Letters Remain

Tag: psychology

  • How Poverty Affects the Brain

    I’ve already noted the correlation between a low IQ and poverty, but now The Economist has a summary of how poverty and stress affects the brain. The reduced capacity of the memories of the poor is almost certainly the result of stress affecting the way that childish brains develop. […] To measure the amount of stress…

  • Salads a Licence to Eat Unhealthily

    Think [generic fast food chain] have been pro-health by offering salads on their menu (calorific value of said salads aside)? Maybe not, says new research showing that if a salad is on a menu, many are more likely to choose the unhealthy option than if the healthy choice was absent. College students were given one of two…

  • Behavioural Economics and Financial Policies

    The news that Obama had some of the leading behaviourists advising his campaign comes as no surprise to me, however I likely underestimated how much they influenced both the campaign and the voters. Time takes a look at this “behavioural dream team” and discusses how the Obama administration is using behavioural economics to guide its…

  • The Future of Human Health

    In seven videos, each between 9 and 19 minutes in length, some of Stanford’s best researchers discuss cutting-edge cognitive science research. Learn about the frontiers of human health from seven of Stanford’s most innovative faculty members. Inspired by a format used at the TED Conference, each speaker delivers a highly engaging talk in just 10-20…

  • The Decay of Social Networks

    Unaccountability and anonymity on the Internet has brought about “the end of empathy”, says Jason Calacanis, as he discusses the ‘condition’ of Internet Asperger’s Syndrome: This disease affects people when their communication moves to digital, and the emotional cues of face-to-face interaction–including tone, facial expression and the so called “blush response”–are lost. […] In this syndrome,…

  • Separating Conversations: The Cocktail Party Effect

    The ‘cocktail party effect’ is the name given to our unusually adept ability of separating out conversations from one another. However it appears that we are unusually bad at retaining information from the discarded conversation(s): Cherry [1953] found his participants picked up surprisingly little information [from the ‘rejected’ conversations], often failing to notice blatant changes…

  • Incidental Similarities and Compliance

    We are more likely to comply with requests from strangers if we believe we share seemingly uncommon, incidental characteristics (e.g. first name, birthday, etc.), according to a 2004 research study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (pdf): Four studies examined the effect of an incidental similarity on compliance to a request. Undergraduates who…

  • Paternal Age and Child Development

    Advanced paternal age at conception has previously been shown to affect the resulting child’s health in many ways. Now, advanced paternal age has also been associated with impaired neurocognitive abilities (“the ability to think and reason, including concentration, memory, learning, understanding, speaking, and reading”). Advanced paternal age showed significant associations with poorer scores on all of…

  • Using Neighbourhood Comparisons to Promote Conservation

    By comparing customers’ usage to that of others in the neighbourhood, utility companies are starting to reduce their energy consumption. This, from an experiment conducted by Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: In a 2004 experiment, he and a colleague left different messages on doorknobs in a middle-class neighborhood north of San Diego. One type urged…

  • The Psychology of Wine

    On Vines and Minds is an excellent summary of the history and psychology of wine (pdf/html). Some topics of note: Music radically influences our purchasing habits: classical music increases the amount we’re willing to spend while characteristically French music sways us toward wine from that region (similarly for German music/wine). Colour affects the brain’s response…