When Situations Not Personality Dictate Our Behaviour
A fundamental mistake we often make when judging other people is assuming that their behaviour mainly reflects their personality. Unfortunately this ignores another major influence on how people behave staring us right in the face: the situation.
New Deepak Chopra iPhone App
Deepak Chopra, author and proponent of alternative medicine, is developing a new series of iPhone applications designed to tackle stress. The first in the series — 'Stress Free' — has just been released for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The app combines traditional Vedic principles with activities drawn from evidence-based psychological research.
How Other People’s Unspoken Expectations Control Us
A good exercise for learning about yourself is to think about how other people might view you in different ways. Consider how your family, your work colleagues or your partner think of you.
Our Minds Are Black Boxes – Even to Ourselves
We all have intuitive theories about how our own and other people's minds work. Unfortunately psychological research demonstrates that these theories are often wrong. The gulf between how we think our minds work and how they actually work is sometimes so huge it's laughable.
Basking in Reflected Glory
Here in England we have a strange tradition called 'test cricket'. It's a ridiculous game that goes on for five days, stops for tea and bad light, has impenetrable rules, weird names for fielding positions like 'silly-mid-on' and 'short-backward-leg' and which frequently ends, after the aforementioned five days, with neither side victorious.
Ads For Unhealthy Foods Increase Children’s Consumption 45%
Nowadays the word 'obesity' is rarely seen in print without its partner-in-crime, 'epidemic'. The developed world seems to be intent on eating itself to death and no small proportion of the newly obese are children: one-third in the US, with a further third at risk.
The Chameleon Effect
Self-help books, persuasion manuals and glossy magazine articles often advise that mimicking body language can increase how much others like us. But is it really true that mimicry causes others to like us, or is mimicry just a by-product of successful social interactions?
