
How Your Coffee Mug Controls Your Feelings (& What You Can Do About It)  - duck
http://johnnyholland.org/2011/03/01/how-your-coffee-mug-controls-your-feelings-what-you-can-do-about-it/
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DanielBMarkham
For some reason this reminded me of neuro-linguistic programming: there's
something there, but it's easy to overstate your case.

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secretasiandan
I more than readily accept your skepticism re NLP. But the first paper he
talks about got into Science

[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5986/1712.abstract?sid...](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5986/1712.abstract?sid=9a6810a0-0083-4a3b-9449-04d476d7e6d1)

I don't have access to the article itself, but I assume the writer didn't
mangle the conclusions that badly. Can anyone with access help out here?

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JoeAltmaier
If the research was anything like the psychology studies I participated in as
a college student, it is a far reach from college students paid to pretend to
"interview a job applicant", to conclusions about a professional interviewer.

With nothing else on the line (your reputation, income, self-image), its easy
for the warm coffee or comfy chair to dominate your attitude.

~~~
idm
What if I said that participants' physiology (stress response, in this case)
is completely different depending on a single variable: being interviewed by a
person, versus giving an unprepared speech to a camera about why you should be
hired.

You can be as cynical as you want, but there's no justification for ignoring
good experimental design and the statistics that demonstrate it's unlikely
that people would react so differently based on the camera/person condition.

The evidence is: if you interview in front of a person, your blood pressure is
demonstrably higher, your palms sweat more, and you self-report that you were
stressed out. In front of a camera, the averageperson does not exhibit a
stress response.

You're not the first to observe that college students are a poor stand-in for
the general population, but I have experience with one of the labs that
conducted this work, and they did extensive "general population" work as well,
which means it's not all college students.

So many of these naive criticisms are addressed in the paper itself - if only
people would take the time to read what the scientists wrote (i.e. "read the
science".)

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TillE
> if only people would take the time to read what the scientists wrote

To do that, I'd have to either pay $15 (for just this one paper) or take a
trip to my local university library.

You're free to chastise people all you like, but as long as the actual papers
are locked up behind paywalls, it's quite difficult to "read the science".

~~~
idm
You can still get this kind of literature from a library, though - especially
university libraries. It's like how books aren't free, yet you can still read
them for free by going to the library.

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gaoshan
If my coffee mug exerts that much control over my feelings my laptop must be
in charge of my very existence.

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deadmansshoes
"It may seem incredulous to imagine that the boring coffee mug you held this
morning while chatting with your kids, or the clipboard you held while filling
out that interview this afternoon, were actively priming your behavior and
emotions."

Yes it does seem incredulous.

Are we to believe that the only differing factor in each case was the stated
coffee cup, puzzle piece softness etc..

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pacifika
Is there a study around desktop methaphors in this context? For example:
moving files to the recycle bin can be 'heavier' or 'lighter' depending on the
total size of the selection (more files are slightly heaver and therefore
subconsciously they're more important - resulting in less user error).

~~~
xsmasher
There's an anecdote claiming that the Mac's old "overstuffed" icon for a non-
empty trash was unsettling to users, who felt like they should immediately
"empty trash" to alleviate the condition... Which defeats the purpose of
having a trash can instead of instant delete.

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jasongullickson
This reminds me of a theory I have that the color beige _may_ cause brain
damage.

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twymer
The wall behind my monitor right now (at work) is beige :(

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mcantor
You'd best offset it by making your desktop background a flat shade of maroon;
it's the only proven way to counteract neural damage from off-white sources.

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zwieback
I was holding a warm cup of tea while reading the article but I still think it
sounds a bit fuzzy. I'm guessing the decline effect will push the results
below the noise floor.

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DanI-S
This is just a reminder of how desperately important good design is. No matter
how minimal this effect may turn out to be, we all interact with thousands of
man-made objects each day. Improving the quality of those interactions is a
cheap way of raising quality of life.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
So now we all adopt feng-sui and hope for the best?

~~~
DanI-S
I would've thought adopting an arbitrary standard and hoping for the best is
pretty much the opposite of good design.

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secretasiandan
"As for the notion of a thought vacuum, I think its incredible to consider
that no matter how bleak an environment you may find yourself in, or how dull
an object you may find yourself holding, these things are always influencing
how you think and feel about the people and places around you."

What's more important to me than how this might/should effect product design,
is how it should effect our concept of free will.

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njharman
Um, yeah. Reason why Zen Gardens exist and in minimalism
art/architecture/design/etc common for many aesthetic/meditative disciplines
such as Zen Buddhism.

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jodrellblank
_subjects asked to move their eyes in a specific pattern while puzzling
through a brainteaser were twice as likely to solve it._

What?!

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dhotson
This article made me thirsty and I don't know why.

