Psychology

Ah, Psychologists. The power to help humans or to manipulate them towards almost any ends. How sad it is that we can so easily be understood and manipulated by marketers, psychologists, politicians with an innate (or learned, heh) understanding of human psychology etc etc

Had a lecture was about Variable Reinforcement: If you reward a worker after them doing something 60 times, they'll invariably take a short break after doing it, then get back to working towards their next reward. Likewise if you reward them after every 180 times, except that they will break for longer; usally more than 180/60=3 times as long as before. But make their rewards arrive at uncertain intervals (eg sometimes twice in a row, sometimes with a gap of 100 in between), and they will break for almost no time. This is part of the reason why gambling is so addictive!!
There is such a fine science to the way in which certain pokie machines, for example, will reward people, to keep them on the track towards destruction (others simply pay-out according to a fixed probability-generating mechanism).
On that note, 21% of the world's pokie machines are in Australia. We really are a nation of losers.

Another one I've noticed: If a journalist simply states that public opinion is "overwhelming" on some matter, it influences people enormously. This is because (most) people don't generally like the idea that they disagree strongly with all their friends, and the rest of society. eg after publishing an article saying that "an overwhelming majority of Australians support gay marriages", experiments suggest people who have just read this article will profess more support for gay marriages than those that didn't read the article (although many who don't will lie in both scenarios, this is controlled for).
Some other funny ones
-- The man who works out why he left his wife AFTER he left her
-- You can help your chances of getting a job by imitating everything that an interviewer does during the interview. They lean forward, so do you. They talk faster, so do you. They lean back, yep, you've guessed it, you lean back. Just repeat his tone, direction etc.
A pity though that psychology, like other fields, often ends up serving the moral agenda of its practitioners.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjGkRFFBd0A