Personalities. Mental Disorders. Top 10 Common Faults In Human Thought. Humans The human mind is a wonderful thing. Cognition, the act or process of thinking, enables us to process vast amounts of information quickly. For example, every time your eyes are open, you brain is constantly being bombarded with stimuli. You may be consciously thinking about one specific thing, but you brain is processing thousands of subconscious ideas. Unfortunately, our cognition is not perfect, and there are certain judgment errors that we are prone to making, known in the field of psychology as cognitive biases.
They happen to everybody regardless of age, gender, education, intelligence, or other factors. The Gambler’s fallacy is the tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality, they are not. Reactivity is the tendency of people to act or appear differently when they know that they are being observed. Pareidolia is when random images or sounds are perceived as significant. Self-fulfilling Prophecy Escalation of Commitment. Top 10 Thinking Traps Exposed. Our minds set up many traps for us. Unless we’re aware of them, these traps can seriously hinder our ability to think rationally, leading us to bad reasoning and making stupid decisions. Features of our minds that are meant to help us may, eventually, get us into trouble. Here are the first 5 of the most harmful of these traps and how to avoid each one of them. 1. The Anchoring Trap: Over-Relying on First Thoughts “Is the population of Turkey greater than 35 million?
Lesson: Your starting point can heavily bias your thinking: initial impressions, ideas, estimates or data “anchor” subsequent thoughts. This trap is particularly dangerous as it’s deliberately used in many occasions, such as by experienced salesmen, who will show you a higher-priced item first, “anchoring” that price in your mind, for example. What can you do about it? Always view a problem from different perspectives. 2. Consider the status quo as just another alternative. 3.
Be OK with making mistakes. 4. 5. How to Detect Lies - body language, reactions, speech patterns. Interesting Info -> Lying Index -> How to Detect Lies Become a Human Lie Detector (Part 1) Warning: sometimes ignorance is bliss. After gaining this knowledge, you may be hurt when it is obvious that someone is lying to you. The following deception detection techniques are used by police, forensic psychologists, security experts and other investigators.
Introduction to Detecting Lies: This knowledge is also useful for managers, employers, and for anyone to use in everyday situations where telling the truth from a lie can help prevent you from being a victim of fraud/scams and other deceptions. This is just a basic run down of physical (body language) gestures and verbal cues that may indicate someone is being untruthful. If you got here from somewhere else, be sure to check out our Lie Detection index page for more info including new research in the field of forensic psychology. Signs of Deception: Body Language of Lies: • A person who is lying to you will avoid making eye contact.
Bored? Are we more -- or less -- moral than we think? If asked whether we'd steal, most of us would say no. Would we try to save a drowning person? That depends—perhaps on our fear of big waves. Much research has explored the ways we make moral decisions. But in the clinch, when the opportunity arises to do good or bad, how well do our predictions match up with the actions we actually take? A study by Rimma Teper, Michael Inzlicht, and Elizabeth Page-Gould of the University of Toronto Scarborough tested the difference between moral forecasting and moral action—and the reasons behind any mismatch. Published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association of Psychological Science, the findings look encouraging: Participants acted more morally than they would have predicted. But lest we get sentimental about that result, lead author and psychology PhD candidate Teper offers this: "There has been other work that has shown the opposite effect—that people are acting less morally" than they forecast.
The philosophy of The Matrix. In The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999) Keanu Reeves plays a computer programmer who leads a double life as a hacker called “Neo”. After receiving cryptic messages on his computer monitor, Neo begins to search for the elusive Morpheus (Laurence Fishburn), the leader of a clandestine resistance group, who he believes is responsible for the messages. Eventually, Neo finds Morpheus, and is then told that reality is actually very different from what he, and most other people, perceives it to be.
Morpheus tells Neo that human existence is merely a facade. In reality, humans are being ‘farmed’ as a source of energy by a race of sentient, malevolent machines. The Matrix is based on a philosophical question posed by the 17th Century French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes. Everything I have accepted up to now as being absolutely true and assured, I have learned from or through the senses. Descartes’s argument is an epistemological one. Like this: Like Loading...
