"47 Mind-Blowing Psychology-Proven Facts You Should Know About Yourself"

Thanks to the awesomeness that is StumbleUpon, I stumbled upon this site the other night. ("47 Mind-Blowing Psychology-Proven Facts You Should Know About Yourself"). I found much of it quite fascinating and easily applicable to my own behavior. Since I'm always looking for reasons to explain my stupidity, I enjoyed this even more. If you don't wanna read through all 47 facts, I tried to post some highlights from my favorite topics, which are:

1. You Reconstruct Your Memories
2. Dopamine Makes You Addicted to Seeking Information
3. If You Use Social Media Without Laughter You Aren’t Being Social
4. You Overestimate Your Reactions to Future Events
5. Trust Your Gut or Be Logical? It Depends On Your Mood
6. The Desire for Control and Choice is Built-In
7. Synchronous activity bonds the group
8. People Assume It’s You, Not The Situation (Fundamental Attribution Error)
9. People Expect Online Interactions to Follow Social Rules
10. The more uncertain you are, the more you dig in and defend your ideas

#6 — You Reconstruct Your Memories

• We tend to experience memories as a movie in our head and we have a tendency to think that memories are stored in entirety and never change. 
• Our memories are actually reconstructed every time we think of them...The memory can change.
• Other events that occur after the original event can change the memory of the original event. At the original event, you and your cousin were close friends. But later on you have an argument and a falling-out that lasts for years. Your memory of the first event might include your cousin being aloof and cold, even if that is not true. 
• It is easy to start mixing up memories. So that things that happened at two separate events become fused into one. Your cousin was pleasant at one event, and not pleasant at the other, but over time your memories about which is which can become confused.
• You will also start to fill in your memory gaps with “made up” sequences of events, but these will seem as real to you as the original event. 
• Elizabeth Loftus is one of the earliest psychology researchers to study reconstructive memory. She was studying eyewitness testimonies, and was especially interested in whether language can affect memory. 
• In her research Loftus would show a video clip of an automobile accident. Then she would ask a series of questions about the accident. She would change the way she worded the questions, for example, sometimes she would phrase it as: “How fast would you estimate the car was going when it hit the other vehicle”, or “How fast would you estimate the car was going when it smashed the other vehicle.” And she would ask participants in the study if they remembered seeing broken glass.
• When she used the word smashed the estimated speed was higher than when she used the word hit. And more than twice as many people remembered seeing broken glass if the word smashed was used rather than the word hit.
• Since memories are reconstructed, here are some things to keep in mind:
• The words you use are important. They can actually affect people’s memories.
• You can’t rely on self-reports of past behavior. People will not remember accurately what they or others did or said.

