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The Neuroscience of Social Influence
Scientific American: Before I wrote this article, I went through two stages. In the first stage, I cruised the academic journals for interesting papers. Once I found a study that grabbed me, I entered phase two: I figured out how in the world to communicate the essence of the findings to a broad audience in a comprehensible, interesting, and relatable way without skimping on the science. Not so easy. What was happening in my brain during each of these stages? Can the pattern of neurons firing in my brain predict how much this article will be retweeted on twitter?
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Distractions Can Help You Make Better Decisions
Inc: Distractions help you make better decisions, researchers say. According to a study published in the journal Psychological Science, you may be better able to make a complex decision after a period of distraction than a period of conscious focus. In the study, led by Marlene Abadie of the University of Toulouse, researchers presented participants with a complex problem-solving question. Then the participants were given either a simple matching game to distract them, a complex distraction, or a quiet period in which to focus and reflect on the problem. Read the whole story: Inc
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Do you have brain power to make an idea go viral?
The Boston Globe: What distinguishes a hot new idea from one that’s destined to be a dud? University of California, Los Angeles, researchers explored what they called the “buzz effect” by recruiting nearly 100 undergraduate students to serve as either “interns” pitching what they deemed to be the next megahit TV show or “producers” to evaluate the interns’ ideas.
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How to Get Children to Eat Veggies
The Wall Street Journal: To parents, there is no force known to science as powerful as the repulsion between children and vegetables. Of course, just as supercooling fluids can suspend the law of electrical resistance, melting cheese can suspend the law of vegetable resistance. This is sometimes known as the Pizza Paradox. There is also the Edamame Exception, but this is generally considered to be due to the Snack Uncertainty Principle, by which a crunchy soybean is and is not a vegetable simultaneously.
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Attention, Shoppers: Store Is Tracking Your Cell
The New York Times: Like dozens of other brick-and-mortar retailers, Nordstrom wanted to learn more about its customers -- how many came through the doors, how many were repeat visitors -- the kind of information that e-commerce sites like Amazon have in spades. So last fall the company started testing new technology that allowed it to track customers’ movements by following the Wi-Fi signals from their smartphones. But when Nordstrom posted a sign telling customers it was tracking them, shoppers were unnerved. ... “The creepy thing isn’t the privacy violation, it’s how much they can infer,” said Bradley Voytek, a neuroscientist who had stopped in at Philz Coffee in Berkeley, Calif.
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The Psychology of Success: Helping Students Achieve (Op-Ed) –
LiveScience: Timothy Wilson is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of "Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change" (Little, Brown and Co., 2011) and he contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Scientific practice is under intense scrutiny these days, including in research psychology. Due to some high-profile cases of scientific fraud, and concern by some about shoddy research practices, there is a lot of hand-wringing going on. This is ironic, because this should be a time for hand clapping, not hand-wringing.
