10 psychological phenomena that will surprise you

Psychology addresses the complexity of the human being, his behavior and his mental processes.

Among the different facets of study of this science, are the so-called psychological phenomena. What are the most common psychological phenomena? In this article we will find out.

10 psychological phenomena that deserve to be explained

Our brain works in a somewhat surprising way, sometimes. We have compiled ten psychological phenomena that maybe you did not know and that you may be interested in knowing.

1. Cognitive dissonance

It means that when we have two contradictory thoughts or beliefs, or we make decisions and behave differently than we think, we will feel bad or we will have anxiety or discomfort. When we become aware of such discomfort or tension, people unconsciously tend to regain balance to reduce dissonance. Then, we can behave or argue in favor of the decision we have made, to give us peace of mind and convince ourselves that we have done well.

Let's take an example: a soldier must go to war but he thinks that it is not right to kill another human being. If you have killed someone, you can argue that he did it to defend the homeland. Another example is the 

smoker that you know that smoking hurts you and increases your chances of getting cancer and other diseases. Advertising and campaigns banning smoking in public places increase internal tension and contradiction. We know that smoking kills, but we prefer to deny it. There are people who would say: “you have to die of something”, “the doctor told me that my lungs are impeccable”, “I control it”, etc., and thus we reduce the tension.

2. Hallucinations are common

One third of people report experiencing hallucinations at some point in their life. Similarly, ordinary people often have paranoid thoughts. The brain works this way to fill in the information gap. The problem is when that happens very often, because it can be an alarm for problems in certain regions of the brain. It is known that when schizophrenics they have hallucinations, it is because the region that would be responsible for sending the message is really activated. The sound, the images or the smells that they perceive, really exist for them, even though there is no stimulus that triggers them.

3. The Placebo effect

It happens when the subject believes that a drug or medication has an effect on him, even if said effect has no physiological basis. Examples of placebo are many drugstore "magic and miraculous effects" products, energy bracelets, and so on.

Researchers have found some curiosities such as:

• The bigger the pills, the more they heal
• Two pills cure more than one
• The blue ones heal more than the red ones
• Placebos in pills heal more than certain pills
• Injections heal more than pills
• There are also placebo tests: X-rays, scans ...

4. Obedience to authority

Numerous studies show how people in power can control our behaviors and lead us to do things we don't want to do. In the famous Stanley Milgram study, 63% of the participants kept giving electric shocks to another human being just because someone in authority told them to do so.

5. Choices Mediated by Emotions

We are not very good at either making decisions or understanding why we make those choices. As the scientific popularizer says Eduard Punset, “We have been taught to be very logical and reasonable in making decisions, but it turns out that there is not a single reasonable decision that is not tainted by an emotion. There is no project that does not start with an emotion. And there is not a project that does not end with an emotion ”.

Also, when we make a decision, even if the decision is not a good one, we have a tendency to rationalize why that decision is the best option. The Emotional Marketing is responsible for gathering this knowledge and applying it to seduce our emotions and get us to buy a specific product.

6. Fantasizing reduces motivation

Thinking that we have already been successful in the past can reduce our motivation. In addition, we could consider valid the argument according to which thinking about success leads us unfailingly to create the conditions for this to happen, but in reality this is rather counterproductive.

7. Brainstorming doesn't work

As the studies of B. Nijstad (2006), group thinking reduces the power of brainstorming, because in a group, people are lazier and care more about what others think. Better to think only when it comes to brainstorming.

• On In this article we fully explain why Brainstorming does not work.

8. We must not suppress thoughts

By stopping thoughts you actually get to think about them even more. It is one of the strategies most used by people who suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and most assume that such a tactic has seldom helped them.

9. We can train multitasking

As usual, multitasking reduces efficiency because we have to assign different cognitive resources to different tasks simultaneously. But recent studies show that you can learn to multitask. You just have to train.

10. It's the little things that matter

We think that it is the big events in our life that change us or make us happy, but in reality it is the little things that add up and make us who we are.

Like in The AlchemisttoWe must be aware that the life course must be valued by itself, in each of its circumstances, regardless of the achievement of the achievements to which we aspire.