Tag: psychology
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #89 — You Can Tell If A Smile Is Real Or Fake More Accurately With Video
Research on smiling started as far back as the mid-1800’s. A French doctor named Duchenne used electrical currents with research subjects. He would stimulate certain facial muscles and then take pictures of the expressions that people made. This was painful and many of the pictures look like the people are in pain. Real or…
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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: #69 — Your Brain Craves Surprises
In Neuro Web Design: What makes them click? I talk about the role of the “old” brain in scanning the environment looking for anything that is dangerous. This also means that the unconscious, old brain is looking for anything that is new or novel. Water vs. fruit juice — Research by Gregory Berns (2001) shows…
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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…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #47 — People Value A Product More Highly If It Is Physically In Front Of Them
You go online to re-order a box of your favorite pens. Will you value the product more if the product page has a picture of the pens versus just a text description? Would you think the pens are worth more if you were in the office store and the pen was right in front of…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #46: The more uncertain you are, the more you dig in and defend your ideas
I’m one of these staunch Apple converts. For as long as there were PCs, I used to be a Windows/PC person. (Realize that I go all the way back to when PCs first came out. I used to sell a marvelous “portable” PC that ran on CPM operating system and had TWO (count ’em) TWO…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #41 — Your Most Vivid Memories Are Wrong
If I ask you to remember where you were and what you were doing when you first heard about the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City, chances are very good that you will be able to tell me in great detail your memory of that day, and how you heard about the attacks.…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #39 — Your Mind Wanders 30% of the Time
You are at work reading a report that one of your colleagues has written and you realize that you’ve just read the same sentence about three times. Instead of thinking about what you were reading, your mind wandered. Mind wandering is similar to, but not the same thing as daydreaming. Psychologists use daydreaming to refer…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #38 — Even The Illusion Of Progress Is Motivating
You are given a frequent buyer card for your local coffeeshop. Each time you buy a cup of coffee you get a stamp on your card. When the card is filled you get a free cup of coffee. Here are two different scenarios: Card A: The card has 10 boxes for the stamps, and when…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #37 — People Assume It's You, Not The Situation
A man is walking down a busy city street on his way to an appointment, and he sees what looks like a college student drop a folder of papers. The papers scatter on the ground and the man glances over but keeps on walking. What do you think? Why didn’t the man stop to help…
