Does seeing altruism make you more altruistic?
elings of elevation, elicited by witnessing another person perform a good deed, have been hypothesized to motivate a desire to help others. However, despite growing interest in the determinants of prosocial behavior, there is only limited evidence that elevation leads to increases in altruistic behavior. In two experiments, we tested the relationship between elevation and helping behavior. Prior to measuring helping behavior, we measured elevation among participants in an elevation-inducing condition and control conditions in order to determine whether witnessing…
1 min read
Where should you sit during a meeting to be most influential?
t in the middle: This paper examines centrality of physical position as a cue that leads to systematic biases in people’s decisions to retain or eliminate a participant from a group. Termed the “centre- stage” effect, we argue that people use their belief that “important people sit in the middle” as a schematic cue that they substitute for individuating performance information for individuals who occupy central positions when the goal is to eliminate all but one of the group members.…
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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
Do the highest paid NBA players misbehave more?
compare and contrast theories of why NBA players misbehave on the court, then test them empirically. I find evidence that earnings are positively correlated with misbehavior and that both absolute and relative salary matter. For instance, a player who is highest paid on his team misbehaves roughly 7% more than one who is second-highest paid, even at the same salary level. This relative effect I interpret as due to lack of good substitutes for top players. I also find…
1 min read
This Is How Your Posture Affects How Powerful You Feel
ree experiments explored whether hierarchical role and body posture have independent or interactive effects on the main outcomes associated with power: action in behavior and abstraction in thought. Although past research has found that being in a powerful role and adopting an expansive body posture can each enhance a sense of power, two experiments showed that when individuals were placed in high- or low-power roles while adopting an expansive or constricted posture, only posture affected the implicit activation of power,…
1 min read
How to easily appear more powerful:
status expectations affect how we interpret interruption in conversation? Two experiments examined how interrupters and their targets are perceived in same- and mixed-gender dyads. In Experiment 1, participants listened to a brief audiotaped conversation in which one person interrupted the other five times. In Experiment 2, four confederates (two men and two women) systematically interrupted naïve participants while discussing an article. In general, interrupters gained in status and targets of interruption lost status. In addition, participants who were interrupted…
1 min read
How to be more charismatic during presentations:
e purpose of this research was to investigate the effects of imagery in a leader's speech on listeners' perceptions of the leader's charisma. A former US president's inaugural address was rewritten to create low and high imagery versions, and audio recordings of the two speeches were made. Participants were randomly assigned to high or low speech imagery conditions. After listening to the speech, they provided ratings on various summary leadership measures. The high imagery speech resulted in higher ratings of…
1 min read
Do collectivist cultures produce better sports teams?
s: Purpose. Research outside sport psychology indicates that collectivist cultures positively influence group achievements. Because of this results of sports teams from collectivist cultures should be better than those of their counterparts from individualist cultures. This hypothesis was examined in two studies. Basic procedures. (1) In study I, 15 coaches, using the IC Interpersonal Assessment Inventory (ICIAI), enumerated characteristics that a perfect team member should possess. (2) In study II, individual results (achieved between 2001 and 2008) of four top…
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