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POPSPower and the Illusion of Control "We conducted four experiments exploring the relationship between power and illusory control - the belief that one has the ability to influence outcomes that are largely determined by chance," said Galinksy, "In each experiment, whether the participant recalled power by an experience of holding power or it was manipulated by randomly assigning participants to Manager-Subordinate roles, it led to perceived control over outcomes that were beyond the reach of the individual. Furthermore, the notion of being able to control a 'chance' result led to unrealistic optimism and inflated self-esteem."
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POPSTrust Your Gut: Too Much Thinking Leads To Bad Choices In the first study, participants rated Chinese ideograms for attractiveness. In a following study, participants were asked to judge paintings that were widely considered high- or low-quality. Subsequent groups of participants rated jellybeans and apartments. In all the studies, some participants were encouraged to deliberate and others to go with their gut. The more complex the decision, the less useful deliberation became. For example, when participants rated apartments on just three primary characteristics (location, price, and size) deliberation proved useful. But when the decision became more complex (with nine characteristics) the participants who deliberated made worse decisions.
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POPS'It takes 2 to know 1': Shared experiences change self-recognition The findings imply that shared experiences may influence the way we perceive ourselves and possibly the way we interact with others. Dr Tsakiris explains, "If I feel that you are more like me, I might then behave to you in a different way. We now test whether shared experiences can make us stereotype others less, or change our attitudes towards people of different social groups, race or gender."
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POPSWhen giving gifts, the price is wrong In three different investigations of gift exchanges among adults, the researchers consistently found that givers wrongly assumed that money spent on gifts buys recipients’ appreciation. “I suspect we’d see different results if we studied gift appreciation among children,” Flynn predicts. Kids, more than adults, focus primarily on the nature of a gift rather than its source. Gift givers reported that relatively expensive purchases best conveyed their thoughtfulness and consideration, the Stanford researchers say. Givers apparently spent more on gifts to impress recipients with the givers’ caring, not their cash, the researchers suggest. Yet recipients preferred gifts that they really needed or that had special personal meaning, regardless of price.
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POPSToo much commitment may be unhealthy for relationships It also factors into one or more partners developing manic, obsessive (or needy) behaviors with regard to love. RCSE might place one at risk for serious mood changes after break-ups, divorce or threats to one's relationship. Identifying it during the early stages of a relationship can prevent such negative outcomes or help partners recognize that they are incompatible.
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POPSTaking A Shower Improves Moral Judgment The research was conducted through two experiments with university students. In the first, they were asked to complete a scrambled sentence task involving 40 sets of four words each. By underlining any three words, a sentence could be formed. For the neutral condition, the task contained 40 sets of neutral words, but for the cleanliness condition, half of the sets contained words such as ‘pure, washed, clean, immaculate, and pristine’. The participants were then asked to rate a series of moral dilemmas including keeping money found inside a wallet, putting false information on a resume and killing a terminally ill plane crash survivor in order to avoid starvation. The second experiment saw the students watch a ‘disgusting’ film clip before rating the same moral dilemmas. However, half the group were asked to first wash their hands.
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POPSGossip more powerful than truth 
The researchers then took the game a step further and showed the students the actual decisions people had made. But they also supplied false gossip that contradicted that evidence. In these cases, the students based their decisions to award money on the gossip, rather than the hard evidence, showing such information is a powerful tool, Sommerfeld said. "Rationally if you know what the people did, you should care, but they still listened to what others said," he said. "They even reacted on it if they knew better." Researchers have long used similar games to study how people cooperate and the impact of gossip in groups. Scientists define gossip as social information spread about a person who is not present, Sommerfeld said. In evolutionary terms, gossip can be an important tool for people to acquire information about others' reputations or navigate through social networks at work and in their everyday lives, the study said. One example could be using gossip to learn tha
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POPSFear Factor: How Herd Mentality Drives Us "Whether it's the fear of being the odd person out, whether it's the fear of uncertainty or the fear of losing your shirt in the market, the fear starts to compel you to do something, because a million years ago, that fear meant you probably had to run or fight," Berns said. But reactions that saved our ancestors from saber-toothed tigers don't make as much sense on the floor of the Stock Exchange. Financial historian Jeff Madrick says that's how we got into trouble in the first place - by developing the notion that the stock is highly rational. "That encouraged this herd behavior," he said. "People would say, 'The stock market is right. Let's get in here.' That was the mythology that fed the herd behavior." So the group think that helped build the bubble is now leading the charge to pop it. "I think there's probably a panic now," Madrick said. Berns agreed: "You could call it panic; I would." But the Bronx Zoo's Pat Thomas says, "It's definitely a survival mechanism."
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POPSNever Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death The common view of death as a great mystery usually is brushed aside as an emotionally fueled desire to believe that death isn’t the end of the road. And indeed, a prominent school of research in social psychology called terror management theory contends that afterlife beliefs, as well as less obvious beliefs, behaviors and attitudes, exist to assuage what would otherwise be crippling anxiety about the ego’s inexistence. Yet a small number of researchers, including me, are increasingly arguing that the evolution of self-consciousness has posed a different kind of problem altogether. This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start.
