Psychology

Pluralistic ignorance makes idiots of everyone

There’s a reason why you should embrace being the stupidest, most obnoxious, loud-mouthed, stick-in-the-mud of any group. In some cases, you’re providing free entertainment. In others, you’re saying what absolutely everyone else is too shy to say. Tell me if you’ve ever had this experience. You’re with a group of friends at a certain place…

Your brain is what makes broken escalators dangerous

Many people have a moment of nervousness when hopping onto a moving escalator. They should feel more nervous when they’re getting on a broken one. Climbing on broken escalators invokes a weird dizziness that’s literally called the Broken Escalator Effect. It’s strange to hear about other people’s neuroses – mostly because I have so many…

How to psychologically treat a walking corpse

People with Cotard’s Delusion believe they’re on the wrong side of The Walking Dead TV series, meaning they think they’re actually dead. How is it possible to treat them? Can you “prove” to a patient that they’re still alive? In 1880, Doctor Jules Cotard had the first of a series of what I can imagine…

An experiment showed that hospital staff were ready to kill patients

The Milgram Experiment is infamous for showing that people, in a situation they didn’t fully understand, would shock another person to death if ordered to do so. But what if people did understand what they were doing? As it turns out, that could actually make things even worse. In 1966, the phone rang at Hofling…

The “screw you” effect and other perils of informed volunteers

It’s important to keep experimental subjects in the dark; this isn’t hard when they’re rats, but can be challenging when they’re humans. An informed human being can do a lot of damage to your experiment. A misinformed one can do even more. Demand Characteristics An ideal experiment calls for the experimenter to disappear. Subjects are…

Where Emotions Hit You, Visualized

Nerves make your stomach churn; embarrassment brings a glow to your cheeks. Emotions clearly have a direct physiological effect on our bodies, and now a team of Finnish researchers has analyzed exactly how—and represented them in this visualization. To construct the maps, the researchers showed 773 participants different words, stories, movies, and expressions, and had…

Heat maps reveal where you feel emotions in your body

Emotions are as much physical as they are mental, and it appears that people from a wide range of cultures feel their emotions in the same places on their bodies. This map shows where those places are — from the blush of shame, to that warm lower-belly feeling in love. According to Gemma Tarlach, writing…

Scientists: Police can identify suspects’ faces from victims’ eyes

Rob Jenkins and a team of scientists at the University of York’s Department of Psychology have demonstrated that people can recognize a suspects’ face reflected in a victims’s cornea 80 percent of the time: Criminal investigations often use photographic evidence to identify suspects. Here we combined robust face perception and high-resolution photography to mine face…

Make people mean (or moral) with fart spray

Every day of our lives, there is the potential for us to learn new and wonderful things. Today I learned that there is such an invention as fart spray. I also learned that I can use it to manipulate people! All right, amoral manipulators of humanity! If you want to lead an angry mob some…

Why you’re usually late (and sometimes early)

Ever noticed that, when you’re hurrying through your daily routine, you always seem late? Ever wonder why, when you go somewhere new and unfamiliar, you’re always the first at the door? It’s the well-traveled road effect, and it messes with your head. If you’re the person who always arrives late for regular events, there might…

Why you should quit your New Year’s resolutions right now

We’re facing another stinking year, people. Some of you will be tempted to make some kind of promise to yourself for the new year. Don’t do it. According to the “willpower paradox,” the determination to do something weakens your will. One study uncovered what seems to be a “willpower paradox” — the very act of…

Is there really such a thing as reverse psychology?

“Reverse psychology” has been featured in everything from political speeches to folk tales. It’s been tested, but does it actually work? You decide. We’ve heard the old wisdom – tell someone they shouldn’t do something and that’s all they want to do. What is forbidden is tempting while whatever is offered is taken for granted.…

This study shows how a good metaphor can change the world

Stirring rhetoric is a celebrated aspect of art, and a controversial part of politics. But one study indicates that it could be something more. Metaphors might be able to affect the way our brains perceive the world, and the power of a good metaphor may actually have a scientific basis. Every election season people ascend…

A disturbing “care pamphlet” given to families of lobotomized soldiers

After World War II, many veterans suffered post-traumatic stress and other mental illnesses. Now, long-buried documents have come to light that reveal how nearly 2,000 of these soldiers who were given lobotomies in VA hospitals. They were sent home to their families with this “care” pamphlet. Photo of doctors examining a lobotomy patient via The…

Why you think you’re better than everyone else

People, as we know, have mixed abilities. One person might be more skilled than average when it comes physical ability, but lack judgment. Others excel when it comes to the ability to buckle down and work hard, but aren’t the most inspired. But not you. You’re very good at everything… at least that’s what we…

This is why advertising works — even when you think it doesn’t

Are you unfazed by ads? Annoyed by them? Do you simply “edit them out”? It doesn’t matter what the answer is, because they probably work anyway. Advertising doesn’t have to be good, it has to rely on the “mere-exposure effect.” Does something have to be good for you to like it? No. It just has…

MIT psychologists claim to have devised the world’s most dastardly difficult tongue twister. The phrase, “pad kid poured curd pulled cod,” may be nonsensical, but test subjects found it nearly impossible to repeat. “If anyone can say this [phrase] ten times quickly,” said psychologist Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, a specialist in speech-errors who helped concoct the phrase,”they…

Gut feelings could foretell future marriage happiness

Couples’ unconscious feelings can be used to better predict their future happiness than what they actually say, according to a study of newlyweds. Top photo by luc.viatour via flickr The study, published in Science, followed 135 couples for the first four years of their marriage and found that gut-level feelings, which they were either unwilling…

The 1931 experiment that paired a newborn chimp with a newborn baby

One of the earliest experiments in primate-human similarities took place all the way back in the 1930s, when a baby chimp and a baby human were raised in the same house. Shockingly, it didn’t turn out well. Project Nim, a recent documentary, popularized the story of a scientist who raised a newborn baby and a…

The inept mind-control experiment that led to 20 years of CIA funding

Ewen Cameron was the doctor in charge of the infamous CIA mind-control project MKULTRA, which drugged and tortured unwitting subjects. How does a guy get a job dosing people with LSD for a CIA brainwashing experiment? Turns out it’s a pretty weird story. Cameron, a psychiatrist working at a hospital in Montreal, started his career…