The human mind is a fascinating creation. With it we move, breathe, consciously decide what to do and subconsciously do things with little knowledge of why or how we do them. With the help of our five senses, our brains help us make sense of the world around us. Despite its wonder our brains can be easily tricked. Consider the following:The Placebo Effect – Many studies show when people believe they’re taking medicine their conditions improve just as if they took the actual medicine. Magicians – These clever folks use their understanding of how the mind works to fool audience members into believing objects miraculously appear and disappear. I saw it with my own eyes!Physical Comparisons – Have you ever gone to pick up something anticipating it was heavy and suddenly it felt light? Or perhaps you went to pick up something you assumed was light and it felt heavy. Ten pounds is ten pounds but sometimes ten pounds feels heavy and sometimes it feels light.Sales – We’ve all bought things on sale feeling we got a great deal because we saved a certain percentage or dollar amount off of the list price. That good deal doesn’t seem so good when someone else announces they got the same item for even less that we paid!There’s something that impacts us every day, which we give very little thought to and yet it makes a big difference in how we perceive things and the decisions we ultimately make. What I’m referring to are anchors but not the kind dropped over the side of a ship into the water. In psychology, according to Amos Tversky and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, an anchor is “an initial value that serves as a benchmark or starting point for an unknown quantity.”There are many things in life that we can’t accurately put a value on. For example let’s consider a house. A four bedroom, two and a half bath house with 3,000 square feet, a wooden deck, family room, dining room, kitchen and den might go for $250,000 in a small Midwestern town. The exact same home on an equivalent sized lot in Southern California might go for more than $500,000.You might be thinking it’s because the market dictates a higher price in California than in the Midwest. No dispute there but the point would be this – the value you put on the home would be dictated in large part by the other values you learn about (the anchors). Consider this experiment from Tversky and Kahneman. A wheel with numbers 1-100 is spun and is set to “randomly” stop on either 10 or 65. Let’s say it stopped on 10. Participants were then asked if the percentage of African nations in the United Nations is higher or lower than 10%. Next they were asked to make their best guess on the actual percentage. Those who saw the wheel stop at 65 were asked if the percentage of African nations in the United Nations is higher or lower than 65%. Then they were asked to guess the actual percentage.For most people, estimating the percentage of African nations in the U.N. is nothing more than a guess. However, those who saw the wheel stop at 10 guessed 25% of the African nations were in the U.N., but for those who saw it stop on 65 the average guess was 45! That’s quite a difference. Each group was heavily influenced by the anchor they were exposed to before making their educated guess.So what does this have to do with you and me? Think about all the things we’ve encountered over time with little or no thought about how the value was determined other than market forces:Long distance charges – I remember when 25 cents a minute was a bargain. When charges were dropped to 10 cents we couldn’t believe it! Now it’s practically free on a per minute basis.Newspapers – Some people still pay to get the weekly and/or weekend edition of their favorite newspaper. Others go online and see the same stories…for free! You could argue the online version is more valuable because it’s portable, updated multiple times and day and doesn’t create any waste.Movies – We used to drive to Blockbuster and pay $8-$10 to rent two or three movies for the weekend. Now many of us watch nearly unlimited movies and shows on Netflix for just $8 a month.In each instance what we paid and what we felt was a good deal, or bad deal, was impacted by the anchor because it served as a comparison point.There are some things we can’t change and have little room to barter on. That’s why most Internet plans are in the ballpark of one another. But when it comes to things like buying homes and cars you should recognize your purchase price will be heavily impacted by a list price for a home or the MSRP (manufacturer’s suggested retail price) for a new car. You would do well to do some research beforehand and go into those situations with your own anchor to start bidding from. And remember this tidbit for negotiations; the person who puts out the first number sets the anchor and most of the time the negotiated price will be close to that number. Don’t let a good deal get aweigh from you. 
Brian Ahearn, CMCT® Chief Influence Officer influencePEOPLE Helping You Learn to Hear “Yes”.
Wild Bonobos Use Referential Gestural System to Communicate Their Intentions
Social interactions among bonobos – pointing gestures and pantomime, too, are deployed in communication. Credit: LuiKotale Bonobo Project/ Zana Clay
Pointing and pantomime are important components of human communication but so far evidence for referential communication in animals is limited. Observations made by researchers Pamela Heidi Douglas and Liza Moscovice of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, make important contributions to this research topic: To solve social conflicts female bonobos invite other females to engage in a socio-sexual behaviour by using pointing gestures and mimicking hip swings. This observation raises new questions about the evolution of referential communication and human language.
One important feature of human language is the ability to use arbitrary vocal and gestural signals to symbolically represent or refer to objects, actions or events. Two examples of symbolic gestural communication are pointing, which directs someone else’s attention to an external object in the environment, and pantomime, or acting out parts of actions to communicate desires or goals even in the absence of the relevant objects.
It has long been believed that forms of referential gesturing, such as pointing, and forms of iconic gesturing, such as pantomime, are unique to humans. In a recent study of wild bonobos at the Luikotale field site in the Democratic Republic of Congo, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology documented regular use of a form of pointing and pantomime. During their three-year study, Pamela Heidi Douglas and Liza Moscovice observed that the gestures were always produced in the context of socio-sexual behaviour between females. Female sexual behaviour serves to reduce social tension and promote cooperation. The gestures used by the females are notable in that they appear to be not only intentional, but also referential and potentially iconic, since they communicate specific information about the desired goal.
The majority of gestures occurred in feeding contexts, and led to socio-sexual interactions between the gesturer and the recipient. Following socio-sexual interactions, the gesturer and partner were more likely to stay near each other and to feed together compared with rare situations when females rejected the gestural requests for sexual interactions. This suggests that female bonobos use referential and iconic gesturing to enhance communication in contexts in which behavioural coordination and cooperation are necessary.
The observed gestures have obvious parallels with human pointing and pantomime in both form and function and the results of this research, published in Scientific Reports, challenge the current view that such gestures are unique to humans. What remains to be explored is whether bonobos have mental representations when they produce these gestures, and whether females who respond to gestures understand the referential or iconic content of the signals.
Why Your Dog is Happy to See You
Is your dog overwhelmed with joy anytime you walk through the door? There’s a scientific reason behind their excitement, a new study shows, and it’s not just because you feed them.
Researchers at Emory University used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan dogs’ brains for activity when they were shown images of dog faces, human faces and ordinary objects.
The dogs’ temporal lobes lit up “significantly more” when presented with the faces than with the objects. These findings suggest that dogs may recognize both human and dog faces.
Facial recognition causes dog brains to activate in the the same areas as in monkey and human brains, the study found. This is separate from the “reward areas” that would be triggered by anticipation of food.
“What we’re finding with the imaging work is that dogs love their humans-and not just for food,” researcher Gregory Berns told io9. “They love the company of humans simply for its own sake.”
“The existence of a face-selective region in temporal dog cortex opens up a whole range of new questions to be answered about their social intelligence,” the researchers explained, such as whether dogs can understand different facial expressions and whether they can read body language.
This isn’t the first time scientists have explored what makes dogs’ tails wag with excitement when reunited with their owners. A January study that Berns was also involved in found that dogs have a positive reaction to the scent of familiar humans compared with other smells, even those of other dogs.
The results of that study “suggested that not only did the dogs discriminate that scent [of familiar humans] from the others, they had a positive association with it.”
A 2013 behavioral study found that dogs can show when they’re happy to see their owners by lifting their eyebrows. Their left eyebrow went up when they saw their respective owners, the study found. They didn’t have this reaction for other things that may excite them, such as attractive toys.
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