Stereotype threat describes the experience of “being at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype of one’s group” (Steel & Aronson, 1995). Continue reading
What is Stereotype Threat?
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Category Archives: Videos
Effective Psychological Strategies Used in Advertising
Advertising is intrinsically linked to the science of psychology. In this short video Dr. Robert Cialdini discusses various psychological techniques employed by advertisers in order to influence consumer thinking and boost product sales. Among the strategies discussed are the principles of reciprocation, scarcity, authority, commitment, liking and consensus.
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- How do you persuade others? (forbes.com)
- The Society for Media Psychology & Technology (psychologytoday.com)
- How to Win Over Someone Who Doesn’t Like You (forbes.com)
Monkey See, Monkey Read
In the video above Jonathan Grainger discusses an experiment in which he and his colleagues attempted to teach Guinea baboons to distinguish between real English words and strings of letters which are not English words. The baboons learned to recognize words from nonwords, exhibiting human-like orthographic processing. The results indicate that the baboons were focusing on the location of individual letters in the words in order to identify them. Interestingly, this is similar to the approach taken by human readers.
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- Reuters Video: Bright baboons show linguistic learning skills (englishblog.com)
- Baboons recognize words on a screen (jtm71.wordpress.com)
- Baboon personalities connected to social success and health benefits (sciencedaily.com)
- Monkey gets upset about receiving unequal pay (Video) (boingboing.net)
Split Brain Behavioral Experiments
Meet Joe. After suffering from years of epilepsy, Joe underwent brain surgery to have his corpus callosum severed. The corpus callosum, also referred to as the colossal commissure, is a thick band of 200-250 million nerve fibers at the longitudinal fissure that facilitates interhemispheric communication in the brain. By having this band severed, Joe prevented the spread of epileptic seizure from one hemisphere to the other.
Deferred Gratification – The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EjJsPylEOY
What’s so fascinating about eating a marshmallow? Quite a lot as it turns out. In 1972, Stanford University’s Walter Mischel conducted one of psychology’s classic behavioral experiments on deferred gratification. Deferred gratification refers to an individual’s ability to wait in order to achieve a desired object or outcome. Continue reading
The Flashed Face Distortion Effect – Pretty Girls Turn Ugly
Like most fascinating phenomena, the flashed face distortion effect was discovered completely by accident. Honors student Sean Murphy had eye-aligned pictures of faces in the University of Queensland psychology lab and was playing around with them when he first noticed the grotesque faces staring back at him. When he looked at the faces individually however, they appeared normal and some were even attractive. Continue reading