Showing posts with label Social Psychology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Social Psychology. 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...

Donald Trumps speech style - what may have helped him win and influence the American nation.

If you were asked the unlikely question of "Who is Donald Trump?" One of the possible answers you could give would be, "The President of the United states - and a controversial one at that." But what is most controversial about President Trump is how he addresses large crowds and responds to anything anyone says to him. It's unlike any President that's preceded him. Or any other politician for that matter.  One of the reasons Donald...

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...

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...

Group perceptions

When we observe or first encounter a group we inevitably have an opinion of them, we use all available and necessary information to create a mental picture of that group, and the information we use will be all relative to who we are individually, our experiences and their general impression. As we know opinions and impressions of a group don't always stick and they can and do change the more information we receive about a given group thus changing...

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...

The mere exposure effect: You may have seen it before.

In psychology the phenomenon known as the mere exposure effect first identified by Robert Zanjoc in 1968 is when an unfamiliar object you either dislike or feel indifference towards becomes familiar and something you grow to feel favourably towards because of repeat exposure. So in essence, the more you see, hear or taste something the more you like it. Humans like comfort and familiarity, and when faced with a choice...

3 quick facts on body language and non verbal communication.

Body language can communicate a wealth of information about someone but usually people do not have the correct knowledge or have had the training to be able to spot the subtle sub-communications that take place that the person themselves aren't usually aware of. Having an awareness of peoples body language helps refine your quality of your personal interactions and make you that much more intuitive as you learn to fine tune...

Negotiation Tactics.

Pretty much all of us have come across a situation where we have to negotiate whether it is trying to convince your boss for a pay rise, closing a deal for a new home or even selling a new product or service to a potential client, in reality more often than not you will find yourself in a position where you have to put forth your best foot to explain your reasons for your proposal or argument or convince somebody else to help you do something...