The Penalty Kick
An intense match took place during the Women’s World Cup final between Japan and the United States Sunday afternoon. With Japan tying up the game twice, the teams were forced into penalty kicks. The U.S. missed three of their penalty kicks, two being stopped by Japanese goalkeeper, Ayumi Kaihori. Did Kaihori get lucky or was there precise timing and decision making leading up to each kick? In an excerpt taken from Wray Herbert’s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits, behavioral economist Ofer Azar discusses goalies and the dreaded penalty kick.
Azar ran intriguing study of premier soccer goalies. Azar, a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, studied penalty kicks. A penalty kick is awarded after a foul, and is often used as a tie-breaker in championship games. A designated player stands 36 feet from the goal, which…
Tags: Behavioral Science, biological bias, Cognition, Decision Making, Exercise, movement, Psychological Science, Sport Psychology, Sports | No Comments »
The Date Everybody Loves to Hate
Today happens to be Friday the 13th and if you have friggatriskaidekaphobia – it’s simply not a day to be trifled with.
“Frigga what?”, you say? Friggatriskaidekaphobia is a fear of Friday the 13th – a superstition that has been around for centuries no matter what part of the world you’re from. Producers of Bollywood movies hesitate to release movies on Friday the 13th because they fear their movies might fail at the box office. The stock market always slows down and people postpone travel.
But why fear a day and a date?
Thomas Gilovich, who chairs the Department of Psychology at Cornell University, thinks that people fear Friday the 13th because they tend to associate it with bad things or events in their life.
“The mind is an associative system and if anything bad happens to you on Friday the…
Tags: Cognition, Decision Making, Economics, Fear, Health, rituals, signs, Spirituality, Superstition, Thinking, Travel | No Comments »
Disaster Survivors Are More Resiliant Than We Think: A Conversation On The Psychological Impact Of The Earthquakes In New Zealand And Japan
Two back-to-back earthquakes have rocked New Zealand and Japan. Both quakes resulted in the largest damage either country has suffered in decades in terms of infrastructure and the loss of human life. And while the citizens of New Zealand are in the process of clearing rubble, the crisis in Japan is continuing to unfold as the Japanese government struggles to meet the basic needs of survivors while trying to contain nuclear material in reactors that were damaged by the quake.
While the images on our television screens and the internet are tragic, an average person survives disaster better than most would think. In 2010, the Association of Psychological Science published a report called Weighing the Costs of Disaster: Consequences, Risks, and Resilience in Individuals, Families, and Communities. Ripped From the Headlines…
Tags: Clinical Psychology, Death, International, Psychlogical Science In The Public Interest | No Comments »
Is Gadhafi Truly In Denial? The Answer Isn’t Easy
The word “denial” has appeared frequently when news outlets have described Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. With his claims that his people love him and that his government has not committed any violence against protesters (despite evidence that they have), Gadhafi appears to be displaying the most extreme form of denial.
But as far as psychological science is concerned, denial is not so easy to define.
“Denial is a very tricky concept,” says Charles Carver, a psychology professor at the University of Miami who studies personality. “In its origins, it meant literally keeping awareness of the threatening nature of whatever is being denied out of consciousness.”
Denial has traditionally been described as a form of coping with distressing events or emotions. More specifically, denial is considered a form of disengagement coping, which is when a person tries…
Tags: International, Personality/Social, Policy, Political Psychology, War | No Comments »
Your Brain On A Budget
Image Source: C-SPAN.org
It seems that everyone has budget problems right now, from the President to the cashier at the local gas station. Congress is scrambling to come up with a budget to avoid shutting down the Federal Government, and mass protests against proposed budget bills have cropped up in states like Wisconsin and Ohio.
People approach budgets differently. Some like to track every penny and divvy up their funds into categories on a spreadsheet that contains more colors than a bag of Skittles. Others prefer to set a spending goal then check their accounts online when the mood strikes them. According to consumer psychologist John Lynch from the Leeds Business Center at the University of Colorado–Boulder, how people approach…
Tags: Cognitive Psychology, Decision Making, Economics, Executive Function, Financial Decision Making | No Comments »
