The 8 most important psychological effects
One of the efforts of research in Psychology has been to understand what are the distortions of perception and thought that lead us to behave as we do. The idea is that by understanding the “psychological circuits” that condition our way of perceiving the world, we will be able to better understand the human mind.
That is why, for decades, psychologists have studied a series of psychological effects ; curious phenomena capable of being studied in laboratory conditions and which reflect biases and strange patterns of perception that occur in almost all people. In this article we will see which are the most important.
The main psychological effects
These are various psychological and perceptual phenomena that show that underneath the apparent order in the human mind, there are strange mechanisms that can behave in a counter-intuitive way at certain times.
1. Dunning-Kruger effect
This is one of the most consistent and robust psychological effects among those found in the different researches on human behavior, since it appears again and again in most experiments on this topic. It consists of the tendency to overestimate our abilities and level of competence in what we are not good at , and the tendency to underestimate ourselves a little in what we are really good at.
2. Stroop effect
The Stroop effect has to do with a process of interference between the senses, in which the textual component of a concept is mixed with a sensation. It appears when, under certain conditions, we read aloud and quickly the name of a color, whose word is written in a different color : in these cases, it is very likely that instead of reading what the text says, we will mention the name of the color to which we have been exposed sensorially, and not textually.
3. Lake Wobegon effect
This is one of the cognitive biases that have to do with the assessments we make about ourselves; that is, it is related to our self-concept and self-esteem. Specifically, it is a tendency to believe that we are more skilled or virtuous than the average person and that, at the same time, if we show any sign of weakness or imperfection, it is due to circumstances external to ourselves, which have not allowed us to behave or be the way we really are.
4. Cocktail party effect
Attention management has been one of the topics that Psychology has been most interested in for decades, and the cocktail party effect gives us an idea of why, since it is both very curious and common.
This is the psychological phenomenon that occurs when, automatically and involuntarily, our mind selects a sound that is mixed with background noise (or ambient noise) and that is relevant to us . For example, if we are at a party full of people and among the noise of people talking we hear our name, we will spontaneously be able to “isolate” that word from the rest and react to it, probably by turning in that direction.
Thus, the cocktail party effect occurs between the borderline between the conscious and the unconscious, as it takes place before we decide to direct our attention to a particular conversation, and it “delivers” a sound that has been selected by some mental process outside of our will.
5. McCollough effect
The McCollough effect is a phenomenon of perception belonging to the world of optical illusions based on post-images, which means that they show us the way in which the cells of the retina adapt to previous visual stimuli and affect the way in which we see things to which we are exposed just afterwards.
To make it happen, we first fix our gaze on a series of parallel lines of red and green, and then we are exposed to a similar pattern of parallel lines, but this time without color, of black on white. This will make us perceive this stimulus mixed with the previous one, making both affect each other, creating an optical illusion.
6. Kappa effect
The Kappa effect is the psychological phenomenon whereby, if enough time passes between exposure to one stimulus and exposure to the next, we tend to believe that this period is longer than normal, while if this period is short enough, the opposite occurs: we have the feeling that less time has passed than has actually passed between one stimulus and the next. In other words, this psychological effect shows us the existence of thresholds that affect our perception of time .
7. Ben Franklin effect
The Ben Franklin effect reveals a mental process related to cognitive dissonance : if we do a favor to a person, in successive periods we are more likely to do him a favor again than if we had received a favor from that person. This is believed to occur as a way of justifying our past action: we assume that it is natural to make small sacrifices for that person regardless of whether they are rewarded.
8. Forer effect
The Forer effect consists of the tendency to identify ourselves with deliberately abstract descriptions of a particular person, even when objectively there is nothing in them that indicates the degree of concreteness necessary to know who is being talked about. It is believed that the success of tarot and divination is based on this distortion of the mind, which can occur in practically any person under the right conditions.
Bibliographic references:
- Broadbent, D.E. (1954). The role of auditory localization in attention and memory span. Journal of Experimental Psychology. 47 (3): 191–196.
- Bronkhorst, A.W. (2015). The cocktail-party problem revisited: early processing and selection of multi-talker speech. Atten Percept Psychophys. 77(5): p. 1465-87.
- Fabiani, M. & Donchin, E. (1995). Encoding Processes and Memory Organization: A Model of the von Restorff Effect, Journal of Experimental Psychology; 21(1): 224-240.
- Nelson, D.L.; Reed, U.S.; Walling, J.R. (1976). Pictorial superiority effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning & Memory. 2 (5): 523–528.
- Ramachandran, V. and Zeve, M. (2017). Synesthesia and McCollough Effect. i-Perception, 8(3), 201-211.
- Svenson, O. (1981). Are we all less risky and more skillful than our fellow drivers? Acta Psychologica, 47, 143-48.