20
votes
Accepted
Why are most people not persuaded by rational arguments?
You may be thinking of the Backfire Effect. When presented with logical and rational evidence disputing a strongly-held belief, most people's natural tendency is to hold on even tighter to those ...
- 316
11
votes
Accepted
What is the psychological effect of wearing black clothes?
This question is studied within the fields of color psychology and enclothed cognition (e.g., Adam and Galinsky, 2012), currently a hot/controversial topic in cognitive science. Without addressing the ...
- 6,902
7
votes
Why are most people not persuaded by rational arguments?
I'm not a cognitive science expert, but I happen to have some experience in change management / trying to convince people. There are in fact a lot of logical reasons for refusing logical and rational ...
- 171
7
votes
Why do people look in the face or eyes while communicating?
Eye contact is one of the principal cues humans use to evaluate where other people direct their attention. A special issue on the use of eye tracking in the Infancy journal and other studies reported ...
- 6,902
6
votes
Difficulty of expressing thoughts verbally
This is not a direct answer to the question, but a related construct that may be useful is alexithymia.
Alexithymia is a personality construct describing relatively decreased ability to identify and ...
- 6,902
5
votes
Why do people look in the face or eyes while communicating?
I don't have a complete answer, but I'll add on to Christian's comment.
I'm not really familiar with an evolutionary account of facial expressions, but folks like Adam K. Anderson have implied that ...
- 4,246
4
votes
Is this Auditory Processing Delay?
Research into auditory processing deficits is a minefield and there is no real consensus as to what is and is not a deficit in auditory processing. Further, and possibly more relevant for individuals ...
- 2,617
4
votes
What is this stratagem called when someone talks to you like you're a slow-witted kid?
There are a few terms which can be used for this. The answer from @AlwaysConfused could describe the situation if you are actually talking to them like a child as stipulated in the title, but ...
- 11.2k
3
votes
Why are most people not persuaded by rational arguments?
Some generalizations:
Because Enlightenment-era rationality, with its values of liberalism and rationality and progress, has a very bad (read: hypocritical) historical track record of irrational, ...
3
votes
Is there a name for the gap between speaker's intention and listener's interpretation?
Note: this is not a psychology-based answer
I think your question is one of the central questions of various fields. For regular communications, they are communication studies, media studies, ...
- 1,740
2
votes
What causes some people to unconsciously imitate the accents of others?
Imitating others behavior patterns while speaking was found to relate more to a cognitive perspective taking than empathy.Chartrand and Bargh 1999
People who do adopt language patterns and accents ...
- 21
2
votes
Accepted
Is there a pictograms repository under an open-commercial license?
I found one! http://straight-street.org/
Those pictos have a Creative Commons BY-SA license.
- 151
2
votes
Why are most people not persuaded by rational arguments?
I am not an expert, but I have given this question a fair bit of thought. I would suggest that the tendency to oppose rational arguments in favor of maintaining beliefs depends upon what beliefs we ...
- 512
2
votes
What is this stratagem called when someone talks to you like you're a slow-witted kid?
it is sometimes called as infantilization, which is common towards children as well for some people with impaired social communication, so apparently considered as childish people. Infantilizing is ...
- 452
2
votes
How is the effect of current vote scores on people's votes interpreted in psychology?
I think you can find an answer from the field of social psychology. The most relevant theory is the social proof, the tendency to immitate the behavior of other people.
Social proof (also known as ...
- 2,137
2
votes
How is the biological error signal in predictive coding computed?
TL;DR: We don't know whether the brain really uses predictive coding or not. But neurally computing an error signal on a small scale is possible (see below).
Predictive coding is an hypothesis for a ...
2
votes
How is the biological error signal in predictive coding computed?
I provided an answer to a similar question here that limitedly deals with the role of biological prediction errors.
Here's an excerpt of that answer:
...to answer this properly, we must first make it ...
- 493
2
votes
Accepted
Impaired verbal communication, but normal reading and writing skills?
Just a reminder that Stack Exchange is not an appropriate place to get a diagnosis; a vague description of symptoms may indicate a variety of possible outcomes. See a doctor instead. That said:
One ...
- 18k
2
votes
Starting academic textbook/survey article for the field of persuasive communication?
I would like to suggest the classic and pioneer book in the field of communication and pursuasion by Daniel H. Pink.
To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others
The book not only ...
- 41
1
vote
Do pictures help young children read (understand meaning) better or does it give them a delayed sense of imagination when decoding information?
I wrote Vexed Texts a long time ago. Since then I have asked the same question and found no research on it, so I did my own research as my doctoral thesis. You can find the results if you want to in ...
1
vote
Accepted
Is there evidence to suggest that receiving angry emails increases stress levels?
The reaction to an angry email is just the same as reacting to any angry comment (verbal or written). It is usually seen as a provocation and triggers the urge to retaliate or invoke self-defense. The ...
- 26
1
vote
Accepted
Anonymity creates an environment full of bullies?
I have had the same question a while back when I observed similar behavior in a forum on a language learning website (I know that the question here is specific about stack-overflow).
There were two ...
1
vote
Anonymity creates an environment full of bullies?
Of course it would change the way people interact with one another. Social and situational settings strongly affect behaviour.
It's funny you see it this way. One can argue that it's exactly the ...
- 1,115
1
vote
Why do people talk (or communicate)?
We evolved from animals which live in groups. Social animals such as chimpanzees (our closest relatives) communicate to one another to warn of danger, call for help, express emotions, etc. In a ...
- 11
1
vote
Do unschooled persons think differently from us (schooled persons)? How?
Given that 1) schooling intentionally exposes individuals to conventionally prescribed concepts they would otherwise not be exposed to, entailing formation of neurally encoded cognitive ...
- 31
1
vote
Do readers consider the passive voice as more authoritative?
Short answer
I haven't found scientific literature on it. Non-scientific sources generally do seem to acknowledge that the passive voice radiates authority.
Background
To answer the question if ...
- 19.6k
1
vote
Difficulty of expressing thoughts verbally
Introverts Process Information Deeply
Trying to think of exactly the right word is called “word retrieval.” And this can be hard for introverts. In social situations, this may translate to us falling ...
- 11
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible