What is New in Psychology?
Here is a a thought provoking discussion, by Tom Stafford, about what Psychology has shown us, Isn’t it all just obvious?. Stafford writes:
I used to keep a stock of ‘unobvious’ findings ready to hand for occasions like this.Is it really obvious that people can be made to enjoy a task more by being more poorly paid to recruit for it (cognitive dissonance: Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959)?
That a saline solution can be as effective as morphine in killing pain (the placebo effect: Hrobjartsson, 2001)?
That students warned that excessive drinking is putting many of their peers at risk may actually drink more, whereas advertising the fact that most students don’t drink, or drink in moderation, is the thing that actually reduces binge drinking (Perkins et al., 2005)?
That over a third of normal people report having had hallucinations, something we normally experience solely with mental illness or substance abuse (Ohayon, 2000)?
Or that the majority of ordinary Americans could be persuaded to electrocute someone to death merely by being asked to by a scientist in a white coat (Milgram, 1974)?
Cognitive dissonance is important because it explains why so many multi-level marketers continue down their fruitless economic path -it feels good to be poor.
Stafford goes on to say:
In fact, there is good evidence that most of us share a common cognitive bias in the form of the illusion of explanatory depth. This is that we mistake our familiarity with a situation for an understanding of how it works. Rozenblit and Keil (2002) showed this by asking people how well they understood certain common devices (such as a flush toilet, a clothes zip or a cylinder lock) and then asking them to describe in detail how these things worked. People’s self-ratings of their understanding dropped as they were forced to confront their ignorance.
This is especially important when buying a franchise -the franchise operations which look so familiar to us as customers make us believe that we understand how they work from an operator's point of view.
Another good reason to review, contemplate, and challenge the facts disclosed in the Franchisor's UFOC before entering the frenzy of Discovery Day.
