5 impressive psychological discoveries

The human psyche hides secrets and surprising things that you are still unaware of.

The systematic study of mental processes and human behavior has long questioned why we act the way we do. why we act the way we do.. Human psychology has surprising curiosities that are relatively unknown. If you like to read about this kind of curiosities, we recommend you to take a look at our previous installments:

• 8 psychological curiosities that will shock you
• 8 popular psychological myths that already have a scientific explanation
• 10 psychological phenomena that will surprise you

Surprising psychological discoveries

In this article that we present today we propose to expose a total of five impressive psychological discoveries that provide answers to some of the enigmas of our psyche.

Are you ready to know them? By clicking on the links you can access more detailed information about each of the discoveries.

1. The Halo Effect

The Halo Effect is one of the concepts that has attracted the attention of social and group psychologists. It is a cognitive bias by which the overall impression of a person is overall impression of a person (e.g., "he is (e.g., "he's nice") is generated from judgments is generated from judgments that pertain to specific traits (e.g., "he is smart"). (e.g., "he is intelligent"). To exemplify the Halo Effect phenomenon even better, we could bring up the case of big screen stars.

Famous actors who appear in blockbuster movies are usually people with great physical attractiveness and people skills. They are one of those people who know how to captivate with their gestures and with their eyes, they perfectly dominate the image they project. These two traits (physical attractiveness and friendliness) make us assume, through this curious psychological effect, that they are also intelligent, generous, friendly, etcetera. The Halo Effect also occurs in the opposite direction: if a person is physically unattractive, we tend to think that he or she is an unpleasant or uninteresting person. That is, we will tend in this case to attribute specific negative traits to him/her.

• Attention: the Halo Effect is also used in the marketing world.

2. The dark energy of the brain

Although it may seem counter-intuitive, when we are lost in thought without thinking about anything in particular or are about to fall asleep, our brain consumes only 5% less energy than when we are asleep, our brain consumes just 5% less energy than when we are trying to solve difficult puzzles.. 

Not only that: when this happens, large regions of the brain start emitting signals in a coordinated manner, causing hundreds of thousands of neurons to work together to... is not very well known for what purpose. The fact that these areas of the brain, which are part of what has been called the Default Neural Networkstop working together when we are paying attention and use our focused attention to solve tasks or reflect on specific things has led to this pattern of electrical signals being called "the dark energy of the brain".

• You can read more about this here

3. Cognitive dissonance

Why do we self-deceive? This is another question that psychologists and philosophers have asked over the centuries. In the study of human psychology, the cognitive dissonance is described as discomfort or the contradictory sensation we experience when our beliefs conflict with what we do, or when we defend at the same time what we believe, or what we do.or when we espouse two discordant ideas at the same time.

Psychologists of the stature of Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith demonstrated something surprising and that marked a before and after in the study of cognitive dissonance. If a person is asked to lie and he/she does not consider him/herself a habitual liar, he/she will manage to tell the lie and still think of him/herself as an honest person. Curious, isn't it? But how is this possible? The human mind resolves this kind of cognitive dissonance by persuading yourself that the lie you have just told is, in fact, a truth. Although this may operate at a not very conscious level, the fact is that our brain tends to think well about the truth. our brain tends to think well about us.

• More about this effect, in this post

4. The false consensus effect

The false consensus effect is another cognitive bias that is studied in all Psychology faculties. The false consensus effect causes Many individuals tend to overestimate the degree of "agreement" that others have with their views or opinions.. Certainly, we tend to perceive that our opinions, values, beliefs or habits are the most common and supported by the majority of people around us. This belief causes us to tend to overestimate the confidence we have in our opinions, even if they are erroneous, biased or in the minority.

From now on, remember: the false consensus effect can make you believe that your opinion is shared by other people... and maybe you are the only one who thinks this way.

5. The Westermarck effect

The incest is one of the most universal taboos and, curiously, it is difficult to justify its existence rationally by sticking to the values of "as long as it does not harm anyone, it should not be forbidden". However, from an evolutionary point of view one can indeed find reasons to avoid incest.The researcher also believes that the birth of individuals with health problems or with difficulties to live with autonomy can be a consequence of this.

Based on this idea, the researcher Edvard Westermarck came to propose that human beings have an innate propensity not to be sexually attracted to people with whom we have had frequent contact during childhood. This translates into a lack of sexual desire for people who are statistically very likely to be part of our family.

This phenomenon, known as the Westermarck effect, has been found in numerous studies on the subject, the best known being an investigation in which it was found that people who had been brought up in the same kibbutz (a typical agrarian commune in Israel) are much less likely to intermarry.

• More on this effect, in this article.

Bibliographical references:

• Triglia, Adrian; Regader, Bertrand; Garcia-Allen, Jonathan (2016). Psychologically speaking.. Paidós.
• Papalia, D. and Wendkos, S. (1992). Psychology. Mexico: McGraw-Hill, p. 9.