9 Simple Suggestions That Change People’s Perceptions

Can we improve our own and other people's lives with the simple power of suggestion? How strong is the power of suggestion? Is it really possible to change how people think by making small changes to their expectations? One of the most famous demonstrations is the placebo effect: the idea that fake drugs can make us better. But psychological research is filled with all sorts of other findings about how simple suggestions can affect the way people think and perceive the world. Here are nine examples from a new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science (Michael et al., 2012): 1. Intelligence boost You can boost intelligence by handing out a placebo and telling them it's cognition enhancing: "....when people take the phony cognition-enhancing drug R273, they tend to expect it to improve their alertness, so they engage in more effortful monitoring but misattribute their improved performance to R273 (Clifasefi et al., 2007)." It would probably do the opposite if you told them the drug would make them more stupid. In fact this has been done, sort of, with alcohol... 2. More gullible Just as you can make people think they're more intelligent, you can also make them more gullible: "...giving people phony vodka tonics made them more susceptible to misleading information..." (Assefi & Garry, 2003) Of course you can get the same effect with several real vodka tonics, but this way is healthier (and cheaper). 3. Hallucinations Want to get hallucinogenic effects without all the bother of actually taking illegal drugs? Use the power of psychology: "We administered suggestions to see a gray-scale pattern as colored and a colored pattern in shades of gray to 30 high suggestible and eight low suggestible students." The highly suggestible individuals saw colour in the shades of gray. (Mazzoni et al, 2009) OK, it's not a very exciting hallucination, but maybe with practice you could work up to full Hunter S. Thompson-type madness (or maybe not!). 4. Tasty chocolate Telling people how luxurious and expensive food is makes them experience it as more luxurious. So, tell them their chocolate is Swiss, not Chinese: "...when students tasted unbranded chocolate and were told, either before or after tasting, that it was from Switzerland or from China, those who were told beforehand that the chocolate was Swiss reported that they liked it more." (Wilcox, Roggeveen, & Grewal, 2011). 5. I'm watching you The 'Hawthorne effect' is one of the most famous in psychology. This is the idea that people's behaviour changes simply as a result of being observed. In the original studies on factory workers at the Hawthorne factory in Illinois, researchers found that changing the physical working conditions (like lighting) did not have consistent effects on productivity. Instead it was the very fact that people were being studied and were receiving attention from their managers that affected how hard they worked. Posted in PsyBlog.com 6/26/2012