Ten Psychological Studies that Might Improve the Way You Manage Your Personal Finances
If you aren't sure how to answer these questions, head over to David DiSalvo's Brainspin blog and read his entry titled "Ten Psychology Studies from 2009 Worth Knowing About."
I've covered a couple of these studies in previous posts here on Creditbloggers, but a few of them are new to me. Item #2 on the list -- "First impressions are all about value" -- is particularly interesting. The results of the research study, led by Daniela Schiller, a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Neural Science and Psychology Department, New York University, were published in the journal Nature Neuroscience under the title, "A neural mechanism of first impressions." It turns out that the parts of our brains responsible for forming impressions about people we meet for the first time are also responsible for figuring out how we can obtain the most benefit from social interactions.
In the study, 19 volunteers were shown faces of twenty different men on a computer screen. Each photo was accompanied by a short fictional biography about the man, listing both positive and negative traits. The volunteers were asked to rate the likability of each man on a scale from one to eight. During the test, the researchers scanned the brains of the volunteers. They found that the volunteers' amygdalas and posterior cingulate cortices went to work immediately to establish an opinion of the fictional person.
As DiSalvo writes, one of the previously-known functions of the amygdala is to help us decide how much we ought to trust another person. And the posterior cingulate cortex helps us with our "economic decision-making and valuation of rewards."
"The implication," write DiSalvos, "is that we’re all hardcore value processors even before 'Hello' comes out of our mouths. The subjective evaluation we make when meeting someone new includes -– to put it bluntly -– what’s in it for us."?
