self-awareness

Will you have that extra chocolate bar when you're worried about your weight? Will you spend that extra hour on the internet when you have other things to do? Will you have that extra drink with an attractive colleague when your partner is waiting at home? Our lives are full of temptations and some of us are better at resisting them than others. But unexpectedly, the very people who think they are most restrained are also most likely to be impulsive. Their inflated belief in their own self-control leads them to overexpose themselves to temptation. In a series of four experiments, Loran…
We all know them - supremely confident, arrogant people with inflated views of themselves. They strut and swagger, seemingly impervious to critical opinions, threats of failure or the glare of self-awareness. You may be able to tell that I don't like such people very much, which is why new research from Sander Thomaes from Utrecht University makes me smirk. Thomaes found that people with unrealistically inflated opinions of themselves, far from proving more resilient in the face of social rebuffs, actually suffer more because of it. Some psychologists hold that "positive illusions" provide…
tags: cognition, behavior, self-recognition, self awareness, tool use, memory, brain architecture, birds, European magpie, Pica pica, researchblogging.org Figure 1. European magpie, Pica pica, with yellow mark [larger view]. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060202. Birds have been disparaged publicly as "bird brains" for so long that most people have lost the ability to view them as intelligent and sentient beings. However, a group of researchers in Germany have conducted a series of studies with several captive European magpies, Pica pica, that challenge the average person's view of birds and…