Category: Psychology

Although cognitive dissonance is a powerful, well-known predictor of human thought and behaviour, its limits are less well understood.

People often display a striking ability to change both their behaviour and their view of the world to try and make it self-consistent. For example, people will interpret seemingly inconsistent information to support their own view of the world and they will adjust their attitudes to make it consistent with their behaviour. One example is that people often value a club or society more if it is harder to get into, even if it turns out to be rubbish.

Continue reading “When Cognitive Dissonance Doesn’t Matter”

Classic psychology studies show just how little access we have to the workings of our own minds.

Ever wondered where your opinions come from, how you manage to be creative, or how you solve problems? Well, don’t bother. Psychology studies examining these areas and more have found that while we’re good at inventing plausible explanations, these explanations are frequently completely made-up.

In this series of posts, I examine some of the classic findings in psychology that show we have precious little insight into our own thought processes.

Continue reading “What Everyone Should Know About Their Own Minds”

From humble beginnings, self-help books have now colonised huge and ever-growing areas of bookshops. Best-selling titles like ‘Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus‘, or ‘Don’t Worry, Make Money‘ promise to teach us how to fix our relationships and live ‘more fully’. But are these, and other come-ons, just empty assurances designed to sell a product?

Continue reading “Is Modern Self-Help Just a Massive Money-Making Scam?”

Accessing our own higher mental processes is often difficult. Psychologists have found it easy to manipulate the reasons we give for decisions, judgements or actions. Worse than this, even when we’re not actively being manipulated, we regularly fool ourselves without the need of any encouragement.

But are these mistakes systematic in any way? Nisbett and Wilson (1977) provide five factors likely to have a huge effect on how accurately we report our own higher mental processes. These give us useful clues about when we’re most likely to be fooling ourselves.

Continue reading “When We Are Fools to Ourselves”

Who do you turn to for a helping hand?

For some common mental health problems people are good at helping each other without the need for professionals. Research has shown face-to-face support groups can be effective for people with depression, chronic mental illness and bereavement. But for those who can’t get to a face-to-face support group, or don’t want to, there’s another rapidly growing option: online support groups.

Continue reading “Can You Recommend an Online Support Group?”

Psychologists are skilled at inventing unusual tests of human thought and behaviour, but some research is pretty weird. Over the past few months I’ve been examining some of the weirdest studies around. There’s research into psychic dogs, invasions from Mars, the antidepressant properties of semen, pigeon-guided missiles and men’s urination.

Continue reading “10 Weird Psychology Studies: Vote Now For Your Favourite!”

A classic 1931 experiment shows how the mechanics of our own problem-solving are often a puzzle to us.

The process of human creativity is both fascinating and, at the same time, mystifying. Understanding the mental processes of great thinkers offers an enormous reward to any who can replicate them: immortality. Perhaps if we really understood what was going through their minds, we too could create an object or idea that would live long after our deaths.

Continue reading “Why Problem Solving Itself is a Puzzle, Even to Poincare and Picasso”

When you change your attitude about something, do you know why? Psychologists have argued that the inner workings of our minds are largely hidden away from us. One aspect of this is the surprising finding that people are often unaware when they have changed their attitudes.

Continue reading “Our Secret Attitude Changes”

How do great artists create? How do brilliant scientists solve the hardest problems in their field? Listen to them try to explain and you’ll probably be disappointed. Artists say mysterious things like: “The picture just formed in my mind.” Writers tell us that: “I don’t know where the words come from.” Scientists say they: “Just had a hunch.”

Continue reading “The Hidden Workings of Our Minds”

It’s one of the great paradoxes of life that we all want to be happy, yet so few of us seem to know exactly where happiness comes from. Happiness itself can be defined in many different ways, it may have all kinds of components, it may be a life’s work, or even no work at all, but we are, most of us, in pursuit of this elusive goal.

Psychologists have good and bad news about our search for happiness. The bad news is that we have essentially no control over 50% of our happiness levels. Happiness, like many of our other attributes is partially set by our genes. While these do interact to a certain extent with the environment, on a day-to-day basis this 50% can be considered immovable.

Continue reading “Sustainable Happiness: Why It’s All About the Day-to-Day”