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Bezos sold off $1.8 BILLION in Amazon shares in just three days!... [Unsubscribe](   [Informed ID Logo]( [Devider] ike many people, public speaking once filled me with a sense of dread. As a writer I felt much more comfortable expressing myself on the page, rather than from centre stage. Strangely, I found that the feelings of anxiety themselves were perfectly tolerable; instead, I was preoccupied with the ways that others would perceive my nervous energy. A slight wobble of the voice, the unconscious biting of my lip – I assumed that I’d be judged harshly for any non-verbal signal that betrayed my lack of confidence. I was experiencing anxiety about my anxiety – a double whammy of worry that made the whole task feel much more daunting. You might have noticed this yourself before a job interview or important work meeting in front of senior colleagues. And the more you try to suppress your feelings, the harder they bounce back. According to a striking new study, however, these concerns may be unwarranted. Jamie Whitehouse, a research fellow at Nottingham Trent University in the UK, has shown that visible signs of stress are often appealing, leaving others predisposed to like us and treat us warmly. If so, we need not try so hard to maintain a calm-and-collected poker face – safe in the knowledge that people will relate well to our emotional authenticity. Magnanimous monkeys Whitehouse’s interest in stress is rooted in evolutionary theory. Stress is typically accompanied by many internal physiological changes which help us to prepare the body for a challenge. A racing heart, for example, helps to deliver oxygen to the brain and body, which will mean we can react with greater speed. It is easy to see why these changes are adaptive. Yet many primates, when they are stressed, also reveal characteristic 'displacement' behaviours – such as nervous scratching of the skin – which don’t seem to serve any obvious purpose in handling the situation causing their discomfort. So why would they evolve? One possibility is that these behaviours help smooth over social interactions within the group. Primate groups are often complex, with alliances between members and established hierarchies, and meeting a potentially hostile individual could be an important source of stress. The displacement behaviours may act as a subtle signal that shows this discomfort and reduces the risk of a needless confrontation. For the higher-ranking individual, it could be the cockier rivals who would most need taking down a peg or two, after all – not necessarily those who are already nervy. These behaviours are not just functionless by-products of stress, but actually have communicative functions - Jamie Whitehouse In 2017 Whitehouse found some initial evidence supporting this idea. Observing a group of 45 rhesus macaques in Punta Santiago, Puerto Rico, he found that individuals tended to show more nervous scratching when they were around higher-ranking individuals and relative strangers with whom they did not already have a strong social bond. And that, in turn, seemed to change the nature of the interaction – resulting in gentler behaviour from the other monkey. Sometimes, colleagues of Informed Investor Decisions share special offers with us that we think our readers should be made aware of. Below is one such special opportunity that we believe deserves your attention. [Devider] here would the self-help and business media be without the secret habits of highly successful people? Almost every week there’s a new article outlining a high-flying individual’s behaviours – with the implied promise that using the same techniques could deliver us fame and fortune, too. Some of their advice is relatively common sense: you’ll often hear how top CEOs like Elon Musk begin work early, skip breakfast and divide their time into small, manageable tasks. Arianna Huffington, the CEO of Thrive Global, prioritises sleep in the name of productivity, including a bedtime ritual in which she turns off all mobile devices and “escorts them out of [her] bedroom”. Other inspirational figures are more idiosyncratic in their habits. Bill Gates, for example, would reportedly rock backwards and forwards in his chair while brainstorming – a bodily means of focusing the mind that apparently spread across the Microsoft boardroom. Gates was also very particular in his choice of notebook: it had to be a yellow legal pad. Further back in history, Charles Dickens carried around a compass so he could sleep facing north, something he believed would contribute to more productive writing, while Beethoven counted exactly 60 coffee beans for each cup, which he used to power his composing. Why do successful people follow such eccentrically specific habits? And why are we so keen to read about them and mimic them in our own lives? The answer lies in a powerful psychological process called ‘superstitious learning’. The brain is constantly looking for associations between two events. While it is mostly correct, it sometimes mistakes coincidence for causality – leading us to attribute success to something as arbitrary as the colour of our notebook or the number of beans in our brew, rather than our own talent or hard work. And when we hear of other’s triumphs, we often end up copying their habits, too, including the arbitrary rituals that they had acquired through superstitious learning – a phenomenon known as ‘over-imitation’. This is not to say the resulting habits are completely devoid of benefits. By giving us a sense of