#8 — Dopamine Makes You Addicted To Seeking Information

• Do you ever feel like you are addicted to email or twitter or texting? Do you find it impossible to ignore your email if you see that there are messages in your inbox? Have you ever gone to Google to look up some information and 30 minutes later you realize that you’ve been reading and linking, and searching around for a long time, and you are now searching for something totally different than before? These are all examples of your dopamine system at work.
• Neuro scientists have been studying what they call the dopamine system for a while. Dopamine is created in various parts of the brain and is critical in all sorts of brain functions, including thinking, moving, sleeping, mood, attention, and motivation, seeking and reward.
• You may have heard that dopamine controls the “pleasure” systems of the brain: that dopamine makes you feel enjoyment, pleasure, and therefore motivates you to seek out certain behaviors, such as food, sex, and drugs. The latest research, though is changing this view. Instead of dopamine causing us to experience pleasure, the latest research shows that dopamine causes seeking behavior. Dopamine causes us to want, desire, seek out, and search. It increases our general level of arousal and our goal-directed behavior. (From an evolutionary stand-point this is critical. The dopamine seeking system keeps us motivated to move through our world, learn, and survive). It’s not just about physical needs such as food, or sex, but also about abstract concepts. Dopamine makes us curious about ideas and fuels our searching for information. The latest research shows that it is the opoid system (separate from dopamine) that makes us feel pleasure.
• According to Kent Berridge, these two systems, the “wanting” (dopamine) and the “liking” (opoid) are complementary. The wanting system propels us to action and the liking system makes us feel satisfied and therefore pause our seeking...The latest research shows that the dopamine system is stronger than the opoid system. We seek more than we are satisfied (back to evolution… seeking is more likely to keep us alive than sitting around in a satisfied stupor).
• With the internet, twitter, and texting we now have almost instant gratification of our desire to seek. Want to talk to someone right away? Send a text and they respond in a few seconds. Want to look up some information? Just type it into google. What to see what your friends are up to? Go to twitter or facebook. We get into a dopamine induced loop… dopamine starts us seeking, then we get rewarded for the seeking which makes us seek more. It becomes harder and harder to stop looking at email, stop texting, stop checking our cell phones to see if we have a message or a new text.
• Brain scan research shows that our brains show more stimulation and activity when we ANTICIPATE a reward than when we get one. Research on rats shows that if you destroy dopamine neurons, rats can walk, chew, and swallow, but will starve to death even when food is right next to them. They have lost the desire to go get the food.
• Although wanting and liking are related, research also shows that the dopamine system doesn’t have satiety built in. It is possible for the dopamine system to keep saying “more more more”, seeking even when we have found the information. During that google exploration we know that we have the answer to the question we originally asked, and yet we find ourselves looking for more information and more and more.
• Dopamine is also stimulated by unpredictability. When something happens that is not exactly predictable, that stimulates the dopamine system. Think about these electronic gadgets and devices. Our emails and twitters and texts show up, but we don’t know exactly when they will or who they will be from. It’s unpredictable. This is exactly what stimulates the dopamine system. It’s the same system at work for gambling and slot machines.
• The dopamine system is especially sensitive to “cues” that a reward is coming. If there is a small, specific cue that signifies that something is going to happen, that sets off our dopamine system. So when there is a sound when a text message or email arrives, or a visual cue, that enhances the addictive effect (for the psychologists out there: remember Pavlov).
• 140 characters is even more addictive. And the dopamine system is most powerfully stimulated when the information coming in is small so that it doesn’t full satisfy. A short text or twitter (can only be 140 characters!) is ideally suited to send our dopamine system raging.
• Not without costs — This constant stimulation of the dopamine system can be exhausting. We are getting caught in an endless dopamine loop.

#15 — If You Use Social Media Without Laughter You Aren’t Being Social

• If you engage in social media are you being social? You email, you text, you twitter, you leave voicemails for people, so you are plugged in, right? Well, actually not. In all of these means of communication you are not actually physically interacting with another person. True social bonding requires a physical reaction to the presence of other people. 
• Considering how universal laughter is and how much of it we do, there is, relatively, not a lot of research on laughter. One of the main researchers is Robert Provine from University of Maryland. Here is a summary of some of the research he has done… some of these findings may surprise you:
• Laughter is universal: All humans in all cultures laugh
• Laughter is unconscious: You can’t actually laugh on command — it will be fake laughter if you try to.
• Laughter is for social communication: We rarely laugh when we are alone. We laugh 30 times more often when we are with others.
• Laughter is contagious: We will smile and then start laughing as we hear others laugh.
• Laughter appears early in babies: at about 4 months old
• Laughter is not about humor: Provine studied over 2,000 cases of naturally occurring laughter and most of it did not happen as a result of “humor” such as telling jokes. Most laughter followed statements such as “Hey John, where ya been?” or “Here comes Mary”, or “How did you do on the test?” Laughter after these types of statements bond people together socially. Only 20% of laughter is from jokes.
• We rarely laugh in the middle of a sentence. It is usually at the end.
• Other primate and mammals laugh. There are videos of rats laughing while being tickled.
• Speaking of tickling, laughing seems to have “evolved” from tickling.
• Most laughing occurs by the person who is speaking, not the person who is listening. The person who is speaking laughs twice as much.
• Women laugh more than twice as much as men.
• Laughter denotes social status. The higher up on the hierarchy you are in a group, the less you will laugh.
• You may have to deal with time zone differences, less than optimal phone connections, language barriers, but I wonder if you’ve considered that the biggest challenge may be lack of social bonding and lack of in-person laughter. Even if everyone is in the same building, if they aren’t working together in person then there is a lack of social bonding. Consider at least having periodic phone calls so that there can be some laughter. If you talk on the phone then you can at least hear each other laugh, even if you are missing the in-person cues. When laughing and social bonding will occur, and even if you work apart the rest of the time you will have had some experience of social bonding.

