We have a few more items to chalk up to the power of unconscious stimuli and bias on our feeble human minds:
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The basic shape of a logo is enough to bias your perception of that company’s product.
“Five experiments document that the mere circularity and angularity of a brand logo is powerful enough to affect perceptions of the attributes of a product or company,” the researchers write in the Journal of Consumer Research.
—”The Shape of a Logo Has a Powerful Impact On Consumers” on Association for Psychological Science
2. White college students associate black faces with violence and guns, even when those faces are as young as 5 years old.
“Our findings suggest that, although young children are typically viewed as harmless and innocent, seeing faces of five-year-old Black boys appears to trigger thoughts of guns and violence,” said lead study author Andrew Todd, an assistant professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Iowa.
—”Faces of Black Children as Young as Five Evoke Negative Biases” on Association for Psychological Science
3. On a more positive front, conducting a value affirmation exercise can not only mitigate the “stereotype threat” for individual students who may be discriminated against, it furthermore seems to transfer that benefit to the entire class.
New research suggests that when students who are vulnerable to being stereotyped complete exercises that cause them to reflect on their own personal values, they perform better in class — and so do other students around them, even if those other students don’t complete the self-reflection tasks themselves.
—Jacqueline Howard, “Shielding Students From Stereotypes Helps Way More Than We Thought” on the Huffington Post
As the lead researcher in the latter study stated, “Who would have thought that the indirect benefits of an intervention could be almost as large than the direct benefits?”
Yet more evidence that speaks to the power of oblique methods of influence.
For more posts on this blog about obliquity, click here.
Schools & Ecosystems 