Jake | The People Manual

BREAKING: Did you know that many of psychology’s classic studies misled us about the self? They really did. Milgram, Zimbardo and recent priming studies suggested we’re highly malleable. They underestimated how stable we really are. There is considerable evidence for human consistency, agency and a remarkable propensity to shape our situations just as they shape us. The good news is that psychology appears to be slowly moving toward increased acceptance of what’s called ‘interactionism’: the view that the person and the situation interactively dictate behaviour. Many people have heard of nudging, in which subtle changes to the presentation of choices can systematically influence behaviour (eg, placing fruits and vegetables more conspicuously, to increase healthy consumption). The idea of nudging has proven enormously popular, with multiple governments around the world setting up ‘nudge units’, but initial results were lacklustre. Happily, research has moved to second-generation, interactionist nudges that tailor the intervention to the beliefs and preferences of the individual. For example, recent research suggests that personalised nudges to make healthier food purchases might be more effective than generic ones. Interactionism likewise paves a more realistic path forward for social change. Rather than assuming that one size fits all, an interactionist approach acknowledges that individual differences inform the way people respond to social situations. Any social movement to reduce harmful behaviour or improve wellbeing needs to meet people where they are at. That means acknowledging that different individuals will respond to the same policies and political messages differently, and in accordance with their own perspectives. #psychology #neuroticism

Psychology owes you an apology. In 2015, 270 researchers reran 100 published studies from three top journals. Of those, 97 had looked like hits. The replications were powered to recover about 89 of them. They recovered 35. #psychology #neuroscience

A dead Atlantic salmon lit up on a brain scan. The machine was working fine. In 2009, researchers at UC Santa Barbara, Vassar, and Dartmouth scanned a dead Atlantic salmon, about 18 inches long and 3.8 pounds, in an fMRI machine. Their title sounds like a joke: "Neural Correlates of Interspecies Perspective Taking in the Post-Mortem Atlantic Salmon: An Argument For Proper Multiple Comparisons Correction." They showed it 15 photos of people in emotional situations and asked it to judge what those people felt. The scan lasted 5.5 minutes. Then they analyzed the data without correcting for the huge number of tiny tests a brain scan runs. A typical fMRI volume has about 130,000 voxels. The chance of at least one false alarm, the authors noted, is almost certain. Something significant showed up anyway. One cluster sat inside the salmon's brain cavity, 81 cubic millimeters, with a cluster-level p of 0.001. A smaller cluster appeared in its upper spinal column. When they ran the same comparison with standard corrections for false discoveries and family-wise error, no voxels survived. Not even after they relaxed the threshold. The fish was not reading faces. Random noise can look like a brain result if you take thousands of shots and never correct for that. The paper is from 2009 and 2010. It does not say every brain scan is junk. The authors checked 2008 issues of major journals. In NeuroImage, only 193 of 260 relevant fMRI papers reported a multiple-comparisons correction. About one in four did not. In the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, closer to two in five skipped it. When someone waves a glowing brain picture at you and ties it to love, lying, or focus, that blotch can quietly waste your trust. The test may have been the same kind that "worked" on a dead fish. Next time a brain-scan claim shows up in your feed or a meeting, look for the words "corrected for multiple comparisons," or the labels FDR or FWER. If the write-up only says the result was significant at an uncorrected p < 0.001, treat the picture as untrustworthy. That check is practical advice, not a reader habit the paper tested. A colorful blob is not evidence until someone has controlled for the thousands of chances they took. Corrected studies are not the problem, and this cannot tell you how many of today's headlines are noise. #psychology #neuroscience

The ad man who invented brainstorming promised twice the ideas. He had it backwards. Psych myths, #4 Alex Osborn sold the world on group brainstorming. His own book claimed the average person "can think up twice as many ideas when working with a group than when working alone." In 1958, researchers tested it. Four people working alone, with duplicates removed, came up with nearly twice as many different ideas as four people brainstorming together. The cleanest takedown came later, in a 1987 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology paper from the University of Tübingen: "Productivity Loss in Brainstorming Groups: Toward the Solution of a Riddle." In one experiment, four-person groups brainstormed out loud for 15 minutes and produced about 56 ideas. Four people working alone produced 106. Same number of brains. Almost half the ideas gone. Laziness and fear of looking dumb mattered a little. The big killer was waiting your turn. While someone else talks, you sit on your idea, forget it, or decide it isn't worth saying. When the researchers made people working alone wait for a signal light before speaking, their output crashed to group levels. And no, it isn't one odd study. A 1991 meta-analysis pooled 20 studies and 2,577 people. Groups lost on number of ideas and on rated quality, and the bigger the group, the worse it got. So the classic "let's all throw ideas out there" meeting is a leaky way to collect ideas. A couple of people fill the air, and everyone else walks out with thoughts nobody heard. Next time you run one, say this before anyone speaks: "Take five minutes. Everyone write your ideas down alone, then we'll go round the table." That's practical advice built on these findings, not a script anyone tested. The honest limit: these were lab studies, mostly students, mostly groups of four on set topics. The few studies that found no loss all used pairs. And the research counted and rated ideas, not whether the final decision was better. More psych myths coming. #psychology #neuroscience