#21 — You Overestimate Your Reactions to Future Events

• People are poor predictors — In his great book, Stumbling on Happiness, Dan Gilbert discusses the research he and others have conducted on predicting or estimating emotional reactions to events. What he has found is that people greatly overestimate the reaction they think they will have to both pleasant and unpleasant events that happen in one’s life. Whether it is predicting how you will feel if a negative event happens, for example, if you lose your job, have an accident, or if a loved one dies, or predicting how you will feel if a positive event happens, such as coming into a lot of money, landing the dream job, or finding the perfect boyfriend or girlfriend, everyone tends to overestimate their reaction. If the event is negative you predict that you will be very upset and devastated for a long time. 
• If the event is positive you predict that you will be deliriously happy for a long time. The truth is that you have a built-in regulator of sorts so that whether negative events happen or positive events happen, you stay at about the same level of happiness most of the time. Some people are generally happier or less happy than others, and this level of happiness stays constant no matter what happens to them.
• Preference vs. Reality – One interesting implication of this is in the field of marketing or user experience research. Be careful of believing customers if they tell you that by making this change or that change to a product that means that they would be much happier with it, or that they would never use it again. People may prefer one thing over another or think they will, but the strength of their reaction, either in a positive or a negative way, is probably not as much as they imagine it will be.

#25 — Trust Your Gut or Be Logical? It Depends On Your Mood

• Marieke de Vries of Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands did research on two types of decision making: a trusting -your- gut intuitive method vs. following a logical, deliberative decision-making process of weighing alternatives and thinking through pros and cons. De Vries was interested in whether one method of decision-making was better than another, and also whether your mood affected the outcome of the decision.
• Research by Dijksterhuis shows that when you have simple decision to make you make better decisions when you use a logical deliberative method.
• Research by Shiv shows that when you have a complicated decision to make, you make better decisions when you use an intuitive or “gut” method.
• If you are in a good mood and/or are making a complicated decision it is best to trust your intuition. If you are in a bad mood and/or are making a simple decision then use a more deliberative process.

#31 — The Desire For Control And Choice Is Built In

• In his book The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz talks about how much we want to have lots of choices. The paradox is that if we have lots of choices then we tend not to choose at all. 
• The desire to control our environment is built into us. The desire to control is related to the desire to have choices.
• In an experiment with rats, the rats were given a choice of a direct path to food or a path that had branches and therefore required choices to be made. The rats preferred the path with branches. Monkeys and pigeons learn to press buttons to get food, but they prefer to have more than one button even though it doesn’t get them any more food. Even though it isn’t necessarily true, we equate having choices with having control. If are to feel in control, then we need to feel that our actions are powerful and that we have choices to make. Sometimes having a lot of choices makes it harder to get what we want, but we still want the choices so that we feel in control of the decision.

#32 — Synchronous activity bonds the group

• When you take action with others, where everyone is moving, singing, chanting, in time together - this is synchronous activity.
• Anthropologists have long been interested in rituals among certain cultures. Many rituals in a culture involve singing, chanting, drumming, dancing, or moving together. When people take part in synchronous activities they then are more cooperative with each other when participating later in different activities.
• In the research the people who were involved in synchronous behavior with other people were then more cooperative in subsequent activities, and ended up making more personal sacrifices in their decisions.
• The research also shows that you don’t have to feel good about the group or the group activity in order to be more cooperative. Just the act of doing the synchronous activity seems to strengthen social attachment among the group members.
• Here’s a list of synchronous activities I can think of:
• Singing together
• Cheers at sporting events
• Drumming or dancing together
• Pledge of allegiance
• Shouting slogans at rallies or marches
• Yoga

#37 — People Assume It’s You, Not The Situation 

• A man is walking down a busy city street on his way to an appointment, and he sees what looks like a college student drop a folder of papers. The papers scatter on the ground and the man glances over but keeps on walking. What do you think? Why didn’t the man stop to help with the papers? If you answer “Well, he’s a self-absorbed person who doesn’t usually help out strangers on the street” then chances are likely that you have just made a “fundamental attribution” error. People have a tendency to give personality based explanations for other peoples behavior more weight than situational factors. Instead of explaining the person’s behavior in the story above as being due to his “self absorption”, you might ascribe his behavior to the situation, for example, “He’s late for a critical meeting with the bank and doesn’t have time to stop today. In other circumstances he would have stopped.”
• Research on the fundamental attribution error shows the following:
• The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to ascribe behavior of other people to personality while explaining their OWN behavior to situational factors more than personality factors.
• Most of the research has to do with individuals deciding on personality vs. situational effects, but some research has been done on group decisions and whether they are influenced in the same way. It seems that they are. People attribute the decisions of a other group to the individual member’s attitudes, but attribute the decisions of their own group to the collective group rules. 
• I think the best theory about why we make the fundamental attribution error is that when we believe that personality causes our behavior that makes us feel that we have more control over our life.
•  The research shows that it is very hard to stop make the fundamental attribution error. Even when you know you are doing it, and even if you know all about it, you will still make the same error.
• So what’s the take-away? — Now that you know people tend to make this error, what can you do about it? Probably not much in terms of getting people to change their interpretations of others’ behaviors. But try and build in ways to cross-check your own biases. If your work requires you to make a lot of decisions about why people are doing what they are doing, you might want to stop before acting on your decisions and ask yourself, “Am I making a Fundamental Attribution Error?”

