Letters Remain

Tag: psychology

  • The Optimal Level of Trust

    How much we trust people influences much more than just our interpersonal relationships and can even cost us a considerable amount of financial harm. The study concluding this (pdf) suggests that too much or too little trust has a financial cost equivalent to that of not attending university and shows that if we trust too much we assume too…

  • We Project Our Beliefs Onto God

    Those with a belief in God subconsciously bestow him with their own opinions in order to “validate and justify” them. This is a theory that has recently been strengthened by two surprisingly simple yet effective experiments conducted to find what the theist think about the beliefs of God, other people and themselves when it comes to…

  • Penny/Dollar Auction Psychology (The Workings of Swoopo)

    I first heard of the bidding fee scheme/online auction site Swoopo in a Coding Horror post that takes a look at the company’s business plan, calling it “pure, distilled evil”. It’s also a pretty simple (or, as the post said, “brilliantly evil”) plan: It’s almost an exploit of human nature itself. Once you’ve bid on…

  • Optimum Starting Prices for Negotiations and Auctions (and Why)

    A high initial offer in negotiations is more likely to lead to a high final price, yet in auctions a low start price is more likely to lead to a high final price. These are the findings of a recent study that attempted to find the optimal starting prices for negotiations and auctions. In negotiations…

  • Self-Awareness and the Importance of Feedback

    It comes as no surprise to hear that we are poor at perceiving how others view us and are poor at recognising the true personality traits of those we observe, but it’s the extent to which this is true and methods we can use to overcome these ‘personality blind spots’ that I find interesting. When…

  • Cultural Differences in Career Change Perceptions

    We all have career transitions throughout our lives—some by choice, some not. By interviewing workers from Austria, Serbia, Spain, China and the U.S., researchers have determined some cultural differences in how people perceive career transitions, and why they occur. Workers in the United States didn’t ever attribute a career transition to an external cause, such as…

  • Bertram Forer Experiments: Your Personalised Generic Profile

    Here is the ‘personalised’ personality profile as used in a 1948 experiment by Bertram Forer: You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. While you have…

  • Applying Knowledge and Not Understanding Ourselves

    One of my favourite reads–the British Psychological Society’s (BPS) Research Digest–has recently published its 150th issue. To observe this occasion, Digest has asked what twenty-three psychologists still don’t understand about themselves. I’ve mentioned a number of the featured psychologists here before,  including Robert Cialdini, Alison Gopnik and Richard Wiseman. As Vaughan notes, many of those contributing to…

  • Seven Psychological Principles Con Artists Exploit

    Inherent human vulnerabilities need to be taken into account when designing security systems/processes, suggests a study that looks at a dozen confidence tricks from the UK TV show The Real Hustle to determine recurring behavioural patterns con artists use to exploit victims. The study was a collaboration between Frank Stajano of the University of Cambridge…

  • (Preventing) Manipulation Through Irrationality

    Through the theories discussed in Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational (and largely based on the excerpts in Chris Yeh’s outline of the book), two articles have emerged on different sides of one topic: our irrational decision-making in terms of products and purchases. One on how to take advantage of our irrationality when marketing products, and another…