Category: research
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Red Or Blue?: Research On Screen Color That May Surprise You
How does color affect our behavior when we are doing things online? Does it make a difference what the color background is? Does it depend on what we are reading or doing? Can you affect people’s decisions and behavior by changing the background color of a particular page or screen? Research by Ravi Mehta and…
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How To Get People To Do Stuff #6: Hot drinks, soft pillows & heavy objects
Do you think you’d make different decisions if you were holding something heavy in your hand than holding nothing? Or if you were holding a cup of hot coffee instead of a cold drink? Sounds unlikely, but it’s true: Here’s a video about “haptic sensations.” Or, if you prefer, you can read the summary text…
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How To Get People To Do Stuff: #4 — Does Money Make You Mean?
The mention of money, or seeing money changes how people behave and interact with each other. Watch the video and find out how: Kathleen Vohs, a Professor of Marketing at the University of Minnesota has researched the effect that money has on people. She doesn’t even use actual money. It turns out that just the…
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How To Get People To Do Stuff: #3 — A Hard-To-Read Font Will Activate Logical Thinking
I am taking a chance here, because I know that the subject of fonts is always controversial, and if I say that you should use fonts that are hard to read I’ll be blasted by many of my readers! But I have to share this fascinating research on how mental processing changes in some surprising…
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How To Get People To Do Stuff: #1 — Use Nouns Instead Of Verbs
This blog post is the first of a new series called “How To Get People To Do Stuff”. It features nuggets from the book I am writing by the same name due out in March of 2013. I’m also starting a new format of doing video blogs. So first is the video, and then below…
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Top 10 Things Every Presenter Needs To Know About People: #4 – People "read" your body positions instantly and unconsciously
Not too long ago I spoke at a conference with a line-up of great presenters. One man I had been looking forward to hearing got up to speak. He is well-known in his field, but I had never seen him speak. His talk was very good, but I couldn’t concentrate on it because throughout the…
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Experiences vs. Possessions: You Are What You've Done, Not What You Own
In the last few years psychology research (e.g. Carter & Gilovich, 2010) has proven what many of us have long suspected: that experiences (vacations, events with friends, etc) make people happier than buying and owning stuff (computers, clothes, etc). But more recent research by the same duo (Carter & Gilovich, 2012) shows that the experience…
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The Science of Happiness, Part 3: What commuting, graduate degrees and being single have in common
WARNING: The following discussion is about the correlation between happiness and many other factors. But it’s just correlation. The factors below are correlated with happiness, but that does not mean they CAUSE happiness. “Correlation does not imply causation”. Now that I’ve posted the warning, I can talk about some of the interesting correlations between happiness…
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7 Tips To Get A Team To Implement Your Recommendations: Tip #5
This is the 5th in a 7-part series on how to get a team to implement your recommendations. Tip #1 was: Hide Your Top 3 Recommendations. Tip #2 was Say “You”, “They”, “Customers”, “Users”, or “Research”. Don’t say “I”. Tip #3 was Give Them A Presentation, Don’t Send Them A Report. Tip #4 was Use The Word…
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7 Tips To Get A Team To Implement Your Recommendations: Tip #4
This is the 4th in a 7-part series on how to get a team to implement your recommendations. Tip #1 was: Hide Your Top 3 Recommendations. Tip #2 was Say “You”, “They”, “Customers”, “Users”, or “Research”. Don’t say “I”. Tip #3 was Give Them A Presentation, Don’t Send Them A Report. Now for Tip #4. The context…
