Mental Mysteries: 40 Little-Known Psychology Facts

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26Bystander Effect: Impact of Group Size

Bystander Effect: Impact of Group Size

The Bystander Effect is a social psychological phenomenon where individuals witnessing a crime or accident are less likely to help, depending on the number of bystanders. The more bystanders there are, the less likely one of them will offer assistance.


27. Soviet psychology once classified "the struggle for truth and justice" as a symptom of paranoid delusional schizophrenia.


28. The Gruen transfer is a psychological phenomenon where a person feels lost in a shopping mall due to its intentionally complex layout. Designers deliberately create complex layouts in shopping malls to encourage more impulsive buying. This phenomenon is named after the Austrian architect Victor Gruen.


29. In 2012, Facebook secretly conducted a massive psychological experiment on its users to see if it could alter their emotional state. Unbeknownst to users, Facebook tampered with the news feeds of nearly 700,000 people, showing them an abnormally low number of either positive or negative posts. The experiment aimed to assess whether more positive or negative comments in a Facebook newsfeed would impact how the user updated their own page.


30. Maladaptive daydreaming causes someone to daydream for hours on end, creating elaborate fantasies comparable to an entire novel or movie. It is a little-known psychological concept that can replace human interaction, interfere with one's life, and be caused by childhood emotional neglect.


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31Long Words and Intelligence Perception

Long Words and Intelligence Perception

Using long words doesn't make readers think you're smart. The first psychology paper reporting on this result was called "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity."


32. In social psychology, pluralistic ignorance is a situation in which a majority of group members privately reject a norm but go along with it because they incorrectly assume that most others accept it. "No one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes."


33. Bank employees all greet customers when they enter a bank to eliminate psychological "trigger points" for potential robbers.


34. The "Third Man Factor" is a psychological phenomenon that can occur during traumatic experiences, where individuals report sensing an unseen presence like a guardian angel that provides comfort or support.


35. Edward Bernays, the 'Father of PR,' employed mass psychology to shape perpetually unfulfilled consumers, pioneering modern advertising techniques. In his work, Bernays aimed to link unconscious desires with mass-produced goods, influencing public behavior by keeping them distracted with trivial wants.


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36Psychological Studies: Cultural Behavioral Differences

Psychological Studies: Cultural Behavioral Differences

In psychology, Westerners, particularly Americans, display strikingly different behaviors from other cultures. However, as of 2013, researchers conducted almost 70% of psychological studies on Americans.


37. Repetition compulsion is a psychological phenomenon in which a person repeats a traumatic event or its circumstances over and over again. This includes reenacting the event or putting oneself in situations where the event is likely to happen again.


38. Self-handicapping is a psychological mechanism wherein individuals purposely put themselves at a disadvantage, providing an excuse for potential failure.


39. A mother-and-daughter team, neither of whom had any formal psychology education, developed the Meyers-Briggs personality test. They studied agriculture and political science, respectively. Briggs' early interest in personality types bloomed from her attempts at fiction writing, heavily influenced by Carl Jung. Briggs was so infatuated with Jung that she even wrote erotic fiction about him.


40. Around 40 percent of Cambodians suffer psychological problems as a result of the Khmer Rouge massacre that killed a third of its population between 1975 and 1979.

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