Month: July 2018
-
Multitasking is a myth – so don’t even think about it!
When I state that multitasking is a myth, I am not talking about chatting to a friend on the phone whilst you stir a pot with one hand and close a cupboard door with your foot. I mean mental multitasking: we cannot pay proper attention to more than one thing at a time. The brain…
-
Washing your hands makes you less likely to do someone a favour
If we feel guilty about something, washing our hands can help to assuage that guilt. It seems that physical washing cleanses us of our moral transgressions. This is known by psychologists as the Lady Macbeth Effect because of the way Macbeth’s wife, in the Shakespeare play, tries to scrub the imaginary blood off her hands.…
-
If you have old age in the back of your mind, you may behave older
Social psychologists love studying the effects of “priming”. This is where they subtly activate schemata we have in our minds without us noticing they have been activated. A schema is like a post-it note in our heads with our beliefs about a concept. For example, our schema for older people might be that they are…
-
How you are asked about your past can change your memory of it
Police, prosecution lawyers and defence attorneys all have an interest in questioning witnesses to crimes. That shouldn’t be a problem should it? In an ideal world, no. But in an ideal world they wouldn’t be able to alter our memories with the deliberately biased wording of their questions. This is not an ideal world though…
-
When we tell an anecdote, it changes our memory of the event
Our memories are not fixed. The memory we have of any event does have, as its basis, some factual details which happened to get lodged in our brains. However, it also consists of a lot of gaps. We don’t usually notice the gaps because they are unconsciously filled in. To us it feels like a…
-
What we perceive is a mixture of what our senses receive and what our brains expect.
What we perceive is a mixture of what our senses receive and what our brains expect In day to day life, we do not perceive an exact replica of the world outside. Instead, our expectations colour what our senses are telling us; what we finally perceive is a blend of reality and expectation. Imagine you…