Category: insight
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Curious Psychology #4: Lies, lies, lies
How do you tell if someone is lying? Stats tell us our chances are little more than chance but a while back, Richard Wiseman (he of all that is quirky in psychology) conducted a mass participation experiment on the BBC on this very subject. The legendary Sir Robin Day was asked to talk about his…
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Curious Psychology #3: Magical Contagion
One of the more curious areas of superstition is the "Law of Contagion" – the feeling people have that when an object has been in contact with someone else that it somehow acquires their "essence". An experiment done by Psychologist Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania tested how strong this was, with distinctly surprising…
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Curious Psychology #2: Positive (and negative) thinking
Second in my occasional series of research studies that have "kept the quirky flag flying" (as picked by Richard Wiseman, Psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire) is this insight from two studies which suggest that the power of the sub-conscious over the conscious may be greater than we think. In the first, two dutch psychologists…
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Curious Psychology
I like quirky. I like offbeat things, quirky reasons why things happen. So does Richard Wiseman, a Psychologist based at the University of Hertfordshire. He’s coined a new discipline he calls ‘Quirkology‘, or "the use of scientific methods to study quirky human behaviour, or quirky methods to probe weightier topics" and has been conducting quirkological…
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Alter Ego
How people construct their online identity is an increasingly complex concept for us to understand. So what about the most obvious representation of this – Avatars? When people create their own avatars, are their real lives echoed in their digital alter egos? If you were to create your own virtual character would it be just…
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Rebel Rebel
Fascinating little piece (sub reqd) in New Scientist on the inclination we sometimes have to do the exact opposite of what someone wants us to do (like the teenage girl who deliberately goes out with the boy her parents have warned her to stay away from). Rather than being just plain contrariness this is actually…
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24 youth insights in 147 seconds
Because killer facts are often lost in the melee, the threebillion project have collated a video which assembles 24 youth related random facts, stats and insights that have hit the internet over the last 4 weeks. Each one of them “was either buried in a lengthy report or brushed over in a blog”. Enjoy.
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Everything you ever wanted to know about women
We are about to undertake a major research project into women (it’s a huge audience for us). We are just formulating our ideas for what the issues/areas are that we are potentially going to investigate – so in the spirit of open source I thought I would open it out to you guys for input.…