Posts by Neil Petersen

Economics and psychology are entangled in complex ways. All the psychotherapy in the world won’t make you happy if you don’t have enough money to live. I’ve written on here before about the mental health damage done by the “Great Recession.” Since my last post on the topic, though, researchers have continued to investigate the…

On Wednesday, I wrote about research into the psychology of beer tasting. Today, we’re going to stick with the theme and look at a study on how a little alcohol can make people more creative – sometimes. As we all know, alcohol and peak cognitive performance tend not to go together. But what about creativity?…

If you’re going to participate in a psychology study, you could do worse than one where you’re asked to taste nine different beers. That’s the study researchers in New Zealand ran recently. Putting their scientific budget to good use, they bought enough beer to invite 128 regular beer drinkers into the lab, then asked the…

This week brings us a study on a somewhat, well, depressing topic: how loneliness makes people depressed and how depression makes people lonely. Granted, it doesn’t take a scientist to know that loneliness and depression can reinforce each other, but this study went a little further than that. It looked to untangle the specific mechanics…

Time is money, they say. But what’s less often talked about is that things go in the other direction too: money is time. That is, if you have enough money, you can always buy more free time. And according to new research, buying time is pretty much the best thing you can do with money.…

Being overweight can make Asian Americans less likely to experience racial prejudice, according to new research. The study, titled Unexpected Gains: Being Overweight Buffers Asian Americans From Prejudice Against Foreigners was published this month by researchers from Stanford University, University of Exeter, Microsoft and University of Washington. The researchers ran a series of experiments in…

You can’t have a good sports movie without an inspirational pep talk. But in real life, do these heartfelt motivational speeches really work? A group of psychologists and kinesiologists from Belgium recently delved into that question with a study of 120 male basketball players. The researchers looked at two different kinds of pep talks –…

Psychologists call it ingratiation. Most people call it trying to make people like you or, in certain contexts, brown-nosing. When it works, you increase the supply of good will people have for you. When it doesn’t, you just end up looking like a phony. So when does it work? To answer that question, a psychologist…

Want to be a good driver? Spend a lot of time driving. Want to be an even better driver? Spend a lot of time cycling, too. At least, that’s what a new study from researchers in Australia suggests. The study involved 42 people between the ages of 30 and 50, all of whom had extensive…