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POPSScientists adapt economics theory to trace brain's information flow Scientists believed the frontoparietal cortex was influencing the visual cortex, but the brain scanning approach they were using, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), can only complete scans about once every two seconds, which was much too slow to catch that influence in action. When researchers applied Granger causality, though, they were able to show conclusively that as volunteers waited for the stimulus to appear, the frontoparietal cortex was influencing the visual cortex, not the reverse.
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POPSComplex decision? Don't sleep on it Since its publication two years ago by a Dutch research team in the journal Science, the earlier finding had been used to encourage decision-makers to make "snap" decisions (for example, in the best-selling book Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell) or to leave complex choices to the powers of unconscious thought ("Sleep on it", Dijksterhuis et al., Science, 2006). But in the new study, to be published in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, scientists ran four experiments in which participants were presented with complex decisions and asked to choose the best option immediately ("blink"), after a period of conscious deliberation ("think"), or after a period of distraction ("sleep on it"), which is claimed to encourage "unconscious thought processes". In all experiments, there was some evidence that conscious deliberation can lead to better choices and little evidence for superiority of choices made "unconsciously".
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POPSHumans' response to risk can be unnecessarily dangerous, study The results of Lotem's research may also be used by economists, politicians and psychologists, who need to know when people will take risks, says Prof. Lotem. A wider understanding of this phenomenon can affect business decisions, the economy ― and, hopefully, the number of road accidents in America each year.
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POPSI click, therefore I am: Toward outsourcing our identity There are two complementary tendencies on the Net: one which encourages keeping multiple personalities, and the other which tends to gather them in a central personality. For instance, a survey said that most people on Twitter use more than one account and a site lets users create profiles for the different facets of their personality. We can set different email addresses (sometimes called “identities”) in email programs. Other tendencies are toward reunification, as in OpenID, a “way to use a single digital identity across the Internet.” Furthermore, many social sites we could be part of, like BlogCatalog and MyBloglog will show the identity we choose to when we visit blogs, leaving a trace of our path.
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POPSMen and women are programmed differently when it comes to temptation "One interpretation of these studies is that men are unable to ward off temptation. We do not subscribe to this. Instead, we believe men simply interpret these interactions differently than women do," said Lydon. "We think that if men believed an attractive, available woman was a threat to their relationship, they might try to protect that relationship."
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POPSWhy We're All Moral Hypocrites The researchers then "constrained cognition" by asking subjects to memorize long strings of numbers. In this greatly distracted state, subjects became impartial. They thought their own transgressions were just as terrible as those of others. This suggests that we are intuitively moral beings, but "when we are given time to think about it, we construct arguments about why what we did wasn’t that bad,"
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POPSIntuition can be explained However, these memories are stored only if they affect us. In other words, for experience to be built up, there must be commitment. This means, according to Lars-Erik Björklund, that we can never read or calculate our way to all the knowledge and abilities we need in our professional life. Practical experience is indispensable and needs to be reevaluated.
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POPS'Mind's eye' influences visual perception The new findings offer an objective tool to assess the often-slippery concept of imagination. This is an interesting and fascinating experiment. It is perhaps a far shot but this may point towards the roots of human's ability and inclination to envision a future reality and than change the world around to fit this reality.
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POPS10 Ways We Get the Odds Wrong And the two last ones: IX. We Love Sunlight But Fear Nuclear Power Why "natural" risks are easier to accept. X. We Should Fear Fear Itself Why worrying about risk is itself risky. Though the odds of dying in a terror attack like 9/11 or contracting Ebola are infinitesimal, the effects of chronic stress caused by constant fear are significant. Studies have found that the more people were exposed to media portrayals of the 2001 attacks, the more anxious and depressed they were. Chronically elevated stress harms our physiology, says Ropeik. "It interferes with the formation of bone, lowers immune response, increases the likelihood of clinical depression and diabetes, impairs our memory and our fertility, and contributes to long-term cardiovascular damage and high blood pressure."
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POPSThe Nearest Thing to Mind Reading “A person can put up a good face and avoid disclosing different types of information,” he added. “You would think depressed people party less, talk less, laugh less and interact less. But the students who reported having the most depressive symptoms did those things as much as anyone else.” The researchers uncovered a few things: Stream of consciousness writing often speaks more loudly about private personality traits than do public forms of expression and those who read personal narratives written by other people can most often come up with an accurate judgment of that person’s character.
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POPSFear can be cured, soon; somewhat disquieting. One little (or not so little) concern regarding these wonderful news, is that the same mechanism can be selectively used to implant fears not only to cure them, an hardly resistible temptation for those hungry for power & control.
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POPSA perspective on perspective In 1988, psychologists Shelly Taylor and Jonathon Brown published an article making the somewhat disturbing claim that positive self-deception is a normal and beneficial part of most people’s everyday outlook. They suggested that average people hold cognitive biases in three key areas: a) viewing themselves in unrealistically positive terms; b) believing they have more control over their environment than they actually do; and c) holding views about the future that are more positive than the evidence can justify. The typical person, it seems, depends on these happy delusions for the self-esteem needed to function through a normal day. It’s when the fantasies start to unravel that problems arise.
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