Category: psychology

Imagine that you’re sitting in a restaurant with a friend and he takes his smartphone out of his pocket, turns off the sound, and puts it off to the side, face down, on the table. He doesn’t touch it all through the meal you have together. He doesn’t look at it, text with it, or…

There’s a lot of research about how talking or texting on a cell phone is distracting and leads to lower performance on cognitive (thinking) tasks, but research by Bill Thornton (2014) shows that people don’t even have to be using the cell phone for it to have an effect. Just having the cell phone nearby…

Gregory Walton is a professor at Stanford who has studied the important effects of belonging on behavior. In one of his experiments, Walton (2012) found that when college students believed they shared a birthday with another student, they were more motivated to complete a task with that student and performed better on the task than…

Singing and theater are favorite hobbies of mine. At various points in my life I have sung in a choir, played in concert bands, played in a marching band, played and sang in jazz ensembles, and acted and sang in musical theater productions. It’s great fun on many levels, but one of things that makes…

In his book Contagious, Jonah Berger talks about New York Times online articles that get shared. Articles that had elicited strong emotion, whether positive or negative, were shared the most. Jennifer Aaker talks about emotion and passion as being components of what makes messages go viral in her book The Dragonfly Effect.In his research, Teixeira…

Teixeira’s research shows that joy and surprise are the emotions that keep people watching a video ad. Because people don’t like ads and want to skip them, ads that stimulate both joy and surprise early on are the ones that grab and hold attention best. Teixeira used software that analyzes facial expressions to research the…

Companies spend a lot of money on video marketing and video advertising, so it’s not surprising that there’s a significant body of research on these subjects. Thales Teixeira from Harvard Business School is one of the people conducting research on video ads.People are inundated with advertising: TV ads, billboards on the road, ads at the…

I recently went to an improv theater performance. I’d had a busy week, and it was fairly late at night. I was tired and not that excited to be there. In fact, I’d been thinking of not going at all. As the room began to fill up before the performance started, I noticed that almost…

In his book Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change, Timothy Wilson describes a large body of impressive research on how stories can cause longterm behavior change. Wilson has people rewrite a self-story. He calls this technique “story-editing.” Story-editing has been used to help people with post-traumatic stress disorder and teens at risk. The…

When people make a public commitment to a product, service, idea, or brand, their self-story about that product, service, idea, or brand becomes stronger. For example, let’s say that Maryanne creates custom bow ties for weddings and sells her bow ties on an arts marketplace online. She has a self-story that she is an arts…