Posts Tagged ‘Psychology’

Since the dawn of time (or at least the dawn of YouTube), people have been laughing out loud at the misfortunes of others. FAIL videos account for over a billion YouTube views, but what is it that makes them so appealing?

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It’s possible that Google borrowed a few principles from behavioral psychologists when building Google Instant in order to get people to search more. They have 5 ‘suggested results’ as a maximum for a reason (in the previous version they were 10), and we suspect it has to do with psychological principles. Also, they have done their best to reduce every possible effort the searcher takes in order to get what he’s looking for. Will this result in more queries, and more importantly, more loyal searchers for Google? We look at the potential below. Read more

Natasha Murashev is the author of PsychBlog, a digital magazine focused on applied psychology.

Recently, the media has been focusing on the bad consequences of teen social networking such as cyberbullying and sexting. But is social media actually bad for teens? According to a new body of research described by Los Angeles Times, teens who are most active on social networking sites such as Facebook are actually more well-adjusted than their less-connected peers.
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A recent case study has revealed that social gamers’ tendency to add strangers as gamer friends is contributing to the growth in identity theft and spamming on social networks like Facebook. Specifically, when social gamers add strangers as friends and share their information, they are “exposing themselves to real and present danger of falling victim to fraud and ID theft” and also clicking on those strangers’ (possibly dangerous) posted links 24% of the time.
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