Our mind is a set of cognitive faculties including consciousness, perception, thinking, judgment, language and memory. It holds the power of imaginations, recognition, and appreciation and is responsible for processing feelings and emotions, resulting in attitudes and actions. Many psychological traps form a part of human thinking that people take for granted. These traps can be true and can be false. There are psychological effects of these traps that block us from perceiving the reality.
According to a research by NYU Psychology professor Peter Gollwitzer, if we keep our intentions or goals private then we are more likely to achieve them than those who made them public and were acknowledged by others. Once you tell people your intentions it gives you a ‘premature sense of completeness’ as a result lessens your chance of achieving them. Your mind starts to perceive the goals shared with others as a part of your reality which demotivates you from working towards them. So share your achieved results with public and not your goals.
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You have a stain on your dress and you feel everyone in the place has noticed it. But you may be wrong. This is ‘spotlight effect’ where you feel more people noticed something about you than they do. We all value ourselves more than others and are center of our own universe based on our perspectives but others are also center of their own universe focusing on other things rather than the stain on your dress. But you feel other people are noticing what your focus is. As a result, you are using your own experiences and cognitions to evaluate other people’s thoughts and behaviors and overestimate the extent to which their perceptions are shared by others accurate.
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According to a series of experiments conducted by Barbara Fredrickson and Daniel Kahneman, people judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak and at its end rather than based on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience. The effect of the experience can be pleasant or unpleasant. Thus they termed it as peak-end rules a psychological heuristics i.e. focusing on one aspect of a complex problem and ignoring others. This happens because people exhibit better memory for more intensely emotional events than less intensely emotional events. So an interesting movie might become average one if it has a mediocre scene at the end while an annoying friend will be attractive if she compliments you at the end of the day.
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People have a tendency to anticipate events as more favorable and positive than at the time of the experience. This is referred to as ‘to see through rose-colored glasses’. A study conducted on a group of people showed that their enthusiasm of visiting Disneyland ‘the happiest place on the earth’ was dampened by large crowds, irritable children, hot weather and underwhelming food. Still, the participants remembered the trip as being much more fun than it actually was at that time. This is because our brain tends to concentrate on positive memories. Positive evaluation of the self can help avoid depression and negative effects, providing a sense of personal control and self-esteem.
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In any game of sports if a player makes a couple of shots the announcers will decide that the player is on fire and he will take the ‘next shot’ too. Probably making a shot increases a people’s confidence in the player and player’s confidence. According to a research by Tom Gilovich, Robert Vallone and Amos Tversky found that the probability that a player would make a second shot was independent of whether they made the first one suggesting the ‘Hot Hand’ phenomenon. So while evaluating the risks taken for if a game won once does not mean fortune will favor to win again.
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New Year holiday after a month may seem like a distant event but after two years you will feel how fast time passed. Time feels shorter than it is in reality. We have uncertainties about memories and these uncertainties increases with more distant memories. A 70 years old perception about his 5 years and 50 years old events is approximately the same. People perceive recent events as being more remote than they are known as backward telescoping and distant events as being more recent than they are known as forward telescoping.
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Are you facing difficulty in meeting deadlines or keeping promises? Because you have underestimated the time required for finishing a deal and is looking at the future with excessive positivity. The planning fallacy proposed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979 is a phenomenon in which predictions about how much time will be needed to complete a future task display an optimism bias and underestimate the time needed.
This phenomenon occurs regardless of the individual’s knowledge that past task of a similar nature had taken longer to complete than generally planned. Its effects only one's own predictions but when outside observers predict task completion time they show pessimistic bias overestimating the time needed.
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There are people who are successful by external standards but they feel their success has been due to some fluke or luck and not their abilities and competence. They are also certain that unless they go to enormous efforts to do so success cannot be repeated and they will be a failure. This is Imposter phenomenon. Instead of rejoicing their achievements and moving on these people feel anxiety and get stuck. According to an observation there were students with excellent academic scores and recommendations felt like imposter with all bright students around and needed counselling.
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In 2005 Barbara Streisand sued aerial photographer Kenneth Adelman for displaying a photograph of her California home. Streisand efforts to suppress the publication of the picture generated publicity. It became widely popular and was copied to multiple sites outside the immediate reach of US law. Mike Masnick of Techdirt termed this as “Streisand effect”. People tend to show more interest in things that are banned. Whether it is trying to watch banned sites on internet or having more sweets if on diet all has Streisand effect.
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Many people are attached to their self built furniture for the act of building something, putting your own hard work into a physical object, seems to instill it with additional value above and beyond its inherent quality which the researchers call the ‘IKEA effect’.
In a study participants who made their own origami frogs and cranes valued them five times as much as another group of participants thought they were worth. The increased worth is not just about efforts but also completion as incomplete projects received no such benefits. So it may be easy for you to buy a thing but a little effort of putting a thing together will make you happy when it is done.
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Why do marketers keep repeating the same advertisements over and over again? For repetition makes information so familiar that our brain spends a minimum amount of time and energy in processing it resulting us into believing in the same. We stop doubting the authenticity of that information. So, all information seems to be truthful after we hear it several times.
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We all have heard the phrases like ‘you got what was coming to you’, ‘what goes around comes around’, ‘chicken come home to roost’ and ‘as you sow shall you reap’. We all believe that the consequences of all noble actions are rewarding and evil actions get punished. This is the Melvin Lerner's just-world hypothesis. This belief generally implies the existence of cosmic justice, destiny, divine providence, and stability has a potential to result in fallacy especially when used to rationalize people’s misfortune on the grounds that they deserve it. But there is no world justice at all. Tragedies are not always the fault of their victims.
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