Category: Psychology

Backed by Science: Easy Mood Improvement Techniques

Nearly 10% of adults will experience a mood disorder each year. It may be caused by several factors such as major life events, chronic or severe illness or injury, medications, or mental diseases. Sometimes, there might not even be an obvious cause. The good news is not everyone who experiences mood changes will develop a disorder. Oftentimes, it will resolve on its own, improve over the course of the day, or within a couple of hours. There are also activities that you can do to combat fluctuating emotions and enhance your mood.

Go Outdoors

Spending time in nature is one of the ways to improve moods especially if you’re living in cities where stress is prevalent. From doing errands to catching public transportation, city living is often hectic. New research validates that urban living is more demanding than rural life. The Meyer-Lindenberg research suggested that residing in cities shapes the way the brain responds to social stress and increases the risk of mental problems compared to living in the countryside.

However, a study by White et al revealed that people who have their home in urban areas that are near greeneries such as parks reported the least mental health concerns. You don’t need to live near a park or a wooded area to get its benefits. A research article by Bratman et al indicated that a 90-minute walk through a natural environment can decrease negative thoughts.

Continue reading Backed by Science: Easy Mood Improvement Techniques

More Than An Art: How Successful Advertisers Use Science To Capture Your Attention Online

We are exposed to more than 1,700 banner ads each month, yet we only see half this number. Marketing is crucial for companies wanting to stay ahead of competitors, but capturing their audience’s attention is a more complex endeavor than it may seem on the surface. If you’ve ever wondered why some online ads seem to hold your attention more than others, it could be that the people who made them have a better understanding of the science behind attention capture. In his 2016 book, Captivology, Ben Parr explained the scientific principles behind catching – and holding – an audience’s attention. So what are the principles successful marketers are applying when we find ourselves sucked into an advertisement?

Three stages of attention

Attention can be thought of in three stages: immediate attention, short attention, and long-term attention. Parr says that the secret of successful attention capture lies in making the audience pass through each stage in order. Immediate attentions are unconscious and subconscious reactions to stimuli. Online advertisements will use certain symbols and colors to catch our immediate attention. From here, we move into short attention, which is where we consciously decide to pay attention. This is the type of attention we use when we’re watching a TV program or reading a news article.

While we’re passing through this stage, successful marketers are making sure their content is new, creating something we want to pay attention to. The final stage is long attention, and here, advertisers want us to hook onto a long-term interest in their idea so that we want to become familiar with it. Long-term attention is what we’re applying when we watch not just one episode of a TV program, but the whole series.

Continue reading More Than An Art: How Successful Advertisers Use Science To Capture Your Attention Online

The Psychology Behind Scamming

by Jackie Edwards

From winning the lottery and PPI refunds to identity theft and online marriage proposals, we’re all potential targets for fraudsters. Globally, scammers conned unsuspecting victims out of $12.7 billion in 2013 — and that was just with 419 advance fee fraud scams. Scam victims typically lose out financially — often without reimbursement — and suffer significant emotional trauma, making them less likely to come forward due to embarrassment. While scams have become more complex and harder to detect in the modern age, the foundational influence techniques scammers use on their victims remain the same. Become aware of how scams exploit emotions and human nature, and you’re less likely to fall for these psychological techniques.

Exploitation of social norms

From birth, we’re conditioned to have unwavering respect for authority figures. Scammers take advantage of this social norm and therefore often pose as bank employees, government officials, or qualified professionals who appear trustworthy. In a similar vein, scammers try to exploit man’s inherent good nature. You may find it hard to say “no” to a charity asking for donations. Or you may be compelled to send money to help pay for emergency medical or travel expenses — which often plays out in online dating scams.

Scarcity-based incentives

Most of us have fallen prey to tempting “limited-time only” sales when shopping. Retailers and scammers alike rely on scarcity-based incentives: offers that expire soon, offers that are one-time only, or deals that will fall through if you don’t act RIGHT NOW! They conjure a sense of urgency in order to get you to take immediate action. The fear of missing out is primal and you’re more likely to forgo rationality and self-control in the face of it. Scammers want you acting now instead of taking time to asses the situation and likely realizing things don’t add up.

Eliciting of emotion

People who lack control over their emotions are more likely to be persuaded by scammers, a report by the UK Office of Fair Trading reveals. Sometimes these will be positive emotions like the excitement of winning money or online relationships. Alternatively, negative feelings like fear and panic are often elicited via supposed fraudulent bank activity. It’s natural to want to alleviate strong, unpleasant emotions as soon as possible. People will therefore act out of fear and desperation — rather than reason — and respond to the scam in order to feel better in the short run.

So, how do you know who to trust? Never give out personal information or money to anybody — especially on first contact. Delete emails from people you don’t know. Do your own research to verify something — but don’t call numbers or click links you’ve been given. Give yourself time to carefully think about the situation. Does it elicit strong emotions urging you to act? If in doubt, always go with your gut. Finally, if you find yourself the target of a scam, report it and let others know, so they can avoid falling prey to the same or similar scam in the future.

