5 impressive psychological discoveries
The systematic study of mental processes and human behavior has been questioned for some time why we act the way we do . Human psychology has surprising curiosities relatively unknown. We recommend you, if you like to read about this type of curiosities, to take a look at our old deliveries:
- 8 psychological curiosities that will impact you
- 8 popular psychological myths that already have scientific explanation
- 10 psychological phenomena that will surprise you
Amazing psychological discoveries
In this article that we present today we propose to expose a total of five impressive psychological discoveries that give answer to some enigmas of our psyche.
Are you ready to meet them? Clicking on the links you can access more detailed information about each of the discoveries.
1. The Halo Effect
The Halo effect it is one of the concepts that has most attracted the attention of social psychologists and groups. It is a cognitive bias whereby the global impression about a person (for example: "he is nice") is generated from judgments that concern certain specific features (for example: "he is smart"). To further exemplify the phenomenon of the Halo Effect, we could bring up the case of the stars of the big screen.
The famous actors that appear in the highest grossing films are usually people with great physical attractiveness and people skills. They are those people who know how to captivate with gestures and with their gaze, they perfectly dominate the image they project. These two traits (physical attractiveness and sympathy) make us suppose, through this curious psychological effect, that they are also intelligent, generous, friendly people, and so on. The Halo effect It also happens in the opposite direction: if a person is not physically graceful, we tend to think that he is an unpleasant or uninteresting person. That is, we tend in this case to attribute specific negative features.
- Attention: the Halo Effect is also used in the marketing world
2. The dark energy of the brain
Although it may seem counterintuitive, when we are absorbed in thought without thinking about anything in particular or are about to fall asleep, our brain barely consumes 5% less energy than when we try to solve difficult puzzles .
Not only that: when this happens, large regions of the brain begin to emit signals in a coordinated manner, causing hundreds of thousands of neurons to work together to ... we do not know very well why. The fact that these brain areas, which are part of what has been called Default Neural Network, stop working together when we are paying attention and use our focused attention to solve tasks or reflect on specific things has caused this pattern of electrical signals has been called "the dark energy of the brain."
- You can read more about this here
3. Cognitive dissonance
Why do we fool ourselves? This is another question that psychologists and philosophers have asked themselves over the centuries. In the study of human psychology, the cognitive dissonance is described as discomfort or the contradictory feeling we experience when our beliefs conflict with what we do , or when we defend two discordant ideas at the same time.
Psychologists the likes of Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith They showed something surprising and that marked a before and after in the study of cognitive dissonance. If a person is asked to lie and she does not consider herself a person who habitually lies, she will be able to tell the lie and will continue to think of herself as an honest person. Curious, is not it? But how is this possible? The human mind solves this type of cognitive dissonance by persuading yourself that the lie you just told is, in fact, a truth. Although this may operate at a not very conscious level, the truth is that our brain tends to think well about us .
- More on this effect, in this post
4. The effect of false consensus
The false consensus effect it is another cognitive bias that is studied in all the faculties of Psychology. The effect of false consensus makes many individuals tend to overestimate the degree of "agreement" that others have towards their approaches or opinions . Certainly, we tend to perceive that our opinions, values, beliefs or habits are the most common and supported by the majority of people around us. This belief produces that we tend to overestimate the confidence we have in our opinions, even if they are erroneous, biased or minority.
From now on, remember: the effect of false consensus can make you believe that your opinion is shared by other people ... and maybe you are the only one who thinks this way
5. The Westermarck effect
The incest it is one of the most universal taboos and, interestingly enough, it is difficult to justify its existence in a rational way, adhering to the values of "as long as it does not harm anyone, it should not be prohibited". However, from the point of view of evolution yes you can find reasons to avoid incest , since it can have as consequence the birth of individuals with health problems or with difficulties to live independently.
Based on this idea, the researcher Edvard Westermarck he came to propose that human beings have an innate propensity not to feel sexual attraction for people with whom we have maintained frequent contact during childhood. This translates into a lack of sexual desire towards people who are statistically very likely to be part of our family.
This phenomenon, known as the Westermarck effect, has been found in numerous studies on the subject, the best known being an investigation in which it was found that people who had been reared in it kibbutz (a typical agrarian commune of Israel) are much less likely to marry each other.
- More on this effect, in this article
Bibliographic references:
- Triglia, Adrián; Regader, Bertrand; García-Allen, Jonathan (2016). Psychologically speaking. Paidós.
- Papalia, D. and Wendkos, S. (1992). Psychology. Mexico: McGraw-Hill, p. 9.
