Does a limit on how many you can buy make you buy more?
om Brian Wansink's excellent book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think: A while back, I teamed up with two professor friends of mine—Steve Hoch and Bob Kent—to see if anchoring influences how much food we buy in grocery stores. We believed that grocery shoppers who saw numerical signs such as “Limit 12 Per Person” would buy much more than those who saw signs such as “No Limit Per Person.” To nail down the psychology behind this, we repeated…
1 min read
Does gossip make us less selfish?
a Science Daily: In every condition, people acted selfishly to some degree -- most people kept more than an equal share for themselves. But when their actions were public and the chance for gossip was high, people became substantially less selfish. When people knew that their selfishness would be on display -- and very likely to be talked about -- they acted most generously to others. "When the threat of gossip exists, group members can expect that they will be…
1 min read
A Quick, Easy Trick For Getting People To Like You
socially optimistic. Expect that people will like you and they probably will. Via Psyblog: So this provides evidence that the acceptance prophecy holds true. In this experiment people who expected to be accepted did act more warmly towards a stranger and consequently they were perceived as more likeable. And: Social optimists, of course, are in the happy position of expecting to be accepted and finding that, generally speaking, they are. Social pessimists, though, face the dark side of what…
1 min read
Is there a way to make it easier to forgive someone?
rgiveness involves forgoing destructive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and, instead, engaging in constructive responses following an interpersonal offense. The current pilot study compared two expressive writing tasks with a control writing task to determine whether writing about an interpersonal offense promotes forgiveness of the offender. Participants who empathized with the offender and identified benefits of forgiveness experienced decreases in avoidance and increases in perspective-taking. Participants who wrote about their thoughts and feelings or about daily events did not experience such…
1 min read
How can you create an instant feeling of familiarity with someone?
e the word "we": The notion that language can shape social perception has a long history in psychology. The current work adds to this literature by investigating the relationship between ingroup-designating pronouns and perceptions of familiarity. In two experiments, participants were exposed to nonsense syllables that were primed with ingroup (e.g., we) and control (e.g., it) pronouns before perceptions of the syllables’ familiarity (Experiments 1 and 2) and positivity (Experiment 2) were assessed. Because previous work has shown that ingroup…
1 min read
The Color That Helps Hitchhikers Get Picked Up
search has shown that with some nonhuman primates, red is associated with greater sexual attractiveness of females. Five female confederates in their early 20s posed as hitchhikers wearing T-shirts of different colors (black, white, red, blue, green, or yellow). It was found that the women wearing red solicited a higher response in the number of male drivers who stopped to offer a ride. No color effect was found when considering the behavior of female drivers. Source: "Color and women hitchhikers'…
1 min read
The Simple Thing Will Help You Communicate Better, Learn More And Enhance Problem Solving
sturing when you talk. It can communicate important information when you're speaking: We explored how speakers and listeners use hand gestures as a source of perceptual-motor information during naturalistic communication. After solving the Tower of Hanoi task either with real objects or on a computer, speakers explained the task to listeners. Speakers’ hand gestures, but not their speech, reflected properties of the particular objects and the actions that they had previously used to solve the task. Speakers who solved the…
4 minutes
Does your last name affect how you shop?
..the later in the alphabet the first letter of one’s childhood surname is, the faster the person acquires items as an adult." In addition to deciding whether to buy an item, consumers can often decide when they buy an item. This article links the speed with which adults acquire items to the first letter of their childhood surname. We find that the later in the alphabet the first letter of one’s childhood surname is, the faster the person acquires items…
1 min read
