How to quickly and easily feel more powerful and increase self-esteem:
line with recent theories of embodied cognition, the authors propose that the self-concept may be embodied in sensory-motor representations. To test this notion, two studies investigated the effects of bodily feedback from a gesture associated with power (making a fist) on the self-concept. As expected, making a fist led male participants to perceive themselves as more assertive and esteemed (Study 1) and to display stronger associations between the self-concept and power (Study 2), while these effects were absent among…
1 min read
Can you predict violence in an area by looking at alcohol sales?
CKGROUND: Alcohol is a contributing cause of unintentional injuries, such as motor vehicle crashes. Prior research on the association between alcohol use and violent injury was limited to survey-based data, and the inclusion of cases from a single trauma centre, without adequate controls. Beyond these limitations was the inability of prior researchers to comprehensively capture most alcohol sales. In Ontario, most alcohol is sold through retail outlets run by the provincial government, and hospitals are financed under a provincial health…
2 minutes
Do blondes raise more funds?
is study uses a door-to-door fund-raising field experiment to explore the returns to physical appearance on fund-raising success. Interestingly, blonde females earn more on average than brunette counterparts. However, the returns to physical appearance depend critically on the race of a potential donor. Source: "Fund-raising success and a solicitor's beauty capital: Do blondes raise more funds?" from Economics Letters. Join over 185,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here. Related posts: How To Stop Being Lazy And Get More Done…
1 min read
Who makes a better eyewitness: men or women?
e research focused on sex differences in the accuracy and quantity of memory recall for specific details of an event. The respondent sample included 280 participants (57.5% females and 42.5% males) with an average age of 19 years. The participants were shown a two-minute recording of a violent robbery, supposedly captured by a surveillance camera, and told their help was needed in verifying hypotheses for the criminal investigation. The results have shown that, overall, females are more reliable eyewitnesses than males.…
1 min read
Are attractive people more comfortable with inequality?
ancestral human environments, muscularity and height (in males) and physical attractiveness (in both sexes) would theoretically have correlated positively with one’s social status, and thus with one’s ability to benefit from social inequality. We therefore hypothesized that individuals who are more characterized by these traits would be less egalitarian (i.e., less likely to believe that resources should be distributed equally in social groups). We used a white-light 3D body scanner to extract anthropometric measurements from 118 participants, and our…
1 min read
Is customer satisfaction higher when we buy from attractive salespeople?
is study assesses if the service worker's physical attractiveness has an impact on customer satisfaction in the moment of truth. An experimental approach, involving two different service settings (visiting a bookstore and traveling with an airline), was used to manipulate the level of the service worker's physical attractiveness. The results, for both experiments, show that a high level as opposed to a low level of physical attractiveness of the service worker produced a higher level of customer satisfaction. In addition,…
1 min read
How does the weather affect your shopping habits?
ere has been a great deal of anecdotal evidence to suggest that weather affects consumer decision making. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence to explain how the weather affects consumer spending and we detail the psychological mechanism that underlies this phenomenon. Specifically, we propose that the effect of weather – and, in particular, sunlight – on consumer spending is mediated by negative affect. That is, as exposure to sunlight increases, negative affect decreases and consumer spending tends to increase.…
1 min read
How to keep your mind strong as you age:
arn another language: In this study, the authors examined whether the number of languages a person speaks predicts performance on 2 cognitive-screening tests. Data were drawn from a representative sample of the oldest Israeli Jewish population (N = 814, M age = 83.0 years; SD = 5.4) that was interviewed first in 1989 and then twice more within the following 12 years. Cognitive state differed significantly among groups of self-reported bilingual, trilingual, and multilingual individuals at each of the 3…
2 minutes
