Neuroscience
One nagging thing I don’t understand about myself is why I’m still fooled by incidental feelings. Some 25 years ago Jerry Clore and I studied how gloomy weather makes one’s whole life look bad -- unless one becomes aware of the weather and attributes one’s gloomy mood to the gloomy sky, which eliminates the influence. You’d think I learned that lesson and now know how to deal with gloomy skies. I don’t, they still get me. The same is true for other subjective experiences, like the processing fluency resulting from print fonts – I still fall prey to their influence. Why does insight into how such influences work not help us notice them when they occur? What makes the immediate experience so powerful that I fail to apply my own theorizing until some blogger asks a question that brings it to mind?
Norbert Schwarz is Charles Horton Cooley Collegiate Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan and is among the most highly cited social psychologists alive today.
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Return to menu for One Nagging Thing.
- Paul Broks: What Should I Do?
There’s plenty I don’t understand about myself, but nothing nags. Paradoxically, the deeper I got into neuropsychology the less interested I became in the details of my own inner workings. I’m not sure why. It certainly is not because I arrived...
- Robert Cialdini: Taking On Too Much
Over the stretch of my professional years, I'd say my most nagging error has involved an inability to gauge correctly the point at which the next possible undertaking - or even golden opportunity - should be firmly rejected. Whenever I've allowed...
- Marilyn Davidson: Lost Opportunities
One nagging thing I still don’t understand about myself is why I didn’t ask my grandparents before they died, more about their childhoods? “Grandpa (R), you’re 100 now but what was it like being born in 1900 into a world where man couldn’t fly...
- Elizabeth Loftus: Nightmares
After struggling mightily, and not particularly successfully, to have a thought about this, I broached a Friday after-work happy hour group and asked them what they would say about themselves. To a person, each looked uncomfortable with the mere question....
- One Nagging Thing You Still Don't Understand About Yourself
The email edition of the British Psychological Society's Research Digest has reached the milestone of its 150th issue. That's over 900 quality, peer-reviewed psychology journal articles digested since 2003. To mark the occasion, the Digest editor...
Neuroscience
Norbert Schwarz: Incidental feelings
One nagging thing I don’t understand about myself is why I’m still fooled by incidental feelings. Some 25 years ago Jerry Clore and I studied how gloomy weather makes one’s whole life look bad -- unless one becomes aware of the weather and attributes one’s gloomy mood to the gloomy sky, which eliminates the influence. You’d think I learned that lesson and now know how to deal with gloomy skies. I don’t, they still get me. The same is true for other subjective experiences, like the processing fluency resulting from print fonts – I still fall prey to their influence. Why does insight into how such influences work not help us notice them when they occur? What makes the immediate experience so powerful that I fail to apply my own theorizing until some blogger asks a question that brings it to mind?
Norbert Schwarz is Charles Horton Cooley Collegiate Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan and is among the most highly cited social psychologists alive today.
--
Return to menu for One Nagging Thing.
- Paul Broks: What Should I Do?
There’s plenty I don’t understand about myself, but nothing nags. Paradoxically, the deeper I got into neuropsychology the less interested I became in the details of my own inner workings. I’m not sure why. It certainly is not because I arrived...
- Robert Cialdini: Taking On Too Much
Over the stretch of my professional years, I'd say my most nagging error has involved an inability to gauge correctly the point at which the next possible undertaking - or even golden opportunity - should be firmly rejected. Whenever I've allowed...
- Marilyn Davidson: Lost Opportunities
One nagging thing I still don’t understand about myself is why I didn’t ask my grandparents before they died, more about their childhoods? “Grandpa (R), you’re 100 now but what was it like being born in 1900 into a world where man couldn’t fly...
- Elizabeth Loftus: Nightmares
After struggling mightily, and not particularly successfully, to have a thought about this, I broached a Friday after-work happy hour group and asked them what they would say about themselves. To a person, each looked uncomfortable with the mere question....
- One Nagging Thing You Still Don't Understand About Yourself
The email edition of the British Psychological Society's Research Digest has reached the milestone of its 150th issue. That's over 900 quality, peer-reviewed psychology journal articles digested since 2003. To mark the occasion, the Digest editor...