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You know what they say… if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS. From the YouTube page:
In 1970 three American researchers, John E. Ware, Donald H. Naftulin and Frank A. Donnelly, designed an experiment to find out whether a brilliant delivery technique of a talk could so completely bamboozle a group of experts that they overlooked the fact that the content was nonsense. The result was the hilarious Dr Fox Lecture and the answer was: yes! The experts didn’t notice a thing.
An actor named Michael Fox was recruited to play the lecturer. Fox didn’t understand the material he was going to present, and he was concerned that someone in the audience would recognize him from his many TV appearances. But he needn’t have worried. Read the full story at Weird Experiments. Link -via Cynical-C
Marketing lore and common sense tells us we value the things we make more than the things we buy already made. That even holds true when we assemble things from a kit, according to research published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.
Experiment 1A: Participants either inspected an IKEA pre-built box or assembled it themselves. Afterward, they were asked to bid on the box they had either seen or built. If their bid was above a random number, they would pay that amount to keep the box; if it was lower, they couldn’t keep it. Participants were also asked to self-report on the value of the box. An effect was found in both cases; on average, participants bid 62% more when they built the box versus when they simply inspected it. On average, participants also self-reported liking the self-built box more than the inspected boxes.
Other experiments used origami creations and LEGO sets, and the same effect was noted. Read more about it at NeoAcademic. Link -via Boing Boing
Have you ever been told that you need to let your anger out or it will explode? As it turns out, that’s completely wrong. Cracked has a great list of psychology myths everyone believes that are utterly and completely wrong. Be warned, some of the language is NSFW.
A study by psychologist Paul Babiak indicates that one in twenty-five leaders could be a psychopath. This affliction could actually be an advantage in a workplace:
The survey suggests psychopaths are actually poor managerial performers but are adept at climbing the corporate ladder because they can cover up their weaknesses by subtly charming superiors and subordinates.
This makes it almost impossible to distinguish between a genuinely talented team leader and a psychopath, Babiak said. Hare told Horizon: “The higher the psychopathy, the better they looked – lots of charisma and they talk a good line.
Link -via Geekosystem | Image: Lions Gate Films
Sure your life might not be that bad, but if you keep feeling like you just need this or that to be happy, you’re never going to actually be happy. Why? Because science says your entire idea of happiness is wrong. Learn why over at Cracked.
While there are always tons of memes floating around the net, most of them are mediocre at best. Scumbag brain, on the other hand, is something all of us can relate to, whether it involves keeping us up at night or replaying the same catchy son over and over. Catch more of the meme over at BuzzFeed.
Dr. Vasilis K. Pozios is a forensic psychiatrist and reader of superhero comic books. He’s spent his career studying dangerous criminals and is now applying that knowledge to comic book villains and the way in which Batman interacts with them:
“As a mental health professional, Batman comes across as insensitive,” Pozios told HuffPost Weird News. “He could definitely use more training in that area.”
Pozios’s colleague, H. Eric Bender, would also like to clear up a misconception about the Joker:
Bender uses the example of the Joker, the most famous Batman villain, as a character who has incorrectly been called “psychotic” many times throughout Batman’s 72-year history.
“Someone who is ‘psychotic’ is experiencing symptoms of psychosis, a mental disorder, which can include auditory hallucinations, such as hearing voices; visual hallucinations, where they see objects that are not truly there; or have delusional thoughts, despite evidence to show that such beliefs are incorrect — such as believing that one’s movements are being tracked by deep space satellites — or disorganized behavior,” Bender said. “In the vast majority of depictions, the Joker is not experiencing such symptoms; rather, the Joker has shown symptoms of psychopathy.”
Link -via Glenn Reynolds | Image: deviantART user MZ09
In 1971, psychology professor Philip Zimbardo began an experiment that became known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. Students were randomly assigned to be “guards” or “prisoners” in an imaginary prison scenario. It shocked the academic world and led to new standards for ethics in psychology studies.
