Studies show we're subconsciously drawn to people who look like us

Next time you find yourself seated in a roomful of strangers, take a look around. What you're likely to find is people who look alike end up sitting beside each other. Sean Mackinnon, Christian Jordan and Anne Wilson did research for the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin where they looked at seating patterns. They found that people tend to sit closer to people who share their physical traits. People with glasses sit closer to other people with glasses. People with long hair sit closer to other people with long hair.

It seems we subconsciously assume people who look like us also think like us, like the same things we do and have similar values and attitudes. We're more comfortable and more likely to open up the more physical characteristics we share.

Same thing happens at a cocktail party. Watch people pick out a stranger to talk to and chances are they'll pick out someone with similar physical attributes. My friend Dr. Karen Stephenson describes it this way:

"In the small talk of cocktail parties, humans are at a random walk, desperately seeking points of similarity through visibility: height, girth, dress, gender, race, accent, hair and eye color, etc. Reading the audience and working a room are ancient skills encoded in us by our forebears who sat cheek by jowl around the campfire; an earlier and more primordial form of cocktail party. I confess to having attended countless cocktail parties and continue to be amazed how, after just a few drinks, I end up with people who like me in some way - same experiences, same clothes, same interest, etc. It's not the alcohol talking, but the ancient drive of seeking similarity: 'You look like me, you think like me, you dress like me...you're one of us'."

Here's an interesting aside. Take a look at the picture on the right. That's Dr. Karen (on the left) around the time she made that comment (late 90s) and me during the same time period when I first starting doing research in this area which later became part of the book Axis of Influence - How Credibility and Likability Intersect to Drive Success. 

Re-wiring the brain to save for the future

Two recent articles provide interesting insight into how the brain works - why most of us tend to opt for instant gratification over future rewards, what that means for our financial futures and how we might re-wire those neural pathways.

Sharon Begley's article in Newsweek - Stop You Can't Afford It - How science unveils how your brain is hard-wired when it comes to spending - and how you can reboot it provides a fascinating journey through neuroscience brain mapping.  It turns out the brains of those who naturally default to save or delay gratification are different from those who opt for immediate rewards. What's more, scientists are looking at ways to amp up the save circuits and amp down the spends.

Even though brain scans suggests hard-wiring, brains can learn. How do they learn?  Through practice, researchers say.  Scientists also found that a squirt of the hormone oxytocin - known as the "love hormone" because of the role it plays in bonding - makes people more patient and likely to opt for future rewards over instant gratification.

One of the keys to changing the brain circuitry is the ability to project yourself into the future and see the future you. It seems we can't get excited about saving for something we can't see or feel connected to.

The second article Face Reality With Aged-Morphed Photos (Wired - Nov 1)  references work by Jeremy Bailenson, head of Stanford’s virtual reality lab and coauthor of the book Infinite Reality. Bailenson discovered that avatars or virtual versions of our selves can help us make positive changes, including saving for retirement.

Most people view their future selves as strangers, which makes them reluctant to put away money for a later date. But Bailenson and his team discovered that if people view a virtual version of themselves digitally aged by several decades, that hesitation disappears instantly. In one study, contributions to hypothetical retirement accounts went up by 30 percent.

Worthwhile Law of Attraction SlideShare

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The Law Of Attraction

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Stocks with easy-to-pronounce names outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names

Small percentage differences account for big money when it comes to the stock market. As a psychology writer and part-time trader, I was delighted to discover work by Psychologists Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer that suggested there was a natural inclination to overvalue companies with easy-to-pronounce names and undervalue those with difficult-to-pronounce names. Logical? Absolutely not, but relevant just the same.

Recognizing that people tended to respond positively to words that are easy-to-pronounce and process, Alter and Oppenheimer decided to see if this preference lent it self to picking stocks - i.e. would people prefer stocks with simpler names over those with complex names?

In their first study they presented groups of volunteers with a series of made-up company names - some difficult to get your tongue around - like Xagibdan and Beaulieaux and some easy-to pronounce, like Barnings and Tanley. They asked the group to estimate the future performance of these stocks. They found that participants tended to overvalue companies with easy names and undervalue companies with difficult names.

In a separate study, the researchers tracked ten stocks with easy-to-pronounce names and ten stocks with hard-to-pronounce names on the New York Stock Exchange. These 20 stocks were new to the NYSE and performance was tracked the first day on the Exchange, then after 1 week, after six months and after 1 year. They found that companies with easy-to-pronounce names outperformed companies with hard-to-pronounce names by 11.2 percent on their first day of trading. After six months, the difference was more than 27 percent. After a year, it was more than 33 percent!

In a third study, Alter and Oppenheimer looked at ticker symbols and found the same thing there, although over the longer term the payoff was less. Companies with easy -to-pronounce symbols (such as KAR) outperformed companies with hard-to-pronounce symbols (such as RDO) by 8.5% on their first day of trading and 2 percent after one year of trading. 2 percent may not sound significant, but in the world of trading, 2 percent is big money.

Source: http://web.princeton.edu/sites/opplab/papers/Adam%20PNAS_paper_Stock_Fluctuations_and_Fluency.pdf

Change your dataset - change your mindset

David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut -- and it may just change the way we see the world.

Is his smile real or simulated?

For years psychologists believed that a real smile was signaled by upturned lips and crinkly eyes. This genuine smile is named after the French physician Duchenne, who passed electrical currents through live subjects and took photos of their weirdly contorted faces.

Researchers suggested that 80% of us are unable to conjure up a fake smile that will trick others because we don't have voluntary control over the muscles around our eyes which signal the Duchenne smile.