#43 — People Expect Online Interactions to Follow Social Rules

• When people interact with each other they follow rules and guidelines for social interaction. Here’s an example: Let’s say I go to a café and I see you sitting by the window. We know each other, and so I come up to you and say, “Hi Richard, how are you doing today?” I expect you to interact with me, and I expect that interaction to follow a certain protocol. I expect you to look at me, in fact to look me in the eye. If our previous interactions have been positive, then I expect you to smile a little bit. Next, you are supposed to respond to me by saying something like, “I’m fine. I’m sitting outside here to enjoy the beautiful weather.” Where the conversation goes next depends on how well we know each other. If we are just casual acquaintances we might wind down the conversation, “Well, enjoy it while you can, bye!” If we are close friends, then I might pull up a chair and engage in a longer conversation.
• We have expectations of how the interaction will go – and if either of us violates the expectations, then we will get uncomfortable. For example, what if I start the conversation as above, with “Hi Richard, how are you doing today?” but you don’t respond. What if you ignore me? Or what if you won’t look at me? What if you say back, “My sister never liked the color blue”, and stare into space. Or perhaps you give me more personal information than our relationship warrants. Any of these scenarios would make me uncomfortable. I would probably try to end the conversation as soon as possible, and likely avoid interacting with you next time the opportunity arises.
• Some people are saying that “social media” has reached its peak and is dying. But maybe the definition just needs to get broader. Is social media just about how to connect people together online? How to use online networking as a way to promote brands or products or services? Aren’t all online interactions really social interactions? People expect their online interactions to follow the rules of social interactions. 

#46: The more uncertain you are, the more you dig in and defend your ideas

• I’m one of these staunch Apple converts. For as long as there were PCs, I used to be a Windows/PC person. (Realize that I go all the way back to when PCs first came out. I used to sell a marvelous “portable” PC that ran on CPM operating system and had TWO (count ‘em) TWO 360 KB (yes, I said KB) “floppy” disk drives (in other words NO hard drive.)) I was a PC person, NOT an Apple person. Apples were for teachers and then later, for artsy people. That was not me. Fast forward to today and I will be talking on my iPhone, charging my Nano for my afternoon exercise, and transferring a movie to my iPad from my MacBook Pro. 
• So you might be able to guess what happened when I went to dinner with a colleague who was showing me his Android phone. He loves his new Android phone and wanted to show me all the great ways it was as good as, or better than, my iPhone. I was totally uninterested in hearing about it. I didn’t even want to look at it. Basically, I didn’t want to allow into my brain any information that would conflict with my opinion that anything besides an iPhone was even a possibility. I was showing classical symptoms of cognitive dissonance denial.
• In 1956 Leon Festinger wrote a book called When Prophecy Fails. In it he describes the idea of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable feeling we get when we have 2 ideas that conflict with each other. We don’t like the feeling, and we will therefore try to get rid of the dissonance. There are two main ways we can do that: change our belief, or deny one of the ideas.
• In the original research on cognitive dissonance, people were forced to defend an opinion that they did not believe in. The result was actually that people tended to change their belief to fit the new idea.
• If you are not forced to state that you believe something you don’t, if instead you are presented with information that opposes your beliefs, but not forced to espouse a new belief, then the tendency is to deny the new information instead of changing your belief to fit.
• When made to feel uncertain, you will argue harder. Gal and Rucker recently conducted research where they used framing techniques to make people feel uncertain. (For example, they told one group to remember a time when they were full of certainty, and the other group to remember a time when they were full of doubt). They they asked the participants whether they were meat-eaters, vegetarians, vegans, etc, how important this was to them, and how confident they were in their opinions. People who were asked to remember times when they were uncertain, were less confident of their eating choices. However, when asked to write up their beliefs to persuade someone else to eat the way they did, they would write more and stronger arguments than the group that were certain of their choice. They performed the research with different topics (for example the MAC/PC distinction) and found similar results. When people were less certain, then they would dig in and argue even harder.