Forty years later, the Stanford Prison Experiment remains among the most notable—and notorious—research projects ever carried out at the University. For six days, half the study’s participants endured cruel and dehumanizing abuse at the hands of their peers. At various times, they were taunted, stripped naked, deprived of sleep and forced to use plastic buckets as toilets. Some of them rebelled violently; others became hysterical or withdrew into despair. As the situation descended into chaos, the researchers stood by and watched—until one of their colleagues finally spoke out.
The public’s fascination with the SPE and its implications—the notion, as Zimbardo says, “that these ordinary college students could do such terrible things when caught in that situation” —brought Zimbardo international renown. It also provoked criticism from other researchers, who questioned the ethics of subjecting student volunteers to such extreme emotional trauma. The study had been approved by Stanford’s Human Subjects Research Committee, and Zimbardo says that “neither they nor we could have imagined” that the guards would treat the prisoners so inhumanely.
Stanford Magazine interviewed some of the participants in the experiment, both faculty and students. They tell their side of the story in the latest issue. Link -via Metafilter
How’s your psychology-fu? Do you know your Dependent Personality Disorder from your Dissociative Identity Disorder?
Let’s play armchair psychologist and find out whether you have an inner Freud. Health Guru has an informative (and surprisingly enjoyable) quiz on evaluating your "shrink" potential: Link
Psychological researchers Michael W. Kraus, Stéphane Côté, and Dacher Keltner noticed that poorer people tended to be more dependent upon relationships that wealthier people:
For example, if you can’t afford to buy support services, such as daycare service for your children, you have to rely on your neighbors or relatives to watch the kids while you attend classes or run errands[...]
So they wondered if lower-class people were able to perceive the emotional states of others at a higher level than upper-class people. They decided to use educational attainment as a determinant of social class and tested the comparative ability of college graduates and non-college graduates at reading facial expressions:
These results suggest that people of upper-class status aren’t very good at recognizing the emotions other people are feeling. The researchers speculate that this is because they can solve their problems, like the daycare example, without relying on others — they aren’t as dependent on the people around them.
A final experiment found that, when people were made to feel that they were at a lower social class than they actually were, they got better at reading emotions. This shows that “it’s not something ingrained in the individual,” Kraus says. “It’s the cultural context leading to these differences.” He says this work helps show that stereotypes about the classes are wrong. “It’s not that a lower-class person, no matter what, is going to be less intelligent than an upper-class person. It’s all about the social context the person lives in, and the specific challenges the person faces. If you can shift the context even temporarily, social class differences in any number of behaviors can be eliminated.”
Link via Glenn Reynolds | Photo by Flickr user Ibrahim Iujaz used under Creative Commons license
Frank Kachanoff, a psychology researcher at McGill University (Canada), conducted an experiment on the emotional responses of people to images of meat. He discovered a positive correlation between meat encounters and a calmer disposition:
Kachanoff recruited 82 men and asked them to punish an aide with various volumes of sound each time he made an error while sorting photos, some with pictures of meat, and others with neutral images. The researcher had anticipated participants who watched the aide sort meat photos would inflict more discomfort on him, but he was surprised when those pictures did not provoke aggressive behaviour.
“[W]ith the benefit of hindsight, it would make sense that our ancestors would be calm, as they would be surrounded by friends and family at meal time,” Kachanoff said in a press release.
