Author: Susan Weinschenk
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #88 — Your Brain Has A Special Response To People You Know
Your Uncle Arden invites you over to watch the World Cup and tells you to bring some friends. When you get there you see that there are several people you know (relatives and friends of relatives), and some you don’t know. It’s a lively bunch, and over food and the game on TV, lots of…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #87 — Speaker and Listener Brains Sync
When you listen to someone talking your brain starts working in sync with the speaker. Greg Stephens (2010) put participants in his research study in an fMRI machine and had them record or listen to recordings of other people talking. What he found is that as someone is listening to someone else talk, the brains…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #86 — How Much People Lie Depends On The Medium
There are many ways to communicate: paper and pen, emails, face to face, telephone, instant message. Some researchers have been interested in whether there are differences in how honest we are based on the medium. 92% of the graduate students lied — Charles Naquin from DePaul University and his colleagues have conducted research on how…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #85 — More People = Less Desire To Compete
Did you take standardized tests to get into college? Like the SAT and ACT? How many people were in the room when you took the test? Does it matter? Research by Stephen Garcia and Avishalom Tor shows that it may matter a lot. Less people = higher scores — Garcia and Tor first compared SAT…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #84 — Average Time To Form A Habit Is 66 Days
You turn on your computer each morning and do the same activities: First you check your email, then you check Facebook, and go to weather.com to check the weather. (Or whatever your particular pattern is). You do this every day. It’s a habit. Why are you motivated to do these same tasks every day? What…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #83 — People Will Use Shortcuts Only If They Are Easy
Do you use keyboard shortcuts when you are typing on the computer? Do you have some you use, but not others? For example, as I’ve been writing my new book on my computer, I use the keyboard shortcuts for cut and paste about 100 times a day. But I never use the keyboard shortcut to…
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100 Things You Should You Know About People: #82 — People Are Motivated By Progress And Mastery
Why do people donate their time and creative thought process to Wikipedia? Or the open source movement? When you stop and think about it you realize that there are many activities that people engage in, even over a long period of time, that require high expertise, and yet are of no monetary or even career…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #81 — Intrinsic Rewards Trump Extrinsic Rewards
Let’s say you are an art teacher, and you want to encourage your students to spend more time practicing their drawing. You create a “Good Drawing Certificate” to give to your students. If your goal is to have them draw more, and for them to stick with it, how should you give them the certificate?…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #80 — Behavior Can Be Shaped
If you studied psychology years ago, you may remember BF Skinner and his work during the 20th century on operant conditioning. Skinner studied whether behavior increased or decreased based on how often, and in what manner, you provide a “reinforcement” (reward). What the casinos know — Let’s say you put a rat in a cage…
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100 Things You Should Know About People #79 — People of Different Ages Have Different Error Strategies
Let’s say you study two people using a smartphone that has an advanced still and video camera. One is 22 years old, and the other is 47 years old. Neither of them has used this smartphone/camera before. You give them a set of tasks to do. Will there be a difference between them? Will they…
