You are out for a Sunday bike ride on your favorite biking path, and you come across a pair of kids selling lemonade. Do you stop and buy some lemonade? Do you like the lemonade? Does your buying or liking the lemonade have anything to do with the wording on the sign next to the…
Category Archives: research
100 Things You Should Know About People: #41 — Your Most Vivid Memories Are Wrong
If I ask you to remember where you were and what you were doing when you first heard about the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City, chances are very good that you will be able to tell me in great detail your memory of that day, and how you heard about the attacks….
100 Things You Should Know About People: #40 — “You’re Easily Influenced, but I’m not”
I have been doing a lot of public speaking about my book and the ideas of persuasion. Early in my talks I often discuss John Bargh’s research on how much we are influenced by factors that we are not aware of. Bargh had people unscramble sets of words to make sentences, for example, he would…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #39 — Your Mind Wanders 30% of the Time
You are at work reading a report that one of your colleagues has written and you realize that you’ve just read the same sentence about three times. Instead of thinking about what you were reading, your mind wandered. Mind wandering is similar to, but not the same thing as daydreaming. Psychologists use daydreaming to refer…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #38 — Even The Illusion Of Progress Is Motivating
You are given a frequent buyer card for your local coffeeshop. Each time you buy a cup of coffee you get a stamp on your card. When the card is filled you get a free cup of coffee. Here are two different scenarios: Card A: The card has 10 boxes for the stamps, and when…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #34 — Too Much Stress Results In Poor Performance
A few days ago I found myself in a hotel room outside of Chicago with my 19 year old daughter moaning and sometimes howling in pain. She’d been sick for a week, each day with a new symptom, and this morning her eardrum felt like it was going to burst. We decided that I should…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #32 — Synchronous activity bonds the group
What do members of a marching band, fans at a college football game, and people at Sunday church have in common? They are all engaging in “synchronous” activity. What is synchronous activity? — It is when you take action with others, where everyone is moving, singing, chanting, in time together. What happens when we engage…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #30 — Our “strong tie” group size is 150 people
Evolutionary anthropologists study social groups in animals. One question they have been trying to answer, is whether there is a limit on how many individuals different species have in their social group. Robin Dunbar studied the relationship between brain (neo-cortex) size and the number of stable relationships that a species had in their social groups….
100 Things You Should Know About People: #26 — Culture shapes our brains
My entire career I’ve been worried about the fact that most psychology research is conducted on 18-24 year old college students. What if the way 18-24 year old college students react, think, and behave is not the same as everyone else? We are drawing conclusions about PEOPLE in general, but only collecting data from a…
Who is The Most Romantic?: The Brain Science of Valentine’s Day
It’s almost Valentine’s Day and you go online to look for a gift to buy that special someone in your life. What will you buy? I posed that question to both men and women in a small research study I conducted recently. And the answers I got surprised me. When research answers a different question…