Internet Psychologist
Throughout the web you will see a seemingly endless array of buttons saying “Buy This”. That is a quite direct form of words. Many sales people would be taught not to be so direct, but to ask questions that imply purchase, such as “how many would you like” or “what …
Coronation Street actor, Antony Cotton could well be the “King of the Jungle” in this year’s “I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here…!” Not only does he have millions of adoring fans who watch him on the box each week, he is also a popular “Tweeter”. And while he is …
Today you have a test. Find something that really, truly interests you and start reading it online. Follow the links and continue reading. Simple. Now look at the address of the website you reach at the end. You could well find it is entirely different to the one you started …
Babies know what you are thinking. New research shows that at around 10 months, young infants can detect if someone has changed their mind. Before they can walk or talk, babies can see inside your mind. So why does this happen? Why is it that trying to get to grips …
So, here’s a conundrum: which way does the Leaning Tower of Pisa lean? Does it lean to the left, or to the right? It rather depends, of course, which way you are looking at it. But the chances are, if you look at the Tower and it appears to be …
This week, Woman’s Weekly magazine is 100 years old. Happy Birthday, old gal. And in spite of the magazine market exploding since the introduction of the 1d (one old penny) magazine, it remains the best performing magazine in the sector, with sales slightly up in a market that has seen …
Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou took a risk this week when he announced a referendum on the EU finance deal, which the rest of Europe thought was done and dusted. Greece and financial matters do not appear to be happy bedfellows at the moment. Indeed, a seemingly happy-go-lucky attitude to …
Sales people up and down the land will be scaring their customers today. Not because it is Halloween, but due to the fact that sales people are taught that people buy because of fear. Nonsense. People do not buy because of fear, no matter what the sales text books tell …
The latest smartphone from Nokia might just sell. Not because it is brilliant – it might be for all I know – but because it is brightly coloured. Most mobile phones are the same colour – sort of grey, silver, black combinations. The white iPhone was massively attractive, of course …
Here’s a simple psychology project you can do yourself this weekend in your local High Street. Sit yourself down in the café or restaurant of your nearest department store and do a bit of “people watching“. All you have to do is count the number of shopping bags each person …
Yesterday I was in Brighton at a family funeral; my Auntie Mary, who was only in her mid-60s, was told a couple of months ago that she had just six weeks to live. She was a wonderful woman and so it was no surprise that the church had just as …
What do you like best – reading something on-screen, or having a piece of paper in your hands and reading from that? Consistently, people claim that the subjective experience of reading from print is better than screen reading. Although we have to read millions of words from our screens each …
How many friends do you have on Facebook? Whatever the answer, I can tell how much grey matter you have in your “amygdala” – a small, almond shaped area deep within your brain. The amygdala plays a central role in emotion and in memory – probably helping us remember things …
Google has announced that it is “making search more secure”. What it is doing is ensuring that for all people who are logged into Google at the “dot com” site their searches will be encrypted. This, according to Google, is because search is “personal”. So, my first question is: what …
Hate your inbox? Think again. All that emailing you do could be doing two things for you. According to a small study of Australian schoolchildren, email makes you more intelligent and increases your popularity at the same time. The research found that boys in particular were more popular the more …