Here’s What Makes A Good Gift, According To Research
you're trying to apologize to someone, expensive gifts work: The present study examined a costly signaling model of human apology. The model assumes that an unintentional transgressor is more motivated to restore the relationship with the victim than an intentional transgressor who depreciates the relationship. The model predicts the existence of a separating equilibrium, in which only sincere apologizers will pay a certain cost to restore the relationship, while dishonest apologizers will not. Accordingly, we hypothesized that the receivers…
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How to easily increase your persistence in just one second:
oss your arms: Two experiments investigated the hypothesis that arm crossing serves as a proprioceptive cue for perseverance within achievement settings. Experiment 1 found that inducing participants to cross their arms led to greater persistence on an unsolvable anagram. Experiment 2 revealed that arm crossing led to better performance on solvable anagrams, and that this effect was mediated by greater persistence. No differences in comfort, instruction adherence, or mood were observed between the arms crossed and control conditions, and participants…
1 min read
Can personalities be judged by physical appearance alone?
a Eurekalert: Observers were able to accurately judge some aspects of a stranger's personality from looking at photographs, according to a study in the current issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (PSBP), the official monthly journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Self-esteem, ratings of extraversion and religiosity were correctly judged from physical appearance. Researchers asked participants to assess the personalities of strangers based first on a photograph posed to the researchers' specifications and then on a…
1 min read
Want to predict the result of a sporting event? Don’t even think about it:
..people with expertise in football are better at predicting match outcomes when they spend time not consciously thinking about their predictions." Via bps-research-digest.blogspot.com: Imagine you've just paid an expert good money for their verdict and they say to you: "Can you hang on a couple of minutes whilst I don't think about this". You'd be forgiven for thinking they've gone silly. They may have. But another possibility is that you've chosen a shrewd expert who's totally up-to-speed with the latest…
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The 4 Psychological Techniques That Increased Navy SEAL Passing Rates
er since reading The Warrior Elite: The Forging of SEAL Class 228 I've been interested in Navy SEAL training, particularly the psychological aspects. In his blog at Psychology Today, Bakari Akil covers a History channel documentary The Brain and what it revealed about the four techniques the Navy used to increase passing rates in the elite SEAL program: Goal Setting "With goal setting the recruits were taught to set goals in extremely short chunks. For instance, one former Navy Seal…
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This Is How Accurate Snap First Impressions Are
a eurekalert.org: First impressions do matter when it comes to communicating personality through appearance, according to new research by psychologists Laura Naumann of Sonoma State University and Sam Gosling of The University of Texas at Austin. Despite the crucial role of physical appearance in creating first impressions, until now little research has examined the accuracy of personality impressions based on appearance alone. These findings will be published in the December 2009 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, co-written with…
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Can you tell if a man is dangerous just by looking at his face?
a slate.com: Now some of the "new physiognomists" are resurrecting an old claim: that you can gauge a man's penchant for aggression by the cut of his jib. Last fall University of California-Santa Barbara psychologist Aaron Sell reported that college students could accurately estimate the upper body strength of unfamiliar men after viewing their faces alone. (The men's necks were obscured.) The students did equally well with fellow undergraduates and men from South American indigenous groups—all of whom had had…
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