Interesting Things For you Late @ Night 2: 6 Psychology Tricks That Will Make You More Successful

6 Psychology Tricks That Will Make You More Successful

Our minds are very unique and powerful tools that we have not yet come close to comprehending. Every year, hundreds of psychology studies uncover findings that reveal elements of our psyche we never knew existed. Many of the findings from these studies can be applied to our everyday activities to make us smarter, happier, or simply improve the overall quality of our lives. Here are 6 such psychology tricks you can use to make yourself more successful in a variety of areas.

1. Get Better Deals: Barter Using Unusual Numbers

The skill of negotiation is a very important one to have even if you’re not a big shot in the business world. Almost all of us will have to haggle over the price of a house or car at some point in our lives, and being a skilled negotiator could save you thousands of dollars on these important purchases. So what’s the best way to ensure you get a good deal? According to a couple of University of Florida psychology professors, it might be to open the bidding with an unusual price (Say $14.31 instead of $15).

They hypothesized that when the opening bid is given, the person responding tends to consider that as a kind of ‘mental anchor’ that they stray from in order to come up with a counter bid. Their thinking (that was eventually backed up by their findings) was that a round bid like $15 gets people to think in terms of dollars whereas an unusual bid causes respondents to focus more on the cents. For example, a bid of $15 makes a person think whether it’s worth $15 or $18 whereas a bid of $14.31 makes them think whether it’s worth $14.31 or $14.75. Next time you go to the flea market, try this one out and see for yourself!

2. Perform Better: Manage Your Audience

In social psychology there is a phenomenon known as social facilitation that you can easily apply in order to improve your performance on virtually any task. The basic tenet behind social facilitation is that when a person performs a task in front of an audience, they will do better than they would do alone if the task is easy or familiar, and worse than they would do alone if the task is new or difficult. This effect has been extensively researched and is supported by studies done with both humans and a variety of animals like cockroaches and rats. Take advantage of social loafing by doing easy tasks in the vicinity of other people that might be observing you, while taking alone time to work on novel tasks.

3. Live Up To Your Full Potential: Think Of Yourself as an Individual

There are many stereotypes that pervade our society despite the great strides we have made to reduce prejudice. However, what might surprise you is that stereotypes, even seemingly positive ones, have a tendency to reduce a person’s performance when they’re made aware of them. This effect is known as stereotype threat and has been found to effect people most when they are made aware of them right before a relevant performance. For example, if a math test is given to women with the preface that the test is especially hard for women, those women will tend to perform worse than those who were not told of any gender differences. Apparently this tendency for poorer performance is due to physiological arousal and fear of confirming a negative stereotype about a group one belongs to. The good news is, just by reading this article, you have helped to cure yourself of any stereotype threat you might be faced with, because people who are aware of it are much less likely to be affected by it.

4. Stick To Your Goals: Reward Yourself

Token economies have been used for years by parents trying to get their kids to do chores, but you might not have thought to apply it to your own goals like weight loss. All you do to establish a token economy is to set a long term goal and reward yourself consistently and incrementally for doing things in line with that goal. For example, if your goal for this year was to lose 20lbs, you could give yourself a token for every workout and for every healthy meal you ate. You could reward yourself by eating a piece of chocolate cake every 10 tokens or treating yourself to a fast food meal every 20. This type of system has been shown to decrease behaviour that is not consistent with your goals (provided you are consistent and don’t just gorge on snack food when you don’t earn it). For my money this could be a very successful diet strategy.

5. Get More From Your Friends — Expect More From Them

One psychological phenomenon most people are familiar with is that of the self-fulfilling prophecy, which occurs when someone has a belief about his/herself and unconsciously behaves in a way that confirms this belief. An example of this might be when you think you’re going to do badly on a math test and you end up failing it. One interesting type of self-fulfilling prophecy is known as the Pygmalion effect. The Pygmalion effect occurs when people (usually students) perform better simply because they are expected to do better. It was discovered when Robert Rosenthal performed a study showing that when teachers were led to believe that a class of ‘average’ students were exceptional, those students began to live up to to these expectations. Apply this by building your underlings up when you need a big project delivered on time, or even just when you need your friends to help you move and you don’t want them lazing around!

6. Improve Group Performance — Get Motivated

Speaking of lazing around, one well-known concept in social psychology is that of social loafing, the tendency for individuals to be less productive when they’re in a group than when they’re on their own. I’m sure we’ve all experienced this when we did group work in high school or college and slacked off a bit. The easy way to fix this and avoid wasting too much of your time is to stay motivated. People in your group will be motivated when they are assigned independent tasks and know that they are going to be evaluated as individuals instead of as a group.