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. 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. Interesting Fact: the Rorschach Inkblot test was developed to use pareidolia to tap into people’s mental states. Self-fulfilling Prophecy
Acts of Kindness Ideas: Thirty Kind Deeds for Personal Growth Personal growth and development is a conscious plan for becoming a better human being. Kindness and generosity are easy qualities to nurture in oneself. Doing kind acts costs little or nothing, no special training is required, and there's no need to buy a self-help book for instruction. Kindness is a way of being, a way of behaving that is easily habituated and brings outstanding benefits to the giver, as described in Positive Psychology Studies on Happiness. Following are more than 30 acts of kindness that anyone can utilize. Self Kindness Begin the kindness-habit journey with yourself. Resolve for the next 24 hours to avoid all negative self talk.Recognize one positive aspect of your body.Recognize one of your positive personality traits.Initiate one self-care act today.Spend a full day without whining or complaining.Forgive yourself for something you regret.Forgive someone's unkindness to you.Learn something new.Take a walk by yourself in silence.Take a nap. Kindness to Others
47 Mind-Blowing Psychology-Proven Facts You Should Know About Yourself I’ve decided to start a series called 100 Things You Should Know about People. As in: 100 things you should know if you are going to design an effective and persuasive website, web application or software application. Or maybe just 100 things that everyone should know about humans! The order that I’ll present these 100 things is going to be pretty random. So the fact that this first one is first doesn’t mean that’s it’s the most important.. just that it came to mind first. Dr. <div class="slide-intro-bottom"><a href="
The uses and abuses of 'happiness' The happiness 'movement' has the potential to transform society, but do its proponents know what they're doing? William Davies sets out four strands of the debate - philosophical, statistical, economical and psychological - and shows how confusion between them is hindering progress The launch of Action for Happiness last week generated yet more debate about the meaning and value of happiness. On top of the Office of National Statistics’ (ONS) ‘national debate’ on how to define and measure ‘national wellbeing’, one can scarcely open a newspaper nowadays without discovering more political, scientific or pseudo-scientific pronouncements about what does or doesn’t make us happy. In a nation as stubbornly curmudgeonly as Britain, it is no surprise to find that the cynics seem equally delighted to have discovered so much Californian chirpiness to grumble about, right here in their own backyard. It is all very strange. There is no reason to dismiss any of this as a flash in the pan.
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. “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. In one experiment a group of people were randomly given one of two gifts — half received a decorated mug, the other half a large Swiss chocolate bar. 3. 4.
Increase your productivity at work by letting go of negative men My alma mater is currently ranked number one in all of the college men’s basketball rankings. They’ve been in the top spot for 11 of the 14 weeks of the polls, and were number one in the preseason. There are five games left in the regular season, and all of the teams Kansas has left to play would love to see the Jayhawks lose. Colorado, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Kansas State, and Missouri fans aren’t the only ones who want to see Kansas mess up their record in the last five games. Fans of the other ranked teams would be happy to see Kansas take a tumble, and, after watching some of the games this year, I’m pretty certain there are a few referees that would be glad to see Kansas lose, too. In competitive sports like basketball, a game has to end with a winner and a loser. In our work lives, however, very few things are like competitive sports. If you want to be productive and manage your time well at work, you need to let go of the belief that your workplace is a zero-sum game.
10 Practical Uses For Psychological Research in Everyday Life | People love to give each other advice. The web is full to bursting with all types of pseudo-psychological advice about life. The problem is, how much of this is based on real scientific evidence? Well, here on PsyBlog we’ve got the scientific evidence. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Foot-in-the-door technique The principle involved is that a small agreement creates a bond between the requester and the requestee. Even though the requestee may only have agreed to a trivial request out of politeness, this forms a bond which - when the requestee attempts to justify the decision to themselves - may be mistaken for a genuine affinity with the requester, or an interest in the subject of the request. When a future request is made, the requestee will feel obliged to act consistently with the earlier one.[5] The reversed approach - making a deliberately outlandish opening demand so that a subsequent, milder request will be accepted - is known as the door-in-the-face technique. Classic experiments[edit] In an early study, a team of psychologists telephoned housewives in California and asked if the women would answer a few questions about the household products they used. [edit] Environmental applications[edit] Examples[edit] "Can I go over to Suzy's house for an hour?" Charitable donation[edit] Notes
List of Values The following list of values will help you develop a clearer sense of what's most important to you in life, as explained in the article Living Your Values. Simply print out this page, mark the values which most resonate with you, and then sort your list in order of priority. As you scan the values list below, you may find that while most values have little or no significance to you (and some may even seem negative to you), there are those values that just jump out and call to you, and you feel, "Yes, this value is part of me." Steve RecommendsHere are my recommendations for products and services I've reviewed that can improve your results. Site Build It! 7 Secrets of the Super Organized A few years ago, my life was a mess. So was my house, my desk, my mind. Then I learned, one by one, a few habits that got me completely organized. Am I perfect? So what’s the secret? Are these obvious principles? If your life is a mess, like mine was, I don’t recommend trying to get organized all in one shot. So here are the 7 habits: Reduce before organizing. If you take your closet full of 100 things and throw out all but the 10 things you love and use, now you don’t need a fancy closet organizer. How to reduce: take everything out of a closet or drawer or other container (including your schedule), clean it out, and only put back those items you truly love and really use on a regular basis. Write it down now, always.
10 Brilliant Social Psychology Studies | PsyBlog Ten of the most influential social psychology experiments explain why we sometimes do dumb or irrational things. “I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures.Why do good people sometimes act evil?Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?” –Philip Zimbardo Like famous social psychologist Professor Philip Zimbardo (author of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil), I’m also obsessed with why we do dumb or irrational things. The answer quite often is because of other people — something social psychologists have comprehensively shown. Each of the 10 brilliant social psychology experiments below tells a unique, insightful story relevant to all our lives, every day. Click the link in each social psychology experiment to get the full description and explanation of each phenomenon. 1. The halo effect is a finding from a famous social psychology experiment. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Ben Franklin effect The Ben Franklin effect is a psychological finding: A person who has done someone a favor is more likely to do that person another favor than they would be if they had received a favor from that person. Similarly, one who harms another is more willing to harm them again than the victim is to retaliate.[1] Recognition of effect by Franklin[edit] In the words of Benjamin Franklin, who famously observed the effect and for whom it is named, "He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged. In his autobiography, Franklin explains how he dealt with the animosity of a rival legislator when he served in the Pennsylvania legislature in the 18th century: Having heard that he had in his library a certain very scarce and curious book, I wrote a note to him, expressing my desire of perusing that book, and requesting he would do me the favour of lending it to me for a few days. Effect as an example of cognitive dissonance[edit] Notes[edit]
The Big Five Personality Test Directions: The following statements concern your perception about yourself in a variety of situations. Your task is to indicate the strength of your agreement with each statement, utilizing a scale in which 1 denotes strong disagreement, 5 denotes strong agreement, and 2, 3, and 4 represent intermediate judgments. In the boxes after each statement, click a number from 1 to 5 from the following scale: Strongly disagreeDisagreeNeither disagree nor agreeAgreeStrongly agree There are no "right" or "wrong" answers, so select the number that most closely reflects you on each statement. Action for Happiness