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Dec 18, 2008
Do opulent Christmas displays in stores and frenzied ads make you feel overwhelmed, depressed, or psyched? The emotions you feel might be a clue to your “shopping personality” – a pattern of behavior that corresponds with how you act in the rest of your life.
Kent State University behavioral economist Paul Albanese has identified four types of shoppers – normal, neurotic, compulsive and psychotic – based on clinical descriptions of human behavior and personality development in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the psychologist’s bible. In describing these shopping personalities in his 2002 book, The Personality Continuum and Consumer Behavior, Albanese draws on the so-called object-relations theory of psychoanalysis, which says humans seek satisfaction through their relationships with others.
Nov 4, 2008 | 13
Are you more likely to get a joke if you lean politically left or right? That's the question New York Times columnist John Tierney asks today, extending a line of inquiry popular this campaign season: the personality characteristics of ideologues.
Tierney cites a study by MIT behavioral scientist Dan Ariely, who ran 22 jokes by 285 Bostonians and discovered that, lo and behold, conservatives are better humored — at least about the funnies.
Those findings may come as a surprise in light of other research suggesting that conservatives are more close-minded, intolerant and allegedly scare more easily than liberals (but do keep neater quarters). Using a scale from 1 to 9, in which 1 indicated "not at all funny" and 9 was "hilarious," conservatives gave an average rating of 5 and liberals gave an average rating of 4.32 to three religious jokes Ariely told them, Tierney writes. Conservatives also liked the golf jokes better, as well as three "Deep Thoughts" by Jack Handey (who doesn't think that guy's a hoot?).
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