Articles About social psychology
Peer Pressure: Why the Presence of Friends Changes an Adolescent Brain
In the experiments that made this finding famous the friends were in another room and could not speak to the teenager at all. The risk taking went up anyway.
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35
23 Aug
Competition and Social Comparison: What Grading on a Curve Does to Learning
Festinger said people prefer an objective standard and compare themselves to others only when none exists. A curve removes it. That is the problem.
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34
23 Aug
The Pygmalion Effect: What a Teacher Believes Before Meeting You
A teacher's expectation moves a child most in the first days of term and almost not at all by the end of the month. That timing is the finding nobody quotes.
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52
22 Aug
Conformity: The Experiment Where People Denied What Their Own Eyes Saw
Asch called it a study of independence. Most of his participants stayed independent under pressure, and the textbooks quietly dropped that half.
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47
22 Aug
The Bystander Effect: Why Help Is Less Likely When More People Watch
The effect is real and the story that made it famous was not. How much the size of a crowd matters turns out to depend on how unclear the moment looks.
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47
16 Aug
Cognitive Dissonance: The Experiment Where One Dollar Changed More Minds Than Twenty
A famous 1959 result rests on sixty men and one question out of four. Sixty-five years later thirty-nine labs went looking for it again and came back empty.
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52
16 Aug
The Halo Effect: One Good Trait Rewrites Everything Else You Notice
Thorndike called it a constant error in 1920. More than a century later psychologists still cannot agree how much of it is bias and how much of it is real.
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49
16 Aug