36 questions · 18 almanac · 0 findings

Psychology of Behavior and Perception

Behavioral and perceptual psychology, broadly construed.

Almanac Forty Years Staring at the Crowd
  • What central idea does Canetti's Crowds and Power argue about how individual minds dissolve inside a mass?
  • What did Canetti mean by treating the fear of death as the primal political fact behind crowd behavior?
Almanac Jell-O the Colour of No Fruit
  • What did Ivette Bassa's blue Jell-O experiment reveal about food color and perceived edibility?
  • Why are people more suspicious of foods colored outside the natural palette?
Almanac Love Looks Like a Disorder, Chemically
  • What did Marazziti's study compare between newly infatuated people and OCD patients?
  • What did the serotonin transporter levels reveal about people newly in love?
  • How did the newly infatuated group's results differ from people in long-term relationships?
Almanac Voters Reduce Leaders to Two Traits
  • Into how few dimensions do voters compress their image of political candidates, and what are they?
  • What Italian election data did Caprara, Barbaranelli, and Zimbardo analyze for the study?
Almanac Dignity, Restored in Silicone
  • What does the commercial success of Neuticles suggest about pet owners rather than about veterinary need?
Almanac Scholarship for Calling Someone a Bastard
  • What did David Sims's paper 'You Bastard' examine about how employees narrate their own workplace indignation?
  • How do the private stories people tell about being wronged at work go on to shape their later behaviour?
Almanac The Dark Triad Keeps Late Hours
  • What three traits make up the 'dark triad' of personality psychology?
  • What did the study find about the relationship between dark triad traits and preferring to stay up late?
  • Why might weaker social norms at night appeal particularly to people high in dark triad traits?
Almanac A Crocodile Changes How You Gamble
  • How did holding a live crocodile change gambling behavior differently for problem and non-problem gamblers?
  • What does the crocodile experiment suggest about the relationship between emotional arousal and compulsive betting?
  • Why did the researchers choose physiological arousal from a crocodile rather than a more conventional stressor?
Almanac Cataloguing the Sealed-Box War of Cursing Drivers
  • How common is shouting and swearing behind the wheel according to the Spanish survey of motorists?
  • Why had road-safety research largely ignored driver cursing in favor of speed and alcohol?
  • How might the emotional escalation behind cursing at other drivers affect actual driving behavior?
Almanac What the Eyebrows Give Away
  • How well could participants in Giacomin and Rule's study identify narcissism from eyebrows alone?
  • What eyebrow features were the strongest signal of higher narcissism scores?
  • How did researchers measure narcissism independently before testing whether it showed in the face?
Almanac One Distracted Walker Trips Up the Crowd
  • How did Murakami's team test the effect of phone distraction on pedestrian flow?
  • Why does a single distracted walker degrade traffic flow for everyone nearby, not just themselves?
Almanac Writing a Word Until It Dissolves
  • What is jamais vu, and how does it differ from déjà vu?
  • How did Chris Moulin's team induce jamais vu experimentally in volunteers?
Almanac Flattery the Narcissist Believed Twice As Much
  • How did Zajenkowski and Gignac test whether narcissists more readily accept flattering but false feedback?
  • What did high-narcissism participants report feeling after being told they scored above average on an intelligence test?