20 Interesting Facts You Didn’t Know About Human Behavior

1. People with high levels of testosterone get pleasure from the anger of others.

2. People with low self-esteem tend to humiliate others. Subjects who were told that the results of their IQ test were poor expressed more national and religious prejudices, than those who reported higher results.

3. People sincerely believe that their negative opinions about others are truthful and have no connection with them and their self-confidence. In fact, the humiliation of others helps them restore their own self-esteem.

4. The behavior of people is affected by bodily sensations. For example, there is a strong association between heaviness and such features as “importance” and “seriousness”. A person is assessed as more serious and sustained, if his CV was applied in a heavy folder, and vice versa.

5. Similarly, the feeling of rigidity and hardness makes people inflexible. People sitting on hard chairs were more uncompromising in the negotiations. Feeling a rough surface causes in people a sense of the complexity of human relations, and cold is tightly connected with the feeling of loneliness.

6. People tend to commit immoral acts or do not fulfill someone’s request for help, if no effort is needed and they do not have to refuse a person directly.

7. However, more people behave “as expected” if they have to take a moral decision in front of someone.

8. Lying requires a lot of mental effort. A person who is lying has to keep in mind at the same time the lie – that it to say, and the truth – in order to hide it. As a result, he uses simple sentences and finds it more difficult to cope with mental tasks.

9. When people are being watched, they behave better. And the illusion of being watched works, too. It was enough to hang a picture of human eyes in a self-service cafeteria, so that more people began to collect their dishes.

10. Behavior affects morality. People who lied, betrayed someone or committed other immoral act begin to perceive what is good or bad in another way.

11. Attractive and honest appearance can easily be misleading. People tend to trust appearance more than sincerity.

12. Appearance plays an important role even when voting during elections. Maturity and physical attractiveness of politicians were mostly important for voters’ choice (unconsciously, of course).

13. More successful and rich people are considered to be more intelligent and wise, and vice versa. Often, people tend to think that those who are successful or those who suffer deserve it.

14. Happier is not the one who has a lot of money, but the one who has more than his neighbor does. People constantly compare themselves with others and feel satisfied if they are superior in some respect.

15. Anger increases the desire of possession in people. People make more efforts to obtain the object that is associated with angry faces.

16. The more complex the decision to be taken is, the more people tend to leave things as they are. If the store has too much choice and people cannot immediately find out which of the products is better, most probably they will leave without buying.

17. When people feel they have no control over what is happening, they tend to see non-existent patterns in unrelated pictures and believe in conspiracy theories.

18. People regret quick decisions, even if the results are satisfying. Not the actual time allotted for the decision matters, but the feeling that the time was enough.

19. Not all risks are the same. The same person can fearlessly jump with a parachute, but be afraid of his boss. Or to train tigers, but feel embarrassed when talking to a pretty woman.

20. Boredom has a bright side. Bored people are often looking for ways to do good things as the entertainment bores them and does not bring meaning to their lives.

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5 Amazing Facts about Human Brain and Memory

Examining the patient who is afraid of tickling, doctors usually try to have his or her hands over their own to prevent such feelings. This happens because your brain keeps your senses focused on the important things, such as signals from the outside world, which should not sink into the bottomless sea of sensations caused by your own actions. For this purpose, there is a part of the brain that generates a signal that distinguishes our own touch from someone else’s. It occupies about 1/8 of the total brain size and weighs about 4 ounces (113g).

It is very difficult to define what a sense of humor is, but we know it very well when we face with it. One theory suggests that the effect of humor is based on a surprise provoked by the outcome of the situation that is different from what standard logic and experience say, with an unusual interpretation of rather ordinary things.

To make it perceived as a joke and not as a logic puzzle, it should be a coherent story with an unexpected, but not too reasonable in the usual sense outcome. Some patients with damage to the frontal lobe of the brain do not understand jokes. Typically, it happens due to the problems with the interpretation of the process. For example, getting a joke with a choice of endings, they cannot determine which of them is funny.

Constant jet lag can be dangerous for the health of your brain. People who do long flights associated with crossing many time zones are at risk of brain damage and memory problems. This, apparently, is the result of stress hormones that damage the temporal lobe and memory, and are produced during the jet lag.

The presence of a song or, more likely, part of a song firmly stuck in your head is incredibly disturbing but, unfortunately, the risk of catching such a “neuroparasite” is directly related to the mechanism of functioning of our memory.

We constantly have to remember a number of sequences, from the movements of signing your name or preparing the morning coffee to a sequence of turns on the highway on your way home.
The ability to reconstruct these and other sequences enables most aspects of our daily lives, as we do it automatically, without thinking. Sometimes at the time when you are thinking about a song or speech, your brain can repeat a certain sequence, thus strengthening the ties with this phrase and associating it with a set of actions or movements. Next time, this sequence can automatically push a recollection out of your memory, that is, a phrase or a portion of a song. Thus, repetition and recollection lead to the strengthening of the reflex.

Despite the fact that we usually associate yawning with sleepiness and boredom, in fact it is a means to awaken us and to refresh our brain. Yawning is an expansion of the pharynx and larynx, which lets more air in and, respectively, more oxygen flows through the lungs into the bloodstream, bringing your body to a state of readiness.

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