Top 5 Incredibly Cool Psychology Concepts

1. Creeping Determinism

Description: The sense that grows on us, in retrospect, that what has happened was actually inevitable.

Example: A researcher asks a group of people about what they think the outcome of an upcoming event will be (a baseball game, for example) and to rate how sure they are about their prediction. After the game takes place, the researcher asks the group to recall their prediction and how sure they were about it. Overwhelmingly, the group will remember being more sure that the actual outcome would occur (or less sure that it would not). Thus, over time, the group comes to see the actual outcome of the event as more likely, or more inevitable, than it actually was.

Article: "Connecting the Dots," Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker

2. Cognitive Fluency

Description: A measure of how easy it is to think about something. Cognitive fluency is important because it researchers have discovered people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard.

Examples: Psychologists have determined that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names. Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process – even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it – can alter people's judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement's author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities. Similar manipulations can get subjects to be more forgiving, more adventurous, and more open about their personal shortcomings.

Article: "Easy = True," Drake Bennett, The Boston Globe

3. Stereotype Threat

Description: A disruptive concern, when facing a negative stereotype, that one will be evaluated based on this stereotype.

Examples: Standford psychologist Claude Steele found that when she gave a group of undergraduates a standardized test and told them it was a measure of their intellectual ability, white students did much better than their black counterparts. But when the same test was presented simply as an abstract laboratory tool, with no relevance to ability, the scores of blacks and whites were identical. The same is true of gender stereotypes. Give a group of qualified women a math test and tell them it will measure their quantitative ability and they'll do worse than equally skilled men will; present the same test simply as a research tool and they'll do just as well as the men.

Articles: "The Art of Failure," Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker
"Thin Ice: 'Stereotype Threat' and Black College Students," Claude M. Steele, The Atlantic
"Stereotype Threat," Wikipedia

4. Embodied Cognition

Description: The idea that cognitive processes are deeply rooted in the body's interactions with the world.

Examples: A series of studies have shown that children can solve math problems better if they are told to use their hands while thinking. Another recent study suggested that stage actors remember their lines better when they are moving. In one study published last year, subjects asked to move their eyes in a specific pattern while puzzling through a brainteaser were twice as likely to solve it. Researchers at the University of Aberdeen found that people lean slightly forward when thinking about the future, and slightly backward when thinking about the past. Researchers at Yale found that students were more likely to judge the personality of an imaginary individual as warm if they were holding a warm beverage, and cold if they were holding a cold one.  When researchers at the University of Toronto instructed a group of students to remember a time when they had felt either socially accepted or socially snubbed, those who conjured up memories of a rejection judged the temperature of the room to be an average of five degrees colder than those who had recalled thoughts of peer approval. One study showed that participants who were asked to dwell on a personal moral transgression like adultery or cheating on a test were more likely to request an antiseptic cloth afterward than were those who had been instructed to recall a good deed they had done. Another study found that when students were told that a particular book was vital to the curriculum, they judged the book to be physically heavier than those told the book was ancillary to their studies.

Articles: "Don't Just Stand There, Think," Drake Bennet, The Boston Globe
"Abstract Thoughts? The Body Takes Them Literally," Natalie Angier, The New York Times
"Heavy, rough and hard – how the things we touch affect our judgments and decisions," Ed Yong, Discover Magazine

5. Risk Homeostasis

Description: Under certain circumstances, changes that appear to make a system or an organization safer actually do not, because human beings have a tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another, and vice versa.

Examples: In a Munich study, half a fleet of taxicabs were equipped with anti-lock brakes, while the other half had conventional brake systems. The crash rate was the same for both types of cab. Queens psychology professor Gerald J.S. Wilde concludes this was due to drivers of ABS-equipped cabs taking more risks, assuming that ABS would take care of them, while the non-ABS drivers drove more carefully since ABS would not be there to help in case of a dangerous situation. It has also been found that drivers behave less carefully around bicyclists wearing helmets than around riders without helmets. More pedestrians are killed crossing the street at marked crosswalks than at unmarked crosswalks because they compensate for the "safe" environment of a marked crossing by being less viligant about oncoming traffic. The introduction of childproof lids on medicine bottles lead, according to one study, to a substantial increase in fatal child poisonings because adults became less careful in keeping pill bottles out of the reach of children. Many drivers are more fearful of roundabouts than intersections, and as a result many more accidents occur at intersections than roundabouts. In the late nineteen-sixties, Sweden changed from driving on the left-hand side of the road to driving on the right. Instead of causing more accidents, people compensated for their unfamiliarity with the new traffic patterns by driving more carefully, and traffic fatalities dropped by seventeen percent over the next year before slowly returning to their previous levels. (It is important to note that risk homeostasis doesn't happen all the time. Often, as in the case of seat belts, compensatory behavior only partly offsets the risk-reduction of a safety measure.)

Article: "Blowup," Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker

Many thanks to my friend Erin Smith, the cheerful Psych major.
Image:  all-about-psychology.com