Blog posts on human emotion & motivation by Sentient Decision Science, a global leader in implicit research.
Take a look at this image. What do you see? You might be saying: “This is a smiling car.” Is this car really smiling? I don’t think so. People smile, and maybe animals, but not cars. But if you see a smiling car, you’re not crazy. You’ve just “anthropomorphized” it. This means that you’ve imagined […]
In our recent paper on Hot State Decision-Making we discussed the perfect storm of providing consumers with immediate visceral delight while simultaneously providing emotional benefits relevant to long-term goals. This formula provides both short-term and long term benefit thereby maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain for your customer base. A recent article by Khan & Dhar […]
Some choices are hard to make, especially when the options we are faced with are nearly equivalent. Nevertheless we manage to make decisions every day and, buyer’s remorse notwithstanding, we frequently feel satisfied with our choices. And those previously attractive alternatives? Well, we tell ourselves, they were somehow lacking anyway. But have we arrived at that conclusion through rational consideration of each alternative’s objective value, or do we subjectively—and retroactively—adjust the value we place on rejected options in order to feel better about the choice we made?
How do we know what others are feeling? How do we gauge our audience in social interactions? Paul Ekman, a prominent psychological researcher, suggests that it’s all in our facial expressions. Even if you’re the type of person who keeps your emotions to yourself, Ekman’s research shows that humans are psychologically disposed to show our emotions on our faces. Analyzing facial expressions in others, thus, is one way in which we empathize with other’s emotions. And it’s not always something you’re conscious of. Consequently, we don’t wear our hearts on our sleeves; we display them right on our faces!
Let’s play a game: There are ten coins on the table. The rules of the game are simple. I propose a way we should split the coins; you can either accept or reject my proposal. If you accept my terms, we get the coins according to my proposed split. If you reject them, we both […]