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Category Archives: Psychology

The way we talk can have profound affects on the way we see the world and, in turn, the way the world sees and interacts with us. One of the easiest ways of eliminating poor, irrational, upsetting, and alienating communication (ie. to increase your general likability) is to stop stating opinions as facts.

I recently came across a simple hack for this called E-Prime. The basic idea is to eliminate the verb “to be” from your vocabulary. For example, “She is an annoying person” becomes “She annoys me sometimes” or “I find her annoying”. This shifts your statements from making a judgement to stating a fact. I have found that paying attention to how I state facts and opinions has not only made me more likable, but also made me more aware of how I judge my self and others. See REBT if you want more information on the bennefits of that.

If you want more more information on E-Prime, check out the Wikipedia article here:

We know it today as “six degrees of separation”, but did you know that number is actually loosely based on the results of an actual experiment?

In the 1960s Stanly Milgram (you know Stanly Milgram he’s the one that tricked subjects in to thinking they were torturing people for science) set out the answer the question of how connected we all really are.

Here’s the general method:


2. Information packets were initially sent to “randomly” selected individuals in Omaha or Wichita. They included letters, which detailed the study’s purpose, and basic information about a target contact person in Boston. It additionally contained a roster on which they could write their own name, as well as business reply cards that were pre-addressed to Harvard.

3. Upon receiving the invitation to participate, the recipient was asked whether he or she personally knew the contact person described in the letter. If so, the person was to forward the letter directly to that person. For the purposes of this study, knowing someone “personally” was defined as knowing them on a first-name basis.



When Milgram did this with 300 people trying to contact one man in Boston, the results where that the man received about 100 letters from people he knew. Milgram found that the average number of links was 6.

Milgram never actually used the phrase “6 degrees of separation” and if you are following along you may notice that this experiment has some flaws. However, after a Psychology Today article (go figure) was eventually written about the Small World Experiment, the “6 degrees” was legitimized and now the phrase is sometimes falsely attributed to Milgram.