Jewish Currents: Resisting Authority: A Personal Account of the Milgram Obedience Experiments :

With some trepidation on my part, we began the experiment. After a few shocks, the learner let out an “Ouch!” and I asked if he was okay. He said he was, but after the next shock, his complaint became louder. I said I would stop. The “professor” told me to continue, and the learner said he was ready to go on, too. I went on for two or three more shocks. With each, the learner’s cry of pain became louder — and then he asked to stop, and I refused to go any further. The professor became very authoritative. He said that I was costing them valuable time, it was essential for me to continue, I was ruining the experiment. He asserted that he was in charge, not me. He reminded me that I had been paid and insisted that I continue. I refused, offered to give him back the five dollars, and told him that I believed the experiment to be really about how far I would go, that the learner was an accomplice, and that I was determined not to continue.

Technorati Tags: psychology, social psychology

Daniel Gilbert – Happiness Researcher – New York Times:

Q. AS THE AUTHOR OF A BEST SELLER ABOUT HAPPINESS, DO YOU HAVE ANY ADVICE ON HOW PEOPLE CAN ACHIEVE IT?

A. I’m not Dr. Phil.

We know that the best predictor of human happiness is human relationships and the amount of time that people spend with family and friends.

We know that it’s significantly more important than money and somewhat more important than health. That’s what the data shows. The interesting thing is that people will sacrifice social relationships to get other things that won’t make them as happy — money. That’s what I mean when I say people should do “wise shopping” for happiness.

Another thing we know from studies is that people tend to take more pleasure in experiences than in things. So if you have “x” amount of dollars to spend on a vacation or a good meal or movies, it will get you more happiness than a durable good or an object. One reason for this is that experiences tend to be shared with other people and objects usually aren’t.

Technorati Tags: emotion, psychology

Change Blindness – Natalie Angier – New York Times:

Whether lured into attentiveness by a bottom-up or top-down mechanism, scientists said, the results of change blindness studies and other experiments strongly suggest that the visual system can focus on only one or very few objects at a time, and that anything lying outside a given moment’s cone of interest gets short shrift. The brain, it seems, is a master at filling gaps and making do, of compiling a cohesive portrait of reality based on a flickering view.

Technorati Tags: perception, psychology, sensation

PsyBlog: How Memories are Distorted and Invented: Misattribution:

When a memory is ‘misattributed’ some original true aspect of a memory becomes distorted through time, space or circumstances.

Technorati Tags: memory, psychology

BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: How to study:

Here are three unintuitive but very effective ways of studying based on findings from psychological research

Over on the excellent blog Cognitive Daily, there is a summary of a research study on the effects of changing camera angles on accuracy of memory for details in the scenes.

Cognitive Daily: Cuts in movies, and their impact on memory:

There was no significant difference in the results for a static camera versus a moving camera, but viewers were significantly less accurate when they saw an abrupt cut in the movie. This decrease in accuracy was almost entirely found at the point in the movie immediately following the cut, suggesting quite strongly that the cut itself momentarily disoriented viewers. So although the perceptual system can handle cuts in a movie presentation, those cuts do have some cost.

PsyBlog has a fascinating post on studies of the “tip-of-the-tongue” phenomenon.

Technorati Tags: memory, psychology