Tag: psychology
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Consumer Profiling and Credit Card Data Mining
I’ve always loved reading and learning about data mining and its applications in various fields. Because of this, Charles Duhigg’s comprehensive look at the consumer profiling practices of credit card companies was my favourite read over the weekend. [Researchers] emphasized that the biggest profits didn’t come from people who always paid off their bills but rather…
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Psychology of Sales
Retailers aren’t in sales; they’re “in the perception business”, says Jonah Lehrer while discussing how we perceive goods of varying prices, especially discounted goods. Consumers typically suffer from a version of the placebo effect. Since we expect cheaper goods to be less effective, they generally are less effective, even if they are identical to more…
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Living Abroad Enhances Creativity
Could living abroad, (or more specifically, adapting to a foreign culture) enhance creativity? Researchers conducting a series of novel and interesting tests (including the candle box functional fixedness test) are starting to suggest so. Across these three studies, the association between foreign living and creativity held even after controlling for personality variables. In other words…
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Indefinite Memories
There are many substances in the brain thought to be responsible for maintaining long-term memories. Now, research is showing that by blocking one of these substances, the enzyme PKMζ (PMKzeta), we could ‘erase’ certain memories. The hope is that the opposite could work, too: The drug [ZIP] blocks the activity of a substance that the brain apparently…
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Emotional Cartography
By getting volunteers to walk around cities with biofeedback machines and GPS devices, Christian Nold has created a series of ’emotion maps’ of cities around the world, including San Francisco, (East) Paris and Greenwich, London. Participants are wired up with an innovative device which records the wearer’s […] emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location.…
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Predicting Our Future Reactions
Written by, among others, Daniel Gilbert (author of Stumbling on Happiness), an article in Science looks at how bad we are at judging our reactions to various future events (closed access article). In two experiments, participants more accurately predicted their affective reactions to a future event when they knew how a neighbor in their social…
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Psychology of Money
New Scientist provides a comprehensive summary of studies looking at the psychology of money. There are some fascinating findings here, including a study showing that “simply thinking about words associated with money seems to makes us more self-reliant and less inclined to help others [and] just handling cash can take the sting out of social…
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Crowd Behaviour
By studying the footage from an unidentified UK city’s CCTV cameras, psychologist Mark Levine is finding that a number of theories about crowd psychology previously taken as gospel may be incorrect, including the bystander effect (sometimes referred to as the Kitty Genovese effect) and the idea that crowds are inclined to be unruly and violent.…
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Setting Goals: A Good Idea?
Could setting goals be detrimental to achieving our targets? Yes, say a number of “management scholars” researching the issue, but only because they may lead to “bursts of intense effort in the short term” or be too narrow and poorly defined. The comprehensive article looking at their work has some interesting anecdotes and some good…