15 psychology facts you should know

 

Confirmation Bias: People tend to seek out information that confirms their existing beliefs and ignore or dismiss information that contradicts them.

The Power of Priming: Subtle cues or stimuli can influence our behaviour and decisions without our conscious awareness. For example, exposure to words related to elderly people can unconsciously affect how fast someone walks.

The Halo Effect: People tend to perceive individuals who possess one positive trait as having many positive traits. This can lead to biased judgments in various contexts, such as assuming that physically attractive people are also more intelligent or trustworthy.

The Bystander Effect: The presence of others can reduce the likelihood of someone offering help in an emergency situation. This phenomenon occurs because individuals may assume that someone else will take responsibility or feel less personal accountability in a group setting.

Cognitive Dissonance: When individuals hold conflicting beliefs or attitudes, they experience psychological discomfort known as cognitive dissonance. To alleviate this discomfort, people may change their beliefs or rationalize their behaviour.

The Zeigarnik Effect: People tend to remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed ones. This is why unfinished tasks often linger in our minds until we complete them.

Social Loafing: In group settings, individuals may exert less effort when working collectively compared to when working alone. This phenomenon occurs because people may feel their individual contributions are less essential in a group context.

The Pygmalion Effect: Expectations about a person's behaviour or performance can influence that person's actual behaviour or performance. When others have high expectations for someone, they tend to perform better as a result.

The Placebo Effect: Believing that a treatment or intervention will be effective can sometimes lead to actual improvements in symptoms, even if the treatment itself has no therapeutic value.

Serial Position Effect: When recalling a list of items, people tend to remember the first and last items most effectively, while the middle items are often remembered less accurately. This phenomenon is known as the primacy and recency effect.

Stereotype Threat: The fear of confirming negative stereotypes about one's social group can impair performance on tasks relevant to those stereotypes. For example, women may perform worse on math tests when reminded of gender stereotypes about math ability.

Implicit Bias: Unconscious biases or prejudices that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions can operate without our awareness. These biases can influence behavior despite conscious efforts to be fair and impartial.

The Peak-End Rule: When recalling past experiences, people tend to disproportionately remember the most intense (peak) moments and the final moments of the experience. This can influence overall evaluations of past events.

The Illusion of Control: People often overestimate their ability to control events or outcomes, even when the situation is governed by chance or outside factors beyond their control.

Fundamental Attribution Error: When explaining others' behaviour, people tend to overemphasize internal factors (personality, character) and underestimate the influence of external factors (situational factors, context). However, when explaining their own behaviour, individuals often do the opposite.

These are just a few examples of intriguing psychological phenomena that help us understand human behaviour and cognition. Psychology is a vast and dynamic field with many more fascinating insights waiting to be explored.