Link via Geekosystem | Photo by Flickr user Naotake Murayama used under Creative Commons license
In the 1960s (of course), psychologist Paul Bindrim, building upon the work of Abraham Maslow, invented a form of psychotherapy that involved everyone getting naked:
Nude therapy was based on the idea of the naked body as a metaphor of the “psychological soul.” Uninhibited exhibition of the nude body revealed that which was most fundamental, truthful, and real. In the marathon, Bindrim interrogated this metaphor with a singular determination. Bodies were exposed and scrutinized with a science-like rigor. Particular attention was paid to revealing the most private areas of the body and mind-all with a view to freeing the self from its socially imposed constraints. “This,” Bindrim asserted gesturing to a participant’s genitalia and anus, “is where it’s at. This is where we are so damned negatively conditioned” [...] Determined to squelch the “exaggerated sense of guilt” in the body, Bindrim devised an exercise called “crotch eyeballing” in which participants were instructed to look at each others genitals and disclose the sexual experiences they felt most guilty about while lying naked in a circle with their legs in the air [...] In this position, Bindrim insisted “you soon realize that the head end and the tail end are indispensable parts of the same person, and that one end is about as good as the other.:”
Link via io9 | Unrelated photo of Bob Newhart statue via Flickr user Digital Sextant, used under Creative Commons license
Image via hurleygurley [Flickr] (BTW, if you want to make your own brain Jell-O, get the mold at the Neatoshop.)
Our brains are incredibly complex organs that allow us to comprehend both our surroundings and abstract concepts. Unfortunately, because our minds have to process so much information at once in order to help us understand things, they can also be easily tricked. Here are a number of ways your brain not be as reliable as you like to think.
We like to think that our memories work as photographs that preserve our pasts, but the reality is that memories change all the time and can be manipulated to change even faster.
Image via wallyg [Flickr]
Do you recall seeing the video of the first plane hit the World Trade Center on September 11? 73% of people remember seeing the video on that fateful day, but the truth is that the footage of the first plane wasn’t released until the next day. The problem is, according to neuroscientist Karim Nader, that every time you remember something, you change it just a little in your mind. Thus, the more we recall a memory, the more we forget the actual details of the event. In fact, if you make up a lie about something and tell it to yourself often enough, your brain will actually start to remember the fib as the cold hard truth.
If that wasn’t bad enough, other people can manipulate your memories just as easily. Remember when the concept of repressed memories came out a few decades ago and everyone started to believe it as absolute truth? As it turns out, repressed memories can be easily implanted in your mind through the power of suggestion. Researcher Elizabeth Loftus told study participants that she was conducting research on childhood memories. She gave them four accounts of stories from their childhood that were written by the relatives. One of the four accounts was a fictional story about being lost in the mall. Loftus then asked them questions about this incident and over a quarter of the volunteers recalled this imaginary event, citing incredible details about the incident.
After learning about these two facts, it’s not entirely surprising that repetition of something can lead to our acceptance of the statement as a truth. It’s called the Illusion-of-Truth effect and it means that we start to believe things are true, despite evidence to the contrary, if we just hear about it enough. It’s sort of our brain’s way of saying, “well if everyone else believes this, then I should too.”
What’s worse though is that when someone has firmly accepted something this way, it’s nearly impossible to prove the truth to them. Think about a cult that says the world will end on a certain date. When the time comes and goes, the cult members don’t realize they’ve been had and move on with their lives, they start rationalizing it, saying that they changed god’s mind somehow. In many cases, being confronted with the truth will only make the mislead person believe his or her convictions even more strongly.
It doesn’t even take manipulation from another person to alter your memories. Your brain can be tricked with a Photoshopped image just as easily. Ms. Loftus, from the repressed memories study, also experimented with falsified images including the famed picture from the Tiananmen Square protest. People who saw the manipulated images were far more likely to remember the events in a different manner than those who didn’t see the altered pictures. By the way, if you realized the crowd in the image above was added after the photo was taken, you’re in the minority.
Our brain’s concentration can also lead to some strange problems with cognition. For example, watch the video below and count how many times the white team passes the ball.
Video link.
Did you notice the gorilla? Over 50% of people watching the white team don’t notice the fact that a man in a gorilla suit walks through the court. This phenomenon is known as selective inattentiveness and it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. When you are hunting or being hunted, you don’t want to be distracted by every little thing going on around you. Sometimes though, this inattentiveness can be a problem. If the players in white were prey and the gorilla was a predator, half of all viewers would be an easy target for the hungry beast.
