Read about and understand the various psychological phenomena you observe in your day-to-day life. Get answers to common curiosities about everyday behavior. Understanding the root causes of your behaviors and those of others will greatly improve your understanding of human psychology. No human behavior, however small, is insignificant.
It’s tempting to think our memory works like the memory of a video recorder, in that it replays information exactly as recorded. This isn’t always the case. Based on how memories are stored and retrieved, they’re prone to errors called memory distortions. A distorted memory is a memory whose recall differs from what was encoded …
Why do humans have a tendency to believe that the grass is greener on the other side? Some call it the grass is greener syndrome. Why do people crave what they don’t have? Why do people compare what they have with what others have? This article will attempt to answer all of these questions. People …
To understand what causes overthinking, we need to understand why we think in the first place. After that, we can begin to explore why this process goes into overdrive and what can be done to overcome it. In the first half of the 20th century, behaviourists dominated the field of Psychology. They believed that behaviour …
Stockholm Syndrome is an intriguing psychological phenomenon in which hostages develop positive feelings for their captors during captivity. It sounds confusing. After all, common sense says that we should hate those who forcibly capture us and threaten us with violence, right? Stockholm Syndrome does not only makes victims like their captors. Some also empathize with …
You show your friend a music video from your favorite band, hoping they’ll like it as much as you do. After about a minute into the video, your friend blurts out, “Ugh… the singer makes me cringe!” You feel devastated, wronged, and slightly embarrassed. “Is this supposed to be cringe-worthy? I didn’t realize this was …
Joe was a brilliant actor who had been nominated for the best actor award in an award ceremony. He had worked hard and his movie had done very well. When the announcer announced that he was the winner, Joe felt a cocktail of emotions- he was joyous, inexplicably sad, relieved and excited all at the …
Have you ever wondered why people keep repeating the same thing in conversations over and over? If you’re anything like me, you can’t ignore the content of conversations because you know that language can be a window to the mind. People repeat what they say for a number of reasons in a variety of contexts. …
We like to think that we see the world as it is and that our eyes function very much like video cameras recording all the details in our field of vision. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that sometimes we are unable to see objects that are right in front of us. …
This article will focus on the mechanics behind the formation of stereotypes, explaining why people stereotype others and how we can begin to break these stereotypes. Stereotyping means attributing a personality trait or a set of personality traits to a group of people. These traits may either be positive or negative and stereotyping of groups …
Dehumanization means stripping humans off of their human qualities. Dehumanized humans are viewed as less than human by the dehumanizers, no longer having the same worth and dignity that humans normally ascribe to each other. Researchers have identified two types of dehumanizations- animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization.1 In animalistic dehumanization, you deny human attributes in the …