Is a touch on the arm all it takes to make you persuasive?
light touch on the arm dramatically increases compliance with all manner of requests, from asking for money to getting a woman's phone number. Via Richard Wiseman's excellent book 59 Seconds: Change Your Life in Under a Minute: A large number of studies has shown that touching someone the upper arm for just a second or two can have a surprisingly significant effect on how much help they then provide. In one experiment American researchers approached people in the street and…
1 min read
The Science Behind Why Dogs Might Just Be Man’s Best Friend
g owners experience a wide range of health benefits. Via Richard Wiseman's excellent book 59 Seconds: Change Your Life in Under a Minute: After carefully following the recovery rates of patients who had suffered a heart attack, Friedmann discovered that those who were dog owners, compared to those without a canine pal, were almost nine times more likely to be alive twelve months later. This remarkable result encouraged scientists to explore other possible benefits of canine companionship, resulting in studies showing…
2 minutes
Here’s What Facebook, Music, And Websites Say About Your Personality
a Sam Gosling's book Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You. Trust Facebook to tell you how extraverted someone is. Music is best for determining how open to new experiences someone is. Someone's website will tell you more about their personality than their living spaces or social behavior. Join over 135,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here. Related posts: Does a Facebook profile show you someone's real personality? Can you tell how smart someone is just by looking at them? What…
1 min read
Is postponement the key to resisting temptation?
lling yourself "Not now, but later" is far more powerful than "No, you can't have that." From Willpower: Resdiscovering the Greatest Human Strength: ...people who had told themselves Not now, but later were less troubled with visions of chocolate cake than the other two groups... And: Those in the postponement condition actually ate significantly less than those in the self-denial condition...The result suggests that telling yourself I can have this later operates in the mind a bit like having it…
2 minutes
What’s an easy way to increase self-control?
rk on improving your posture. From Willpower: Resdiscovering the Greatest Human Strength: Unexpectedly, the best results came from the group working on posture. That tiresome old advice—“Sit up straight!”—was more useful than anyone had imagined. By overriding their habit of slouching, the students strengthened their willpower and did better at tasks that had nothing to do with posture. The improvement was most pronounced among the students who had followed the advice most diligently (as measured by the daily logs the…
1 min read
How To Quickly And Easily Make Any Task Seem Easier
an back instead of leaning forward. Via Harvard Business Review: People who leaned back so that their eyes were an average of 38.8 inches from a computer screen found the task of pronouncing meaningless strings of letters easier than people who leaned forward to 12.5 inches, say Manoj Thomas of Cornell and Claire I. Tsai of the University of Toronto. That's because increasing the physical distance from a complex task also increases the psychological distance, which mitigates the sense of…
1 min read
Do jerks make more money?
s. Via Harvard Business Review: Using earnings data, the researchers found that men who rank high in agreeableness make substantially less than men who are less agreeable. Across studies, this difference was as high as $10,000 per year. Join over 271,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here. Related posts: How To Get People To Like You: 7 Ways From An FBI Behavior Expert New Neuroscience Reveals 4 Rituals That Will Make You Happy New Harvard Research Reveals A Fun…
1 min read
Can Moneyball statistics be used to beat Jeopardy?
R covers the fascinating story of Roger Craig, a PhD in computer science, who used data-mining and statistics to make hundreds of thousands of dollars on Jeopardy: Using data-mining and text-clustering techniques, Craig grouped questions by category to figure out which topics were statistically common — and which weren't. "Obviously it's impossible to know everything," Jones says. "So he was trying to decide: What things did he need to know? He prepared himself in a way that I think is…
2 minutes