self-determination, the adoption of rituals – including the completely random behaviours that we have learnt ourselves or borrowed from those we admire – can help us to overcome anxiety, and may even bring about a noticeable boost in performance. From the placement of objects to over-reliance on particular possessions or behaviours, people's special rituals can be diverse (Credit: Getty) From the placement of objects to over-reliance on particular possessions or behaviours, people's special rituals can be diverse (Credit: Getty) Pigeon performance The scientific study of superstitious learning began in the late 1940s, with an influential paper by the American psychologist BF Skinner. Skinner was interested in the learning process of conditioning: how we teach animals to perform tricks. If you want to teach a dog to sit, for example, you give it a small treat whenever it lowers its hind legs. Soon, the dog learns to link the reward with the behaviour, and will sit on command. Skinner wondered whether animals might also come to associate random behaviours with rewards. If an animal, for example, was moving in a particular way when food was offered, might it then assume the food was a reward for the move? If so, might it repeat that same move over and over again in case it brought further success? To find out, Skinner took a group of hungry pigeons and attached a device that would feed them at regular intervals to their cage. Sure enough, the pigeons soon began to perform idiosyncratic behaviours when they felt hungry again. “One bird was conditioned to turn counter-clockwise around the cage, making two or three turns between reinforcements,” he wrote. “Another repeatedly thrust its head into one of the upper corners of the cage.” You might wonder how long the bird would continue with this behaviour without becoming disillusioned. But the simple rules of probability meant that the food would often come again while the bird was repeating its ritual, which reinforced the illusion that its behaviour was somehow influential. There’s a new market segment exploding right before our eyes. I'm not talking about crypto. Not 5G. Not artificial intelligence or electric vehicles. Ironically, the mainstream media is covering it… but the financial news isn’t. It’s [an entirely new sector]( in the market… And Jeff Bezos has stepped down from Amazon CEO… Sold his Amazon shares… To finance THIS new project… This could be your lucky second chance if you missed out on Amazon… [Click here to see the company Jeff Bezos is investing in NOW]( Skinner described the birds’ behaviour as a kind of superstition, and speculated that a similar psychological process could drive many human rituals. Skinner’s initial results have been questioned by other scientists, but later experiments provide substantial support for the general idea. It seems that the brain is constantly looking for associations among our behaviour, our environment and the rewards that we seek – and quite often, it can come to the wrong conclusions. “Superstition is a kind of maladaptive behaviour that arises from what is normally a very good thing – the ability of the brain to predict,” says Elena Daprati, a neuroscientist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. Daprati’s own research has showed further evidence for this theory. In a 2019 paper, her team showed that individual differences in implicit learning – the brain’s ability to non-consciously pick up patterns – can explain why some people are more likely to form superstitious habits than others. In one task, for instance, participants viewed a series of shapes appearing on a screen. Each time, they had to quickly identify whether it was the same shape or different to the one before. Unbeknown to the participants, the colour of the previous shape could predict where the next appeared on the screen. Participants who learnt to pick up on that pattern should be able to focus their attention and make their choice more rapidly. Besides taking this test, the participants also completed a questionnaire that measured how superstitious they were in everyday life. If superstitious behaviours arise as a by-product of our ability to form associations, then you would expect more superstitious people to perform better on this task – and this was exactly what Daprati found. “Superstitious individuals generally pick up on the cue and use it,” she says. In everyday life, this associative learning might lead us to settle on a ‘lucky’ pen that seems to deliver particularly good grades in exams, or a certain suit that we feel guarantees a good job interview. Creative tasks are especially rife with uncertainty – which may explain why thinkers like Gates, Beethoven and Dickens adopted such specific behaviours to get their thoughts flowing. The problem of ‘over-imitating’ Once rituals informed from superstitious learning exist, they can extend their influence beyond their creator. Emilia Rovira Nordman, an associate professor of marketing at Mälardalen University in Sweden, highlights an example from academia. It is notoriously difficult to get a new paper accepted by a prestigious journal, she says, and researchers will often find spurious reasons for their successes and failures. They will then pass on that advice to their colleagues and students – meaning that others will start to adopt the same arbitrary rules when preparing and submitting papers. [Devider] You received this email as a result of your consent to receive 3rd party offers at our other website. 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