SLG - Fun Facts and Cool Studies
From PsychWiki - A Collaborative Psychology Wiki
The happiest day of the year is... Christmas!
{Did you know the happiest day of the year is... Christmas!, followed closely by Thanksgiving. Valentines Day and Halloween are tied for the same level of happiness. There is a 9.7 percent increase in happiness on Fridays compared with the worst day of the week, Monday.} The link above is a New York Time Article which discusses how Facebook created Gross National Happiness Index that collected data from over 100 Million users over two years to find out the level of happiness of each day of the year.
Puppy therapy relieves stress
(quotes) A Chapman University student group wanted to find a way to relieve stress during finals week, so it came up with an innovative approach: puppies. A student group will bring 10 dogs to campus next week to help everyone relax during finals, just one of the things the school will do to help students de-stress. "It has been proven that having a dog helps relieve stress, so we thought it would be a cute idea if we brought some furry friends on campus," said Jennifer Heinz, a sophomore and integrated educational studies major who helped organize the event. (quotes)
We eat the bad movie-popcorn because of the situation (aka - be a social psychologist and watch movies for a living)
"The researchers showed movie trailers in a theatre to two groups of people — one group got fresh popcorn and the other got stale, week-old popcorn. After the trailers, the researchers collected the popcorn containers and weighed them. The results showed that participants with a movie-popcorn habit ate the same amount of popcorn whether it was fresh or stale. This was especially striking because the participants acknowledged that they didn’t really like the stale popcorn. “What this shows is that these people ate in response to being in a movie theatre. Although we might think that we eat because food tastes good, we sometimes eat habitually,” Wood explained. “We’re in the same place with the same food as in the past, and we are cued to eat.”
If you want an occupied subway seat, don't provide a justification (aka - be a social psychologist and ride the subway all day)
"As Milgram's mother-in-law had posed it to him: "Why don't young people get up anymore in a bus or a subway train to give their seat to a gray-haired elderly woman?" Milgram wanted to know: What if you simply asked them to? And so students in his experimental social psychology class took to the underground to ask for seats, under a number of conditions (either with no justification, or offering a rationale like "I can't read my book standing up"). People were surprisingly compliant—a total of 68 percent either got up or moved over in the "no justification" condition. The more justification that was offered, however, the less likely people were to stand up. "
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