Psy-Q: You know your IQ—Now Test Your Psychological Intelligence
Ben Ambridge
Language: English
Pages: 185
ISBN: 1781252106
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Psychology is everywhere. Our emotions and desires, the decisions we make on a daily basis - absolutely every aspect of the way we think and feel has been studied by psychologists. Through dozens of interactive puzzles, IQ tests, quizzes, jokes, puns and visual illusions, Ben Ambridge guides us through this wealth of research, showing us how we can better understand ourselves.
Debunking tabloid speculation, revisiting old favourites like the Stanford Prison Experiment and unearthing bleeding edge research unknown to the general reader, renowned psychologist Ben Ambridge blows away the received wisdom to reveal to enthusiasts and novices alike the psychology behind our daily lives.
With wit and humour aplenty, he explains whether your blue eyes make you more or less trustworthy, how analogies can help cure cancer, whether Rorschach's famous inkblot tests really work, what your love for heavy metal (or Mozart) says...
focus on the wider issue of psychological gender differences in Men are from Mars …). Setting aside studies with mixed-sex groups – in which participants may have had obvious ulterior motives for either agreeing with certain group members or for striking out as individuals – all-female groups showed significantly more conformity that all-male groups; and there was no sign of this effect diminishing over the years. Does this mean that women are stupider, weaker or more easily manipulated than
What’s more likely – that the sun won’t rise tomorrow, or that this is the one time out of 100 that the machine has got it wrong? Now, returning to the disease, let’s walk through the maths to see why the correct answer is the unlikely seeming 1 in 102. Out of the million people that took the test, only 100 are actually infected (because the disease affects 1 person in 10,000, and 1,000,000 divided by 10,000 is 100). Because the test is 99 per cent accurate and 1 per cent inaccurate … 99
remember individual characters. Yet still they preferred the old characters to the new. This effect is also seen with babies, who are born preferring sounds that they heard in the womb, whether their mother’s voice or the theme tune to her favourite TV show. The same is true for both rats and chickens, which can easily be trained to prefer certain musical tones and even certain composers. Psychologists call this the mere-exposure effect; but what causes it? Many textbooks will tell you that
at his leisure (or even decided not to). Instead, he went for the risky option of choosing ‘split’, for no other reason than to demonstrate his confidence in his scheme. Could this strategy work for global warming? What if a large and powerful country, instead of making promises of minor reductions, vowed to increase its emissions rapidly to such an extent that the world would fry within a couple of years unless other countries reduced theirs? It’s a long shot. But if it works, then psychology
(see Be on Your Guard), but I’ve sorted out another job for you, and this one’s a real knock-out: mixed martial arts fighter. I’ve lined up five possible opponents for your first fight. Please pick the one who you think you’re most likely to beat (or – more realistically – who will hurt you the least). A B C D E ANSWER As your manager, I hope that you picked Fighter A, who has the least aggressive-looking face. For your own sake, I’m praying that you didn’t pick Fighter C. But isn’t this