Should every store have a beautiful female employee?
Ceteris paribus, having her there should make the store better at selling expensive stuff to guys: Exposure to mating cues activates the goal to signal one's mate value to members…
1 min read
Where should you sit during a meeting to be most influential?
Sit in the middle: This paper examines centrality of physical position as a cue that leads to systematic biases in people’s decisions to retain or eliminate a participant from a…
2 minutes
Here’s how you get people to donate money:
The authors find that appeals for charity that evoke personal nostalgia will have an effect on the charitable-donation intentions of consumers. In study 1 with 103 respondents, nostalgic charity appeals…
1 min read
Do blondes raise more funds?
This study uses a door-to-door fund-raising field experiment to explore the returns to physical appearance on fund-raising success. Interestingly, blonde females earn more on average than brunette counterparts. However, the…
1 min read
Is customer satisfaction higher when we buy from attractive salespeople?
This study assesses if the service worker's physical attractiveness has an impact on customer satisfaction in the moment of truth. An experimental approach, involving two different service settings (visiting a…
1 min read
Another simple trick for persuading people:
Remember their name: Three experiments demonstrate that remembering someone's name facilitates their compliance with a purchase request made by the rememberer. Experiment 1 shows that name remembrance increases request compliance,…
1 min read
A quick and simple way to influence others:
This study reports the results of three field experiments which demonstrate that asking someone how they feel, having them verbally respond, and then acknowledging that response, facilitates compliance with a…
1 min read
How to easily appear more powerful:
Do status expectations affect how we interpret interruption in conversation? Two experiments examined how interrupters and their targets are perceived in same- and mixed-gender dyads. In Experiment 1, participants listened…
1 min read
