Should attractive people use different techniques to be persuasive than unattractive people?
in 25K+ subscribers. No spam, ever. Enter your email here: It has been argued that the accessibility of persuasion motives elicits distrust in a communicator's underlying motives and leads to decreased persuasion success. However, this research highlights the fact that salient and positive communicator characteristics (here physical attractiveness) can temper consumers' attributions of selfish motives and lead to increased behavioral compliance when recipients are faced with direct persuasive appeals to get them to do something. This experiment demonstrates that…
1 min read
Are there more women than men in major cities because women want rich guys?
llow @bakadesuyo Throughout the industrialized world, young women outnumber young men in urban areas. This paper proposes that such a pattern may be linked to higher male incomes in urban areas. The argument is that urban areas offer skilled workers better labor markets. Assuming that there are more skilled males than females, this alone would predict a surplus of males. However, the presence of males with high incomes may attract not only skilled females but also unskilled females. Thus, a…
1 min read
Cologne, Germany – bleg/meetup?
y everyone, Heading to Cologne, Germany next week. Any suggestions on what to do? Schedule's tight as always but people have been emailing about meetups so let's see if we can make something happen. Feel free to email me. -Eric
1 min read
In which countries does divorce impact happiness the most?
ttle is known about if and how the effect of divorce on well-being varies across societal contexts. This article uses multilevel models for 38 developed countries to test three hypotheses about societal differences. Data are used from the European and World Values Studies. Results show that, in most countries, the divorced have a lower level of well-being than the married, but the magnitude of this difference varies significantly across countries, even when compositional factors are taken into account. The results…
2 minutes
How does feeling lucky affect people’s behavior?
llow @bakadesuyo Cognitive priming procedures were used to identify the unique effects that luck-related concepts have on consumer behavior. The effects of these concepts could theoretically influence behavior through the elicitation of positive affect or via temporary changes in participants' self representations of how lucky they feel. An initial experiment showed that priming Asian consumers with lucky numbers independently influenced both their perceptions of personal luck and the positive affect they reported experiencing. Subsequent experiments, however, showed that the effect…
1 min read
Is your left hand more motivated than your right hand?
llow @bakadesuyo For the new study, in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Pessiglione and his colleagues Liane Schmidt, Stefano Palminteri, and Gilles Lafargue wanted to know if they could dig even farther down and show that one side of the brain could be motivated at a time. The test started with having the subject focus on a cross in the middle of the computer screen. Then the motivational coin – one euro or one cent…
2 minutes
Is it a bad idea for a start-up to take venture capital money?
in 25K+ readers. No spam, ever. Enter your email here: It might do more harm than good: If entrepreneurs are liquidity constrained and not able to borrow to operate on an efficient scale, economic theory predicts that entrepreneurs with more personal wealth should do better than those with less wealth. We test this hypothesis using a novel data set covering a large panel of start-ups from Norway. Consistent with liquidity constraints, we find a positive relation between founder prior…
1 min read
Does time fly when you’re reading about sex?
llow @bakadesuyo Does time fly or stand still when one is reading highly arousing words? A temporal bisection task was used to test the effects of sexual taboo words on time perception. Forty participants judged the duration of sexual taboo, high-arousal negative, high-arousal positive, low-arousal negative, low-arousal positive, and category-related neutral words. The results support the hypothesis that sexual taboo stimuli receive more attention and reduce the perceived time that has passed (“time flies”)—the duration of high sexual taboo words…
1 min read
