# Tag Info

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You may be thinking of the Backfire Effect. When presented with logical and rational evidence disputing a strongly-held belief, most people's natural tendency is to hold on even tighter to those beliefs rather than to reassess their position. As for why it happens... that's a matter of some debate (surprise, surprise), but the general thinking seems to be ...

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First, biological features do not always arise from some intrinsic benefit. They can also be byproducts of other adaptations, or spandrels. That being said, one example of a possible benefit is specialization. For instance, birds will develop asymmetries in their visual system based on light inputs to their outward-facing eye (one eye faces the eggshell, ...

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I think the field of persuasive communication is relevant for your answer, as well as research into the efficacy of psychotherapy. Customers trust advertising if it is communicated by: attractive persons credible experts Psychotherapy is more effective if: the therapist believes that his methods are effective (!) patient and therapist share the same ...

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I think this is not a psychological syndrome but just a reflection of the physical procesces. As such it might not be on-topic for this site. Having this said, here is a quick answer. When you hear your own while speaking, the sound source is in a different place than it is, when you hear a recording of your voice through a loudspeaker. In addition, when ...

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I'm lucky enough to know a counselor-in-training whose preferred modality is CBT; here's what she suggested. Identifying those core beliefs is indeed the important part. Useful tools include the CBT Thought Record worksheet, which pretty well explains itself, and the downward arrow technique illustrated in this figure: (Trader, 2011). One ...

3

I'm not a cognitive science expert, but I happen to have some experience in change management / trying to convince people. There are in fact a lot of logical reasons for refusing logical and rational arguments. Suppose someone tries to share an idea with you. I will pass on the very obvious problems of "not befitting my interest" / "triggering ...

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Sure, to some extent mind reading "implicitly implies" brain reading. For instance, if you were reading someone's mind by their behavior or their heart rate, it would be through their brain's effect on those organs. But the brain is a physical object, whereas the concept of the mind is more obfuscated. Some people emphasize the experiential aspects of the ...

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Jens' answer is pretty much spot on, but misses the fact, remembered from my undergraduate lectures, that your ears actually partially 'turn off' when you speak (or chew), in what's called the stapedius reflex (wikipedia). The most common reference I've seen for this is Møller (2000), which unfortunately is a book, but I'm sure more information could be ...

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There are several approaches to theoretical neuroscience. I am currently taking the physics/mathematics approach: modelling the currents in neurons and coupling several neurons together through differential equations. In Computer Science, the tendency is more towards machine learning: Bayesian statistics, artificial neural networks, signal processing, ...

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A heuristic consists of preferences that help you decide in a situation where you do not have enough information or do not care enough to make an informed decision. For example, when you want to buy yoghurt, but are no nutritionist, you might decide on which yoghurt you buy by the familiarity of the brand name (you prefer the familiar, this is called the ...

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In my country, studying educational psychology is a postgraduate qualification. It implies that you have completed an undergraduate sequence in psychology, and therefore would have already been exposed to the basics of statistics and research methods (e.g., univariate, bivariate statistics, significance testing, various ANOVA, regression, study designs, ...

3

Cross Validated has a long list of answers to, "What book would you recommend for non-statistician scientists?" including an answer from our own @JeromyAnglim regarding SPSS for psychologists. Jeromy has also listed a number of good recommendations in response to The current recommended text for statistics in behavioural sciences, and @Mike suggested one for ...

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From experience and some knowledge gathered from all over the place, yes and no. For example, if you want to do two things that are both mind-engaging, you'll probably end up doing both sloppily, or one much better than the other. But if one task is mundane and other mind engaging, like listening to music and doing math problem, or listening to a lecture and ...

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There is some research into the efficacy of self-help versus therapy. Usually these studies find that self-help is less effective or not effective at all (e.g. Ehlers et al., 2003, to give just one example), although the relative effectiveness depends on the type and severity of disorders. For example, fear of flying is probably easier to self-treat than a ...

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It's a little unclear to me from what you've said that your efforts are truly affecting your brother's ideas. It's also unclear whether those ideas are objectively bad, or whether you should be trying to change them. In general, we have to be careful to avoid recommending specific actions for specific people here. That being said, the general phenomenon you ...

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A few bits of useful jargon come to mind... Low cognitive complexity may lead to simplistic and absolutist thinking, which one may also refer to as splitting or "black-and-white" thinking (because there's no recognition of "grey areas"). Need for closure and low openness to experience may lead to resistance to change, which is a somewhat less pejorative ...

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Mu The question is like a tautology - ALL effective ways of changing people's beliefs would automatically be valid marketing techniques, pretty much by definition. Marketing is not a subset of all possible techniques, it's a discipline on using all those for the specific purpose of marketing goods/services. Rational argument is also a classic marketing ...

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Some generalizations: Because Enlightenment-era rationality, with its values of liberalism and rationality and progress, has a very bad (read: hypocritical) historical track record of irrational, inegalitarian, maximally exploitative colonialism. Phrenology and Orientalism are among its crown jewels. The first chapter of Immanuel Wallerstein's ...

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You'll be interested in Where Mathematics Comes From, by George Lakoff and Rafael E. Núñez. Lakoff & Núñez argue that all of our mathematical concepts are based on some kind of conceptual metaphor, where we take the rules of a domain that we understand intuitively and apply them into a new, mathematical context. For example, the concept of "motion along ...

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Schema and Heuristic are two different things- not really related to one another, so I'm not sure asking for the difference between the two makes sense. That said- A Schema is a cognitive framework for storing information and relating it together. Schemas form the basis for knowledge in the head. A Heuristic is a mechanism for solving problems. Therefore, ...

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Unless the advertisement is actually advertising the person's attractiveness directly, this should be a peripheral issue. Consider Wikipedia's description of the central route: Central-route processes involve scrutiny of persuasive communication (e.g., a speech or an advertisement) to determine the arguments' merits. Under these conditions, a person's ...

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Here are a few theories and sources I happen to know that relate to your questions: Contextual cues aid recall of context-dependent memories. Plenty of research exists on these topics. An easily digestible example may be found through PsychCentral (Nauert, 2009). We have another great question about context-switching here already that you might want to ...

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In many languages, there is no word similar in meaning to the English word mind. In my opinion that fact illustrates an inherent problem with the scientific use of that word: that mind does not even denote a unified concept at all. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the following current meanings of mind, among others ...

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Wikipedia is often a good place to start for basic questions like these. Wikipedia has separate pages devoted to the mind, the brain, and even the mind–body problem, which is one example of the many theoretical challenges implied by the distinctions between "mind" and "brain". Simply stated: The brain is a physical organ. It's entirely possible that much ...

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Some ancient historical precedent exists for preferring $10$, but also for $6$, so that's mixed support from Wikipedia on perfect numbers. As for honest-to-goodness modern research, here's one quick result on prevalence of round prices in marketing (Klumpp, Brorsen, & Anderson, 2005): it's higher than for non-round prices. Some other results are reviewed ...

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There are numbers - as in groups of objects - that are easily divisible so may have the appeal of symmetry. Other numbers may align with the number system. However, there are different number systems. The ancient Egyptians counted on their fingers using the each knuckle of the four fingers sequentially, so 3 knuckles x 4 fingers allowed them to count to ...

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