Interestingly, if we are told not to focus on something after it is brought to our attention, we usually can’t get the image out of our minds. Watch the video again and try to ignore the gorilla. Your eye and your mind will almost certainly keep going back to it.
Image via Marcus Vegas [Flickr]
Similarly, if you try not to think of a white bear, your mind will keep veering back to the white bear. If you’ve ever had a crush that just wouldn’t get out of your head even after you made a conscious effort to stop thinking about him or her, it’s the same problem; the conscious effort makes you focus on the one thing you aren’t supposed to think about. This can even lead to an obsession, which is why so many stalkers know very well that they shouldn’t be so focused on the person at hand.
Image via Sean Dreilinger [Flickr]
Did you know today is National French fry day? I don’t know about you, but where I live, everyone is frying them up. I can smell French fries all over the place, even in my house. Do you smell them? If so, then I have some bad news; it’s not National French fry day and unless someone’s in your kitchen making fries right this second, your mind is probably playing tricks on you.
Over 100 years ago, Professor Edwin Slosson proved that suggestion is a major part of our sense of smell. He poured distilled water on a cotton ball and told his class that he just poured a sample of a highly aromatic chemical. He then asked them to raise their hands when they could smell it. Within 15 seconds, the majority of the front row had their hands in the air and within 45 seconds, three-quarters of the class was raising their hands.
If you read the rest of this article saying “fine, my memories and my concentration can be manipulated, but my basic observations are more reliable,” then you’re wrong. Sensory manipulation is so easy that even professionals can be duped.
Image via digimist [Flickr]
A 1998 study by Frederic Brochet asked 54 professional wine tasters to try some wines and write down their opinions. He asked the specialists to taste two white wines and two red wines. The first set of red and white wines were different, but the second set was the same white wine with some red food coloring added, presented as “red wine.” The tasters used completely different adjectives to describe the colored wine as its uncolored equivalent. Their notes on the white wine included things like “dry, apricot, lemon, honey, and straw,” while the red wine notes included words like “deep, cherry, raspberry, spice and black currant.”
He later tried serving the specialists another wine, telling them it was a common table wine for the first sampling and for the second sampling, he told them it was an expensive vintage. The tasters loathed the first sample, calling it “simple, unbalanced and volatile.” When it was presented as a premium wine, they called it “complex, balanced, flavorsome and excellent. While it would be easy to say that this was a good way to prove that wine tasters are full of it, the study actually goes a lot deeper into how we give foods a perception prior to trying them and how this can affect our sense of taste.
The human mind is a complex and wondrous place, but the more you accept its ability to make mistakes, the fewer manipulations you will be subject to. And next time you’re arguing with someone about politics, just remember, whoever is wrong will never allow their mind to accept the truth, even when it is presented conclusively, so there’s really no point to the discussion.
Sources: Elephants on Acid, Smithsonian Mag, Boston Globe, Wiley InterScience, Wikipedia, Cracked
A team of psychologists showed video footage of male dancers to 37 young women who rated them, and used the results to pinpoint what makes a man a good dancer or a bad dancer.
Men who were judged to be good dancers had a varied repertoire and more moves that involved tilting and twisting the torso and neck.
But the majority of men displayed highly repetitive moves that used their arms and legs, but not the rest of their bodies.
“It’s rare that someone is described as a good dancer if they are flinging their arms about but not much else,” said Nick Neave, a psychologist at the University of Northumbria, who led the study.
“Think about a head banger. Their head movement has a large amplitude, but it’s not changing direction or showing any kind of variability. That’s a bad dancer. Or someone who is just twisting and turning left and right? That’s a bad dancer too.”
The article includes a video of a dancing avatar demonstrating “bad” dancing and “good” dancing. Next research needed: the science of getting a man to even try dancing at all. Link -via Metafilter
Researchers in Germany examined what news stories older people like to read. They found that grandma and grandpa tend to prefer stories that cast younger people in a negative light:
“Living in a youth centered culture, they may appreciate a boost in self-esteem. That’s why they prefer the negative stories about younger people, who are seen as having a higher status in our society,” said Dr. Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, of Ohio State University.[...]
