This is a cool article discussing memories. Apparently, even though you can’t recall them, they still exist in your gray matter. Cool.
Link:
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A placebo is a medical wonder. Scientists don’t really understand how a sugar pill can heal. Apparently, the power of the human mind is more powerful than we realize.
Link: Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.
Think you can multi-task? You can’t.
There has been a lot of research released over the past few years describing this new fact. Here’s a new paper:
Multitaskers beware: your divided attention comes at a price
Think about your favorite activity.
It could be anything – your kids, your house, your garden, fishing, sports, sewing – whatever. Take a few minutes and picture about yourself actively taking part in whatever it is. Now, think about how many people you know that enjoy this exact same activity.
Depending on the activity, you can immediately think of at least 5 people immediately. (Maybe more if it’s really popular…)
Now consider the niche you are in and the customers you are serving. Do you think this behavior exists with them? Of course it does.
Each one of your customers has a connection to other people who would be interested in your product. You should always be extending your product into that niche by referrals and introductions. It’s an easy way to expand your sales base without incurring additional costs. Being introduced to a prospect by their ‘friend’ is the fastest way to gain immediate trust and credibility.
What’s your plan for targeting groups?
From NPR:
In one of the most overlooked areas of marketing, picking the right words can either skyrocket a campaign or bury it. Many times, changing a word or two is the difference between acceptable results and stellar, out of this world results. But the language is rarely scrutinized at the same level compared to the other components of a campaign. Why is that?
There are 3 main reasons:
One – it’s hard. Writing and editing is time consuming. It takes effort and discipline. Most people (except for professional writers) don’t want to take the extra time to refine their copy.
Two – people don’t get it. Most business owners and marketers don’t realize the effect that changes to their copy will have.
Three – people don’t believe. Of those that are don’t about the power of language, many don’t believe that a few word changes will make a difference. (Personally, I can relate to this viewpoint. I shared it for many, many years. )
Don’t underestimate the words you use. Spend time going through your campaign looking for words that aren’t carrying their own weight. Change them immediately. Even a few changes will make a difference.
Continuing off yesterday’s post on heuristics.
There are ways heuristics help us. As we mentioned yesterday, using mental shortcuts eliminates the mental overhead in processing every single minute detail and decision in our life. There are times, however, where these shortcuts lead us astray.
Take the example given yesterday. As we leave the building, we follow everyone else out the exit door. This is an example of a mental heuristic called ’social proof.’ This behavior is perfectly reasonable and thousands of people use this shortcut each day. But sometimes it leads us down a terrible path.
Social proof is discussed extensively in the book:
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials)
Riots and violent outbreaks often contain elements of social proof. In the beginning, there is mostly yelling. More people show up and the level of interaction increases. People start getting angry, waving their arms, and shaking their fists. Soon, everyone is yelling, complaining, and acting with threatening behavior. A frenzy starts in the crowd. As soon as the first person makes a single violent move, the stage is set and the remaining group acts in a similar manner. Normal, sane, calm individuals start destroying things. All because of social proof.
Financial bubbles are another example of social proof gone wild. Buying a stock causes the prices to rise, which cause more buying, which causes the prices to rise, etc.
From an evolutionary standpoint, this behavior has it’s roots in survival. In both nomadic and stationary tribes, it made sense to makes decisions based on the group’s needs. Survival then was completely different than today. Things were dangerous then. You had a greater chance of staying alive if you followed the group then if you decided to make your own decisions. So we learned to follow the crowd.
Does social proof serve us now? Yes, of course it does. It help us through the day. Only in rare circumstances do these things get out of control.
We’ll discuss another particularly nasty heuristic about pricing next.
Advances in the History of Psychology has just alerted me to a fascinating short article on the work of the influential 18th-century physician Samuel Tissot, who wrote a book arguing that concentrating on books for too long damaged the mind.
The 18th century was when books were becoming cheap enough to be widely available to the middle classes and it’s interesting that this new cultural development produced a similar pseudo-medical concern about damage to the mind that we often hear today, but in a completely different direction.
While modern day technological doom-sayers suggest that technology damages the mind because it interrupts concentration, 18th century technological doom-sayers suggested that reading damaged the mind because it required too much concentration.
Neither have an evidence base, but I maintain a morbid interest in medicalised concerns about new technology and cultural innovations, which often take the same basic form but cite a cause which is always curiously in line with the authors’ prejudices.
It turns out Tissot, like many of this medical contemporaries, was also obsessed with masturbation, which he cited as the cause of madness and a host of other psychological problems.
Catholic church aside, it seems an ridiculous view to us now, but it was widely held by some of the most prominent and influential medical men of the time.
Link to Guardian ‘Beware: studying can make you ill’.
Link to AHP on ‘Read Till You’re Crazy’.
The new edition of Scientific American Mind is out an it has an excellent cover article on the psychological effects of humour and laughter.
It’s a remarkably wide-ranging article, covering everything from the effect on the immune system, to laughter’s pain killing properties to its beneficial effect on mental health.
There’s also an interesting aside on the role of humour in attraction:
In 2006 psychologists Eric R. Bressler of Westfield State College and Sigal Balshine of McMaster University in Ontario reported that women are more likely to consider a man in a photograph a desirable relationship partner if the picture is accompanied by a funny quote attributed to the man. In fact, the women preferred the funny men despite rating them, on average, less intelligent and less trustworthy.
Although the men in Bressler and Balshine’s study did not prefer witty women as partners, other research indicates that both men and women value a “sense of humor” when choosing a partner. Either way, males do seem to like ladies who laugh at their jokes. A 1990 study suggests that when women and men chat, the amount of laughing by the woman indicates both her interest in dating the man and her sexual appeal to the man. (The man’s laughter did not relate to attraction in either direction.)
The issue also has freely available online articles on ‘brain training’, the psychological effect of architecture and personality disorder with many more in the print edition.
Link to April’s SciAmMind.
Have you ever been in conversation with someone who had no idea what they were talking about? Maybe you were at a party, in a meeting, or just standing in line for a burger. And someone starts talking about a topic and they are 100% wrong. And you know it’s wrong.
(For the record, I’m not talking about differences of opinion here. I’m talking about being wrong on well-established subjects that have verifiable facts, not opinions. )
Here’s the interesting part of their blathering. They don’t realize they are wrong In fact, they truly believe they know what they are talking about. Sounds odd, right? Surely someone can’t go on endlessly without realizing they are wrong. They must have some idea that they are wrong, or at least off by a little. Right?
A Cornell University study set out to prove just that point. And, as it turns out, people who scored lower on tests results about a topic had an interesting idiosyncrasy. In addition to their low scores, they didn’t realize their own low scores. They over-estimated their ability on the tests.
The study compared 3 groups and ran tests on their expertise in humor, logical reasoning, and grammar. The low scorers and high scorers were asked to gauge their own performance. In all cases, the low scorers in the groups all significantly overestimated their performance. Every time.
Fascinating.
The explanation for this overestimate is hidden within the low scores. Because the lower percentile doesn’t have knowledge in the field, hence the low scores, they also lack the capacity to accurately evaluate their performance. They lack the metacognitive ability to asses themselves.
What does this mean for you? It means next time you hear someone spouting off on a topic and they don’t know what they are talking about, take pause before correcting them. They earnestly believe in what they are saying. You correcting them probably won’t lead anywhere except an argument, since they don’t have the capacity to correctly assess your argument.
Source article: Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments