Category: Miscellaneous Awesome

Live The Good Life

Is there a way to trick yourself into exercising more?

o studies demonstrated that leading individuals to mentally reframe the time required for an exercise program (e.g., 2 hr per week) in terms of the equivalent daily amount (e.g., 17 min per day) reduced the perceived time commitment and increased people's willingness to try the program. Study 2 also identified a cognitive mechanism that mediated the effect of temporal framing on exercise intentions. Consistent with findings in other domains (Gourville, 1998), reframing exercise duration in daily units led participants to retrieve comparison activities…


1 min read
Live The Good Life

The Most Wonderful Way To Reduce Your Chance Of Getting Prostate Cancer

ve lots of orgasms: Context  Sexual activity has been hypothesized to play a role in the development of prostate cancer, but epidemiological data are virtually limited to case-control studies, which may be prone to bias because recall among individuals with prostate cancer could be distorted as a consequence of prostate malignancy or ongoing therapy. Objective  To examine the association between ejaculation frequency, which includes sexual intercourse, nocturnal emission, and masturbation and risk of prostate cancer. Design, Setting, and Participants  Prospective study using follow-up…


2 minutes
Make Better Decisions

How to easily increase your willpower:

st a little bit of practice every day: Self-control performance may be improved by the regular practice of small acts of self-control. Ninety-two adults’ self-control capacity was assessed using the stop signal paradigm before they started practicing self-control and again at the end of 2 weeks. Participants who practiced self-control by cutting back on sweets or squeezing a handgrip exhibited significant improvement in stop signal performance relative to those who practiced tasks that did not require self-control. Participants who did not practice…


1 min read
Make Better Decisions

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
Be A Great Negotiator

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
Live The Good Life

A Quick And Easy Way To Make Yourself Tougher

and up straight. Via Eurekalert: ...poor posture not only makes a bad impression, but can actually make you physically weaker. According to a study by Scott Wiltermuth, assistant professor of management organization at the USC Marshall School of Business, and Vanessa K. Bohns, postdoctoral fellow at the J.L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, adopting dominant versus submissive postures actually decreases your sensitivity to pain. And: ...their research suggests that curling up into a ball may make…


1 min read
Live The Good Life

What makes us selfish: happiness or sadness?

oks like happy people are thinking about themselves. If you break the law, pray for a sad judge: Does temporary mood influence how fair or selfish we are in interpersonal situations? These three experiments predicted and found that when people have the power to allocate scarce resources between themselves and others in the dictator game, positive mood increased selfishness, and sad mood produced greater fairness. In a public setting (Experiment 1), happy persons kept more raffle tickets to themselves when…


1 min read
Miscellaneous Awesome

Which countries drink the most?

urce: The Economist via Flowing Data: "The world drank the equivalent of 6.1 litres of pure alcohol per person in 2005, according to a report from the World Health Organisation published on February 11th. The biggest boozers are mostly found in Europe and in the former Soviet states. Moldovans are the most bibulous, getting through 18.2 litres each, nearly 2 litres more than the Czechs in second place." Join over 190,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here. Related posts: How To…


1 min read

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