File this one under “even I didn’t fully expect that.” I’m a strong believer in the power of the subconscious mind, and that people make decisions before they ever consciously consider the reasons for them.
At Yale, they had a number of students bump into the lab assistant who was holding a lot of books. The assistant asked them to hold a cup of coffee and The students who held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot java.
That’s pretty serious - just a small thing like that their characterization of the person changed.
Read: The Subconcious Brain - Who’s Minding the Mind? - New York Times
Utterly fascinating article about the use & abuse of power, disproportionate access to resources based on chance, rules, and individual will. All told through the eyes of 3rd graders playing with Lego.
Children dug through hefty-sized bins of Legos, sought “cool pieces,” and bartered and exchanged until they established a collection of homes, shops, public facilities, and community meeting places. We carefully protected Legotown from errant balls and jump ropes, and watched it grow day by day.
After nearly two months of observing the children’s Legotown construction, we decided to ban the Legos.
Read: Why We Banned Legos - Volume 21 No. 2 - Winter 2006 - Rethinking Schools Online
This doesn’t really surprise me. If you see someone trip & fall, you feel it, you react to it as if it happened to you. Ever since they discovered mirror neurons, it’s been no secret that seeing, thinking about, and doing something are one thing to the brain.
The researchers predicted that when they gave the subjects a cue that they were about to perform a hard task, only the superior parietal cortex, known for its involvement in spatial attention, and the premotor cortex, known for planning movements, would activate. Then, the prefrontal cortex, known for its role in decision-making, would activate after the stimulus was presented. But they were wrong.
“We found that all of these regions began to activate when the subjects prepared to do the task, even the prefrontal, which is the region that makes the decision on what to do,” said Schumacher. “Activating the decision-making region even before the stimulus is presented seems to allow for a quicker response, it allows the brain to get a running start.”
Read: Preparation And Performance Are One Brain Process
Subliminal messages - for years science has wondered whether or not we could pick up on messages below the level of consciousness, and whether or not those messages could influence our behavior. While I believe the answer to both of those questions is an affirmative ‘yes,’ science hasn’t done much to demonstrate that this is possible. But we’re making progress.
Using fMRI, the study looked at whether an image you aren’t aware of — but one that reaches the retina — has an impact on brain activity in the primary visual cortex, part of the occipital lobe. Subjects’ brains did respond to the object even when they were not conscious of having seen it.
Dr Bahador Bahrami, of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and the UCL Department of Psychology, said: “What’s interesting here is that your brain does log things that you aren’t even aware of and can’t ever become aware of. We show that there is a brain response in the primary visual cortex to subliminal images that attract our attention — without us having the impression of having seen anything. These findings point to the sort of impact that subliminal advertising may have on the brain. What our study doesn’t address is whether this would then influence you to go out and buy a product. I believe that it’s likely that subliminal advertising may affect our decisions — but that is just speculation at this point.”
Read: ScienceDaily: Subliminal Advertising Leaves Its Mark On The Brain (via son of parnas)
Psychopaths tend to make better stock traders than regular people.
The scientists found emotions led some of the group to avoid risks even when the potential benefits far outweighed the losses, a phenomenon known as myopic loss aversion.
One of the researchers, Antione Bechara, an Associate Professor of Neurology at the University of Iowa, said the best stock market investors might plausibly be called “functional psychopaths.”
Read: Psychopaths to rule fin markets? (via Mindpixel Blog)
People are capable of making rational decisions, but the moment you introduce stress, that ability goes out the window. It’s already been demonstrated that being around friends can impair your memory, and now research shows that people lose the ability to perform calculations in stressful situations.
“People tend to have a hard time evaluating numbers, even when the numbers are clear and right in front of them,” Arvai said. “In contrast, the emotional responses that are conjured up by problems like terrorism and crime are so strong that most people don’t factor in the empirical evidence when making decisions.”
So we can’t remember things when we’re with people, and we can’t think clearly under stress. What chance do we have to make good decisions? Pretty good, actually. Gary Klein in his book Sources of Power studied people who made decisions in high-stress situations - fire chiefs, nurses, etc. What he found was that when placed in a high-stress situation (and any deadline situation is a high stress situation, even if that deadline is 6 months away), rather than listing alternatives and weighing possibilities, we came up with a scenario, ran through it looking for flaws, and then acted on it. The best way to train for these situations is to live through them, or to listen to the stories of people who have. This allows us to build a mental model of how things should go & identify, however subconsciously, when it’s going wrong.
Read: Decision making isn’t always as rational as you think (or hope) (via Crazy on Tap)
Whenever I watch game shows and they ask people inane questions and they can’t get them, I never assume they’re idiots. Plenty of people have a hard time remembering things under pressure. Now we know that people have a hard time remembering things in most social situations.
Researchers from Indiana University found that people in a group setting exposed to brand information - such as an ad for Pizza Hut — have a hard time recalling the brand’s competitors. In other words, being around friends when deciding where to order takeout might cause you to forget completely about that local pizza place you’ve been wanting to try.
Being Around Friends Can Impair Your Memory