Category: psychology
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #31 — The Desire For Control And Choice Is Built In
I’ve just started reading Sheena Iyengar’s new book, The Art of Choosing. I’ve been a fan of Dr. Iyengar’s work for a while. She’s the author of the famous “jam study”, that I talked about in a previous blog. (I’ll do a book review of the new book in a future post). Early in the…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #30 — Our "strong tie" group size is 150 people
Evolutionary anthropologists study social groups in animals. One question they have been trying to answer, is whether there is a limit on how many individuals different species have in their social group. Robin Dunbar studied the relationship between brain (neo-cortex) size and the number of stable relationships that a species had in their social groups.…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #29 – Brand Names Talk To Our "Old" Brains
You are planning on buying a new TV. Will you buy a brand you recognize? Or will you go for the unfamiliar “no name” brand that is less expensive? What if you are buying luggage? Talking to the “old brain” — In my book, Neuro Web Design: What makes them click? I write about the…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #26 — Culture shapes our brains
My entire career I’ve been worried about the fact that most psychology research is conducted on 18-24 year old college students. What if the way 18-24 year old college students react, think, and behave is not the same as everyone else? We are drawing conclusions about PEOPLE in general, but only collecting data from a…
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Who is The Most Romantic?: The Brain Science of Valentine's Day
It’s almost Valentine’s Day and you go online to look for a gift to buy that special someone in your life. What will you buy? I posed that question to both men and women in a small research study I conducted recently. And the answers I got surprised me. When research answers a different question…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #25 — Trust Your Gut or Be Logical? It Depends On Your Mood
In a previous post on how mood affects your reaction to brands you know (see You Are Most Affected By Brands And Logos When You Are Sad And Scared), I talked about the research from Marieke de Vries of Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands. De Vries also did research on two types of decision…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #24 — You Are Most Affected By Brands and Logos When You Are Sad Or Scared
Here’s Scenario 1: You get together with your friends to watch your home team play a game on TV. They win! After an afternoon of fun and friendship you stop at a grocery store on your way home. You are in a good mood. Are you more or less likely to buy the usual cereal…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #22 — Peripheral Vison — Keeping You Alive or Channel Surfing?
You have probably heard the term “peripheral vision”, but did you know that you use your peripheral vision to get the gist of the scene around you? Two kinds of vision — Basically, you have two types of vision: Central and Peripheral. Central vision is the vision you have when you look at something directly…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #21 — You Overestimate Your Reactions to Future Events
Here’s is a thought experiment — On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest, rate how happy you are right now. Write that number down. Now, I want you to imagine that today you win the lottery. You now have more money than you ever thought…
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Quick Review of Jonah Lehrer's Book How We Decide
Here is a quick video review of one of my favorite psychology books ever written. First the video review and then below I have a text summary of the review. Jonah Lehrer’s book How We Decide is a best seller. It’s a relatively short book, but it is packed full of all the latest science…
