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Say This, Get Your Way
Men's Health Magazine: f people don’t listen to you, it’s not that they don’t respect you—it could be how you’re phrasing your request, suggests a new study published in Psychological Science. In the study, college students who were told that speed limit laws were about to take effect accepted and agreed with the new regulations. But when the laws were said to be possibly going into effect, more students expressed outrage. What’s going on? If a direction seems final, people just accept it, explains researcher Kristin Laurin, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Waterloo.
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How ‘Social’ Is Social Networking?
Huffington Post: I like Facebook. I've been signing into the site fairly regularly for a couple years now, and it has become my large extended family's primary form of communication. It also keeps me connected with friends and former colleagues -- people I like a lot but would never stay in touch with otherwise. We share photos, update personal news, comment on politics and pop culture -- nothing serious, but it's still more connection than I would have in a previous era. In that sense, Facebook is certainly a social lubricant for many of its 500 million users, facilitating fast and effortless and widespread connection.
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How Giving is Better Than Receiving
International Business Times: As the old saying goes, "It is better to give than to receive." Most people would shrug off this proverb and keep to themselves thinking that it would be better, but there is scientific proof that people like it better when they give than receive. According to a study that is based on the wise saying, University of California, Los Angeles, scientists revealed that giving support to people's loved ones' not only benefits the recipient, but also the giver. Naomi Eisenberger, UCLA assistant professor of psychology and the senior author of the study, along with Tristen Inagaki, studied 20 young couples in good relationships.
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Körperhaltung trifft Entscheidungen
Men's Health Denmark: Unsere Entscheidungsfindung hängt offenbar stark davon ab, zu welcher Seite unser Körper gerade geneigt ist. Wer mit leichtem Linksdrall ein Urteil fällt, soll zu einem anderne Ergebnis kommen, als im aufrechten oder nach rechts geneigten Stand. Zu dieser Erkenntnis kamen nun niederländische Forscher der Erasmus University Rotterdam. Für Ihre Studie mussten sich 33 Probanden auf ein sogenanntes Wii Balance Board stellen, mit dem die Wissenschaflter unbemerkt die Neigung ihrer Körper steuern konnten. Anschließend wurden den Studienteilnehmern Fragen gestellt, deren Antwort sie mehr schätzen, als wissen konnten.
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Want a pay raise? Keep on the right side of your boss
Express: Be careful to stand upright next time your boss asks you how much you should be paid. If you are leaning to the left you will be putting a lower value on your worth. Fascinating new research has found body posture affects decision-making, and people who physically lean to the left are more likely to underestimate figures. Researchers found that covertly manipulating the tilt of the body influences people’s estimates of sizes, numbers and percentages. They got 33 students to stand on Wii balance boards that imperceptibly manipulated their posture to tilt left or right or stay upright while questions appeared on a screen. Read the whole story: Express
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The predictably irrational NBA lockout
ESPN: Dan Ariely thinks Duke basketball fans are crazy. Or at least they act a little irrational sometimes. As a behavioral economics professor at the ACC school, he noticed something interesting -- that fans who won Duke basketball tickets through a lottery tended to overvalue those tickets. In fact, those randomly selected students valued those tickets 10 times more than what other students did. Cameron Crazies, indeed. Ariely interpreted this phenomenon as an example of the endowment effect, an imperfection of the human mind that causes people to believe the things they possess are worth more than they actually are.
