Are young children better economists than the average adult?
en playing the Ultimatum Game, you might think so: Via Secrets of the Moneylab: How Behavioral Economics Can Improve Your Business: Most of the older children, second graders and sixth graders alike, played the game just as adults do, all of them making fair offers and usually rejecting unfair offers. But the kindergartners played very differently: 60 percent of them proposed unfair offers and, when put in the role of Responder, only 20 percent of them rejected an unfair offer.…
1 min read
What are the best questions to ask on a first date?
n't be typical and boring. Make it fun. Via Richard Wiseman's excellent book 59 Seconds: Change Your Life in Under a Minute: A few years ago I teamed up with fellow psychologists James Houran and Caroline Watt to examine the best chat-up lines when speed dating.13 We assembled fifty single men and fifty single women, randomly paired them, and asked the pairs to spend three minutes chatting. We then told everyone to make quick notes about the lines they had used…
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Is there any real need for swear words?
bsp; If you're trying to emotionally affect the listener and make them remember what you say, yes. Swear words don't have magic powers but our brains do react to them differently and the effects can be measured: The unique emotional power of taboo language reflects properties that affect cognitive processes like memory and attention. Cursing is unlike other forms of speech; it is more physically arousing, as evidenced through physiological responses such as skin conductance or neural activity such as…
1 min read
Does dancing make you more creative?
gnitive scientists describe creativity as fluid thought. Drawing from findings on gesture and embodied cognition, we hypothesized that the physical experience of fluidity, relative to nonfluidity, would lead to more fluid, creative thought. Across 3 experiments, fluid arm movement led to enhanced creativity in 3 domains: creative generation, cognitive flexibility, and remote associations. Alternative mechanisms such as enhanced mood and motivation were also examined. These results suggest that creativity can be influenced by certain types of physical movement. Source: "Fluid…
1 min read
BUT WAIT… THERE’S MORE! Do infomercial sales techniques really make you more likely to buy?
s, they do: Seven experiments with 426 adolescents, undergraduates, and adults were conducted to examine the effectiveness of a compliance procedure known as the that's-not-all technique. The procedure involves offering a product at a high price, not allowing the customer to respond for a few seconds, then offering a better deal by either adding another product or lowering the price. Exps I–II demonstrated the effectiveness of this procedure over a control group that was given the better deal initially. Exps…
1 min read
Do economists lie more?
s. And it seems the effect is causal: studying business and economics makes you more likely to lie: Recent experimental evidence suggests that some people dislike telling lies, and tell the truth even at a cost. We use experiments as well to study the socio-demographic covariates of such lie aversion, and find gender and religiosity to be without predictive value. However, subjects’ major is predictive: Business and Economics (B&E) subjects lie significantly more frequently than other majors. This is true…
1 min read
What’s the connection between sexual orientation and education?
mpleting college doubled the likelihood that a man identified as gay or bisexual and was associated with a 900% increase in the chance of women identifying as lesbian or bisexual. A college education is associated with more liberal sexual attitudes and behavior, but this effect is greater for women than for men. Even more striking is the association between college education and sexual orientation shown in a recent national survey (Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, & Michaels, 1994). Completing college doubled the…
1 min read
Who survives a catastrophic emergency?
the end, it's all about preparation. Via David McRaney's You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself: According to Johnson and Leach, the sort of people who survive are the sort of people who prepare for the worst and practice ahead of time. They’ve done the research, or built the shelter, or run the drills. They look for the exits and…
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