Author: Susan Weinschenk
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #68 — Smells Evoke Emotions and Memories
Do you have a type of food that makes you feel a certain way? When you smell it you have an emotional reaction? For me it is kasha. Kasha is a form of buckwheat. You cook the buckwheat kernals in oil and then boil them (with salt, pepper, onion, and garlic). I’ve never met very…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #67 — Anecdotes Persuade More Than Data
Let’s say you have to make a presentation to several department heads at work about your latest conversations with your customers. You interviewed 25 customers and surveyed another 100, and have lots of important data to share. Your first thought might be to present a summary of the data in a numerical/statistical/data driven format, for…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #66 — Emotions Are Tied To Muscle Movement
Botox is a popular cosmetic procedure to reduce facial wrinkles. Botox is injected into various muscles, for instance in the face, and it paralyzes the muscles thereby causing the wrinkles to “relax”. It’s been known for a while that one of the side effects of Botox treatments are that people can’t fully express emotions (for…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #65 — Seven Emotions Are Universal
If you go to the other side of the world and interact with people there, can you recognize the emotions they are feeling by looking at their facial expressions? Paul Ekman says the answer is yes. He has been studying emotions for many years and in different geographies and cultures. He has identified seven emotions…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #64 — Groups Are Swayed By A Dominant Personality
In the last blog post I talked about how groups end up making faulty decisions. How many times have you been part of a group discussion and decision-making process and there is one person who is dominating the conversation and the decision. Just because decisions are made in a group setting doesn’t mean that the…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #63 — Group Decision-Making Is Faulty
If your work life is anything like mine, your day is filled with groups meeting by phone or in person and making decisions. Unfortunately research shows that group decision-making has some serious flaws. The Danger of Group-Think — Andreas Mojzisch and Stefan Schulz-Hardt (2010) presented people with information on prospective job candidates. People who received…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #62 — People Love To Categorize
If you are between the ages of 5 and 60 and grew up with a television in the US, you probably will know what I mean if I say, “One of these things is not like the other.” This was (is) a favorite snippet from the popular children’s show Sesame Street. If you don’t know…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #61 — People Learn Best By Example
Let’s say you are a marketing person and you are going to send out an email to your customers about a new product offering. And let’s assume that you use a web application like MailChimp to create and distribute your emails. Here are some directions from the MailChimp web site on how to build an…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #60 — Cognitive "Loads" Are The Most "Expensive"
You are paying bills at your online banking website. You have to think about what bills need to be paid when, look up your balance, decide how much to pay on your credit cards, and push the right buttons to get the payments processed. As you do this task, you are thinking and remembering (cognitive),…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #59 — Time Is Perceived as Relative
Has this ever happened to you? You are traveling 2 hours to visit friends. It’s two hours to get there and 2 hours to get back, but the trip there feels much longer. It’s about the mental processing — In his interesting book, The Time Paradox, Philip Zimbardo discusses how our experience of time is…
