This Is Why You Like Brand Name Clothes
awing from costly signaling theory, we predicted that luxury consumption enhances status and produces benefits in social interactions. Across seven experiments, displays of luxury — manipulated through brand labels on clothes — elicited different kinds of preferential treatment, which even resulted in financial benefits to people who engaged in conspicuous consumption. Furthermore, we tested preconditions in which the beneficial consequences of conspicuous consumption may arise and determined the proximate mechanisms underlying them. The present data suggest that luxury consumption can…
1 min read
Here’s How Your Self-Esteem Affects Your Salary
cent research in economics suggests a positive association between self-esteem and earnings. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), which administered the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale during its 1980 and 1987 interviews, I provide further evidence for the existence of a self-esteem premium by exploiting variation in these measures between the two years. I show that self-esteem in 1980 has a sizeable impact on wages 8 years later, controlling for a wide set of individual characteristics and addressing problems of…
1 min read
What can we tell about someone’s personality from their handshake?
examined whether handshakes improved the accuracy with which participants judged a set of targets. Handshakes are interpersonally coordinated behaviors that require motivation and practice to perform well. Therefore conscientiousness may predict how well handshakes are executed. If so, a person's conscientiousness may be more accurately perceived at zero-acquaintance through a handshake. Individual female and male participants rated the personality of five, same-gender targets after each had introduced herself or himself. Half of the targets offered and shook hands with…
1 min read
When faced with moral dilemmas, do we do what is ethically right or what is mentally easy?
e literature on how people solve moral dilemmas often focuses on situations in which individuals have to make a decision where different moral rules are in conflict. In some of these situations, such as in footbridge dilemmas, people have to choose between sacrificing a few people in order to save many. The present research focuses on how people decide what to do in dilemmas involving conflicting moral rules. We propose that the rule that is cognitively most accessible during the…
1 min read
Houseplants make your mind sharper
is research studied possible benefits of indoor plants on attention capacity in a controlled laboratory experiment. Participants were 34 students randomly assigned to one of two conditions: an office setting with four indoor plants, both flowering and foliage, or the same setting without plants. Attention capacity was assessed three times, i.e. immediately after entering the laboratory, after performing a demanding cognitive task, and after a five-minute break. Attention capacity was measured using a reading span test, a dual processing task…
1 min read
Does being in a good mood make your memory worse?
me evidence suggests that positive mood influences cognitive control. The current research investigated whether positive mood has differential effects on two aspects of cognitive control, working memory and prepotent response inhibition. In Study 1, following either a positive or neutral mood induction, participants completed the Running Memory Span (RMS), a measure primarily of working memory storage capacity, and the Stroop task, a measure of prepotent response inhibition. Results were that the positive mood group performed worse on the RMS task…
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Do “beer goggles” really make people seem more attractive?
e popular notion that alcohol intoxication enhances perceptions of the physical attractiveness of the opposite sex has been inconsistently supported. The current study tested intoxicated and non-intoxicated persons of both genders in naturalistic settings after measuring their blood alcohol concentration (BAC) by a breath test. A sample of 80 heterosexual university student social drinkers was recruited at a campus pub and campus parties over a 3-month period to take a survey rating the attractiveness of unfamiliar faces of the opposite…
1 min read
What makes a sporting event great?
n satisfaction with individual sports games is likely to be an important indicator of future sales of tickets, television and radio advertising, and team merchandise sales. For the 2009-2010 National Football League (NFL) season, NFL.com, the official website of the NFL, had fans enter a ‘‘fan rating’’ for each game of the season. This rating was on a scale of 0—100 with 100 being the most memorable. Using these figures, the authors test the economic hypotheses of the importance of…
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