November 18, 2017

From The Economist:

[The] British are more confident about the existence of ghosts than they are of a divine creator, or heaven.

From Teju Cole's Known and Strange Things:

It is about the incontestable fundamentals of a person: pleasure, sorrow, love, humor, and grief, and the complexity of the interior landscape that sustains those feelings. Baldwin was astonished that anyone anywhere should question these fundamentals, thereby burdening him with the supreme waste of time that is racism, let alone so many people in so many places.

From Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (H/T: Kevin Lewis):

In this paper, we reexamined the question of automaticity in social comparison by testing the hypothesis that subliminal social comparison affects explicit self-evaluations. In two high-powered experiments, young women were subliminally exposed (or not) to a high standard of comparison (media images of ultra-thin women). Next, they made explicit self-evaluations of their body appearance anxiety. Using both between-participants (Experiment 1) and within-participant (Experiment 2) designs, we found converging evidence that subliminal exposure to the thin ideal increases body appearance anxiety in women. Using Bayes factors as measures of evidence, the present experiments provided substantial (Experiment 1) and very strong (Experiment 2) evidence that social comparison takes place outside awareness and affects explicit self-evaluations.

From Journal of Consumer Research (H/T: Kevin Lewis):

Sensorimotor experiences of going against the flow can affect the choices consumers make. Eight experiments show that consumers who experience the sensation of going against the flow pick alternatives that are normatively not preferred (experiments 1a and 1b). These effects are evident only when the sensations are dynamic and self-experienced (experiments 2a and 2b), subjective feelings are elicited (experiments 4a and 4b), and no other objective, external norm information is supplied (experiment 5). Experiences of going against the flow typically involve both movement and direction and are represented in memory schematically. Re-experiencing these sensations leads to the activation of this schematic representation and elicits a feeling-based behavioral disposition to do something different, or to go against one’s initial inclination (experiment 3), leading participants to pick an option that is normatively not preferred.

From The Economist:

In China, online retailers are gearing up for “Singles Day”, November 11th, the world's busiest shopping day. Last year Alibaba, much the biggest of the country's e-commerce giants, rang up sales of $18bn on that occasion, the most ever spent in one day anywhere on Earth.