- Accidentally step on your friend’s foot, and it will hurt. But let your friend believe that you intentionally stepped on her foot and, research has shown, it will hurt even more. The injury is the same, but the perceptions are different. (1)
- Numerous studies have shown that medical patients who adhere to their treatment—even when that treatment is phony—have better health outcomes than those who don’t (2)
- If a doctor offers us words of hope and encouragement, we are more likely to heal faster and feel better than are patients of doctors who don’t. In one well-known study of people recovering from abdominal surgery, patients who were treated encouragingly by their doctors went home from the hospital more than two days earlier than patients who weren’t (3)
- Colloca et al. (2004).When compared with open injections administered in full view of the patients, the hidden injections were far less effective. In other words, the drugs worked better when the patients could see them being administered. This was true not just for one or two of the drugs; it was true for all of them (4)
- simply substituting the name Jennifer for John lowered both men’s and women’s estimations of an aspiring scientist’s résumé. (5)
- Baseball umpires have been shown to favor star players, and schoolteachers favor star pupils (or at least those they perceive as being stars). In the case of umpires, their perception of a pitch appears to be colored by their perception of the pitcher: the better they believe him to be, the more likely it is that a ball will be called a strike. In an ideal world, these pitcher-friendly calls would be evenly distributed among all pitchers. But they aren’t. According to one recent study, they go disproportionately to the game’s elite (6)
- For instance, doctors in urology groups that profit from tests for prostate cancer order more of the tests than doctors who send samples to independent laboratories. (And in case you’re wondering: no, all those extra tests don’t result in more cancer being detected. Just the opposite, in fact. Doctors’ practices that do their own lab work bill the federal Medicare program for analyzing 72 percent more prostate tissue samples per biopsy. Yet they actually detect fewer cases of cancer than their counterparts who send specimens to outside labs.) This is no knock on urologists; cardiologists do pretty much the same thing. A study published in 2011 in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that, after controlling for a number of factors, such as the doctor’s specialty, a patient of a doctor earning money from testing was more than twice as likely to be tested as a patient of a doctor without financial interest in the tests (7)
- Singapore tokens representing money and invited them to bet on the outcome of random coin flips. Before each flip, participants got the chance to pay to read a prediction of what the result of the next toss would be. After the coin toss, those who hadn’t paid also learned what the “expert” had predicted. The odds of any one prediction being right were, of course, fifty-fifty. Still, when the advice proved correct after the first coin toss, roughly 12 percent of players were convinced enough that they paid for a tip in the second round. But here’s the kicker: the proportion rose each time the advice was correct. If four tips in a row were right—purely the result of chance, mind you—more than 40 percent of players paid for advice for round five. In other words, they were willing to do something completely irrational: pay for predictions about an event whose outcome was impossible to predict. (8)
- When it came to the authoritarian churches, the tough times were good for business: during the Depression, every one of them added converts. But this was not true of the nonauthoritarian churches. Denominations like the Presbyterians and the Episcopalians foundered. During the depths of the Depression, for instance, the Presbyterian Church in the United States attracted about 30 percent fewer converts than it had during more prosperous times. The Seventh-day Adventist Church, by comparison, drew flocks of new parishioners; it attracted about 68 percent more converts during the Depression than it had during good times (9)
- They, too, found that health followed wealth: the richer the twin, the healthier the body. But they also found that health was correlated with one other factor: a sense of control. (The researchers were able to determine this because the twins in the database answered a series of questions about the degree to which they perceived they had control over various aspects of their live: sex, money, marriage—the whole shebang.) They looked, in particular, at two broad indicators of health: each person’s body mass index, or BMI, which is a measure of obesity, and how many chronic health problems they had experienced in the past year. And they found that these indicators tended to go down as the sense of control went up: the greater the sense of control, the fewer health problems. Their results suggest, as they put it, “that a personality variable involving perception of reality is as powerful as the ‘actual reality’ of income (10)
- Weger and Loughnan (2013).were told that before each question appeared, an answer would be briefly flashed on their computer screens. The answer would appear too quickly for them to consciously perceive it, they were told, but it would appear slowly enough that their unconscious minds would absorb it. The other group, however, was told that the flashes simply signaled the next question. In fact, for both groups, a random string of letters, not the answers, was flashed. But, remarkably, the people who thought the answers were flashed did better on the test. Not a lot better—on average they scored 9.85 out of 20 questions, compared to 8.37 out of 20 for the other group—but still, that is a significant, quantifiable difference (11)
