Letters Remain

Tag: psychology

  • Psychology of Credit Card Minimum Instalments

    New research finds that the ‘recommended minimum instalment’ suggestions on credit card statements are more influential than previously thought: Mr. Stewart presented 413 people with mock credit-card bills of £435.76 (about $650) that were identical — except that only half mentioned a minimum payment of £5.42. Participants were asked how much they would pay. Among…

  • A Look at our Sense of Touch

    Primal, Acute and Easily Duped: Our Sense of Touch is a recent article from Pulitzer Prize-winning Natalie Angier (author of The Canon: The Beautiful Basics of Science) taking a rudimentary look at the sense of touch and some recent research in the field of haptics. Scientists have determined that the human finger is so sensitive…

  • The Contagion of Happiness

    In a 20-year study of almost 5,000 people it was found that happiness is more contagious than previously thought. While there are many determinants of happiness, whether an individual is happy also depends on whether others in the individual’s social network are happy. Happy people tend to be located in the centre of their local…

  • Menu Consultants (or: Tips to Hack Restaurants)

    A short piece in Time profiling Gregg Rapp: a “menu engineer” who optimises restaurant menus to maximise profits. The first step is the design. Rapp recommends that menus be laid out in neat columns with unfussy fonts. The way prices are listed is very important. “This is the No. 1 thing that most restaurants get…

  • Our Convenient Overconfidence

    Overcoming Bias looks at two research papers on overconfidence, concluding that we “are more overconfident on tasks we don’t actually expect to perform, and when we don’t expect to have to explain our evaluation to others”. On performance: Participants made predictions about performance on tasks that they did or did not expect to complete.  In…

  • Gladwell, Journo-gurus, and Anecdotes as Science

    You can guarantee that whenever Malcolm Gladwell brings out a book he’ll make headlines. And with his latest book having recently been released, here are a number of interesting and contrasting views. First (via Kottke, and in Gladwell’s own words), what to expect from Outliers: though the story of Sidney Weinberg, from high-school dropout to…

  • False Advertising (With Statistics) Works

    Recent advertising research shows how numerical specifications drastically influence our choices: even if they’re meaningless and contradict our personal experience. Bigger numbers, it seems, are what we want: no matter how abstract or inane. The first test involved megapixels. The authors took a single image, and used Photoshop to create a sharper version, and one…

  • Breaking Past the Uncanny Valley

    The company who produce the animation for Grand Theft Auto, Image Metrics, claim to have create photo-realistic animations that break through the ‘uncanny valley‘ barrier. The Times is a believer, giving us a sample video and stating that IM’s lifelike animation heralds a new era for computer games. “Ninety per cent of the work is…

  • Exercise and the Placebo Effect

    Can the placebo effect work with exercise and fitness? Two Harvard psychologists decided to find out, and the results were startling. 84 maids at seven carefully matched hotels [were quizzed on] how much exercise they got. Fully a third of the women said they got no exercise at all, while two-thirds said they did not…

  • Losing Your Sense of Balance

    After a hysterectomy, Cheryl contracted a post-operative infection and was given the antibiotic gentamicin; a known side effect of which is a loss of the sense of balance (equilibrioception). When it was overprescribed to her the inevitable happened. The Telegraph follows Cheryl’s story on losing her sense of balance and enlightens us on neuroplasticity in…