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9 Surprising Psychology Studies That Will Change The Way You Think PDF
9 Surprising Psychology Studies That Will Change The Way You Think PDF
How many friendships can you have at once? Jari Saramaki answered this question
in 2013 with his study Persistence of social signatures in human communication.
Many of us might suppose that we have large circles of friends, but in reality, you
probably have large circles of acquaintances. That is, you know many people, but
none on a deep or significant level. It turns out that we have only a limited amount
of social bandwidth and energy, and this truly limits the amounts of friendships we
can actively have at one time.
In the study, it was found that people spent 40% to 50% of their social energy and
contact on only three people. The people may have changed from time to time, but it
was generally impossible for people to spend more energy on more people.
This means we are doing ourselves a disservice when we try to engage too many
people at once. You can recognize the top three people in your life and focus on
them, or you can focus on meeting new people and growing your personal network.
You can’t do both effectively, and this theory forces you to be choosier about your
friends and prioritize better.
Focusing on three people is how you gain real friends instead of a circle of
acquaintances. Anything else and you become an afterthought to everyone.
Theory Seven: The Dunning-Kruger
Effect
It’s also when competent people underestimate their abilities, but as you can
imagine, that’s less of a problem.
In other words, people that lack knowledge or are otherwise unskilled in an area
vastly underestimate the amount of intricacy and nuance involved. Therefore, they
see themselves as skilled because they don’t know what is actually involved – they
aren’t proficient or skilled enough to recognize their lack of skill. It’s when people are
too stupid to know that they know nothing.
He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, and when we operate with incomplete
information, we grow falsely confident – that is the essence of the Dunning-Kruger
effect.
Point being, if something seems too easy or good to be true, you are probably only at
the tip of the iceberg in terms of what you need to know. Always err on the side of
asking more questions, even if you just need to ask, “Is that it? There’s really nothing
else to it?”
Theory Eight: The Urge to Conform
This study was conducted by Solomon Asch of Swarthmore College in the 1950s and
broadly demonstrated the compulsion to conform and “fit in” despite our best
instincts and interests.
The study asked participants to engage in a vision test. In each run of the study,
there was only one subject, and the rest of the people present were Asch’s
confederates. They would attempt to influence the true participant to conform and
act against their free will. The participant sat around a table with seven
confederates and was asked two questions:
1. Which line was the longest in Exhibit 2?
2. Which line from Exhibit 2 matches the line from Exhibit 1?
Below is what the participants saw and made their judgment on. When participants
were asked this question alone, through writing or without confederates who would
provide a range of answers, they consistently answered in the exact same way:
obviously Line C and Line A, respectively.
However, when confederates were present and provided incorrect answers, what
followed was surprising.
When the true participant was surrounded by confederates who gave incorrect
answers, such as stating that Line C was equal to Exhibit 1 or Line B was the longest
in Exhibit 2, they also conformed their answers to be stunningly incorrect based on
the social pressures of the people around them. Over one-third of the true
participants gave an obviously wrong answer.
Asch successfully displayed that people, whether they believe it or not, wish to
blend in with their peers and their environment so they don’t stick out. Asch
commented, “The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong that reasonably
intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black.” He had
the opportunity to ask participants after the experiment whether they actually
believed their altered stances, and most did not and simply wanted to go along with
the group because they did not want to be thought of as “peculiar.” Others thought
the group’s judgment was actually correct and felt their new answer to be correct as
well.
People’s sense of free will is subverted by emotional reactions to what other people
are doing. The psychological implications of Asch’s experiment may not be
groundbreaking—we are all afraid of judgment, but the degree to which we strive to
avoid it is huge and can be said to make us a follower in a negative way.
Theory Nine: The Speed of Wit
A 2015 study by William von Hippel called “Quick Thinkers Are Smooth Talkers:
Mental Speed Facilitates Charisma,” provides a clear and instructive lesson that will
make an impact on how others perceive you. As you might gather from the name of
the study, his discovery was that speed of thought and dialogue was more related to
people’s ratings of charisma than many other traits, including being correct or
accurate. In fact, if you were to prioritize one aspect of interaction, quickness would
be highest rated.
The researchers asked test participants to rate how funny and charismatic their
friends were depending on how they performed on a series of tests. Friends of the
participants were also present and observing the tests. In the first test, participants
were asked to answer trivia questions given out in rapid succession. Afterward, the
participants’ friends were asked to rate their friends who actually took the tests.
Conventionally, you would assume that the friends of the participant would rate the
participant more charismatic and funny based on how they conducted themselves
and the presence they had in the room while they were taking the test. After all, we
established that charisma is about some positive impact on the surrounding people.
Maybe, like with the General Charisma Inventory, the participant smiled at
everyone, got along with the researchers, and made people laugh. Isn’t this our first
indication of charisma?
If not, perhaps they rated them on how well they performed on the first test.
Intelligence is attractive, and attractiveness is an element of charisma, right?
Perhaps humans are less shallow than we would expect, and we rate correctness
and accuracy highly.
Instead, neither of those factors mattered whatsoever. It turns out that charisma
wasn’t related to a positive impact on surrounding people or accuracy or the
appearance of intelligence. What mattered most was how quickly the participants
answered—the speed with which they took action. The friends of the participants
didn’t necessarily care whether the participant performed the task correctly. All
they based their decisions on was speed.
The study concluded that people tend to have a more favorable impression of you
depending on how quickly you speak or take a position. It doesn’t really matter
whether you are correct, accurate, or maybe even sensible. So to appear more
charismatic, it’s better to speak first and loudly, even if you have nothing to say and
even if you are speaking gibberish (to a reasonable extent). Slowly and correctly,
while it may not be seen as negative, clearly won’t have the overwhelmingly positive
effect that acting quickly will have.
People apparently tend to have a natural attraction to others who “think on their
feet,” and it is seen as one of the ultimate expressions of someone desirable and
charismatic. Of course, this is the same tendency that allows us to fall for people
who are smooth talkers and conmen, the consummate used car salesman. If
someone appears to have a speedy answer for everything, especially in a confident
and assertive manner, then we find it appealing for some reason.
Overall, whether we deem someone charismatic is more of an emotional reaction
than a logical one, so it makes sense that speed dictates it.
The researcher Von Hippel perhaps summed it up best: “Although we expected
mental speed to predict charisma, we thought that it would be less important than
IQ. Instead, we found that how smart people were was less important than how
quick they were.”