Word: roomful
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...industry executive, arrived late to the boardroom of Universal Music Group's international head office in London after the company had suffered a particularly poor sales period. As he entered, he turned off the lights, leaving his executive team sitting nervously in the dark. He then paced around the room until finally uttering the words: "See that. Better get used to it. That's what it's like when you don't have any hit records...
...study, Zhong and his colleagues took a subtler approach, but one that's likely to have more real-world implications. In the first part of their three-part experiment, they recruited 84 students and divided them between a brightly lit room with 10 fluorescent bulbs burning and a dimmer room with only four bulbs. The subjects were each given a brown envelope with $10 in singles and coins as well as an empty white envelope. They were all then told they had five minutes to complete a simple mathematical task, looking for pairs of numbers that added...
When the researchers collected the envelopes and reviewed the results at the end of the five-minute period, what they found was striking. Consistently, the people in the dimmer room reported finding more matches - an average of 11.47 - than those in the bright room, who averaged just 7.78. When their work was checked, it turned out that cheating was rife in the dim room, with the participants there claiming an average of 4.21 more correct answers than they actually got, compared with 0.83 for the other room. Even though none of the subjects put their name on their paper...
...second experiment, 50 students were similarly divided into two groups, this time in equally bright rooms, but one group was given sunglasses to wear and the other glasses with clear lenses. Each volunteer was then placed before a computer and told to interact - via chat only - with a partner in another room, who was actually one of the researchers. The volunteers were given $6 to divide any way they wanted between themselves and their partner. There was no question of honesty on the line - keeping the entire $6 and giving the partner nothing was a permissible choice - but there were...
...have a hard time remembering that the rest of the world doesn't always perceive things the way we do. That's the reason that in psychological tests, children in the 4-to-7 age group mistakenly believe that a doll seated facing them would see the room the same way they do, instead of from the opposite perspective. It's also the reason that in adulthood, we tend to overestimate the ability of others to notice when we're nervous or distracted, simply because we feel that way. Says Zhong: "We believe this behavior is learned through our early...