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
This is interesting. People have more confidence in small business owners than in anyone else from politicians to doctors to the religious leaders. Combine that with the fact that more students are or want to be entrepreneurs than any time in recent history & it really looks like this century is going to be the century of the small business owner.
Looking at specific institutions, we have a change at the top this year. Small business was added to the list of institutions in 2005 and tied with the military at the top of the list that first year. Last year, it was a close second to the military, but in 2007, over half of U.S. adults (54%) express a great deal of confidence in leaders of small business.
Read: Harris Interactive | The Harris Poll - Confidence in Leaders of Major Institutions: Small Business Tops the List this Year
Via: Small Business Trends
Politics is a fascinating area for me - massive PR campaigns designed to sway millions of people to a certain ideological viewpoint. A viewpoint that those who are doing the persuading may or may not actually hold, but which they espouse because that’s what the people they’re trying to influence want their leaders to espouse. Here is a meta-study that attempts to tease out what political conservativism is all about, at its core.
Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:
* Fear and aggression
* Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
* Uncertainty avoidance
* Need for cognitive closure
* Terror management
“From our perspective, these psychological factors are capable of contributing to the adoption of conservative ideological contents, either independently or in combination,” the researchers wrote in an article, “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” recently published in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin.
Read: Researchers help define what makes a political conservative