Letters Remain

Category: psychology

  • Separating Conversations: The Cocktail Party Effect

    The ‘cocktail party effect’ is the name given to our unusually adept ability of separating out conversations from one another. However it appears that we are unusually bad at retaining information from the discarded conversation(s): Cherry [1953] found his participants picked up surprisingly little information [from the ‘rejected’ conversations], often failing to notice blatant changes…

  • The Dunbar Number and the Limits of Social Networking

    The Economist looks at whether Dunbar’s number, the supposed limit of stable social relationships, holds true on social networking sites. That […] online social networks will increase the size of human social groups is an obvious hypothesis, given that they reduce a lot of the friction and cost involved in keeping in touch with other people. […]…

  • Leaving Infants in Cars

    A child is accidentally left in the back seat of a car and dies from hyperthermia: a parent’s worst nightmare, I imagine, and something many believe wouldn’t happen to them (itself a big part of the problem). In an article debating the legal ramifications of such an accident, The Washington Post presents not only a…

  • Subconscious Social Interactions

    Some recent research has shown that our conscious minds controls less of our interactions than previously thought: The researchers could predict how around 70% of the students would rate an instructor just by analysing the instructor’s body language in 30 seconds of soundless video. […] The researchers were able to devise an algorithm that could…

  • Incidental Similarities and Compliance

    We are more likely to comply with requests from strangers if we believe we share seemingly uncommon, incidental characteristics (e.g. first name, birthday, etc.), according to a 2004 research study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (pdf): Four studies examined the effect of an incidental similarity on compliance to a request. Undergraduates who…

  • Paternal Age and Child Development

    Advanced paternal age at conception has previously been shown to affect the resulting child’s health in many ways. Now, advanced paternal age has also been associated with impaired neurocognitive abilities (“the ability to think and reason, including concentration, memory, learning, understanding, speaking, and reading”). Advanced paternal age showed significant associations with poorer scores on all of…

  • Physiognomy and Looking Creditworthy

    Using data from the person-to-person lending company Propser.com, research is starting to show that—when it comes to analysing creditworthyness—the once discredited science of physiognomy may be valid. In other words, people may be able to tell if we are actually trustworthy just from looking at our facial features. Science proceeds by trial and error. The successes…

  • Risk Analysis Education

    Ron Lieber of The New York Times asks, Could the current financial crisis be breeding an entire generation of risk averse traders? Kevin Brosious, a financial planner in Allentown, Pa., polled the students in his financial management class at DeSales University on the percentage of their portfolios they would allocate to stocks right now. The…

  • Using Neighbourhood Comparisons to Promote Conservation

    By comparing customers’ usage to that of others in the neighbourhood, utility companies are starting to reduce their energy consumption. This, from an experiment conducted by Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: In a 2004 experiment, he and a colleague left different messages on doorknobs in a middle-class neighborhood north of San Diego. One type urged…

  • The Psychology of False Confessions and Punishment

    A recent instalment of Scientific American’s ’60-Second Psych’ discusses a series of articles on why innocent people confess to crimes they didn’t commit, and the problems this can pose. Scientists had 206 subjects witness a “staged” crime and then were asked to pick the perpetrator from a line up. They were later told that their…