The secrets to a good apology
esults indicated that relationships recovered significantly when offending partners used behaviors labeled as explicit acknowledgment, nonverbal assurance, and compensation." Therapists and theologians claim that the process of forgiveness is essential to the restoration of damaged relationships, but this possibility has received limited empirical attention. Furthermore, the role of an offender's communicative behavior in the forgiveness process remains understudied. This project first analyzed an inductively derived list of communication behaviors to develop a taxonomy of forgiveness-seeking approaches used by 186 romantic…
1 min read
Is there a reason why some women like a guy with chest hair and other women don’t?
has commonly been considered that women’s preference with regard to male body hair changes over the years according to fashion and is influenced by the media. Experimental evidence, however, is currently lacking. We examined the effect of male torso hairiness on Finnish women’s attractiveness ratings by presenting pictures of male torsos before and after the removal of body hair. We found that the women’s preferences correlated strongly with the hairiness of their current partners, suggesting that body hair may…
2 minutes
Does letting your teenager drink at home make them more or less likely to binge drink?
e current study examined whether permitting young women to drink alcohol at home during senior year of high school reduces the risk of heavy drinking in college. Participants were 449 college-bound female high school seniors, recruited at the end of their senior year. Participants were classified into one of three permissibility categories according to their baseline reports of whether their parents allowed them to drink at home: (a) not permitted to drink at all; (b) allowed to drink with family…
1 min read
Is a cheeseburger an effective persuasion tool?
e purpose of this experiment was to follow up on previous findings of a gain in opinion change produced by eating-while-reading (Razran, 1940; Janis, Kaye, and Kirschner, 1965) by testing predictions from a “conditioning” theory and from an alternative explanation in terms of greater receptivity to any communication endorsed by E, the donor of the food. A factorial design was used to determine the extent to which the opinion changes induced by two persuasive communications were influenced by (1) E's giving…
2 minutes
How much of who you choose to date is determined by your preferences?
rriage data show a strong degree of positive assortative mating along a variety of attributes. But since marriage is an equilibrium outcome, it is unclear whether positive sorting is the result of preferences rather than opportunities. We assess the relative importance of preferences and opportunities in dating behaviour, using unique data from a large commercial speed dating agency. While the speed dating design gives us a direct observation of individual preferences, the random allocation of participants across events generates an…
2 minutes
How many of your Facebook friends actually influence your behavior?
e success of Internet social networking sites depends on the number and activity levels of their user members. Although users typically have numerous connections to other site members (i.e., “friends”), only a fraction of those so-called friends may actually influence a member's site usage. Because the influence of potentially hundreds of friends needs to be evaluated for each user, inferring precisely who is influential—and, therefore, of managerial interest for advertising targeting and retention efforts—is difficult. The authors develop an approach…
1 min read
What’s an easy way to strengthen your relationships?
are good news and enthusiastically respond when others share good news with you: Sharing good news with others is one way that people can savor those experiences while building personal and interpersonal resources. Although prior research has established the benefits of this process, called capitalization, there has been little research and no experiments to examine the underlying mechanisms. In this article, we report results from 4 experiments and 1 daily diary study conducted to examine 2 mechanisms relevant to capitalization:…
1 min read
An easy way for women to be more attractive to men and men to be more attractive to women:
rls, wear red: In many non-human primate species, a display of red by a female increases attraction behavior in male conspecifics. In two experiments, we investigate an analogous effect in humans, specifically, whether red on a woman's shirt increases attraction behavior in men. In Experiment 1, men who viewed an ostensible conversation partner in a red versus a green shirt chose to ask her more intimate questions. In Experiment 2, men who viewed an ostensible interaction partner in a red…
1 min read
