AUG 08
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“ It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into“
Jonathan Swift
Due to an unfortunate combination of staff shortages, IT failures, and cashflow bottlenecks, Really Magazine is currently running slow. We hope to catch up shortly.
Pork Pies - Eyes
Another ' how to tell when someone is lying ' technique may be in the course of development.
The Department of Psychology at the University of Portsmouth believes that their new discoveries -
" could potentially be used in future by police forces and security agencies to detect deception "
Their studies showed that experimental subjects ( students ) blinked less when ' telling a lie ' ( which, enigmatically, was itself a fake ) than did those who were telling the truth.
After telling the ( fake ) lie, the liars blinked far more – presumably to make up for lost blink-time.
Really Magazine draws attention though to the word ' potentially ' in the above quote . . .
For, if the effect is confirmed, professional liars simply have to make sure that they blink plentifully when lying in order to have their investigators believe them.
22 AUG 08
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Dear Prudence
As a consumer, setting oneself an accurate monthly expenditure budget is never going to be easy. But, pooling the not inconsiderable resources of University of Southern California, Cornell University and New York University, researchers have identified a method which might help.
Their experimental studies revealed an enigmatic result - that consumers were significantly less accurate when trying to estimate their monthly budgets than when they estimated for the whole year.
But why ?
“ Consumers’ default tendency is to underestimate their budgets, for both next month and next year frames. However, budgets for the next year are closer to recorded expenses because consumers feel less confident when estimating these budgets, and therefore, adjust them upward. ”
Thus, the results suggest an easy way to more accurately estimate one's monthly expenditures –
" The authors propose that the best way to prepare a [ monthly ] budget is to make an annual budget and divide by 12. "
see : ' Will I Spend More in 12 Months or a Year? ' published in the current issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.
20 AUG 08
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The Seven Types of Forgetting revisited.
A recent article in the journal ' Memory Studies ' posited the theory that there are ( at least ) Seven Types of Forgetting -
Repressive erasure;
Prescriptive forgetting;
Forgetting that is constitutive in the formation of a new identity;
Structural amnesia;
Forgetting as annulment;
Forgetting as planned obsolescence;
Forgetting as humiliated silence.
Helpful though the article was in ' disentangling ' the process of forgetting things, the ideas have now been ' re – interpreted ' – with an essay ( in the same journal ) entitled ' Should we forget forgetting? '.
The new article suggests that ' forgetting something ' might instead be seen as :
" a problem of relative accessibility from a larger store of available memory. "
In an attempt to ' disentangle ' things still further, Really Magazine suggests a compromise theory encompassing both concepts :
Some things are deliberately forgotten,
Some are accidentally forgotten,
and Some are a mixture of the two.
14 AUG 08
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Hedges – a leap forward
Linguistic hedges : some examples :
Perhaps
Maybe
It's possible that
To a certain extent
Some have dismissed them as ' linguistic deadwood ' or ' lexical throat-clearing ' - but how much do they really affect the interpretation of verbal and written statements ?
Researchers from the Department of Psychology at Northern Illinois University have recently conducted a series of experiments which might help to finally pin down the effect of hedges - especially when they are used in persuasive arguments.
The research has just been published in the latest issue of the Journal of Language and Social Psychology.
" This research suggests that hedges describing data statements and/or that use colloquial language can, but do not always, undermine persuasive attempts. "
06 AUG 08
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