All the adults in the study were shown what they were led to believe was a test version of a new online news magazine. They were also given a limited time to look over either a negative and positive version of 10 pre-selected articles.
Each story was also paired with a photograph depicting someone of either the younger or the older age group.
The researchers found that older people were more likely to choose to read negative articles about those younger than themselves
Link via Slashdot | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user little sourire used under Creative Commons license
In the Ultimatum game, you’re handed $100 and told to offer a portion to someone else. If the person accepts, then both of you get the money. If he declines, then none of you get it.
Americans typically offer (almost) $50, and reject offers below $40 if the tables were turned. After all, fair is fair, right? But is this how the rest of the world think?
Researchers from the University of British Columbia decided to test the Ultimatum Game to the rest of the world and found that the Western concept of fairness is actually not the norm, it’s the outlier. Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic (WEIRD) people, he argued, are actually the weird ones:
It seems most of humanity would play the game differently. Joseph Henrich of the University of British Columbia took the Ultimatum Game into the Peruvian Amazon as part of his work on understanding human co-operation in the mid-1990s and found that the Machiguenga considered the idea of offering half your money downright weird — and rejecting an insultingly low offer even weirder.
"I was inclined to believe that rejection in the Ultimatum Game would be widespread. With the Machiguenga, they felt rejecting was absurd, which is really what economists think about rejection," Dr. Henrich says. "It’s completely irrational to turn down free money. Why would you do that?"
Link – via Metafilter
Social psychologists at Washington State University found that better workers in a group are the least popular because they make everyone else look bad in comparison:
Parks and Stone found that unselfish colleagues come to be resented because they “raise the bar” for what is expected of everyone. As a result, workers feel the new standard will make everyone else look bad.
It doesn’t matter that the overall welfare of the group or the task at hand is better served by someone’s unselfish behavior, Parks said.
“What is objectively good, you see as subjectively bad,” he said.
The do-gooders are also seen as deviant rule breakers. It’s as if they’re giving away Monopoly money so someone can stay in the game, irking other players to no end.
Link via reddit | Photo by Flickr user schopie1 used under Creative Commons license
We’re all familiar with the concept of time seemingly moving faster when we’re having fun, and dragging when we’re bored. Professor Philip Zimbardo explains in this artfully presented video that it’s a lot more precise than that. Past-oriented vs. present or future-oriented personalities differ across many landscapes, and factors like religion, geography and culture greatly influence how individuals experience time.
Yesterday I posed this thought to our Twitter and Facebook users: The world can be divided into two types of people: Those who squeeze the toothpaste in the middle (or anywhere, randomly), and those who must squeeze from the bottom.
Then I asked for additional examples. Dozens poured in. Here are my Top 10 Favorites:
10. Heather Griffin said: one that calls any type of cola SODA, and the other that calls it POP.
9. Kristen Leigh said: Those who hang the roll of toilet paper over, and those who hang under.
8. Liz Kim said: those who pour the cereal in first and those that pour the milk in…!
7. Ferris Weston said: 1) Those who do not understand dichotomies.
6. Jane Daugherty Martin said: People who read the instructions and those who do not
5. Kathryn Kamowski said: Those who like Journey, and those who lie.
4. Rammy Meyerowitz said: There are two “types” of people, the “touch-typists” and the “hunt and peckers”
3. Norbert Smith said: Those who think there are two types of people, and those who don’t.
2. Charlotte Holden said: those that understand Lost and those that appreciate all this free time on their hands
And my number-1 favorite, which is an old math joke, but one I’d never heard before: Amy Dyer said: There are 10 types of people: Those who understand binary and those who don’t
Here’s my answers, what are yours?
10 – soda, 9 – over, 8 – cereal, 6 – do not read, 5 – Journey rocks!, 4 – touch, 3 – two types!, 2 – time on hands!
