Letters Remain

Category: psychology

  • Scarcity Marketing

    Neuromarketing has recently been looking at The Scarcity Effect: WORCHEL, LEE, AND ADEWOLE (1975) asked people to rate chocolate chip cookies. They put 10 cookies in one jar and two of the same cookies in another jar. The cookies from the two-cookie jar received higher ratings—even though the cookies were exactly the same! Not only…

  • Unconscious Plagiarism

    Cryptomnesia, according to Wikipedia, is “a memory bias whereby a person falsely recalls generating a thought, an idea, a song, or a joke, when the thought was actually generated by someone else”. Newsweek has an article discussing this phenomenon; including what appear to be genuine cases of cryptomnesia and the novel tests being conducted by…

  • 18 Factors of Risk Perception

    In Dan Gardner’s excellent Risk, he lists psychologist Paul Slovic‘s list of 18 factors that influence how we judge the severity of risk: Catastrophic Potential If fatalities would occur in large numbers in a single event — instead of in small numbers dispersed over time — our perception of risk rises. Familiarity Unfamiliar or novel risks…

  • New Literacy Strategies

    Seth Roberts recently reflected on the New York Times article The Future of Reading | A New Assignment: Pick Books You Like with his own piece entitled Student Power.  Seth delivers his own constructive criticism regarding the American higher education system (emphasis his): 1.  Students in a class are treated all alike. They’re not. All…

  • The Inefficiencies of Multitasking

    Those who regularly multitask are the worst at multitasking: In [a test] designed to measure how well [students] could filter out extraneous stimuli from the environment, the subjects had to look for changes in red rectangles while ignoring blue rectangles displayed on a computer monitor. Infrequent multitaskers scored well on the test, but habitual multitaskers…

  • The Neuroscience of Driving

    Elderly drivers are the most dangerous on the road, we are often led to believe thanks to the news highlighting accidents involving the aged. This is not necessarily the case, research is showing, but it’s partly true due to the decline of many cognitive functions. In a comprehensive article looking at the neuroscience of driving,…

  • A Not-So-Good Cry

    Crying has long been espoused as being a cathartic response to traumatic or sad events and/or thoughts. In fact, over two-thirds of mental health practitioners actively promote crying as a therapy tool. That fact comes courtesy of Scientific American discussing the lack of empirical evidence for crying as a coping or cathartic response. One group…

  • Marriage, Children, and Surnames

    In most countries around the world it is convention that the wife take the husband’s surname at marriage. It is equally conventional for a child to then also take this same name. Evolutionary psychology is the reason behind this phenomenon, as discussed briefly in the book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters. One of the…

  • The Macbeth Effect and Moral Colours

    The Macbeth effect is the tendency for people who have acted or thought in an immoral or unethical manner to want to clean themselves physically as a kind of surrogate for actual moral cleansing. Researchers looking at this effect wondered about other interesting characteristics of moral psychology which led them to devising a test for…

  • Information Gaps and Knowledge Rewards

    Starting with two great examples of marketing through curiosity (the Hot Wheels mystery car and California Pizza Kitchen’s Don’t Open It thank you card), Stephen Anderson looks at how you can use ‘information gaps’ to drive curiosity and then interaction with your customers. Information can be presented in a manner that is straightforward or curious.…