secrets’: The first lesson came from…
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Vowel Sounds and Price Perceptions
How the vowels in words are pronounced has an influence on how we perceive the size of an item. This ‘phonetic symbolism’ has also been shown to effect how we perceive prices: Researchers have known for 80 years about a symbolic connection between speech and size: back-of-the-mouth vowels like the “o” in “two” make people…
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Scientifically-Proven Ways to Improve Creativity
Fourteen acts or mindsets that have been shown–using science!–to increase creativity, from a two-article series on scientifically-proven methods to increase your creativity: Psychological distance: Imagine your creative task as distant and disconnected from your current location. Chronological distance: Project yourself or the task forward in time. Absurdist stimulation: Read some Kafka: absurdity is a ‘meaning threat’,…
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Hand Washing Leads to Rational Evaluations
Postdecisional dissonance–an extremely close relative of both post-purchase rationalisation and the choice-supportive bias–is the phenomenon whereby once we have made a decision we perceive our chosen option as the most attractive choice and the discarded alternatives as less attractive, regardless of the evidence. Some intriguing recent research suggests that the physical act of cleaning one’s hands helps…
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Fooled by Pseudoscience: A Philosophy of Science
The “huge quantities of data” collected on the subject show that the principal reason people are deceived by pseudoscientific claims and alternative therapies is not intellectual ability, but personal experience: a bad personal experience with mainstream medicine is the overwhelming reason, regardless of medical training. That’s from Ben Goldacre in an interview for The Philosophers’ Magazine…