5 impressive psychological discoveries

The systematic study of mental processes and human behavior has long been questioned why we act the way we do. Human psychology has amazing relatively unknown curiosities. We recommend, if you like to read about this type of curiosities, that you take a look at our old installments:

• 8 psychological curiosities that will impact you
• 8 popular psychological myths that already have a scientific explanation
• 10 psychological phenomena that will surprise you

Amazing Psychological Discoveries

In this article that we present today we intend to present a total of five impressive psychological discoveries that give answers to some enigmas of our psyche.

Are you ready to meet them? By clicking on the links you can access more detailed information on each of the discoveries.

1. The Halo Effect

He halo effect It is one of the concepts that has most attracted the attention of social and group psychologists. It is a cognitive bias through which the overall impression of a person (for example: “he is nice”) is generated from judgments that pertain to certain specific traits

(for example: "he is smart"). To better exemplify the phenomenon of the Halo Effect, we could bring up the case of the stars of the big screen.

The famous actors who appear in the highest grossing films are usually people with great physical attractiveness and a gift for people. They are one of those people who know how to captivate with their gestures and their eyes, they perfectly control the image they project. These two traits (physical attractiveness and sympathy) make us suppose, through this curious psychological effect, that they are also intelligent, generous, friendly people, etc. He halo effect It also happens in the opposite direction: if a person is not physically attractive, we will tend to think that he is an unpleasant or uninteresting person. That is, we will tend in this case to attribute specific negative traits to it.

• Attention: the Halo Effect is also used in the world of marketing

2. The dark energy of the brain

Although it may seem counterintuitive, when we get lost without thinking about anything in particular or are about to fall asleep, our brain consumes barely 5% less energy than when we try to solve difficult puzzles.

Not only that: when this happens, large regions of the brain begin to emit signals in a coordinated manner, causing hundreds of thousands of neurons to work together to... It is not very well known for what. The fact that these areas of the brain, which are part of what has been called Default Neural Network, stop working together when we are paying attention and using our focused attention to solve tasks or reflecting on concrete things has led to this pattern of electrical signals being called "the dark energy of the brain".

• You can read more about this here

3. cognitive dissonance

Why do we deceive ourselves? This is another of the questions that psychologists and philosophers have asked themselves over the centuries. In the study on human psychology, the cognitive dissonanceIt is described as discomfort or the contradictory feeling we experience when our beliefs conflict with what we do., or when we defend two discordant ideas at the same time.

psychologists of the stature of Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith They demonstrated something surprising and that marked a before and after in the study of cognitive dissonance. If a person is asked to lie and he does not consider himself a habitual liar, he will succeed in telling the lie and still think of himself as an honest person. Curious, isn't it? But how is this possible? The human mind resolves this type of cognitive dissonance by persuading yourself that the lie you just told is actually the truth. Although this may operate at a not very conscious level, the truth is that our brain tends to think well of us.

• More about this effect, in this post

4. The false consensus effect

He false consensus effect is another one cognitive bias which is studied in all Psychology faculties. The false consensus effect makes many individuals tend to overestimate the degree of "agreement" that others have towards their statements or opinions. Certainly, we tend to perceive that our opinions, values, beliefs or habits are the most habitual and supported by the majority of people around us. This belief produces that we tend to overestimate the confidence we have in our opinions, even if they are wrong, biased or minority.

From now on, remember: the false consensus effect can make you believe that your opinion is shared by other people... and maybe you're the only one who thinks so

5. The Westermarck effect

He incest it is one of the most universal taboos and, curiously, it is difficult to rationally justify its existence by adhering to the values ​​of "as long as it does not harm anyone, it should not be prohibited". However, from the point of view of evolution Yes, reasons can be found to avoid incest, since it can result in the birth of individuals with health problems or with difficulties to live independently.

Based on this idea, the researcher Edvard Westermarck He went on to propose that human beings have an innate propensity not to feel sexual attraction to people with whom we have had frequent contact during childhood. This translates into a lack of sexual desire towards people who are statistically very likely to be part of our family.

This phenomenon, known as the Westermarck effect, has been found in numerous studies on the subject, the best known being an investigation in which it was found that people who had been raised in the same kibbutz (a typical agricultural commune in Israel) are much less likely to marry each other.

• More about this effect, in this article

Bibliographic references:

• Triglia, Adrian; Regader, Bertrand; Garcia-Allen, Jonathan (2016). psychologically speaking. Paidos.
• Papalia, d. and Wendkos, S. (1992). Psychology. Mexico: McGraw-Hill, p. 9.