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Unraveling Mysteries of Safe Steering with Behavioral Science
We may take it for granted, but exactly how we steer a car has remained a mystery to researchers for nearly 70 years. The prevailing theory for how we steer towards a target was initially developed by British researcher Arnold Tustin in 1947. Tustin was a pioneer in the engineering field of control theory which focuses on the interactions between humans and complex machines.
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It’s Crazy How Easy It Is to Make People Falsely Remember Committing a Crime
New York Magazine: Memory's a pretty fluid and complex thing. We don't always remember specific details of an event well, and what details we do remember can be influenced by stuff that happened after the event itself. This is all pretty standard when it comes to memory research. What the authors of a new paper in Psychological Science just pulled off, though, takes things to a whole new level: They were able to convince study participants they had committed a crime that was completely fabricated.
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Love is … getting the answers to all these 36 questions right
The Guardian: The 36 questions that can make you “fall in love with anyone” were first published in 1997, in an academic paper by psychologist Arthur Aron and others, under the title The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings. The questions appeared in the appendix, along with the instructions that the team had given each pair, which began “This is a study of interpersonal closeness, and your task, which we think will be quite enjoyable, is simply to get close to your partner.” Participants were told to work their way through the questions in order, each answering all 36 questions, over a period of about an hour.
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The Psychological Reason ‘Billie Jean’ Kills at Weddings
The Atlantic: “… Baby, One More Time” is not a good song. You could make a convincing argument, in fact, that it is an actively terrible song: devoid of musical merit, underdeveloped, overproduced, eroding our collective IQs one oh, baby, baby at a time—a notable roadblock, basically, on humanity’s long march toward the hazy destination of Progress. And yet: I love “… Baby, One More Time” with the kind of mindless devotion I normally reserve for family, friends, and late-night Taco Bell.
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Puppy vs. puppy: Tail of Super Bowl ads
USA Today: The Super Bowl is fast-evolving into a Puppy Bowl of marketing. Two of the game's biggest advertisers — Anheuser-Busch and GoDaddy — will feature golden retriever puppies as stars in their upcoming Super Bowl commercials. What's more, both ads are about lost puppies. And, for the 11th consecutive year, Animal Planet plans to air — opposite the Super Bowl — its "Puppy Bowl" broadcast, featuring nothing but puppies at play. Sounds cute, right? Don't be fooled by the puppy breath and furry fellas. It's all about capturing the attention of the game's viewers by highly competitive marketers spending a record $4.5 million per 30-second time slot in the Feb. 1 contest.
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Creating a New Mission Statement
The New York Times: Forget the New Year’s resolution. This year, try creating a personal mission statement instead. While it is common for businesses to define goals and values with mission statements, most people never take the time to identify their individual senses of purpose. Most focus on single acts of self-improvement — exercising more, eating more healthfully, spending more time with family — rather than examining the underlying reasons for the behavior, says Jack Groppel, co-founder of the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute, an Orlando-based coaching firm.
