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A Psychological Twist in Getting Something for Nothing
The Wall Street Journal: When consumers are offered something for nothing, they generally want to pay anyway. That’s according to a new study and a handful of businesses that say “pay-what-you-want” options for products often drive customers to pay a full price or just skip buying. Why would people act against their own economic interest? To protect self image, researchers say. Consumers “feel bad when they pay less than the ‘appropriate’ price, causing them to pass on the opportunity to purchase the product altogether,” says the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Rapid Thinkers Take Greater Risks
The Atlantic: Pop quiz: do you consider yourself a fast thinker or a slow thinker? Time's up! If you took less than a second to answer that, you might be more of a risk-taker. That's according to new research (via Psychology Today) from a team of Princeton scientists who thought there might be a causal relationship between the speed of a person's thought and their willingness to embrace dangerous behavior, such as illegal drug use and unprotected sex. The researchers, Emily Pronin and Jesse Chandler, ran two tests in a study that appeared this month in Psychological Science. Participants were divided into two groups.
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Busy bodies, healthy minds
Chicago Tribune: Carol Adamitis had a stroke when she was 5 years old. Now, at 65, she is participating in research that annually tests her physical and mental health, examining her dexterity as she places pegs in a board and her memory as she repeats a series of numbers backward and forward. The study, led by professors at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, has found that people who are active are sharper and experience lower rates of Alzheimer's disease. Although Adamitis' arthritis makes exercise more difficult, and the stroke hurt her math skills and memory, her exam results show consistency from year to year. "I'm always glad to know how I did on these tests.
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Insights From the Youngest Minds
The New York Times: CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Seated in a cheerfully cramped monitoring room at the Harvard University Laboratory for Developmental Studies, Elizabeth S. Spelke, a professor of psychology and a pre-eminent researcher of the basic ingredient list from which all human knowledge is constructed, looked on expectantly as her students prepared a boisterous 8-month-old girl with dark curly hair for the onerous task of watching cartoons. The video clips featured simple Keith Haring-type characters jumping, sliding and dancing from one group to another.
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The Future of Focus Groups: My Brain Knows What You Like
Forbes: Sometimes what you don’t know you know is where the action is. With lessons about both personal humility and the future of focus groups, first of its kind research used brain data from a small group to predict behavior in the general public. In a research report just published online in Psychological Science, public health officials used activity in a very specific region of the brain to predict which would be the most effective of three different anti-smoking ad campaigns. Rather than focus group self-reports, or even the predictions of experts, the useful information was found to be in brain activity not represented in consciousness.
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The Spirit of Sisterhood Is in the Air and on the Air
The New York Times: When first we meet Hannah, the wondrously mopey mid-20s heroine of HBO’s new hit series “Girls,” she seems to have more strikes against her than a bowling alley at Fenway Park. Her parents have cut off her monthly stipend. Her literary-magazine boss refuses to turn her unpaid internship into a real job. Her atonal lover explores his sex fantasies on her awkwardly untitillated body. She lives in New York City. She majored in English. Yet offsetting all those slings and risk factors is a powerful defense system: girlfriends.
