Let us put some popular psychological life hacks under the scientific microscope.
Power Pose:
Power poses make you feel confident and help reduce stress. In 2012 Ami Khali presented the second most viewed ted talk of all. The research showed that after taking a dominant pose for at least two minutes subjects felt more powerful and less stressed.
They also took risks and performed better in job interviews. Now these changes will even lead back to physiological changes in hormone levels.
She concluded that power poses can significantly change te outcomes of our lives. Does this trigger really work then? In 2014 other researches tried replicating this initial experiment with the largest sample of participants. In the replication participants did report feeling more powerful after performing their task. However they couldn’t replicate the changes in behavior or hormone levels. Furthermore an analysis of 33 studies on this topic found that after controlling for publication bias there was no effect of power posing. So it sort of sounded like a placebo effect. Overall more research is needed before you can trust the street.
Name:
Saying a person’s name more often will make them like you more. This advice comes from the classic Del Carnegie book called ‘How to Make Friends & Influence People’. In I he says that a person name is to that person the sweetest most important sound. In psychology this is shown by the ‘name letter effect’. You find that people like the letters in their name more than the letters there are. But will repeating their name help them warm up to you? Three studies found that people are more likely to comply to your questions if you remember their name. it also made them positive and flattered. So it is less about repeating the names but more about showing that you remember them.
The Benjamin Franklin
Effect:
The Benjamin Franklin effect is next in this list. It claims that ifg we help someone else we end up liking them more. So if you want someone to like you simply ask them for a favor. This happens because of cognitive dissonance which is when people change their attitude to resolve the contradiction between their thoughts and behavior. Suppose you dislike someone but then go on to help them to justify this contradiction you likely to change your initial opinion of that person. This is the experiment every article cites to prove this agenda. In this experiment participants got to win a bit of money by answering some questions. Afterwards the researcher would ask as a favor for the participants to return the money because he was running low on funds. Those who performed the favor did end up liking the researcher more. However the effect was pretty small, those who gave the money back rated him 5.8 out of 12 and those who did rated him a 7.2 which is only one and a half points higher. The reviewers and psychologists from the University of Wisconsin and Minnesota concluded that the overall evidence was consistent but weak. So these are few of the popular psychological theories debunked.
Transcripted By Benazir Elahee Munni