Category: Mind & Psychology
-
Why Things You Had No Interest In Quietly Become Your Favourites
Simply seeing or hearing something over and over makes us more likely to like it — even if we were never interested in it to begin with. Psychologists call this the mere exposure effect.
-
Why, When Everyone Is Watching, No One Helps
When no one helps, it is not because everyone is cold. Two brakes are at work — diffusion of responsibility and everyone else looking calm — and experiments show the more bystanders there are, the less likely anyone is to move.
-
Why Painful Experiences Are Judged by Their Final Few Seconds
We judge an experience not by its total length or misery, but by its most intense moment and how it ended. In Kahneman’s cold-water experiment, most people preferred the longer trial simply because its final seconds were slightly less painful.