The Funny Thing About Funny Ads
Humor makes you like an ad more — but it doesn't make you buy. The paradox that every advertiser needs to sit with.
Sex Sells — Just Not the Product
A meta-analysis of 78 studies found that people remember sexy ads more than any others — but they can't tell you what was being sold.
Darwin vs the Puff Adder: Why You Can't Reason Your Way Out of Fear
In 1872, Charles Darwin published a book arguing that emotions are evolved survival tools. Then he went to the zoo reptile house and pressed his face against a glass snake cage to prove it.
The Picture That Sold the Product (Without Saying a Word)
They showed people an ad with a pretty picture and zero product information. People liked the product anyway. How your feelings leak onto things without asking permission.
You'll Never Understand How Hungry You'll Be — The Hot-Cold Empathy Gap That Makes You Buy Things You Don't Need
Grocery shopping on an empty stomach is a terrible idea. But it's not just hunger — your 'cold' brain can never really understand what your 'hot' brain is capable of.
The Garden, the Daughter, and Psychology's Biggest Pivot
In 1997, Martin Seligman's five-year-old daughter told him to stop being a grouch. It changed psychology forever — and gave us the PERMA model of what makes life worth living.
Don't Bottle It: The Stanford Study That Proved Holding It In Only Makes It Worse
James Gross showed that trying to hide your emotions doesn't make them go away — it makes your heart race harder while your brain forgets what happened
The Man Who Went to Papua New Guinea to Prove Emotions Aren't Universal
In the 1960s, the scientific consensus was clear: emotions are culture. What you feel and how you show it is learned, not innate. Then a young psychologist named Paul Ekman traveled to a remote highland in Papua New Guinea to show photographs of Western faces to a people who had never seen a photograph — and the entire field had to rewrite its textbooks.
When Sadness Opens Your Wallet
You'd think all negative emotions make us less likely to spend. But a 2004 experiment found the opposite: sad people paid more for the same water bottle than neutral people did, while disgusted people paid less. Same valence, opposite behavior — because your emotions carry hidden appraisals that rewrite your sense of value.
You're Not Afraid Because Your Heart Is Racing — Your Heart Is Racing, So You Feel Afraid
What if we've had the order of emotions backwards for centuries? William James proposed in 1884 that we don't cry because we're sad — we're sad because we cry. Then Walter Cannon cut the nerves of cats to prove him wrong. The 140-year argument between these two theories is one of psychology's most beautiful intellectual fights, and modern neuroscience is only now finding out who was closer to the truth.
You've Been Tricked by Your Own Heartbeat: The Experiment That Proved Your Brain Is Making It Up as It Goes
A 1962 experiment injected people with adrenaline, sat them in a room with a very happy (or very angry) stranger, and proved something unsettling: your emotions aren't what you think they are.