Blog Entries tagged 'Psychology'

School or Church: Can Where You Vote Impact How You Vote?

rsambandam@trchome.com — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 01:00:00 +0100

It is election day and you do your civic duty by going to your designated polling place, standing in line, chatting with a couple of nice people, drawing the curtain and pulling the lever. Do you notice where you have voted? Of course, it's at your local school (or church or firehouse). Did that have any influence on how you voted? Of course not, right? Not so fast. New research (by Jonah Berger, Marc Meredith and Christian Wheeler) indicates that the type of polling place can have a subt [...]

Jeopardy! Explains Gender Differences

rsambandam@trchome.com — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 01:00:00 +0100

OK, so Jeopardy! cannot possibly explain all the differences between the genders, but it helps quite a bit in understanding financial risk taking because of its unique format. Researchers studying gender differences in risk taking have known that men and women are different in several ways. For example, in general men are more willing to take risks, single women allocate less wealth to risky assets compared to single men, women have lower risk tolerance on health and retirement issues, women [...]

Does the Bradley Effect Exist?

rsambandam@trchome.com — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 01:00:00 +0100

The Bradley Effect is quite often mentioned in the media as we approach the Presidential election. It refers to the under-performance of a black candidate as compared to poll numbers. A good summary of various issues can be found here. A lot of the information about this effect is speculative or based on sparse polling numbers from other races which have led to questions of whether the effect really existed, whether it was seen in other races and whether in 2008 it is still likely to be seen. [...]

What's in a Name (or Initial)?

rsambandam@trchome.com — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 01:00:00 +0100

Do names have an impact on performance? How about initials? Would major league baseball players with the initial K strikeout more than others? Would people with intials C or D perform worse in class? Are people with white or black sounding names likely to be more or less successful in life? Interesting research has been done in both the areas of initials and names and the results are seemingly contradictory.

The research on initials (Nelson and Simmons) relies on a previously demon [...]

What You See is Not What You Drink

rsambandam@trchome.com — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 01:00:00 +0100

In a series of classic studies done in the 1960's, the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget showed how children can misperceive volume. When colored liquid was poured from a taller cylinder to a shorter wider cylinder, they thought the volume of liquid had decreased. These primary school children were using only the height of the container when making volume judgments and were hence making mistakes. Ah, you say, they are children and are naive enough not to understand that more th [...]

Tom Sawyer and the Two Market Theory

rsambandam@trchome.com — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 01:00:00 +0100

In Mark Twain's classic novel Tom Sawyer is white washing a fence because his aunt told him to do it. In other words, it's work. But Tom soon convinces his friends that whitewashing the fence is a privilege and even gets them to pay him for a chance to try their hand at it. Twain makes the larger point that whether something is work or not is based on whether one gets paid for it. In this case work becomes a privilege when the worker has to pay to take part, as opposed to being paid f [...]