Don’t forget to Follow us: @neatorama and Fan us: www.Facebook.com/neatoramanauts
Rich CEOs are different from you and I – not only do they have more money, their brains are wired differently. That’s the conclusion of an online "color test":
Ask CEOs to pick their favorite color and what they select will often be very different than what most people would pick.
For example, when 877 members of USA TODAY’s CEO panel took an online personality color test, they were three times more likely to favor magenta than the public at large, three times less likely to select red, and 3½ times less likely to choose yellow.
This, it turns out, is more than a curiosity. Psychiatry professor Rense Lange, an expert on tests for everyone from students to job hunters to those with early signs of Alzheimer’s disease, has been looking hard at color tests and he has reached the conclusion that the results all but prove that CEOs are wired differently.
They are often wired in counterintuitive ways. For example, the color test shows that the typical CEO is more sensitive and private than the typical person and is less likely to be a perfectionist or to be dominant and more likely to be emotionally unstable. CEOs, it turns out, are not as self-assured as the public at large, and they are more cooperative and less forceful than the typical person, says Dewey Sadka, who has spent the last 15 years refining the color test completed by the 877 current and retired CEOs and chairmen.
A study of the data from 5,000 individuals who participated in the Framingham Heart Study leads researchers to believe that loneliness spreads through social networks like a virus. The tendency to be a loner may be less of a character trait and more of a “state such as hunger”.
They found loneliness is catchy with three degrees of separation. So a person’s loneliness depended not just on his friend’s loneliness but also on his friend’s friend and his friend’s friend’s friend. Participants were 52 percent more likely to be lonely if a person to whom they were directly connected (one degree of separation) was lonely. For two degrees of separation, the number drops to 25 percent and 15 percent for three degrees.
The number of family members had no effect on loneliness scores.
Over time, lonely individuals become lonelier and transmit such feelings to others before severing ties. “People with few friends are more likely to become lonelier over time, which then makes it less likely that they will attract or try to form new social ties,” they write. Such friendless individuals ended up on the outskirts of their social networks.
(image credit: Flickr user ~Oryctes~)
A team led by psychologist Martin Doherty of the University of Stirling in Scotland found that visual illusions that befuddle adults don’t effect children as easily. The pair of orange circles in the above illusion are slightly different in size. The blue dots will either accentuate those differences, or mislead the eye into thinking they are bigger or smaller than they are. In an experiment, participants of different ages were asked to identify the circle that looked bigger.
For 4- to 6-year-olds, accuracy of size perception for misleading images remained at about what it was for control images. Misleading images increasingly elicited errors from older children and tricked adults most of the time. Adults made almost no errors on helpful images. Kids from age 7 to 10 erred on a minority of helpful images, while 4- to 6-year-olds performed no better than chance.
The results suggest that considering context in images is something we learn as we age. Link
Your mother always urged you to sit up straight, and you should have listened to her. A study by researchers from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Spain and Ohio State University finds that sitting up straight makes you feel more confident about yourself. 71 students were given a reason to either sit up straight or slouch in their chairs. Then they wrote down either three positive or three negative things about themselves. Then they were tested to see how much they believed the things they wrote.
The results showed that people who had been sitting up straight were much more likely to believe the positive things they’d been writing about themselves, whereas those who were slouching weren’t so sure. Meanwhile a doubtful posture had very little effect on the half who were thinking negatively about themselves.
You know, Mom is always right. Link
Psychological researchers at Radboud University in the Netherlands conducted a study which supports the popular impression that men lose their minds in the presence of attractive women:
The research shows men who spend even a few minutes in the company of an attractive woman perform less well in tests designed to measure brain function than those who chat to someone they do not find attractive…
Women, however, were not affected by chatting to a handsome man.
This may be simply because men are programmed by evolution to think more about mating opportunities.
Psychologists at Radboud University in The Netherlands carried out the study after one of them was so struck on impressing an attractive woman he had never met before, that he could not remember his address when she asked him where he lived.
Researchers said it was as if he was so keen to make an impression he ‘temporarily absorbed most of his cognitive resources.’
