Showing posts with label Research. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Research. Show all posts

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...

Our sleep cycle and the different stages of sleep.

So what happens to we're asleep? Despite the fact that we spend a good portion of our lives fast asleep (around a third), most of us aren’t really aware of the fact that we experience different stages of sleep and different times of the night. Sleep is a vastly complicated science, and a typical night of sleep consists of just five sleep stages. Though sleep can also be divided into two broader stages, non-rapid eye movement (NREM), and rapid...

Fundamental attribution error

When an incident or an event occurs (whether negative or positive) the tendency to place a significant amount of blame on a persons personality or characteristics rather than situational factors is quite a common one. This is because we tend to focus more on the person involved by assuming that a person is responsible due to their personality/characteristics and not the conditions around them that they could not have had control over in the first...

The Stroop Effect.

The phenomenon The Stroop Effect first discovered by American psychologist John Ridley Stroop is where the brains reaction time slows down when processing conflicting information. This happens because of interference or the use of incompatible functions in the brain causing the decreased reaction time within the brain. This phenomenon is usually studied with a stroop test where a researcher first takes note of how long a participant takes to...

The Zeigarnik Effect: The need for closure.

First identified by gestalt psychologist Kevin Lewin, the zeigarnik effect is where we tend to remember incomplete tasks more often than tasks that are completed. This effect was first discovered in 1927 when Kevin Lewin sitting in a restaurant in Vienna noticed that waiters only remembered orders while they were in the process of being served thus incomplete, and when they were completed they later had little recollection...

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 confirmation bias and seeing only what you want to see.

Being in a world where there is conflicting information can make it a difficult job to make sense of things, and because of this we have a need to filter out information so we don't overload our heads with conflicting thoughts causing confusion. Our need to make sense of things on the other hand can also be a hindrance when we go too far the other end by fixating on one idea and only excepting information supporting this...

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...

False memories: Do you remember when......?

Often the human memory is seen as something that is similar to a video tape where once something is recorded it cannot be altered, changed or tampered with. Even when someone is 100 percent sure that a situation or an event took place in a particular way they can still be wrong despite their certainty, in reality the human memory is susceptible to change and manipulation regardless of how solid and reliable you think it is. The human memory...

Fear psychology

What is fear? Fear is an emotional response towards something which can pose a potential threat alerting us to danger. The threat can be towards ones physical well being or the threat can be towards ones social standing, both can be experienced as very real and result with the urge to withdraw away from the object of endangerment. When someone experiences fear not only is there a negative emotional response, the response is also physical which includes...

Microexpressions and spotting a liar.

Pretty much everybody has the ability on some level or another to read facial expressions. this can be from cheerful to sad to angry amongst other emotions, from seeing an expressions on somebody's face you can identify that emotion due to past experiences. Now we all know people can fake their facial expressions and most of us have even done it ourselves whether its bumping into somebody you don't really like and greeting...