Letters Remain

Tag: psychology

  • The Inefficiencies of Multitasking

    Those who regularly multitask are the worst at multitasking: In [a test] designed to measure how well [students] could filter out extraneous stimuli from the environment, the subjects had to look for changes in red rectangles while ignoring blue rectangles displayed on a computer monitor. Infrequent multitaskers scored well on the test, but habitual multitaskers…

  • The Neuroscience of Driving

    Elderly drivers are the most dangerous on the road, we are often led to believe thanks to the news highlighting accidents involving the aged. This is not necessarily the case, research is showing, but it’s partly true due to the decline of many cognitive functions. In a comprehensive article looking at the neuroscience of driving,…

  • A Not-So-Good Cry

    Crying has long been espoused as being a cathartic response to traumatic or sad events and/or thoughts. In fact, over two-thirds of mental health practitioners actively promote crying as a therapy tool. That fact comes courtesy of Scientific American discussing the lack of empirical evidence for crying as a coping or cathartic response. One group…

  • The Macbeth Effect and Moral Colours

    The Macbeth effect is the tendency for people who have acted or thought in an immoral or unethical manner to want to clean themselves physically as a kind of surrogate for actual moral cleansing. Researchers looking at this effect wondered about other interesting characteristics of moral psychology which led them to devising a test for…

  • Information Gaps and Knowledge Rewards

    Starting with two great examples of marketing through curiosity (the Hot Wheels mystery car and California Pizza Kitchen’s Don’t Open It thank you card), Stephen Anderson looks at how you can use ‘information gaps’ to drive curiosity and then interaction with your customers. Information can be presented in a manner that is straightforward or curious.…

  • All About Placebo

    Wired has published what must be one of the most comprehensive articles looking at the phenomenon of the placebo effect. From its humble beginnings in WWII with anesthetist Henry Beecher to the placebo’s transition from being treated as a purely psychological trait to a physiological one; there’s some great material here. Two comprehensive analyses of…

  • Art and the Brain

    Jonah Lehrer, a neuroscientist and writer I’ve mentioned many times, has a wonderful article in Psychology Today that looks at the field of neuroaesthetics and how the brain interprets art. All the adjectives we use to describe art-vague words like “beauty” and “elegance”-should, in theory, have neural correlates. According to these scientists, there is nothing…

  • Moral Psychology and Innate Lying/Honesty

    We have based our society on the assumption that deciding to lie or to tell the truth is within our conscious control. But […] this assumption may be flawed and […] honesty may instead be the result of controlling a desire to lie (a conscious process) or of not feeling the temptation to lie in…

  • Social Ignorance and Surrogacy

    A vibrant social life and close friendships are an important part of staying healthy, many recent studies have shown, but what is strange about this is why this is the case, considering that we’re surpisingly bad at judging the beliefs, opinions and values of our friends and partners. A growing body of experimental evidence suggests…

  • On-Hold Music and Time Perception

    With the correct choice of music and by giving the perception of progress customers on-hold in a telephone queue underestimate the time they have been kept waiting and will stay on the line longer before hanging up. Newsweek summarises a number of research studies that have looked at the psychology behind telephone queues and on-hold…