SeeVay is a baby product store that provides comprehensive safety checklists and a curated selection of high-quality, safe baby products. Our mission is to give new moms peace of mind by ensuring their baby’s safety is always top of mind.
Jump to
In May, I flew to Chicago for the Psychological Science convention.
If you’re at all inclined to nerd out over the study of human behavior (nope, not me), the convention is one of the coolest places you’ll ever find yourself.
Dozens of top psychologists were there to present their findings on topics including happiness and well-being, memory, and goal pursuit.
Around the same time, my colleague Melia Robinson of Tech Insider was visiting Stanford University, asking students to tell her something that would blow her mind. And I thought: Who knows more about the mind than an entire convention of psychologists?
I caught up with a few of them and asked each one to tell me about a piece of research that completely blows their mind.
Here’s are the findings that make psychologists do a double-take:
Roy Baumeister, a professor at Florida State University, recently learned about some intriguing research on addiction.
For a 2010 study, researchers measured cigarette cravings among flight attendants who smoked, on both long and short flights. (Smoking is prohibited on flights.)
Results showed that flight length had no significant effect on craving levels. And interestingly, cravings were stronger at the end of the short flights than they were at the end of the long flights.
These findings suggest that people start craving cigarettes when they know they’re about to have one — not when they haven’t had one in a while.
Gabriele Oettingen, a professor at New York University and the University of Hamburg, pointed to her work on a process called “mental contrasting,” or “WOOP.”
An alternative to positive thinking, WOOP involves thinking about your goal, the best possible outcome, the personal obstacles that stand in the way, and a plan for getting around them.
Oettingen and her colleagues have found that WOOP works by affecting our nonconscious processes, which in turn influence our conscious decisions.
For example, in one clever 2014 study, researchers had college students go through the WOOP process for a social goal, like finding a girlfriend. Then those students took a reaction-time test that measured how quickly they connected words related to their present reality and their desired future. (The words were presented quickly, so the students couldn’t have consciously made the connection.)
Finally, the students indicated how motivated they were to achieve their goal.
Results showed that the students who had completed the WOOP process were more motivated to achieve their goal than students who hadn’t gone through the WOOP process. And that was largely because the WOOP-ers saw the future and reality as more closely linked.
Nicholas Epley, a professor at the Chicago University Booth School of Business, said he was fascinated by the idea that we’re more likely to act unethically when someone else is involved.
In one 2015 study, researchers had participants work in pairs: Player A would roll a die and report the number and then player B would do the same. If the players rolled the same number, they would each get that number of Euros as a reward.
Each pair rolled the dice 20 times, meaning they should have rolled the same number about three times. Instead, the average pair said they rolled the same number a whopping 16 times.
Even more interesting was that people seemed to egg each other on. Player B was more like to lie when player A lied, meaning when player A kept saying they’d rolled a high number.
A postdoctoral student who works with Henry L. Roediger, III, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, highlighted research suggesting that the drug propranolol can reduce fear in humans.
In the 2015 study, researchers had some spider-fearing women take a propranolol pill and some women pop a placebo. (None of the women knew which pill they were consuming.) Before and after they took the pill, they were asked to touch a tarantula and rate how frightened they felt.
As it turns out, all the women who’d taken propranolol touched the tarantula, while only some of the participants in the other group were able to do so. Even three months later, the women who’d taken propranolol were able to touch the tarantula.
Dan Ariely, a professor at Duke University, mentioned research that found Israeli rightists were inclined to change their political views when they saw the extreme version of their political opinions.
For the study, which was published in 2014, researchers had a group of Israeli participants watch either a video clip of a tourism campaign or a video clip that was designed to present the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a positive experience that underlied Israeli Jewish identity. The second video ended with the message, “We need the conflict in order to have the strongest army in the world.”
Participants watched these videos multiple times over the course of the months leading up to the 2013 Israeli elections.
Results showed that participants who’d seen the political videos were more likely to vote for a moderate party. Even one year after the study ended, the participants who’d seen the political videos showed a shift in their attitudes.
The researchers say this approach doesn’t threaten people, so it reduces the activation of defense mechanisms, and allows them to reconsider their positions. And responses from an earlier experiment in the study suggest that participants might have seen the messages as so extreme as to be absurd.
Robert Cialdini, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University and CEO and president of Influence at Work, pointed out that a small tweak can change people’s willingness to help you.
While we typically ask for our boss’ input or feedback on a project, studies suggest that’s a mistake. Instead, we should ask for their advice.
When you ask for someone’s opinion, they take a step back from you and your work, Cialdini said. But when you ask for their advice, they feel like they’re helping and collaborating with you. Suddenly you have an accomplice in your manager.
A previous version of this post cited a study on air rage. It has been removed since statistical critiques of the underlying research cast doubt on its claims.
Read next
source
At SeeVay, we know that the safety and well-being of your baby is your top priority. That’s why we’re dedicated to providing you with the tools you need to make sure you’re always on top of your baby’s safety. We understand that being a new mom can be overwhelming, and there’s so much information out there that it can be hard to know where to start.
