Why you would pay more than a dollar for a dollar?
Imagine the following scenario:
You’re at a lecture and the teacher holds up a dollar, telling everyone they can bid on it and the highest bid gets it. Hey, who wouldn’t take the opportunity to buy money for less money. So far so good. There is one more rule however. Everyone can bid but the runner up (the second highest bidder) must pay up and will get no dollar.
By Tom Damen
Female politicians seem less competent in their profile pictures, because their faces are shown systematically smaller than that of male colleagues. This remarkable insight has been demonstrated in a recent research in Psychology of Women Quarterly.
By Tom Damen
Every week there is a political poll in the Netherlands. We get to hear what a small sample of the Dutch population would vote would there be elections today. We get used to them as displays about the recent performance of political parties and their leaders.
Of course this is as big as a weapon of Social Influence as they come by. The polls shape our reality of who is doing well. They thereby influence us, as they not only signal us who is ahead, but also who others will currently be more and less likely to vote for.
By Tom Damen
How long do we take when deciding whom to vote for? Well, rather quickly an article by Charles Ballew II and Alexander Todorov suggests.
Ballew and Todorov were interested to what extent facial features can influence our competency judgments of politicians, and finally also our voting choices.
In three studies they presented participants with the faces of politicians running for election. On each trial they presented participants with two faces of the politicians unknown to the participants, who were contending with one another in real life. Participants we’re asked who they thought to be the most competent and how much more so than the other contender.
Great piece on leftist dutch blog about psychological framing & how Geert Wilders creates his own political reality by introducing novel words like “left elite” and “islamisation”. Most interestingly other politicians do not pick up on this strategy (or do not know how to counter it) and adopt this terminology, thereby, in the eyes of the public, validating his viewpoints.
The article argues the left needs to create its own reality defining terminology and not to keep using rights’. It’s a bit of a read but worth every minute spent on it.
By Tom Damen
Although presidential debates are high impact and attended-to events, research shows that our opinion of who did well is often affected by much more than what was said.
In fact, a study by Fein, Goethals, Kugler showed that people’s judgments of presidential debates can be strongly influenced by their knowledge of other people’s reactions.
As an interviewer; how often can you ask the exact same question? As an interviewee; how often can you answer in the same evasive way? 12 times apparently.
Howard is unexpectedly trapped, as he cannot change his answer after the two first questions, maybe for fear of looking inconsistent. Paxman smells blood and goes for the kill.
The more often the question is asked the more obvious it seems that Howard did in fact threaten to overrule him. How beautifully this illustrates that repetition of the same question and answer over and over still gradually changes your interpretation of the content.
(Action from about 04:15 but the whole piece is worth watching)
By Tom Damen
Voting is perceived as free and rational. Citizens make whatever choices they wish, shielded from external influences by the privacy of the voting booth.
A recent study however by Abraham Rutchick, suggests that it can matter a great deal where we vote! In five studies he found that people voting in churches were more likely to support conservative candidates and agendas.
By Tom Damen
In a recent article called “It’s My Campaign, I’ll Cry if I Want to”, social psychologists Travis Ridout and Kathleen Searles investigated the use of emotions in political campaigns.
Using campaign advertising data from several U.S. Senate races from 2004, they analyzed how often particular emotional appeals are used, when they are typically used and by whom. They found that there are some systematic patterns to the use of specific emotional appeals in political campaigns
