Can you tell if someone is good at their job just by watching them for 6 seconds?
e accuracy of strangers' consensual judgments of personality based on "thin slices" of targets' nonverbal behavior were examined in relation to an ecologically valid criterion variable. In the 1st study, consensual judgments of college teachers' molar nonverbal behavior based on very brief (under 30 sec) silent video clips significantly predicted global end-of-semester student evaluations of teachers. In the 2nd study, similar judgments predicted a principal's ratings of high school teachers. In the 3rd study, ratings of even thinner slices (6…
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How To Quickly Increase Confidence And Self-Esteem:
what mom told you and sit up straight: Building on the notion of embodied attitudes, we examined how body postures can influence self-evaluations by affecting thought confidence, a meta-cognitive process. Specifically, participants were asked to think about and write down their best or worse qualities while they were sitting down with their back erect and pushing their chest out (confident posture) or slouched forward with their back curved (doubtful posture). Then, participants completed a number of measures and reported…
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Is posture the key to power?
a Science Daily: According to new research from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, posture plays an important role in determining whether people act as though they are really in charge. The research finds that "posture expansiveness," or positioning oneself in a way that opens up the body and takes up space, activates a sense of power that produces behavioral changes in a person independent of their actual rank or hierarchical role in an organization. And: Although not…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Does humor mentally disarm us?
is article explores humor's impact on cognitive processing of political messages. Although recent research has pointed to effects of late-night comedy viewing on political attitudes and cognitions (Moy, Xenos, & Hess, 2003; Young, 2004, 2006), scant attention has been paid to the development of a theoretical model to account for these outcomes. This manuscript posits that humor suspends argument scrutiny of the premise of a given text through various cognitive mechanisms involving processing ability and motivation. Four different pathways accounting…
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Another way to improve your persuasion skills:
ke sure your body language matches your verbal strategy: How can we be more successful in persuading others and increase the odds of behavioral compliance? We argue that when a verbal influence strategy is embedded in a nonverbal style that fits its orientation, this boosts the strategy's effectiveness, whereas a misfit attenuates its impact. In field-experiment 1, agents tried to persuade participants in buying a candybox by using an approach-oriented strategy (Door-In-The-Face, DITF). An eager nonverbal style increased the impact…
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