- In one experiment, students were each given a word problem. But the problems were not all the same; some were solvable and some were not. After working on these for a while, the students were presented with a new set of problems to solve—anagrams. The students were also given a questionnaire that allowed the researcher to determine which of them were superstitious and which were not. This, as it turned out, was an important distinction. After being stumped by the unsolvable problem, students with a high level of superstitious belief solved more anagrams than did students with a low level of superstitious belief. Superstition spelled the difference (12)
- By subjecting the women to a mood disorder scale, researchers were able to determine that reciting the Book of Psalms produced not merely a psychic benefit, but a tangible one: it measurably lowered the women’s level of anxiety, allowing them to carry on with their daily lives in the midst of a war zone (13)
- during an eclipse, major U.S. stock market indexes typically fell. Not by much—10 basis points a day, or one-tenth of a percentage point—but enough to matter. And in case you’re wondering, this superstitious behavior wasn’t unique to the United States. Lepori looked at how eclipses affected markets in ten other countries, including China, India, Japan, and Thailand. He found that they all fell under the influence of eclipses. Again, the effect wasn’t big—just 8.5 basis points per day— but it was always there (14)
- In a series of experiments, he randomly assigned people either to work groups with positions of high or low power, or to a control group. When they were questioned afterward, those who had been primed with power were convinced the others were on their side—a view not shared by the less-powerful. But it gets worse. In another experiment, he found that the powerless worker bees in his groups would form alliances against those with power—even when it was not in their financial interest to do so. So not only do bosses habitually overestimate their ability to win respect and support from their underlings—they are also blissfully unaware of those working against them… In an additional experiment, Brion found that when a boss tells a joke to a subordinate, he loses the innate ability to distinguish between a real smile and a fake (15)
- More importantly, this reluctance to take advice varied according to the degree of the manager’s power: the more powerful the manager, the less likely he or she was to take advice. (16)
- the experience of power directly activates the motivational systems in the brain that regulate what researchers call “approach behavior”—that is, the behavior that allows you to “go for it,” whatever the “it” happens to be—food, sex, physical comfort, you name it. The more powerful you feel, the more inclined you are to pursue these things. (17)
- we think others will pay far more for things than we will. It doesn’t matter what the thing is —it can be a teddy bear, an iPhone, or a trip to the moon—we consistently believe that the next guy will pay more for it. In one study, for instance, people were asked how much they would pay to have flawless teeth. (The average answer, in case you’re wondering, was $692.) But the people in the survey thought other people would pay nearly twice as much—$1,349. The same biased self-view, by the way, holds true when it comes to selling things. Asked how much it would take for them to do something embarrassing or demeaning, like shaving their heads, people said they couldn’t bear to do it for anything less than $766. But their fellow man, they thought, would sell out for much less: just $222, on average (18)
- people were given false feedback—that is, they were lied to— about their performance in a competition of muscular strength. Some were told they were really strong when they were weak, and others were told they were weak when they were strong, thereby inflating or deflating each person’s sense of their own physical ability. But this illusion produced a lasting impact. When the participants were later tested on a different motor task requiring physical stamina, those whose sense of strength had been artificially boosted displayed greater physical endurance. Given a little encouragement—even false encouragement—they not only persevered, they excelled (19)
References
- The Sting of Intentional Pain
- Adherence to Treatment and Health Outcomes
- Reduction of Postoperative Pain by Encouragement and Instruction of Patients—A Study of Doctor-Patient Rapport, General Practice Consultations: Is There Any Point in Being Positive?
- Overt Versus Covert Treatment for Pain, Anxiety, and Parkinson’s Disease
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- Urologists’ Self-Referral for Pathology of Biopsy Specimens Linked to Increased Use and Lower Prostate Cancer Detection, Association Between Physician Billing and Cardiac Stress Testing Patterns Following Coronary Revascularization
- Why Do People Pay for Useless Advice? Implications of Gambler’s and Hot-Handed Fallacies in False-Expert Setting
- Economic Threat as a Determinant of Conversion Rates in Authoritarian and Nonauthoritarian Churches
- Higher Perceived Life Control Decreases Genetic Variance in Physical Health: Evidence from a National Twin Study
- Mobilizing Unused Resources: Using the Placebo Concept to Enhance Cognitive Performance
- The Effect of Superstitious Belief on Performance Following an Unsolvable Problem
- Psalms and Coping with Uncertainty: Religious Israeli Women’s Responses to the 2006 Lebanon War
- Dark Omens in the Sky: Do Superstitious Beliefs Affect Investment Decisions
- The Loss of Power: How Illusions of Alliance Contribute to Powerholders’ Downfall
- The Detrimental Effects of Power on Confidence, Advice Taking, and Accuracy
- Social Power and Approach-Related Neural Activity, Power and Goal Pursuit
- Overestimating Others’ Willingness to Pay
- Control and Efficacy as Interdisciplinary Bridges, Self-Evaluative and Self-Efficacy Mechanisms Governing the Motivational Effects of Goal System, Expectations and Performance: An Empirical Test of Bandura’s Self-Efficacy Theory