Psychology

The more you value Facebook as a social outlet, the more your Facebook friends probably just wish you’d shut up. A study on confidence, emotional expression, and Facebook curation found athat people likely to see Zuckerberg’s virtual community as a haven are also more likely to annoy their contacts.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/02/08/facebook_study_shows_insecure_users_posts_are_more_likely_to_annoy_their_friends_.html

Dating sites match people based on similarities in personality. However, there are three problems with this approach: 1) Research shows that couples with similar personalities are only 0.5% happier than couples with different personalities. 2) We don’t know what we want. What we say would make us happy changes upon presentation of different choices. 3) Choosing becomes more difficult when one is presented with too many choices.

http://www.economist.com/node/21547217?fsrc=nlw|hig|2-9-2012|editors_highlights

Can you tell if someone’s lying by their use of function words?

Yes. A person who’s lying tends to use “we” more or use sentences without a first-person pronoun at all. Instead of saying “I didn’t take your book,” a liar might say “That’s not the kind of thing that anyone with integrity would do.” People who are honest use exclusive words like “but” and “without” and negations such as “no,” “none,” and “never” much more frequently. We’ve analyzed transcripts of court testimony, and the differences in speech patterns are really clear.

http://hbr.org/2011/12/your-use-of-pronouns-reveals-your-personality/ar/1?cm_sp=most_widget-_-hbr_articles-_-Your%20Use%20of%20Pronouns%20Reveals%20Your%20Personality

There is nothing particularly magical about moving things with thoughts. Human beings perform the feat every time they move a limb, or breathe, by sending electrical impulses to appropriate muscles. If these electrical signals could be detected and interpreted, the argument goes, there is in principle no reason why they could not be used to steer objects other than the thinker’s own body. Indeed, over the past two decades brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) which use electrodes implanted in the skull have enabled paralysed patients to control computer cursors, robotic arms and wheelchairs.

http://www.economist.com/node/21527030?fsrc=nlw%7Cpub%7C1-18-2012%7Cpublishers

Humans, it turns out, are impressionable, emotional and irrational. We buy things we don’t need, often at arbitrary prices and for silly reasons. Studies show that when a store plays soothing music, shoppers will linger for longer and often spend more. If customers are in a good mood, they are more susceptible to persuasion. We believe price tends to indicate the value of things, not the other way around. And many people will squander valuable time to get something free.

http://www.economist.com/node/21541706?fsrc=nlw%7Cnewe%7C1-2-2012%7Cnew_on_the_economist

Facebook [is] impacting the lives of hundreds of young businesspeople… [B]ehind all the liking, commenting, sharing, and posting, there were strong hints of jealousy, anxiety, and, in one case, depression. Said one interviewee about a Facebook friend, “Although he’s my best friend, I kind-of despise his updates.” Said another “Now, Facebook IS my work day.” As I dug deeper, I discovered disturbing by-products of Facebook’s rapid ascension — three new, distressing ways in which the social media giant is fundamentally altering our daily sense of well-being in both our personal and work lives.

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/12/facebook_is_making_us_miserabl.html?cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-technology-_-technology122011&referral=00208&utm_source=newsletter_technology&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=technology122011

DURING the second world war a new term of abuse entered the English language. To call someone “a little Hitler” meant he was a menial functionary who employed what power he had in order to annoy and frustrate others for his own gratification. From nightclub bouncers to the squaddies at Abu Ghraib prison who tormented their prisoners for fun, little Hitlers plague the world. The phenomenon has not, though, hitherto been subject to scientific investigation.

Nathanael Fast of the University of Southern California has changed that. He observed that lots of psychological experiments have been done on the effects of status and lots on the effects of power. But few, if any, have been done on both combined. He and his colleagues Nir Halevy of Stanford University and Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University, in Chicago, set out to correct this. In particular they wanted to see if it is circumstances that create little Hitlers or, rather, whether people of that type simply gravitate into jobs which allow them to behave badly. Their results have just been published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

http://www.economist.com/node/21530945

[H]ormones drive investment decisions to a far greater extent than economists or bank executives realise. When traders are on a winning streak, their testosterone levels surge, sparking such euphoria that they underestimate risk. When they are acutely stressed, the adrenal cortex produces a flood of cortisol, a hormone that can make them overly fearful and risk-averse.

http://www.economist.com/node/21530111?fsrc=nlw|mgt|09-28-11|management_thinking

Marketers milk science for insights. Studies show that music can affect people’s behaviour: shoppers in American department stores who are exposed to piped tunes with a slow tempo spend 18% longer in the store and make 17% more purchases than those who shop in silence. Marketers routinely track shoppers as they make their way around supermarkets and listen in on their conversations at the counter. They also take willing subjects and observe their reactions as they gawp at products.

http://www.economist.com/node/21530076?fsrc=nlw|mgt|09-28-11|management_thinking

Truth-tellers, [psychologist James] Pennebaker explains, tend to use more words, bigger words, more complex sentences, more exclusive words (except, but, without, as in the sentence “I think this but not that”), and more I-words (I, me, my, etc.). Liars, apparently, trade in simple, straightforward statements lacking in specificity because—Pennebaker posits—it’s actually pretty difficult to make stuff up. They avoid self-reference because they don’t feel ownership of their expressed views.

http://www.slate.com/id/2301859/?wpisrc=newsletter_slatest

One of the most recent papers on the subject [of false confessions], published in Law and Human Behavior by Saul Kassin and Jennifer Perillo of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, used a group of 71 university students who were told they were taking part in a test of their reaction times. Participants were asked to press keys on a keyboard as they were read aloud by another person, who was secretly in cahoots with the experimenter. The volunteers were informed that the ALT key was faulty, and that if it was pressed the computer would crash and all the experimental data would be lost. The experimenter watched the proceedings from across the table.

In fact, the computer was set up to crash regardless, about a minute into the test. When this happened the experimenter asked each participant if he had pressed the illicit key, acted as if he was upset when it was “discovered” that the data had disappeared, and requested that the participant sign a confession. Only one person actually did hit the ALT key by mistake, but a quarter of the innocent participants were so disarmed by the shock of the accusation that they confessed to something they had not done.

http://www.economist.com/node/21525840?fsrc=nlw|hig|08-11-2011|editors_highlights

In his new book, A First Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness, [Dr. Nassir] Ghaemi lays out the argument that leaders with some mental illnesses, particularly mania or depression, are often better in times of crisis.

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“Creativity and resilience is higher in people with mania and realism and empathy is higher in people with depression compared to normal subjects,” he says. “The problem often with mentally healthy, average leaders is — even though they’re not weak in the sense of not having any of these qualities — they often don’t have enough to meet the very high demands of crises.”

Ghaemi explains that one of the reasons mentally healthy people might actually have a disadvantage when trying to navigate a crisis is that most of the time, the average person has what psychologists call a “mild positive illusion.”

“We think that we’re slightly more intelligent, slightly better looking, than we really are,” Ghaemi says. “We tend to overestimate our control over our environment. And that can be quite fine under normal circumstances. That may actually help us to get more done because of that confidence, but a political leader needs to be realistic rather than just optimistic for the sake of optimism.”

http://www.npr.org/2011/08/20/139681339/madness-and-leadership-hand-in-hand