Who is the most indecisive: people from America, China or Japan?
ree studies examined cultural variations in indecisiveness among Chinese, Japanese, and Americans. In Study 1, validated self-report, comprehensive measures of indecisiveness indicated large cultural differences, with Japanese participants exhibiting substantially more indecisiveness than Chinese or Americans. Study 2 provided evidence that such cultural variations correspond to variations in people’s positive versus negative values for decisive behaviors, suggesting that such values are plausibly an important means for motivating and sustaining cultural differences in indecisiveness. Study 3 provided direct behavioral instances of…
2 minutes
Should men who want to be more attractive to women read Byron?
llow @bakadesuyo Surveyed women consistently specify preferences for egalitarian dates and/or mates. A common perception is that many of these same women often select consorts who are inscrutable, assertive, and controlling, ultimately bemoaning their choices. Dominance has been experimentally shown to provide initial attraction advantages. The Byronic Hero, a venerable literary model, embraces protagonists who possess extraordinary masculine traits that include dominance but also multiple personal flaws. Byronic Heroes, easily identified and plentiful in popular fiction, appear strongly to resonate…
1 min read
What kind of people are prone to nostalgia?
rticipants listened to randomly selected excerpts of popular music and rated how nostalgic each song made them feel. Nostalgia was stronger to the extent that a song was autobiographically salient, arousing, familiar, and elicited a greater number of positive, negative, and mixed emotions. These effects were moderated by individual differences (nostalgia proneness, mood state, dimensions of the Affective Neurosciences Personality Scale, and factors of the Big Five Inventory). Nostalgia proneness predicted stronger nostalgic experiences, even after controlling for other individual…
1 min read
Do business documents need to be visually appealing?
observe the influence of aesthetic design on consumer behavior involving financial products—an area where financial decision-makers say they do not take aesthetics into account. In a series of three studies we find that the look of a document in hypothetical investment decisions impacts stock valuation and behavior in some but not all situations. Specifically, our results show that calling attention to the influence of design on behavior moderates the effect, including the paradoxical finding that the effect of design…
2 minutes
Does being sad lower grades in school?
is study examines the past year relationship between GPA and experiencing a combination of two primary depression symptoms, feeling sad and losing interest in usual activities for at least two consecutive weeks, among high school students during 2001–2009. The GPA loss associated with sadness, as defined above, falls from slightly less than a plus/minus mark to around 0.1 point when commonly co-occurring behaviors are held constant. Nonetheless, this effect is significantly larger than those of having considered or planned suicide…
2 minutes
Does where you vote affect who you vote for?
llow @bakadesuyo Voting is perceived as free and rational. Citizens make whatever choices they wish, shielded from external influences by the privacy of the voting booth. The current paper, however, suggests that a subtle source of influence—polling places themselves—can impact voting behavior. In two elections, people voting in churches were more likely to support a conservative candidate and a ban on same-sex marriage, but not the restriction of eminent domain. A field experiment found that people completing questionnaires in a…
1 min read
Can diabetes make you less forgiving?
llow @bakadesuyo Yes: Conflict pervades social life. To forgive others, people must control their vengeful impulses. The efficiency by which the body uses glucose, an indicator of self-control, might have direct implications for interpersonal forgiveness. In four studies (N = 693), we tested the hypothesis that a physiological marker of deficient glucose use (i.e., type 2 diabetic symptoms) relates to less forgiveness. Higher type 2 diabetic symptoms correlated negatively with a dispositional tendency to forgive others (Study 1) and correlated positively with…
1 min read
What percentage of sex shop patrons are women?
though the proportion of women who patronize sexually oriented book-video-novelty stores appears to be growing, little is known about the phenomenon generally or about male-female differences. In the only studies of “female patrons of porn,” both Hefley (2007) and Berkowitz (2006) report that half of the customers that they observed entering two stores were women. Compared to men, women were less likely to enter alone. To further investigate this phenomenon, we observed customers entering 33 stores for 162 hours over…
1 min read
