RoyMogg's Blog

We wore ankle-length blue coats at my school, in the Tudor-style. When it rained, the wool of the coat gave off a pungent smell, rather like wet dog. Now when I encounter a similar scent, it propels me back in time to my school days. This effect is called the “Proustian phenomenon”. The name comes from Proust’s description in Remembrance of Things Past of how the smell of a tea-soaked madeleine biscuit transported him back in time to his childhood.

Smells do have this uncanny, evocative power, don’t they? It’s because of the relative proximity of the olfactory bulb (which processes smells) and the hippocampus and amygdala, which are involved in memory and emotions. Right?

Not so fast. In fact very little research has investigated whether smells really do evoke vivid and emotional memories, more than other sensory cues. What follows is a new, rare attempt.

Marieke Toffolo and her collaborators invited 70 female student participants to

Continue reading Do smells really trigger particularly evocative memories?

More women than ever go out to work and yet surveys in Western countries show that wives continue to take on the lion’s share of domestic chores.

A new study has quizzed 389 couples in Austria, Germany and Switzerland to build up the most comprehensive picture yet of how this uneven distribution of domestic chores is associated with men’s and women’s marital satisfaction.

These were all dual-earning couples with young children, with both spouses working at least 15 hours per week. Eighty-nine per cent of the couples were married. The average professional work load for women was 30.2 hours per week; for men it was 48.6 hours. Consistent with past surveys, the women in this sample took on nearly two thirds of the domestic chores.

The researchers Gerold Mikula, Bernhard Riederer and Otto Bodi asked their participants several things: what share of the chores they took on; whether they thought that was fair;

Continue reading When wives believe they do an unfair share of the housework, everyone loses

Psychologists have identified an important reason why our insight into our own psyches is so poor. Emily Balcetis and David Dunning found that when predicting our own behaviour, we fail to take the influence of the situation into account. By contrast, when predicting the behaviour of others, we correctly factor in the influence of the circumstances. This means that we’re instinctually good social psychologists but at the same time we’re poor self-psychologists.

Across three studies, Balcetis and Dunning asked students to predict how they or their peers would behave in various scenarios. This included whether or not they or others would help a researcher clear up a knocked-over box of jigsaw pieces; donate part of their participation fee to charity; or cheat on a self-marked quiz. The relevant situational factors were, respectively: being alone or in a group of two to three; being in a good or bad mood (induced via funny or boring videos); having

Continue reading Why we’re better at predicting other people’s behaviour than our own