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Pricing and the brain: Why things cost $19.95
Are we really fooled when storekeepers price something at $19.95 instead of a round twenty bucks? It seems so and new research from University of Florida marketing professors Chris Janiszewski and Dan Uy shows that something fundamental might be going on in the brain when we think about the value of a commodity. Using a series of experiments Janiszewski and Uy decided to test if the precision of the opening bid might be important to how the brain acts at an auction. The researchers used hypothetical scenarios, in which participants were required to make a variety of educated guesses.
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Destined to Cheat? New Research Finds Free Will Can Keep us Honest
With the start of the New Year millions of Americans have resolved to lie less, cheat less, put the holiday hangovers behind them, or otherwise better their lives. Some will moderate their bad habits; others may make significant changes and become shining examples of integrity. But most of those well-intended New Year’s resolutions are destined to fail. In an age where cheating scandals plague elite universities and major corporations are brought down by unethical actions, the debate about the origins and nature of our decisions play into a larger debate about genetic determinism and free will. It is well established that changing people’s sense of responsibility can change their behavior.
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Do Today’s Young People Really Think They Are So Extraordinary?
When asked about the state of today’s youth, former president Jimmy Carter recently mused “I’ve been a professor at Emory University for the past twenty years and I interrelate with a wide range of students…I don’t detect that this generation is any more committed to personal gain to the exclusion of benevolent causes than others have been in the past.” Now research is beginning to support this notion. An article appearing in the February issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, found no evidence that today’s young people have inflated impressions of themselves compared to the youth of previous generations.
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Seeing is Believing, but Hearing Could Be Misleading
The game “spot-the-difference,” in which a player is presented with two photos and asked to pinpoint the variations, is an excellent example of the human brain’s ability to perceive detailed changes in complex images. Up until now, scientists proposed that our auditory and visual perceptions functioned through similar parts of the brain. But thanks to a study from the Université Bordeaux in France, that notion is about to change. Psychologists Laurent Demany, Wiebke Trost, Maja Serman and Catherine Semal discovered that, despite popular belief, our ability to detect auditory and visual changes appears to be controlled by separate mechanisms.
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Unanimous Union: The Mind and Body Together Lean Toward ‘Truthiness’
‘Truthiness,’ according to television satirist Stephen Colbert, represents the human preference to follow our intuition despite the presence of facts or evidence. For example, the more ambiguous an answer to a question, the more likely an individual will believe it is truthful. At least that is what psychologists Rick Dale of the University of Memphis, Michael Spivey of Cornell University and the late Chris McKinstry found when they asked college students questions that ranged in levels of vagueness and tracked their corresponding arm movements to clicking ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on a computer screen.
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The Human Brain: Detective of Auditory and Visual Change
The human brain is capable of detecting the slightest visual and auditory changes. Whether it is the flash of a student’s hand into the air or the faintest miscue of a flutist, the brain instantaneously and effortlessly perceives changes in our environment. Several studies have indicated, however, that even a small span of time in between pre- and post-change images can disturb the brain’s ability to detect visual discrepancies. “The pre-change scene must be memorized in some way,” explained psychologists Laurent Demany, Wiebke Trost, Maja Serman and Catherine Semal from the University of Bordeaux and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).
