Why close proximity breeds competition.
It is estimated that each day the average person checks their phone 100 times and spends 5 hours looking at it.
Discover the food trick that could change how you build relationships.
This surprising study reveals the true nature of human honesty.
This surprising study reveals the true nature of human honesty.
Seventy-two percent of people will report a lost wallet containing a large sum of money, a study finds.
Indeed, the more money in the lost wallet, the more likely it is to be reported.
The findings suggest that many people are basically honest.
When asked, people say that the more money is in a wallet, the more it feels like stealing not to return it.
Dr Alain Cohn, the study’s first author, said:
“Honesty is important for economic development and more generally for how society functions in almost all relationships.
Yet, it often is in conflict with individual self-interest.”
The conclusions come from a study in which 17,303 wallets were ‘lost’ by psychological researchers in 355 cities in 40 countries around the world.
Some wallets had no money, others had $13.45 and some had $94.15.
The wallet had three business cards with the apparent owner’s name and email address so there was ample information to return it to the owner.
The wallets were dropped by researchers in various public places where they were bound to be found, such as banks, theatres, police stations and public offices.
The results showed, surprisingly, that the more money the wallet contained, the more likely people were to return it.
Only 40 percent that contained no money were reported, 51 percent of the wallets containing a little money were reported, but 72 percent containing the larger amount were reported.
The most honest countries were Switzerland, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden.
The least honest country was China, followed by Morocco, Peru and Kazakhastan.
The U.S. and the U.K. finished in the middle of the table.
Dr Michel André Maréchal, study co-author, said:
“The psychological forces — an aversion to not viewing oneself as a thief — can be stronger than the financial ones.”
The results are unusual because they provide a real-world test of people’s honesty.
Alain Cohn, the study’s first author, said:
“It involves relatively high stakes in some countries.
Previous studies focused on cheating in modest stakes.”
Experts surveyed by researchers thought that the more money was in the wallet, the less likely they were to be reported.
The fact that the reverse was true shows many underestimate people’s basic honesty.
→ This study echoes classic research carried out by social psychologist Stanley Milgram.
The study was published in the journal Science (Cohn et al., 2019).
The surprising benefits of having a varied social network.
People need to belong and feel they matter to others — simple conversations can do that.
Do you like to keep a poker face? Learn the surprising link between facial expressions and social success.
People felt emotionally closer to strangers who did this.
People felt emotionally closer to strangers who did this.
Smiling is one of the best ways to make people instantly like you, research reveals.
However, a smile needs to be real: what psychologists call a ‘Duchenne smile’.
People are highly tuned to the Duchenne smile, which involves upturned lips and crinkly eyes.
Fake smiles are relatively easy to spot and involve only the mouth and not the eyes.
A genuine smile is a strong sign of cooperation and affiliation.
People are generally more aware of positive emotions in other people than negative.
A smile makes people feel emotionally closer to strangers.
Dr Belinda Campos, who led the research, said:
“Our findings provide new evidence of the significance of positive emotions in social settings and highlight the role that positive emotions display in the development of new social connections.
People are highly attuned to the positive emotions of others and can be more attuned to others’ positive emotions than negative emotions.”
For the study, participants watched a video of people interacting and showing both positive and negative emotions.
The results showed that positive emotions are particularly powerful in drawing strangers together.
People felt emotionally closer to strangers who showed positive emotions.
The positive emotion that was particularly attractive was awe.
The study was published in the journal Motivation and Emotion (Campos et al., 2015).
Research reveals the hidden bias that makes us focus on life’s challenges.
The effect of hot people on your cognitive abilities, revealed by research.
The effect of hot people on your cognitive abilities, revealed by research.
People become cognitively impaired in the presence of an attractive member of the opposite sex, research finds.
The drop in intelligence is particularly strong for men.
The more attractive the woman, the more men’s test scores plummeted, psychologists found.
It may be because men are so concerned about making a good impression that they have few mental resources left over for anything else.
The study involved people talking to members of the opposite sex before completing cognitive tests.
Both sexes performed worse on the tests when they were trying to make a good impression on the other person.
It made no difference whether or not they were already in a relationship or single.
However, men were more often struggling to make a good impression, so their cognitive powers weakened the most.
Impression management is no easy task for the human brain, as the authors explain:
“…leaving a favorable impression on an opposite-sex partner may not always be easy.
Impression management requires careful monitoring and modifying of one’s own behavior to optimize the overall impression an individual wants make on the interaction partner, making it an effortful and cognitively demanding endeavor.
Research by Vohs and colleagues (2005) suggests that impression management indeed generally requires relatively high levels of cognitive control.”
The study was inspired by an experience of one of the study’s authors:
“Some time ago, one of the male authors was chatting with a very attractive girl he had not met before.
While he was anxious to make a good impression, when she asked him where he lived, he suddenly could not remember his street address.
It seemed as if his impression management concerns had temporarily absorbed most of his cognitive resources.”
The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (Karremans et al., 2009).
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