Category: psychology
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Psychic Numbing and Communicating on Risk and Tragedies
I’ve been preoccupied lately with the developing aftermath of the Tōhoku earthquake. Unlike other disasters on a similar or greater scale, I’m finding it easier to grasp the real human cost of the disaster in Japan as my brother lives in Kanagawa Prefecture and therefore there are less levels of abstraction between me and those directly…
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How We Read
What we know about how we learn to read and how our ability to read developed is fascinating, and in a review of a book that looks at exactly this — Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain — Jonah Lehrer offers us a wonderful teaser on exactly that: the hows of reading, from a neuroscience perspective. The introduction:…
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Child Development: Content, Not Medium, Matters (Why Sesame Street Beats Teletubbies)
Debates have raged over the last couple of years on the effects (detrimental or not) of television, computer games (violent or not) and the Internet on a child’s cognitive development. Taking excerpts from a review article that provides an excellent summary of the topic, Jonah Lehrer makes it clear: for a child’s cognitive development, the medium doesn’t matter but the content…
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Timed Exposure Can Be As Good As Practice
We know that deliberate practice is an important part of learning (and mastering) new skills–but what role, if any, does mere passive exposure play? Can relevant background stimulation help us to reduce the amount of effort and practice necessary to master a skill? To answer these questions Jonah Lehrer contacted the authors of a recent paper studying exactly…
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Body Language and Signalling Power
If we are prompted to recall a time in which we had power, we temporarily behave in the exact same way as those who have been given actual power (or ‘resource control’) and believe we currently have power, too. Interestingly, this method doesn’t signal power to others: observers are able to differentiate, despite the fact…
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An Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs
Parts of Abraham Maslow‘s famous 1940s hierarchy of needs are outdated and thought of as quaint by the scientific community, according to a team who have revised the hierarchy to take into consideration scientific findings from the last 60+ years. Maslow’s pyramid is used to represent the hierarchy of basic human motivations, from basic physical…
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Irrelevant Neuroscience Jargon Increases Persuasiveness
The addition of “irrelevant talk about neuroscience” makes a previously bad psychological explanation much more persuasive and acceptable. Luckily experts are not fooled by this addition of spurious neuroscience, but as an in-depth look at the study shows, almost all non-experts (including neuroscience students) are fooled and persuaded by the addition of logically irrelevant neuroscience…
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To Complete Goals, Concentrate on ‘The Big Picture’ (Not Subgoals)
To help control and manage progress on a difficult or long-term goal, we often split that goal into many individual subgoals. Once we begin to complete these subgoals, our continued motivation and progress toward the main, or superordinate, goal can be compromised. A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2006…
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For Motivation, Keep Goals Secret
Conventional wisdom for setting goals and following through on intentions is to make a public statement of intent in order to bring about some accountability. However the research on the theory is mixed. Derek Sivers summarises a number of studies that suggest we should keep our goals private if we want to remain motivated (especially…
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Evidence-Based Study Tips
A recent issue of The Psychologist included a “rough guide to studying psychology” by the editor of the excellent Research Digest blog, Christian Jarrett. In his guide, Jarrett provided nine evidence-based study tips: Adopt a growth mindset: [Students] who see intelligence as malleable, react to adversity by working harder and trying out new strategies. […] Research…