What Does Science Say about Psychics?

by Jackie Edwards

Extrasensory perception and haunted houses seem to be the stuff that horror stories or comedies are made of. Yet, a Gallup survey indicates that around three out of four Americans hold at least one paranormal belief. Around 32% of people believe that spirits of those who have passed away can return to certain places, and 31% believe in telepathy. Around 21%, meanwhile, believe that people can communicate mentally with someone who has died, which begs the question: has science ever established the existence of psychic powers?

An Academic Study on Psychic Phenomena

A study that is often cited when discussing what science has to say on psychic abilities is D Bem’s Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The study involved nine experiments and over 1,000 participants.

In the experiments, aspects of stimuli were shown to correlate with participants’ responses which occurred before the stimuli were produced randomly by computer. For instance, participants were shown two curtains on a computer screen and were told to pick the one they thought had an image behind it. In fact, none of the screens had an image behind them. Rather, after the participants made their choices, the computer randomly chose which curtains would hide an image, and the researchers subsequently found that the participants had ‘predicted’ the positioning of the images at a higher rate than chance would indicate.

Continue reading What Does Science Say about Psychics?

The Cocktail Party Effect

Introduction

The term cocktail party effect was coined by a British Cognitive scientist Colin Cherry, in the 1950s. He was interested in understanding how people listened, by conducting a few experiments. In his first experiment, he played two different overlapped messages recorded in the voice of the same person, through headphones. The participants were asked to listen carefully and try to write one of the messages on paper. If they put in enough concentration, the participants usually succeeded.

Now, if someone asks you to describe the cocktail party effect. The formal Cocktail Party effect definition is as follows:

Cocktail Party Effect Definition:

The cocktail party effect is the phenomenon of being able to focus one’s auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, much the same way that a partygoer can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room. Continue reading The Cocktail Party Effect

The Illusion of Transparency

By Anupum Pant

Imagine learning something whilst a very experienced person speaks about a subject that he’s been working on for 35 years. Let’s say, we’re talking about a professor here. It’s pretty annoying to listen to them using mysterious abbreviations, jargon and what not. This is a very normal thing for humans to do. Because we are basically not smart. Our brains have their own ways to fail us.

I’m doing my graduate studies and it’s not very rare that I come across very learned professors who aren’t very good teachers. Being a good teacher, speaker or a textbook author isn’t the same as knowing stuff, and is possible to be one when you know one thing, and just one thing.

Continue reading The Illusion of Transparency

Curiosity Kills the Cat

By Anupum Pant

Booby traps play with your mind. They cause fear and uncertainty and can be hidden in anything. For these psychological traps to be the most effective, they are often hidden in the most familiar or the most ordinary things. Especially something that a soldier would decide to move for some random reason.

During the world war one and two the Germans probably demonstrated the most creative booby traps. The most interesting one was booby trapping a framed picture on the wall. The Germans would make the picture skewed and booby trapped it. Knowing that the gentlemen soldiers would come in and straighten the picture without even thinking that it could be a trap, they’d trigger the bomb.

Babies Learning

By Anupum Pant

When babies first start crawling, irrespective of how big a drop is, they’ll just crawl over the edge, not knowing they’d fall. That’s pretty natural. And after a few weeks of crawling they learn that crawling over the edge is not a good thing to do and automatically stop when they see a visual cliff. This works even if there is a visual cliff, but a pane of transparent glass over it. The baby, if it has learned not to crawl over the edge, wont crawl on to the pane of glass because it sees a dangerous cliff.

The interesting part is that the babies do not learn about the cliff at all. They learn about crawling. Doesn’t seem very different, does it? The difference is clear when a baby first starts walking. A newly walking baby would step over the cliff happily, and get hurt. Even when it had learned not to do so while crawling. But after a few weeks of walking they learn not to do it. Just like they learned while crawling.

Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy

By Anupum Pant

As hard as it may sound and the very fact that there hasn’t been a good one commercially available yet, actually making a holographic display is not very hard if you have a few pieces of plastic (an old CD case) lying around. Yes, that is all you need. Here’s how you can do it at home…

When you are trying to prove someone wrong on the internet, you might not be arguing properly because of a simple fallacy which might be undercutting your own claims. It’s better understood through this parable – That is how it gets its name.

Let’s say a Texan randomly shoots some rounds on a wooden wall. Then he goes to the wall and finds a small area with maximum number of holes and draws a bulls-eye around it. This makes him look like a sharpshooter who shot a couple of shots right in the bulls-eye.

Just Ask a Narcissist

By Anupum Pant

People who talk about how awesome they are can be really annoying some times. And then there is a psychologically disposable severe personality dysfunction Narcissistic personality disorder, also referred to as NPD. To find out if some one you know has that, just ask them. Yes, it’s as simple as that. They’ll tell you if they are…

The Porcupine’s Dilemma

By Anupum Pant

The porcupine’s dilemma is a metaphor about the challenges of intimacy among human beings. This explains perfectly the situation in which couple of porcupines need to feel watmer during a cold winter night, so they have to come closer to each other. And yet not so close that would hurt the other porcupines with the spikes they have on the back of their bodies.

