Courtesy of StockVault

Enjoy some fun & interesting facts on various social issues.  The Boston Globe took the time to compile these short but very interesting insights on why we like what we like and do what we do!!

Trusting Faces:

How long does it take us to judge the trustworthiness of a person we just met? According to the article, science and brain scans apparently not long. In fact the article mentions that within 33 milliseconds , we have already decided if we initially trust a person just by judging their face.

The Empowerment & Music:

Listening to music can make people think and act like they are more powerful;  according to researchers who tested this theory in several experiments.  The findings shown that people were inclined to think more abstractly, want to be the one to go first more often and want more control.

Racism & Prison Policy:

According to the article, America incarcerates much more of its population in comparison to the rest of the world. Research from Stanford University noted that our toughness on crime may be driven by racism. In one of Stanford’s experiments, white California voters were less likely to sign a petition to weaken California’s three-strikes law after viewing a series of mug shots of which 45% were black men, compared to viewing a series of mug shots of which 25% were black men. In another experiment, white residents of New York City were significantly less willing to sign a petition against the police department’s stop-and-frisk policy after being told that the prison population was 60% black, compared to 40% black.

Money Buries Emotions:

Many know the saying money doesn’t buy happiness and according to this report, money doesn’t buy any emotions either.  In multiple experiments, people who were exposed to pictures or words related to money subsequently thought it was less desirable to express emotions, expressed less anger in a customer complaint, expressed less emotion after watching a comedy movie, judged emotional expressions in public (but not in private) to be more intense, and were less interested in interacting with someone who displayed an emotional expression.

Do You Have Some Interesting Facts You’d Like Share?

Courtesy of StockVault

Forbes: Entrepreneur delves into what really motivates people in this day and age!  How can people, companies, and groups spur us into action?

There are plenty of options: advertising, marketing, and of course the ever popular and influential social media.  It has been revealed long ago that influencing one’s emotions can in turn effect their actions.

Many of us think of Facebook when we think of social media and influencing emotions, especially in light of the recent news regarding Facebook’s experiment in manipulating their user’s emotions by removing all of the positive or negative posts from certain user’s feeds.  Right or wrong, using emotions to control our actions is not recent news and many companies are now taking this to the next level.

According to Forbes’ article, Participant Media, which makes films that promote progressive causes and informs audiences in an effort to spur action, is currently working with Knight Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism to create a brand new way to measure this impact.

The company is banking on the overwhelming evidence that story-telling touches our emotions as well as our intellects.  Which strategies are more effective in galvanizing a viewer is the real question.

The Times also commented on this new way to measure the impact of social media,

Participant created an evolving index that compiles raw audience numbers for issue-driven narrative films, documentaries, television programs and online short videos, along with measures of conventional and social media activity, including Twitter TWTR +0.32% and Facebook presence. The two measures are then matched with the results of an online survey, about 25 minutes long, that asks as many as 350 viewers of each project an escalating set of questions about their emotional response and level of engagement. Did it affect you emotionally? Did you share information about it? Did you boycott a product or company? Did it change your life?

This Index will score films on whether they move people to take action, from sharing media on social channels to getting involved. However, Jay Rosen , a NYU journalism professor, purports,

“Action and behavior are not the same thing at all. One is a conscious choice, the other a human tendency. There’s a tension, then, between commercial behaviorism, which may be deeply functional in some ways for the news industry, and informing people as citizens capable of understanding their world well enough to improve it, which is the deepest purpose of journalism.”

It is important for corporate marketing specialists, especially in a consumer driven society, to know if what they are doing is working. The bigger question is, is taking the art of manipulating our emotions to the next level really what we want to do.

PsychCentral also has a similar article on how social sharing influences our emotions.