Can you tell Nobel Peace Prize winners from America’s Most Wanted just by their faces?
ople's guesses were generally better than random chance. Nobel Prize winners could often be detected after seeing a picture for 100 milliseconds. Distinguishing who was one of America's Most Wanted took a little longer: Although trustworthiness judgments based on a stranger's face occur rapidly (Willis & Todorov, 2006), their accuracy is unknown. We examined the accuracy of trustworthiness judgments of the faces of 2 groups differing in trustworthiness (Nobel Peace Prize recipients/humanitarians vs. America's Most Wanted criminals). Participants viewed 34…
1 min read
What is it about travel that can make us more creative?
posure to other cultures: Many practices aimed at cultivating multicultural competence in educational and organizational settings (e.g., exchange programs, diversity education in college, diversity management at work) assume that multicultural experience fosters creativity. In line with this assumption, the research reported in this article is the first to empirically demonstrate that exposure to multiple cultures in and of itself can enhance creativity. Overall, the authors found that extensiveness of multicultural experiences was positively related to both creative performance (insight learning,…
1 min read
What’s a trick we can use to make sure we do the right thing?
niel Akst, author of We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess, has a piece in Slate where he explains how we can use "precommitment devices" to rein in desire: How can you use precommitment to keep yourself from giving in to unwanted desires? You're probably already doing so—for example, by asking your significant other, on the way to a restaurant, not to let you order dessert when you get there. Dan Ariely, that tireless student of…
2 minutes
How can you make a gathering more social and friendly?
rning up the temperature a few degrees physically and emotionally makes people warmer: "Holding warm feelings toward someone" and "giving someone the cold shoulder" indicate different levels of social proximity. In this article, we show effects of temperature that go beyond these metaphors people live by. In three experiments, warmer conditions, compared with colder conditions, induced (a) greater social proximity, (b) use of more concrete language, and (c) a more relational focus. Different temperature conditions were created by either handing…
1 min read
What’s a good trick for outsmarting liars?
king them unexpected questions dramatically raises the chance you'll be able to detect their lies: We hypothesised that the responses of pairs of liars would correspond less with each other than would responses of pairs of truth tellers, but only when the responses are given to unanticipated questions. Liars and truth tellers were interviewed individually about having had lunch together in a restaurant. The interviewer asked typical opening questions which we expected the liars to anticipate, followed by questions about…
1 min read
Being An Expert Doesn’t Make You Look Like An Expert. This Does.
ople choose confidence over actual expertise. From New Scientist: The research, by Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows that we prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to forgive a poor track record. Moore argues that in competitive situations, this can drive those offering advice to increasingly exaggerate how sure they are. And it spells bad news for scientists who try to be honest about gaps in their knowledge. In…
1 min read
How you can deal with angry people without losing your cool:
ll yourself they are having a bad day and that it's not about you. Via US News: Telling yourself that an angry person is just having a bad day and that it's not about you can help take the sting out of their ire, a new study suggests. This strategy of finding another way to regard an angry person is an approach commonly suggested in cognitive behavioral therapy. For example, you can tell yourself that the angry person has just…
1 min read
What’s an easy way to feel more powerful?
wer your voice: Voice pitch may not only influence the listeners but also the speakers themselves. Based on the theories of embodied cognition and previous research on power, we tested whether lowering their pitch leads people to feel more powerful and think more abstractly. In three experiments, participants received instructions to read a text out loud with either a lower or a higher voice than usual. Subsequently, feelings of power (Experiments 1 and 2) and abstract thinking (Experiment 3) were…
1 min read
