Scientific American has an article about Why Things Cost $19.95. They find that the more precise the price, the less likely people are to negotiate over the value. While the evidence they suggest supports what I believe, I disagree with their conclusions.
They say that we’re more likely to believe in “$19.95″ pricing because we’re “thinking in cents” rather than in dollars. I believe that it’s because we believe precise prices are derived from precise means - from accurate portrayals of time & materials and profit margins. When we see a round number we think “Oh, they just made that number up, we can negotiate that,” but when we see a precise number we think “Well, that must really be the value of it.”
Read my post on $19.99 vs. $20.
Read: Why things cost $19.95
I’ve long noticed the “date the exciting guy when you’re younger, find the radically opposite stable nerdy guy when you’re ready to settle down and have kids” phenomenon amongst my friends. Books like Sperm Wars posit a Richard Dawkins-esque “sexy sons” evolutionary reason for this. Women are attracted to men who will produce attractive children, making the woman’s genes more likely to continue on to future generations. However, these sexy men aren’t necessarily the type to stick around and raise the kid well, so the female will find a more stable man to raise the kids, sometimes tricking him into believing that the child is his own.
I’m not sure I agree with this theory, but it’s fun to mention at parties. Still, it’s hard to deny that my female friends often do make a very sharp turn from rock star to school teacher about the time that they have, or decide that they want to have kids.
Women see masculine men as unsuitable long-term partners, new research suggests. Conversely, the psychologists from Durham and St Andrews Universities found that men with feminine facial features are seen as more committed and less likely to cheat on their partners.
Read: Women Prefer Less Macho Men For Long-Term Relationships
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
A recent study in the UK shows that people in skilled jobs said they were happier than people in other jobs.
Professionals including doctors, solicitors, nurses, teachers and police officers were most satisfied with their lives, scoring 7.6 out of 10 on average.
Read: Health, wealth and a skilled job is the way to happiness - Independent Online Edition > Health
UK residents as a whole scored 7.3
Most people don’t appreciate an angry look, but a new University of Michigan psychology study found that some people find angry expressions so rewarding that they will readily learn ways to encourage them.
I used to think that “people crave attention in any way they can get it, and if they can’t get it in a positive way, then they go for the destructive way.” Which, I guess is a very cliche`d movie plot - guy get spurned by beautiful girl, guy turns into psycho.
This study suggests that some people may simply crave other people’s negative emotions, but I guess it could be a “self fulfilling prophecy” type thing where the high testosterone people are more prone to piss people off, which makes them crave that emotion more etc…
Read: High-testosterone people reinforced by others’ anger, new study finds
Quite a bit, actually. Psychologists gathered students to take various personality tests, and then had a separate group of people rate their Facebook personalities against the same dimensions and found that there was a strong correlation between the two.
I wonder what my facebook profile says about me?
Read: Student Facebook Profiles Are a Match - US News and World Report
The Gender Genie is an online tool, based on an algorithm, based on a study, that claims to be able to tell whether or not you’re male or female based on just your language patterns. Paste some text into The Gender Genie, click submit and it will tell you (with 80% accuracy) whether or not you’re a man or a woman.
I’ve seen similar question & answer tests that guessed whether or not you were male or female (but it’s unfortunately lost now to the vast sea of sites I visited before I del.icio.us existed).
Play with: The Gender Genie
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
In the new digital age, nerds are the new bullies. In the wake of Kathy Sierra’s death threats, this is an interesting study.
Preliminary results from the research show so-called computer geeks are becoming the new schoolyard bullies. Final results of the study, which will be completed in June, are expected to be published in the autumn.
“Traditional bullying is a power differential,” Mishna said in an interview.
“The power before could have been age, size, smartness, popularity, ability. Now it’s the perceived anonymous nature. We’d like to find out how anonymous it really is. The power now is you can put it all over (the place).”
The focus groups also revealed victims refuse to tell an adult about the abuse because they fear they will be punished in order to be protected.
“They’re scared that their parents will take away their computer privileges,” Mishna said.
Read: Schoolgirls bullied into stripping online - Yahoo! News
This is one of those articles where I just want to quote the whole thing beause it doesn’t stop with the insights.
So he went out into natural habitats — city sidewalks, suburban malls — and carefully observed thousands of “laugh episodes.” He found that 80 percent to 90 percent of them came after straight lines like “I know” or “I’ll see you guys later.” The witticisms that induced laughter rarely rose above the level of “You smell like you had a good workout.”
“Most prelaugh dialogue,” Professor Provine concluded in “Laughter,” his 2000 book, “is like that of an interminable television situation comedy scripted by an extremely ungifted writer.”
He found that most speakers, particularly women, did more laughing than their listeners, using the laughs as punctuation for their sentences. It’s a largely involuntary process. People can consciously suppress laughs, but few can make themselves laugh convincingly.
“Laughter is an honest social signal because it’s hard to fake,” Professor Provine says. “We’re dealing with something powerful, ancient and crude. It’s a kind of behavioral fossil showing the roots that all human beings, maybe all mammals, have in common.”
…
When the woman watching was the boss, she didn’t laugh much at the muffin joke. But when she was the underling or a co-worker, she laughed much more, even though the joke-teller wasn’t in the room to see her. When you’re low in the status hierarchy, you need all the allies you can find, so apparently you’re primed to chuckle at anything even if it doesn’t do you any immediate good.
“Laughter seems to be an automatic response to your situation rather than a conscious strategy,” says Tyler F. Stillman, who did the experiments along with Roy Baumeister and Nathan DeWall. “When I tell the muffin joke to my undergraduate classes, they laugh out loud.”
Read: What’s So Funny? Well, Maybe Nothing - New York Times