This metaphor originated from a short explanation writte by a German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer. The parable goes like this…

A number of porcupines huddled together for warmth on a cold day in winter; but, as they began to prick one another with their quills, they were obliged to disperse. However the cold drove them together again, when just the same thing happened. At last, after many turns of huddling and dispersing, they discovered that they would be best off by remaining at a little distance from one another. In the same way the need of society drives the human porcupines together, only to be mutually repelled by the many prickly and disagreeable qualities of their nature. The moderate distance which they at last discover to be the only tolerable condition of intercourse, is the code of politeness and fine manners; and those who transgress it are roughly told—in the English phrase—to keep their distance. By this arrangement the mutual need of warmth is only very moderately satisfied; but then people do not get pricked. A man who has some heat in himself prefers to remain outside, where he will neither prick other people nor get pricked himself.

Science Says buy Cheap Wine

By Anupum Pant

Taste is a very subjective sense. So, even people trained to taste wine get it wrong (wrong for you), most times. Even if you track the way the judges in a wine tasting decide the winner, you’ll find that the distribution is very close to what you’d get when you do a random distribution.

Expensive wines are often appreciated because it’s known to wine tasters most times that the wine they are tasting is the expensive one. Cost is equated to quality, or taste. While most normal people, who aren’t trained wine tasters, do spot it as expensive, they do it because they don’t like the taste of it. Crux of it all, buy the cheap wines. I personally love Apothic red, which I get it in the grocery store for about $8.

Learning Learned Helplessness

By Anupum Pant

Achieving things that seem totally out of reach, the very things that seem impossible, can actually be accomplished if you learn to get around the state of mind that is called learned helplessness.

Timothy Ferris, the author of 4-hour work week tells a story when he visited Princeton. He challenged the students with something that seemed impossible. The goal of this seemingly arduous task was to make them move out of their comfort zones. So, he offered them a roundtrip ticket to anywhere in the world, but didn’t tell them what the challenge was. They had to come meet him after the lecture. A third of the students came.

This was what they were asked to do. He wanted them to contact J Lo., Warren Buffett, Bill Clinton, J.D. Salinger and get a reply from at least one of them. No one even tried. Clearly, it did not look like a task that an average person could complete.

He did this again the next year and also told the students about what had happened last year. And after hearing the story of faliure of last year students, among the 17 guys, 6 finished the challenge in 48 hours.

The students last year had learned helplessness. And the people who came over this psychological hurdle accomplished a seemingly impossible task with flying colours.

Just knowing about this effect is enough to change the way you look at your life and opportunities. One great way to take away for the people who come here every day to read things.

It always seems impossible until it’s done. – Nelson Mandela

Knowledge is Not Understanding

By Anupum Pant

Let’s say you know how to ride a bike. One day, like Destin, you flip the bike’s handle. That is to say, when you turn the handle left, the bike turns right and vice versa. Yes, a welder can easily do that to your bike with help of a tiny gear system.

The thing about knowing how to ride a bike is that you don’t really understand how you do it. Millions of things go running in your mind when you do it. The algorithm is hardwired. So many things happen in there unconsciously, you never realize. Unless…

You do the flipping and try to ride this new flipped bike. You just can’t. Assuming you know your bike well, you think it’s going to be just a matter of time that you learn to ride this new thing. But it’s not that easy. Especially when you are old. Destin goes around the world offering people $200 to ride this thing for 10 feet without putting down their feet. No one has been able to do it. It takes effort.

Destin put in this effort. He unlearned his old way of riding a bike and took 8 months to master this new flipped bike. To his amazement, he learned it suddenly. One minute he wasn’t even close to riding it and the other minute he was gliding past in his new bike. But it took 8 months and a lot of practice.

Now, he took it a level further. He hopped on to a normal bike, and guess what? He couldn’t ride it. His brain had learned to ride the flipped bike too well. The algorithm inside had changed.

And suddenly, like he had learned to ride the flipped bike, after some practice, something clicked and he was back to riding the normal bicycle. He documented all of it in a video below. Which I think has a very deep message for all of us. It can’t be put into words. It’s a realization.

Also, his son, with a much more plastic brain than his could learn to ride the new bike in just two weeks. Learn it young is another direct message this genius experiment gives us.

Making Your Dream Come True With Science

By Anupum Pant

Haven’t people told you this, visualize what you want to achieve and if you think about your final state enough, your chances of achieving it will sky rocket? Okay, go ahead and do it now. So, if you want to lose weight, think of a slim you doing 3 backflips back to back.

There, sorry for being a prick, but you just decreased the odds of you being that slim. Scientists at the university of Pennsylvania have found that visualizing a happy ending decreases your chance of reaching the goal. That’s because you feel more satisfied with the image of a happy ending in mind, and when obstacles come along, which they always do, you lose hope and quit.

Instead, to make your dreams come true, or rather to increase the chance of your dream coming true, visualize the path, the process of you getting there. A path filled with all kinds of obstacles. That’d make your odds much better.

Richard Wiseman explains…