Tag: psychology
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Want Happiness? Buy Memories, Not Objects
In one of my very first posts, I wrote about an article that noted how “money will make you happier, up to a point. After that, it makes no difference. That point is the wonderfully quantitative ‘point of comfort‘. That is, once we have enough money to feed, clothe and house ourselves, extra money makes…
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More Psychology of Wine
Most psychology studies focusing on my good friend, wine, rely on applying the scientific method to the tasting of different wines, and this is done in one, relatively simple way: blind tasting. Finance blogger at Reuters, Felix Salmon, isn’t a fan of blind tasting, and after reading his eminently-quotable piece on the subject I tend to…
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The Deadweight Loss of Gift Vouchers
Of the $92 billion spent on gift vouchers in the U.S. last year, $6 billion was lost to fees and unused cards. In response to this, the U.S. Credit Card Act now bans fees on vouchers that have been dormant for less than 12 months and expiration dates of less than five years from the…
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Purchasing Green a Licence to Steal, Cheat
Just as a salad option on a menu increases the incidence of unhealthy orders, and national park visitors are less likely to support conservation charities later in life (as compared to hikers or backpackers), now buying green has been shown to increase bad behaviour. It’s not all bad, though: merely being exposed to green products…
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Rewards Corrupt Altruistic Tendencies
It has been known for decades that infants up to 14 months old will act on altruistic impulses without reward. Recent research, following on from a similar 1973 study, is starting to show that rewards could be responsible for the inhibition of this natural desire to help others—an innate altruism. 48 German toddlers averaging 20…
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Realising Metaphors
Deciding which part of this article on how we internalise metaphorical concepts to quote was proving troublesome, then David came along with this take on the article: Though Drake Bennet’s piece feels a little shallow — like he’s pointing to this really interesting thing and rather than explain it is merely puzzling at it beside you — he does…
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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…
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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…
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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…