Writing in a recent issue of the journal Emotion, Krumhuber and Manstead question whether this 80% estimate is anywhere near the mark. In the first of a series of experiments they found that 83% of the people in their study produce fake smiles that others mistook for the real thing in photographs.

The researchers also explored how people perceived genuine and fake smiles when they saw videos rather than just static pictures. Then it emerged that fake smiles were easier to spot, but the supposedly crucial crinkling around the eyes didn't help much. Instead, telling a real from fake smile relied more on dynamic processes such as how long people hold it, the symmetry of the expression and whether conflicting emotions are communicated by other facial areas.

So the Duchenne smile has taken a bit of bashing in this research, which suggests that most people can fake crinkly eyes. Not only that but the crinkly eyes aren't as crucial for us in judging the sincerity of a smile as other factors. Rather than just the crinkly eyes, it's the whole movement of the face which tells a tale either of deception or of genuine, felt emotion.

How you speak and write provides clues to your identity and character

The way we write and speak can reveal a great deal about our identity and character. Here is a sampling of the variables that can be detected in our use of style-related words such as pronouns and articles.

• Sex. In general, women tend to use more pronouns and references to other people; men are more likely to use articles, prepositions, and big words.
• Age. As people get older, they tend to refer to themselves less, use more positive emotion and fewer negative emotion words. Older people also use more future tense and fewer past tense verbs.
• Social class. The higher the social class, the less likely one uses 1st person singular pronouns and the less one uses emotion words.
• Honesty. When people tell the truth, they are more like to use 1st person singular pronouns. They also use more exclusive words like except, but, without, excluding. Words such as this indicate that a person is making a distinction between what they did do and what they didn’t do. Liars have a problem with such complex ideas.
• Dominance in a conversation. Analyze the relative use of the word “I” between two speakers in an interaction. Usually, the higher status speaker will use fewer “I” words.
• Social bonding after a trauma. In the days and weeks after a cultural upheaval, people become more self-less (less use of “I”) and more oriented towards others (increased use of “we”).
• Depression and suicide-proneness. Public figures speaking in press conferenecs and published poets in their poetry use more 1st person singular when they are depressed or prone to suicide.
• Testosterone levels. In two case studies, it was found that when people’s testosterone levels increased rapidly, they dropped in their use of references to other people.

Adapted from work by James Pennebaker at the University of Texas. http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/Faculty/Pennebaker/Home2000/Words.html

Why smart people forward stupid emails

I receive weekly, sometimes daily emails from friends or family telling me about yet another computer virus, missing child, or lie about our President. Today, I was revisited by the granddaddy of hoax emails - that Microsoft and AOL were going to pay me big bucks for forwarding this email to all my friends. Yes, the person mentioned in the email had already received $24,800!

This email has been circulating since 1997. 13 years folks!!! and a gazillion of tracks back and forth across the airwaves. In fact I'm pretty sure I have received it from the same people 4 or 5 times.

My fascination with this subject is with the instant believability factor. It only takes a minute or two to do a quick Google search to check the validity of the email, but few people ever do that. Why? I think there are three reasons: One, because they want to believe its true - whatever "it" is matches their values. They want to believe Obama is a radical Muslim, or that computer viruses are rampant or there's a chance of winning cash and prizes for doing nothing more than forwarding an email.

The second reason is a combination of mental laziness and an urge to genuinely help people. The act of passing the email on to friends and family in order to help them ranks higher in most people's values food chain than the requirement for validity or fact checking.

The third reason, which is kind of tied to the second reason, is that we don't feel like we have to question it because the email came from someone we know and trust. I trust my friend Paul who trusted his friend John who trusted his sister Kathy who trusted her friend Pam and so on.

So what's the harm in passing these innocent emails along or simply ignoring them when they come in? Maybe nothing in the short term, but after awhile don't we run the risk of becoming sheep, able to be easily herded, cajoled or sold a bill of goods because we're not smart enough or motivated enough to do some homework, check the facts or think for ourselves.

Want to feel happier or less pain during a procedure? Smile!

It's true - smiling can actually make you feel better. Recent studies suggest that our emotions are reinforced, maybe even driven, by facial expressions.

It was actually Darwin who first suggested the link between facial expressions and emotions. In 1872 he said "The free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it." In other words, smiles will make you feel happier, frowns will pull you back the other way.

Psychologists at the University of Cardiff in Wales found that people whose ability to frown is compromised by botox injections are happier, on average, then people who can frown. Dr Michael Lewis, a senior lecturer at the university’s school of psychology, said “We know from research in the past that if you make someone smile they feel happier. More on this study here


It appears facial expressions also have a relationship to pain. The May 2008 Journal of Pain reported that people who frown during an unpleasant procedure report feeling more pain than those who do not.

For more on this topic, see Scientific American Mind's Smile! It Could Make You Happier

Your brain wants you to be successful

Research by Massachusetts Institute of Technology neuroscientist Earl Miller suggests that our brains are inherently wired toward success. Miller's research shows that not only does the brain learn more from success than from failure, but it seeks out success.

The pleasurable feeling that comes with successes is brought about by a surge in the neurotransmitter dopamine. By telling brain cells when they have struck gold, the chemical apparently signals them to keep doing whatever they did that lead to success. In other words success leads to more and more success.

"We have shown that brain cells keep track of whether recent behaviors were successful or not," Miller said. Furthermore, when a behavior was successful, cells became more finely tuned to what the animal was learning. After a failure, there was little or no change in the brain - nor was there any improvement in behavior.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/successes-0729.html