CogBlog – A Cognitive Psychology Blog

How important is it to you to feel like your opinion matters when you buy something? Recently, companies have become popular for their “one-of-a-kind” products that the customer designs themself. People want to buy products that they can take responsibility for, and the IKEA Effect shows that they will pay more for them. The IKEA Effect is a cognitive bias that makes people overestimate the value of items that they themselves have built or added to. Take Build-A-Bear Workshop for example, they market a mildly creepy frog for $22 (already absurd), but the second you cut it open, put a heart in it, and give it clothing that you get to choose yourself, that same frog costs you $45. Yet, people keep paying for it, and you can find a Build-A-Bear-Workshop in every state other than Wyoming, Alaska, Hawaii, and North Dakota (according to a blurry map on the Build-A-Bear Website). This same effect has been noted in products bought from IKEA, a popular Swedish store that specializes in furniture that the buyer must, in part, build themself. This study showed that people who bought and assembled IKEA products were willing to pay more for their own furniture than other similar products. Although not seemingly very important, the IKEA Effect can make you question why you’re willing to pay so much for certain products.

Have you ever met someone and immediately forgot their name? Or you meet someone, and then down the road, you recognize their face but cannot recall their name? Well, you are not alone; this is very common. The everyday experience of encountering a well-known person and not being able to identify them is a common form of paramnesia (a disorder of memory). It often happens when we see the person outside the usual context or outside where we initially met them (Higbee, 2001). Forgetting someone’s name is embarrassing and aggravating, and often we have tip-of-the-tongue states….so close yet so far. A solution to this issue could be to get names tattooed on our foreheads, but no one wants that! So, are there ways to help solve this awkward problem? The answer is yes! There are a lot of practical solutions to helping us remember names, leaving those embarrassing moments in the past.

Have you ever watched those short videos on Tik-Tok with titles like “POV: You are in 20XX” that are supposed to invoke nostalgic emotions in you? When such videos were recommended to me and I scrolled through their comments quickly, I often saw people saying things like “Everything used to be better before Covid” and “I would do anything to go back to 2016”. The number of such videos increased rapidly in recent years after the pandemic started with a speed so fast that makes me wonder what causes people to linger over those “good old days”. After all, are those days really as good as people assume they are, and why did such videos start to go viral in the pandemic era? Well, consider the saying “look through rose-colored glasses”—this is what psychologists have found about the way people look into their past, and the effect of Covid-19 on people’s memories seem to have deepened the “rosiness” of those glasses.

A better understanding of cognitive biases can improve your social media habits

Instagram. Snapchat. Facebook. Twitter. Youtube. If you use any of these sites, you are one of 7 in 10 Americans using social media to connect with people around the world – these platforms have become a part of our lives and culture. And if you’ve spent more than five minutes on one of these sites, you have probably been subjected to some… interesting opinions. Maybe your weird aunt retweeted something about vaccines causing autism, or a random page with thousands of followers pops up, selling herbs and crystals to align your chakras and stay healthy. Maybe it’s an account with “fact” in the name, but half of their posts explain that 5G causes covid-19 symptoms. The comments under these posts are a vicious mix of devout believers and non believers, each citing articles to prove their arguments. How did we get here? What forces could lead somebody to advocate for “Flat Earth”? Hint, it happens at the intersection between web design and human psychology. As we move into the future, social media will only expand its influence on the world, for better or for worse. This isn’t on anybody’s mind when they pull out their phone to scroll for a few minutes on the toilet, but maybe it should be. 

What is your favorite flavor of gum? Mint? Bubblegum? Tropical Twist? None? Turns out, chewing gum may have more effects than simply making your breath smell good, or giving you something to do when bored. In fact, some studies show chewing gum can actually increase feelings of relaxation, increase attention, lower stress levels, and improve memory. Now, this is not to say that simply chewing gum while studying will get you an automatic 100% on an exam. But it may help enough to bump your grade up and boost your confidence!

Chewing gum is something a lot of researchers have recently realized might help students out, especially those who are in a cram session! Studies have been conducted to see whether chewing gum actually has an effect on recalling information and keeping us awake. In 2018, authors Ginns, Kim, and Zervos looked into seeing if chewing gum affected alertness and test performance. Participants were split up into two groups: one that chewed gum while studying and another group that studied without gum. It was found that chewing gum did in fact impact learning for the better – people who chewed gum and studied performed better on an exam given after the fact and felt much more alert and awake during the exam than the non-chewing gum group.

Have you ever seen someone, recognized them, but for the life of you couldn’t remember their name or how you know them? Maybe it felt like their name was on the tip of your tongue? I know I have. Not only does this situation teach us how to awkwardly smile and look away, but it can also teach us about how the human mind works. This scenario likely happens because we are seeing the person in a different context than when we originally met them. In psychology, plenty of research has been done on how context impacts recognition, and specifically how we recognize people. Maybe after learning why this happens, we can find a way to improve recognition, and one day become less awkward.

