The importance of control

Of course the experience of control is important, though it's not obvious just how important it is to our well-being. As it turns out, it is critically important. My good friend Ebonmuse, one of the contributors to this blog, recommended a book called Forty Studies That Changed Psychology: Explorations into the History…

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Just because . . .

In his book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1998), Robert Cialdini describes an experiment that illustrated the power of the word "because."   The experiment was conducted by Harvard social psychologist Ellen Langer, who found that people are highly motivated by the form of others’ reasons, even reasons lack persuasive content. …

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