Link via The Presurfer (Photo: Getty)
Payday loans can have a annual interest rate of 400%, but people who take them don’t look it it that way when they borrow $100 and pay back $115 in two weeks. Many fall into the trap of taking a second, third, or more loans to cover the shortfalls caused by the previous loans. University of Chicago economists Marianne Bertrand and Adaire Morse ran an experiment in which they explained the terms of payday loans in detail, and gave statistics on how the average borrower must continue getting loans.
In a nationwide experiment, Bertrand and Morse found that providing a clear and tangible description of a loan’s cost reduced the number of applicants choosing to take payday loans by as much as 10 percent. Better information, it turns out, may dissuade borrowers vulnerable to the lure of quick cash while maintaining the option of immediate financing for those truly in need.
Among the other 90%, some won’t change their behavior no matter what, but many have no other credit options available. Link
After determining the biological basis of why teenagers don’t like doing chores, science turns it attention to another of life’s great mystery: why toddler don’t do what they’re told.
Are you listening to me? Didn’t I just tell you to get your coat? Helloooo! It’s cold out there…
So goes many a conversation between parent and toddler. It seems everything you tell them either falls on deaf ears or goes in one ear and out the other. But that’s not how it works.
Toddlers listen, they just store the information for later use, a new study finds.
"I went into this study expecting a completely different set of findings," said psychology professor Yuko Munakata at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "There is a lot of work in the field of cognitive development that focuses on how kids are basically little versions of adults trying to do the same things adults do, but they’re just not as good at it yet. What we show here is they are doing something completely different."
Joe Dziemianowicz of the Daily News wrote that even though President Obama doesn’t like to reduce America into a collection of red states and blue states, he wore only red and blue neckties in his first 11 days in office. Is that just a coincidence?
Not according to science – Robert Roy Britt of LiveScience explains why in high-stakes politics and business, there are only two color of ties, red and blue:
Red and blue are also thought by psychologists to improve brain performance and receptivity to advertising. The new study in Science supports this idea. It also suggests nuances the president might want to know about, assuming one buys into the notion that presidential messages — delivered on television or on Capitol Hill — are essentially a form of advertising.
The study found that red is the most effective at enhancing our attention to detail, while blue is best at boosting our ability to think creatively.
"Previous research linked blue and red to enhanced cognitive performance, but disagreed on which provides the greatest boost," said study leader Juliet Zhu of the University of British Columbia. "It really depends on the nature of the task."
Zhu and colleagues tracked the performance of more than 600 people on cognitive tasks that required either creativity or attention to detail. Most experiments were conducted on computers with a screen that was red, blue or white.
Red boosted performance on detail-oriented tasks such as memory retrieval and proofreading up to 31 percent more than blue. For brainstorming and other creative tasks, blue cues prompted participants to produce twice as many creative outputs compare to red cues.
Psychologists at the University of British Columbia have conducted a study on the cognitive effects of colors. They found that red helped subjects concentrate while blue led to greater creativity.
“Think about red, and what comes to mind: stop lights, stop signs, danger, ambulances…People want to avoid those things, and that’s why they do better on detail-oriented tasks…Blue is the color of the sky, the ocean, safety…When their environment is safe, people are more explorative.”
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Out-of-body experiences and even the sense of switching bodies with another person can be induced by tricking the mind with sensory illusions!
In a study presented Tuesday, neuroscientists at Stockholm’s renowned Karolinska Institute show how they got volunteers wearing virtual reality goggles to experience the illusion of swapping bodies with a mannequin and a real person.
“We were interested in a classical question that philosophers and psychologists have discussed for centuries: why we feel that the self is in our bodies,” project leader Henrik Ehrsson said. “To study this scientifically we’ve used tricks, perceptual illusions.”
70-80% of the test subjects experienced the illusion “very strongly”. How weird that feeling must be! Link -Thanks, Geekazoid!
(image credit: AP/Niklas Larsson)
