Can one product catch “cooties” from another?
a Science Daily: ...ordinary products that can evoke feelings of disgust in consumers include trash bags, cat litter, diapers, cigarettes, mayonnaise and shortening. "Because these products are so common, consumers are likely to experience feelings of disgust on routine shopping trips," Fitzsimons said. Fitzsimons and Morales sought to understand how "disgusting" products can affect consumers' opinions of other products in their grocery carts. They performed a series of experiments in which participants observed food products placed close to or touching…
2 minutes
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
Should everyone be required to learn a musical instrument?
m sure it sounds strange: a fascist rule that makes people learn to create music. I'm not a hippie, nor am I Amy Chua. I've got evidence: A simple cost-benefit framework is used to estimate substantive social benefits associated with a universal music training program in Venezuela (B/C ratio of 1.68). Those social benefits accrue from both reduced school drop-out and declining community victimization. This evidence of important social benefits adds to the abundant evidence of individual gains reported by the developmental psychology…
2 minutes
Here’s How You Can Increase Your Attention Span In Just A Few Days
ditate: Recent studies suggest that months to years of intensive and systematic meditation training can improve attention. However, the lengthy training required has made it difficult to use random assignment of participants to conditions to confirm these findings. This article shows that a group randomly assigned to 5 days of meditation practice with the integrative body–mind training method shows significantly better attention and control of stress than a similarly chosen control group given relaxation training. The training method comes from…
1 min read
What’s a quick and easy way to boost cognitive performance?
ink a Red Bull: There has been a dramatic rise in the consumption of glucose energy drinks (e.g., Amp, Monster, and Red Bull) in the past decade, particularly among high school and college students. However, little laboratory research has examined the acute objective and subjective effects of energy drinks. The purpose of this study was to investigate the acute effects of a glucose energy drink (Red Bull) on cognitive functioning. Participants (N = 80) were randomly assigned to one of five…
2 minutes
Does your mind play tricks on you when it comes to food?
ian Wansink researches eating behavior at Cornell. In an extended interview he covers a number of the ways context and bias surreptitiously affect our eating decisions: It was all the same $2 cabernet. And we found that if people thought it was from California, they rated the wine as better, they rated the food as better, they stayed at the restaurant about 10 minutes longer, and many of them made reservations to come back. When we served them the North Dakota…
3 minutes
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
Are the most romantic gifts expensive and worthless?
at are the characteristics of a good courtship gift? We address this question by modelling courtship as a sequential game. This is structured as follows: the male offers a gift to a female; after observing the gift, the female decides whether or not to accept it; she then chooses whether or not to mate with the male. In one version of the game, based on human courtship, the female is uncertain about whether the male intends to stay or desert…
2 minutes
