Letters Remain

Category: psychology

  • Predicting Our Behaviour

    Other people are far superior than us at predicting our behaviour as their predictions are based primarily on observation and are not tainted by our psychological narrative. After reading Timothy Wilson’sĀ Strangers to Ourselves, Nick Southgate–faculty member at London’s The School of Life–discusses this idea thatĀ our friends and acquaintances are better than us at predicting our…

  • Conformity and Its Influences

    There are ten “timeless influencers” of conformity, suggests the literature on the topic, and by understanding what these influences are–and how to use and counteract them–we are provided with some insight into our and others’ behaviour in many situations. To that end, PsyBlog helpfully provides a summary of the ten core factors that influence conformity.…

  • The Effectiveness of Social Support on Exercise Goals

    Informing our friends and family of our resolutions in hope that the social support will encourage us is an effective tactic–as long as these people ‘check-in’ on our progress at semi-regular intervals. That’s the conclusion from a study where three groups of people had their exercise goals tracked under one of three conditions: a regular…

  • Perceived Freedom Threats and Our Reactions

    PerceivedĀ 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 inĀ Harvard Business Review, noting the many unexpected ways we react to perceived freedom and autonomy threats. What’s amazing…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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 toĀ 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’,…

  • 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. SomeĀ intriguingĀ recent research suggests that the physical act of cleaning one’s hands helps…

  • Price Reductions and Cognitive Fluency

    If the mental calculation required to determine the discount given on a product is difficult then we often misjudge the magnitude of the reduction. This “ease-of-computation” effect for judging price reductions is obviously related to other recent studies looking at ‘cognitive fluency‘ and is another way to manipulate and be manipulated through product pricing. Consumers’…

  • The Cognitive Impact of Evaluative ‘Grade’ Letters

    Priming students with “evaluative letters” (i.e. letters used to grade papers, such as A and F) has a significant influence on their performance on cognitive tests. As you can imagine, primed with an A their performance on the cognitive tests improve, while those primed with an F displayed degraded performance. That’s what researchers found when…