Dan Ariely asks, Are we in control of our own decisions? Why the #$%! Do We Swear? For Pain Relief. Bad language could be good for you, a new study shows. For the first time, psychologists have found that swearing may serve an important function in relieving pain. The study, published today in the journal NeuroReport, measured how long college students could keep their hands immersed in cold water.
During the chilly exercise, they could repeat an expletive of their choice or chant a neutral word. When swearing, the 67 student volunteers reported less pain and on average endured about 40 seconds longer. Although cursing is notoriously decried in the public debate, researchers are now beginning to question the idea that the phenomenon is all bad. How swearing achieves its physical effects is unclear, but the researchers speculate that brain circuitry linked to emotion is involved. One such structure is the amygdala, an almond-shaped group of neurons that can trigger a fight-or-flight response in which our heart rate climbs and we become less sensitive to pain.
Eight Ways to Spot Emotional Manipulation. List of cognitive biases. Systematic patterns of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from norm and/or rationality in judgment. They are often studied in psychology, sociology and behavioral economics.[1] Although the reality of most of these biases is confirmed by reproducible research,[2][3] there are often controversies about how to classify these biases or how to explain them.[4] Several theoretical causes are known for some cognitive biases, which provides a classification of biases by their common generative mechanism (such as noisy information-processing[5]). Gerd Gigerenzer has criticized the framing of cognitive biases as errors in judgment, and favors interpreting them as arising from rational deviations from logical thought.[6] Explanations include information-processing rules (i.e., mental shortcuts), called heuristics, that the brain uses to produce decisions or judgments.
Belief, decision-making and behavioral[edit] Anchoring bias[edit] Project Reason | BEHAVIORAL Foundations for Value Ethics - Part 1. Gay Or Straight? Body Language Reveals Sexual Orientation « intellectual vanities… about close to everything. An individual’s body motion and body type can offer subtle cues about their sexual orientation, but casual observers seem better able to read those cues in gay men than in lesbians, according to a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Good data, biased interpretation. As probably the researchers have been straight, they missed the term “gay-dar” used for this sensing ability within the community. As such, this study shows much less about allegedly treacherous body language but about perception stereotypes: “gender-atypical combinations were perceived generally to be homosexual”, as the authors put it. Or more frankly: what seems queer is classified as queer.
Volunteers were filmed and analyzed as they walked on a treadmill for two minutes. Johnson and colleagues at New York University and Texas A&M measured the hips, waists and shoulders of eight male and eight female volunteers, half of whom were gay and half straight. Kimmel SB, Mahalik JR. Like this: How to Change the Way You Process Negative Memories. The way we think of past events in our lives is very flexible and subject to change. Whenever we look back at our life story, it can change based on our perspective and what information about our lives we choose to pay attention to and find important. We can take this flexible nature of our minds and use it to process negative memories in different ways that benefit us instead of holding us back.
Memories are flexible Memories are never as picture perfect as we think they are. In fact, every time we recall an event it changes from the last time we remembered it. A recent study published in The Journal of Neuroscience illustrates this phenomenon quite well. Interestingly, researchers found that on the third day, participants placed the object closer to the incorrect location they chose on the second day rather than the correct location. This shows that our past retrieval of memories can influence how we think of memories in the future.
“Memories aren’t static. Psychotherapists: Mechanics, Surgeons, or Rehab Workers? Have you ever noticed that people often think that psychotherapists are like car mechanics? It reminds me of an old boyfriend of mine who used to give nicknames to the women he was dating. My nickname was “crazy mechanic girl.” In his tongue and cheek way, he coined the nickname because he thought that, as a psychotherapist, I fix crazy people. This idea is a misconception at so many levels! First of all, going to therapy doesn’t make you crazy and, second of all, therapists don’t fix their patients. But I think the misconception stems from the hope that a therapist actually fix you. After all, you come to therapy because you feel broken. The mechanic model doesn’t quite capture real psychotherapists, though. As an alternative to the mechanic model, many of my patients think of me as a kind of psychological surgeon.
I don’t blame them. The model that I like the best is that a psychotherapist is like a mental health rehabilitation worker. Copyright 2012 Jennifer Kunst, Ph.D. Like it!