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How Your Coffee Mug Controls Your Feelings (& What You Can Do About It)
- jasongullickson 16y agoThis reminds me of a theory I have that the color beige may cause brain damage.
- twymer 16y agoThe wall behind my monitor right now (at work) is beige :(
- mcantor 16y agoYou'd best offset it by making your desktop background a flat shade of maroon; it's the only proven way to counteract neural damage from off-white sources.
- cynicalkane 16y agoGiven the popularity of beige in corporate environments, I think you may be on to an interesting correlation.
- secretasiandan 16y ago"As for the notion of a thought vacuum, I think its incredible to consider that no matter how bleak an environment you may find yourself in, or how dull an object you may find yourself holding, these things are always influencing how you think and feel about the people and places around you." What's more important to me than how this might/should effect product design, is how it should effect our concept of free will.
- DanielBMarkham 16y agoFor some reason this reminded me of neuro-linguistic programming: there's something there, but it's easy to overstate your case.
- secretasiandan 16y agoI more than readily accept your skepticism re NLP. But the first paper he talks about got into Science http://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5986/1712.abstract?sid=9a6810a0-0083-4a3b-9449-04d476d7e6d1 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5986/1712.abstract?sid... I don't have access to the article itself, but I assume the writer didn't mangle the conclusions that badly. Can anyone with access help out here?
- JoeAltmaier 16y agoIf the research was anything like the psychology studies I participated in as a college student, it is a far reach from college students paid to pretend to "interview a job applicant", to conclusions about a professional interviewer. With nothing else on the line (your reputation, income, self-image), its easy for the warm coffee or comfy chair to dominate your attitude.
- idm 16y agoWhat if I said that participants' physiology (stress response, in this case) is completely different depending on a single variable: being interviewed by a person, versus giving an unprepared speech to a camera about why you should be hired. You can be as cynical as you want, but there's no justification for ignoring good experimental design and the statistics that demonstrate it's unlikely that people would react so differently based on the camera/person condition. The evidence is: if you interview in front of a person, your blood pressure is demonstrably higher, your palms sweat more, and you self-report that you were stressed out. In front of a camera, the averageperson does not exhibit a stress response. You're not the first to observe that college students are a poor stand-in for the general population, but I have experience with one of the labs that conducted this work, and they did extensive "general population" work as well, which means it's not all college students. So many of these naive criticisms are addressed in the paper itself - if only people would take the time to read what the scientists wrote (i.e. "read the science".)
- TillE 16y ago
- zwieback 16y agoI was holding a warm cup of tea while reading the article but I still think it sounds a bit fuzzy. I'm guessing the decline effect will push the results below the noise floor.
- pacifika 16y agoIs there a study around desktop methaphors in this context? For example: moving files to the recycle bin can be 'heavier' or 'lighter' depending on the total size of the selection (more files are slightly heaver and therefore subconsciously they're more important - resulting in less user error).
- sophacles 16y agoThis makes a certain amount of intuitive sense to me. I would also like to see such a study.
- xsmasher 16y agoThere's an anecdote claiming that the Mac's old "overstuffed" icon for a non-empty trash was unsettling to users, who felt like they should immediately "empty trash" to alleviate the condition... Which defeats the purpose of having a trash can instead of instant delete.
- njharman 16y agoUm, yeah. Reason why Zen Gardens exist and in minimalism art/architecture/design/etc common for many aesthetic/meditative disciplines such as Zen Buddhism.
- DanI-S 16y agoThis is just a reminder of how desperately important good design is. No matter how minimal this effect may turn out to be, we all interact with thousands of man-made objects each day. Improving the quality of those interactions is a cheap way of raising quality of life.
- JoeAltmaier 16y agoSo now we all adopt feng-sui and hope for the best?
- DanI-S 16y agoI would've thought adopting an arbitrary standard and hoping for the best is pretty much the opposite of good design.
- gaoshan 16y agoIf my coffee mug exerts that much control over my feelings my laptop must be in charge of my very existence.
- deadmansshoes 16y ago"It may seem incredulous to imagine that the boring coffee mug you held this morning while chatting with your kids, or the clipboard you held while filling out that interview this afternoon, were actively priming your behavior and emotions." Yes it does seem incredulous. Are we to believe that the only differing factor in each case was the stated coffee cup, puzzle piece softness etc..
- dhotson 16y agoThis article made me thirsty and I don't know why.
- jodrellblank 16y agosubjects asked to move their eyes in a specific pattern while puzzling through a brainteaser were twice as likely to solve it. What?!