People expect solitude to feel better on the train. They get the direction wrong. University of Chicago researchers Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder tested that forecast in a 2014 Journal of Experimental Psychology: General paper, "Mistakenly Seeking Solitude." In a survey of 203 people, 76% said they would skip talking to a stranger on a train. Waiting rooms hit 93%. Most of us treat the person six inches away like furniture. Then they put the habit on a real commute. On Chicago Metra trains, 97 riders were told to connect with a stranger, sit in solitude, or ride as usual. People told to connect reported a clearly more positive commute than people told to sit alone. Conversations lasted about 14 minutes on average and rated 5.1 out of 6 for pleasantness. Reported productivity did not drop. A separate group of 66 riders predicted the opposite. They expected connection to feel worse than solitude, and less productive too. Wrong on both. The same flip showed up on public buses (75 riders in the experience study). Connection beat solitude again. Predictors still guessed solitude would win. Why does the mistake stick? Commuters rated their own interest in talking higher than they thought others felt. They guessed fewer than half of strangers would be willing to talk. When a seatmate was actually there, connection attempts worked far more often than that gloomy forecast implied. Example: you take the same morning train every day. Headphones in. Eyes down. You tell yourself the other person wants quiet. You never check. Small action for the next ride or waiting room (practical advice, not a script the paper tested): take the headphones off for two stops. Say hello to the person beside you and ask one ordinary question about their day. Stop if they shut it down. The paper's results say refusal is less common than people expect. Honest limit: Chicago field samples, self-report after the ride, and people who agreed to be studied. Partners in the field were not measured the same way (a lab waiting-room study found people who were talked to felt about as good as people told to talk). This is about short stranger chats in public, not forcing a deep conversation on someone who is clearly busy or unsafe to approach. The solitude you protect among strangers is often a forecast error. Test it once. #psychology #neuroscience

Your "calm down" pep talk never actually calms you down. Say This Instead Right before a pitch, a status update, or a meeting with your boss, most people whisper the same useless line to themselves: "Just calm down." Harvard Business School researcher Alison Wood Brooks tested that advice in a 2014 Journal of Experimental Psychology: General paper, "Get Excited: Reappraising Pre-Performance Anxiety as Excitement." In a survey of 300 people, 90.97% said they would try to relax and calm down before a high-stakes company speech. Open-ended advice from strangers landed in the same place about 85% of the time. Then the lab work. Heart rate jumped once people learned they had to sing, speak, or grind through a timed math test, and it stayed high. Telling people to remain calm did not bring it down. What did move the needle was a three-word swap. In karaoke, people who said "I am excited" out loud hit 80.52% singing accuracy. Saying nothing got 69.27%. Saying "I am anxious" sank to 52.98%. In a camera speech about why you'd be a good work partner, the "I am excited" group spoke longer (167 vs 132 seconds) and was rated more persuasive, confident, competent, and persistent than the "I am calm" group. Anxiety scores barely moved either way. The body stayed revved. The label changed. A 2025 direct replication (Poynter and Pasqualini) got the same feeling shift: "I am excited" made people feel more excited without making them feel less anxious. Judges did not rate the speeches differently. So treat the performance claim as mixed. The feeling claim held. Next time your chest is buzzing before you talk, say this instead: "I am excited." Out loud, once, right before you start. Practical advice, not a cure for clinical anxiety. The honest limit: these were mostly student samples, and the speech performance bump failed a direct replication. What still holds is the wasted calm-down ritual. Your heart does not obey it, and the usual line trains you to fight the arousal instead of using it. Stop trying to shut the engine off. Rename it. #psychology #neuroscience