PsychCentral has compiled a list of the top 10 online psychology experiments. Thoughtfully, the list is of the top 10 long term experiments, meaning that they will be online for a long time to come.
Here’s the list, but check PsychCentral’s original as each experiment is described in some depth:
- You Just Get Me
- Bad Vibes
- The Stroop Test
- FaceResearch.org
- The Concept of Intentional Action
- Project Implicit
- Basic Music Intervals
- Face Transformer from the Perception Lab
- Visual Phenomena and Other Psychological Diversions
- Casual Fridays at Cognitive Daily
via Mind Hacks
Can the placebo effect work with exercise and fitness? Two Harvard psychologists decided to find out, and the results were startling.
84 maids at seven carefully matched hotels [were quizzed on] how much exercise they got. Fully a third of the women said they got no exercise at all, while two-thirds said they did not work out regularly. Langer and Crum took several measures of the women’s basic fitness levels, which indicated that they, indeed, had the poor health of basically sedentary people. Then just over half the women were told an unfamiliar truth: cleaning 15 rooms daily — pushing recalcitrant vacuum cleaners, scrubbing tubs, pulling sheets — constitutes more than enough activity to meet the surgeon general’s recommendation of a half-hour of physical activity daily. [The] control group was left in the dark.
A month later, Langer and Crum checked back with the women to find, as they reported in the February issue of Psychological Science, remarkable results. The average study-group maid had lost 2 pounds, while her systolic blood pressure had dropped by 10 points; by all measures the 44 women “were significantly healthier.” Yet there were no reported changes in behavior, only in mind-set.
The accompanying graphic highlights the findings, and the story was also covered by Ben Goldacre in his Guardian column, Bad Science.
via MeFi
I keep forgetting that audio recordings of Patient HM talking to scientists are online.
Brain Connection has a good overview of HM, and NPR discusses him in HM’s Brain and the History of Memory.
When twenty-seven year old Henry M. entered the hospital in 1953 for radical brain surgery that was supposed to cure his epilepsy, he was hopeful that the procedure would change his life for the better. Instead, it trapped him in a mental time warp where TV is always a new invention and Truman is forever president. The removal of large sections of his temporal lobes left Henry unable to form any new personal memories, but his tragic loss revolutionized the field of psychology and made “H.M.” the most-studied individual in the history of brain research.
The hows and whys on helping overcome the Tip-of-the-Tongue effect (PDF):
One of the most fascinating things about the tip-of-the-tongue state, is that it demonstrates how sometimes we know that we know something, without actually being able to recall it. This is part of what psychologists call ‘metacognition’, which allows us to realise when we should keep trying, despite the fact our memories might be failing us at a particular moment.
[…]
When a tip-of-tongue state is encountered, it is common that people focus on the few relevant things that are easily remembered, in the hope that the elusive fact will pop into mind. A more successful technique is to try and recall as much information about the topic as possible, no matter how loosely it is related.
Kevin Mitnick and Emmanuel Goldstein are undoubtedly the most widely known names in the black hat community*. In a series of videos from CNET News, they describe and demonstrate social engineering techniques.
On the same subject, this video demonstrating how easy it is to social engineer you way into clubs by pretending you’re the DJ is worth your time.
*I guess Kevin Poulsen should be on that list too… now the senior editor at Wired News and author of Threat Level.
via Schneier on Security