Everyone knows how hard it can be to remember specific information. During that test you didn’t study enough for or when you can’t remember whether you turned the stove off, we often find ourselves wishing we had a perfect memory, like a computer. However, this is not how the human mind works. The worst part is, according to research, we have the memory of these events (studying for the test, turning the stove off, etc.) stored in our minds, it just may not be accessible. Another common phenomenon is when you feel like you have a word “on the tip of your tongue” but can’t think of it. Maybe on a different day, you would have remembered it easily, but on that day you can’t. All your memories are available (stored) in your mind, but at a certain time only some of them are accessible. Why is this? Well, because having all your memories from your whole life at the ready would be too cognitively taxing, only some of them are accessible. There’s no need to be able to remember your first middle school dance when you’re sitting in a job interview twenty-five years later, so the human brain suppresses the unneeded memories until they are recalled again. This is why we rarely bring up random memories without being prompted at all. Although this saves us a lot of brainpower, it can sometimes be frustrating if it prevents us from remembering something we need in the moment. However, by knowing how the process works, we’ve learned ways to manipulate it and help retrieve information.

The Super Bowl is one of the largest, most publicized sporting events in the world. And, even if you don’t know a thing about football, odds are you watch the Super Bowl to see the ads, or you look them up on YouTube the next day so you’re up to speed on the ones people are talking about. My personal favorite is the Bubly seltzer commercial with Michael Bublé. Michael Bublé is probably best known for his Christmas albums, but he also has a lot of non-holiday music that has made him a well-known and successful artist all around the world. In the commercial, Michael walks into a convenience store and looks at the rows of Bubly seltzers, then sits on the floor with a sharpie and changes them all to say Bublé instead of Bubly, as seen in the photo below. He also calls it Bublé seltzer instead of Bubly seltzer, and refuses to believe the workers when they tell him he is wrong.

As mentioned above, Michael Bublé is pretty much the Christmas music representative of this generation (and every generation) and he has become a fairly popular household name. So, naturally, he would have to be in a Super Bowl commercial for one company or another. Big brands using famous celebrities in their ads demonstrates what is called the halo effect: brands like to use attractive, well-known people in their ads because when we see someone we have positive thoughts about, we will associate those positive attributes with the product they are advertising. Everyone loves Michael Bublé, or can at least feel favorably about him after seeing his charismatic personality in the commercial, so everyone will want to love Bubly seltzer, the product he is advertising. I mean, look at the picture of him sitting on the floor changing Bubly to Bublé. Who wouldn’t love that face?

Have you ever noticed that some people treat their dogs like their children? In my house, we treat our dogs like family members. They have human names, they sleep in bed with me, and we even all wear matching Christmas pajamas. When I talk about my dog Henry, I explain his anxiety, his grumpiness, and his great need for snuggles. When I talk about my dog Georgia, I explain her clinginess, her obsession with my dad, and her toddler-like antics. I talk about them as if they are other humans living in the home. Even while writing this blog post, I am dog-sitting for my friend’s parents. The parents left us pages of specific instructions talking through the dogs’ physical and emotional needs, just like a parent would for their children’s babysitter. 

Henry in his Christmas Pajamas

I don’t often think about why we do these things, because treating dogs like family seems so normal. But when we were learning about cognitive biases in my Cognitive Psychology course, I started to see the relationship between cognitive processes and this concept of dogs as family. The way that many people treat dogs is an example of anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism, by definition, is the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman entities like dogs. Many people view animals such as dogs and cats as companions, similar to human friends. When we see animals as similar to ourselves, we are more likely to treat them better. I am going to walk you through the benefits of anthropomorphizing animals, specifically how it can help to reduce animal cruelty and increase the ethical treatment of animals.

If you spend any time on Twitter, you may have seen a tweet last fall reacting to a YouGov survey. The survey, conducted by the British market research firm YouGov, asked people about their tennis abilities and how they thought they’d perform in a match against Serena Williams. 12% of men surveyed said that if they were playing their very best tennis, they think they’d be able to win a point off of Serena Williams. 12%!!! That’s 1 in 8!! These are average, everyday British men, talking about scoring a point against the tennis player with the most Grand Slam titles in their career. In reality, these people would be lucky to even touch one of the balls hit at them by Serena Williams. So why do they have this overinflated sense of their tennis abilities? This is only one example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, a metacognitive idea that influences many aspects of our everyday lives, from wine-tasting to practicing medicine.

Here’s a test. Do the women in this image look similar to you? What about the men? If you did not grow up in a community where Asian people were the dominant race, you may have answered yes to both of these questions.