The reciprocity norm refers to the expectation that people will help those who helped them. A well-known study revealed that the norm is strong with Christmas cards, with 20% of people reciprocating a Christmas card received from a stranger. I attempted to conceptually replicate and extend this effect. In Study 1, 755 participants received a Christmas card supposedly from a more- versus less-si...

Abuelita wants to buy the latest Neal Stephenson cypherpunk thriller. Almost without thinking, she visits the website of riverofbooks.com, a “category killer” e-tailer. She quickly finds what she wants, and with a few easy clicks, has purchased the book for $28.99, plus $4.99 shipping and handling. She can’t wait for the book to arrive in 3 business days. Later that day, she rides her bicycle o...

hypnosis, where the power of the imagination was accepted. 7 If there was a " medical " value for a placebo it was as an occasional diagnostic tool to separate imaginary " psychological " symptoms from real problems. 8 In 1945, an influential article stated that the placebo was a valuable device " to smooth [the patient's] path " , which " cannot harm and may comfort " patients, especially the ...

Environmental acoustic sensing involves the retrieval and processing of audio signals to better understand our surroundings. While large-scale acoustic data make manual analysis infeasible, they provide a suitable playground for machine learning approaches. Most existing machine learning techniques developed for environmental acoustic sensing do not provide flexible control of the trade-off bet...