Showing posts with label Behaviour. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Behaviour. Show all posts

Narcissism and narcissistic personalities.

Like a lot people, you’ve most likely have encountered a few people who are narcissistic individuals. You know the type – the person who is typically described as vain and self-absorbed. They come across as someone that thinks they are extremely important and expect everyone else to be aware of how important they are to the point of obnoxiousness. Though many people can be selfish and every so often be a little vain, some individuals...

Interpreting and Reading Body Language

What can be one of the greatest barriers some people have is the inability to detect physical social cues in conversations. Extroverts are usually more prone to develop this skill naturally through years of high exposure to new social interactions, while other more introverted personalities would need more guidance in this area.  Sometimes we over-complicate things because we’re oblivious to what for others appears...

Book Review: The Lucifer Effect How Good People Turn Evil.

The Lucifer Effect, a New York Best Selling book written by research psychologist Professor Philip Zimbardo  highlights an uncomfortable but honest observation regarding human nature: That even the most seemingly ordinary, up-right and good person can become a perpetrator of evil. When we're trying to understand behavior that is destructive, irrational and malicious we often direct our focus primarily onto innate characteristics or personality...

10 Quick And Interesting Facts About Body Language

As you may know body language is more complex than it seems at first glance. This is because reading body language has so many nuances and subtleties you have to account for such as context, culture, mood, level of comfort, baseline behavior etc. The list can go on. For example a country and its culture can have a wide range of facial expressions, body movements, and hand gestures that can signal particular emotions and feelings but go from one...

The Pygmalion Effect - The Psychology of Having High Expectations

First named by the psychologist Robert Rosenthal; The Pygmalion Effect is where the someone who is in a position of leadership has expectations of someone to perform a task well and can encourage them to actually meet those high expectations and display higher levels of performance compared to if there wasn't any expectations at all. Conceptually it is similar to having Confirmation Bias where expected behaviors are shaped creating an expected outcome. An...

Sibling Relationship Psychology

Out of all the relationships throughout our lives whether it's a friendship, parent/child relationship or a romantic relationship one of the most unique and powerful bonds we may have is the relationships with our siblings. Our siblings are usually the ones that we share our life journey's with from a young age all the way across to our adult years and during that journey you experience the ups and downs, family woes, jealousy and hostility...

Understanding introverts

Normally misunderstood, introverts generally are lower energy and conservative than their extravert counterparts, but because western society often favours the extravert for their gregarious nature and their outwardly focused approach to life and the people within it introverts often get looked over and even worse misunderstood. As written previously in this post regarding introverts sometimes being introverted can be misconstrued as...

Self completion theory

When a person attempts to define themselves whether it is a physician, footballer, mathematician, rock climber etc. they engage in behaviours which relate to the identity they are trying to cultivate and when any of these behaviours receive some sort of negative feedback they feel an incompleteness in regards to their identity  motivating them to redeem themselves by trying harder on any subsequent task related to the self identity...

The Dark Triad. The personality of evil.

First introduced by Psychologists Delroy L. Paulhus and Kevin M. Williams the dark triad is a set of overlapping personality traits which host a group of undesirable behaviours. These three personality traits are narcissism, machiavellism and psychopathy. Some may say that these traits are can bring out the worst in human behaviour. People who score high on the dark triad personality scale can be manipulative, have a high sense...

Scarcity: Having less making you want more.

We as people have the innate tendency to value things more that are seen as a limited resource whether it is something is that you cant have or something that you already own but its availability has begun to decrease. Robert Caldini best known for his ideas's of influence in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion states that the idea that something is less available can enhance its desirability through fear that you are...

How psychology and influence is used to open doors.

In psychology and influence its always good to understand that when you are attempting to persuade some to make an action or decision it is usually better to start small. This is because putting all your cards on the table and directly asking for a large concession upfront is usually met with resistance, and while this bold move can sometimes work depending on who your dealing with most of the time it doesn't and can place you in a more...

Deindividuation and ''losing yourself'' in the moment.

Deindividuation, a term first used by social psychologists Leon Festinger, Albert Pepitone and Theodore Newcomb in 1952 where a person may feel they can act impulsively without social repercussions and commit actions that they wouldn't normally do, this is particular in groups or crowds. When a person is deindividuated their sense of identity is reduced which temporarily affects their ethical...

Being an extrovert: The good and the bad.

A term first introduced by psychologist Carl Jung, extraversion is a personality trait where a person directs their energy outwards by seeking stimulus from either being social and outgoing, taking risk taking activities and generally seeking excitement from the outside environment. These traits are contrary to being an introvert. The modern western world often praises extrovert characteristics which is usually perceived as being...