Category: psychology
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The Inefficacy of Learning Styles
Learning styles, you’ve heard of them before: visual, kinaesthetic or auditory learners; left and right brainers; activists, reflectors and analysts. However learning styles are “theoretically incoherent and conceptually confused” concluded a 2004 study from the UK’s Learning and Skills Development Agency—an agency set up by the UK government to “improve the quality of post-16 education…
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Time Needed to Form a Habit
How long does it take to form a habit? By studying 96 people as they each attempt to start a new habit, the answer comes out as between 18 to 254 days, with a mean of 66. Some good news and caveats: Missing a single day did not reduce the chance of forming a habit. A…
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What Makes Us Human: Tolerance and Cooperation
In the 1950s, Russian scientist Dmitri Belyaev ran a selective breeding project to, by artificial selection, breed (incredibly cute) domesticated silver foxes. The results of this multi-decade experiment were impressive, especially given that the foxes were selected solely for their amicability toward humans: After only forty generations, the selected foxes began to display changes you (and Darwin, too) might…
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Want Happiness? Buy Memories, Not Objects
In one of my very first posts, I wrote about an article that noted how “money will make you happier, up to a point. After that, it makes no difference. That point is the wonderfully quantitative ‘point of comfort‘. That is, once we have enough money to feed, clothe and house ourselves, extra money makes…
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More Psychology of Wine
Most psychology studies focusing on my good friend, wine, rely on applying the scientific method to the tasting of different wines, and this is done in one, relatively simple way: blind tasting. Finance blogger at Reuters, Felix Salmon, isn’t a fan of blind tasting, and after reading his eminently-quotable piece on the subject I tend to…
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The Deadweight Loss of Gift Vouchers
Of the $92 billion spent on gift vouchers in the U.S. last year, $6 billion was lost to fees and unused cards. In response to this, the U.S. Credit Card Act now bans fees on vouchers that have been dormant for less than 12 months and expiration dates of less than five years from the…
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Purchasing Green a Licence to Steal, Cheat
Just as a salad option on a menu increases the incidence of unhealthy orders, and national park visitors are less likely to support conservation charities later in life (as compared to hikers or backpackers), now buying green has been shown to increase bad behaviour. It’s not all bad, though: merely being exposed to green products…
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Rewards Corrupt Altruistic Tendencies
It has been known for decades that infants up to 14 months old will act on altruistic impulses without reward. Recent research, following on from a similar 1973 study, is starting to show that rewards could be responsible for the inhibition of this natural desire to help others—an innate altruism. 48 German toddlers averaging 20…
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Realising Metaphors
Deciding which part of this article on how we internalise metaphorical concepts to quote was proving troublesome, then David came along with this take on the article: Though Drake Bennet’s piece feels a little shallow — like he’s pointing to this really interesting thing and rather than explain it is merely puzzling at it beside you — he does…