What is better at promoting happiness: deep conversations or small talk?
oks like deep conversations might help: ...Together, the present findings demonstrate that the happy life is social rather than solitary, and conversationally deep rather than superficial. What makes these findings especially compelling is the lack of method overlap between the wellbeing measures (self- and informant reports) and the interaction measures (direct observation). Also, the replication of findings across measures of well-being and across weekday and weekend behavior is encouraging. Naturally, our correlational findings are causally ambiguous. On the one hand, well-being may be causally antecedent to…
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Research Shows Trying To Look Smart Makes You Seem Stupid
st texts on writing style encourage authors to avoid overly-complex words. However, a majority of undergraduates admit to deliberately increasing the complexity of their vocabulary so as to give the impression of intelligence. This paper explores the extent to which this strategy is effective. Experiments 1–3 manipulate complexity of texts and find a negative relationship between complexity and judged intelligence. This relationship held regardless of the quality of the original essay, and irrespective of the participants' prior expectations of essay…
1 min read
4 Speaking Tips That Will Make You More Persuasive
a Eurekalert: "Interviewers who spoke moderately fast, at a rate of about 3.5 words per second, were much more successful at getting people to agree than either interviewers who talked very fast or very slowly," said Jose Benki, a research investigator at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). And: "But in fact we found only a marginal effect of variation in pitch by interviewers on success rates. It could be that variation in pitch could be helpful for some interviewers…
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Does putting your best self forward reveal your true self?
w does trying to make a positive impression on others impact the accuracy of impressions? In an experimental study, the impact of positive self-presentation on the accuracy of impressions was examined by randomly assigning targets to either “put their best face forward” or to a control condition with low self-presentation demands. First, self-presenters successfully elicited more positive impressions from others, being viewed as more normative and better liked than those less motivated to self-present. Importantly, self-presenters were also viewed with…
1 min read
Are there tricks to detecting deception?
a Science Daily: Geiselman and his colleagues have identified several indicators that a person is being deceptive. The more reliable red flags that indicate deceit, Geiselman said, include: When questioned, deceptive people generally want to say as little as possible. Geiselman initially thought they would tell an elaborate story, but the vast majority give only the bare-bones. Studies with college students, as well as prisoners, show this. Geiselman's investigative interviewing techniques are designed to get people to talk. Although deceptive people…
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How To Speak Persuasively
a Psyblog: Stephen Smith and David Shaffer, for example, tried to convince one group of student participants the legal age for drinking should be kept at 21 (Smith & Shaffer, 1991). Another group they tried to persuade the age should not be 21 (this was shortly after the legal age for drinking in the US was raised to 21). Fast, slow and intermediate speech rates were employed and this time a telling twist emerged. When the message was counter-attitudinal (you'll be…
1 min read
How do you turn enemies into friends?
ke them work to achieve a common goal. Via Wikipedia: Sherif is equally famous for the Robbers Cave Experiments. This series of experiments, begun in Connecticut and concluded in Oklahoma, took boys from intact middle-class families, who were carefully screened to be psychologically normal, delivered them to a summer camp setting (with researchers doubling as counselors) and created social groups that came into conflict with each other. These studies had three phases: (1) Group formation, in which the members of…
1 min read
Should you trust your gut to tell you who is a good person?
mans behave altruistically in one-shot interactions under total anonymity. In search of explanations for such behavior, it has been argued that at least some individuals have a general tendency to behave altruistically independent of profitability. In fact, a stable altruistic trait would be adaptive if it were recognizable. Then, altruists could choose each other in order to retain benefits through mutual cooperation. Previous research has shown that individuals can predict the degree of altruistic behavior of strangers by reading signs…
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