Dr. Emily Balcetis
Associate Professor of Psychology, New York University. On 1 show, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
academicauthorscientist@EBalcetis ↗psych.nyu.edu/balcetis ↗Wikipedia ↗
She investigates how internal motivations, emotions, and cognitive biases alter visual perception and impact decision-making, performance, and goal pursuit. She is the author of the book Clearer, Closer, Better: How Successful People See the World and a recognized TED speaker.
1shows
2appearances
18statements
12resolved
12supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
Everything Dr. Emily Balcetis said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Balcetis: Higher BMI individuals visually perceive distances as farther
“And we found that people who have a higher waist to hip ratio or a higher BMI see distances as farther than people who have a lower waist to hip ratio or lower BMI. Those distances literally look farther to people that for whom it might be harder to make it to…”
Balcetis: Narrowed visual focus makes runners 23% faster with 17% less pain
“And when we taught people that narrowed style of attention, what we found is that they moved 23% faster in this course that we had set up from the start line to the finish line. It was always exactly the same distance, and we were using our stopwatches to see …”
Narrowed visual focus improves speed 23% and reduces perceived effort 17%
“And when we taught people that narrowed style of attention, what we found is that they moved 23% faster in this course that we had set up from the start line to the finish line. It was always exactly the same distance, and we were using our stopwatches to see …”
Balcetis: Vision Creates Misplaced Confidence Due to a Lack of Corrective Feedback
“If we are seeing something the way that it is not really, or if we've missed seeing something, very rarely does the world correct that experience for us. And that contributes to, you know, a sense of confidence that we're getting the whole picture, which build…”
Balcetis: Higher BMI individuals perceive physical distances as farther
“We found that people who have a higher waist to hip ratio or a higher BMI see distances as farther than people who have a lower waist to hip ratio or lower BMI.”
Balcetis: Motivation counteracts body weight effects on distance perception
“When people are more motivated to exercise or to make it to that finish line, that motivation can, in a sense, compensate for that effect of their body on their perception of distance. So that even highly motivated people, people who are highly motivated, even…”
Committed people stay motivated by looking ahead; uncommitted people by looking back
“And what she has found is that people get a burst of motivation or, you know, and performance increases. People engage in the goal-relevant activity at that halfway point if they look towards the finish line. Look towards what separates where I'm at right now …”
Balcetis: Faster runners increasingly narrow visual attention toward race finishes
“And what we found is that the people who actually run races faster and in other studies who report that their fastest race time or what they're currently running at is faster than those that have slower race times. Those are the people that use this strategy o…”
Balcetis: Olympic Athletes Do Not Focus on Competitors at Finish Lines
“Our Olympic athletes said they don't do that. They are not really focused on you know, where are other people relative to where they are when they're really trying to push themselves over the finish line.”
Balcetis: People Prefer Negative Feedback That Confirms Existing Self-Perceptions
“Sometimes counterintuitively, we'd rather get negative feedback about ourselves than positive feedback. We relish that if it's consistent with what we think is true about ourselves. That getting something that maybe is even positive or at least neutral that is…”
Balcetis: High-clarity vision spans only two thumbnails at arm's length
“To put it in a perspective, essentially, if you take your two thumbs, put them side by side and hold them at arm's length, that surface area of your thumbnails is what you can take in with great precision and clarity. And the rest is coming in fuzzy.”
Balcetis: More cortex is dedicated to vision than hearing or touch
“There's far more of our cortex, you know, the outer layer of our brain that responds to visual information than any other form of information. So our brain thinks it's important. More of our brain space is, is taken up to respond to visual input Than auditory …”
Balcetis: Systolic Blood Pressure Drops When Facing Impossibly Hard Goals
“They've looked at systolic blood pressure as a physiological indicator of our psychological readiness to do something, and they have found that systolic blood pressure goes down when people set goals that feel impossibly hard to accomplish.”
Pre-committing to 'if-then' contingency plans enables faster pivoting under pressure
“If you've already been thinking about, should this happen? I will do this. If this happens and I'll do this, it's easier to pivot. You already know what the next steps will be, and you don't have to then pause when you might not be able to pause to try to thin…”
Balcetis: Planning calendar a week ahead yields 2.5 more goal hours
“Over the course of a week, when people had spent, had planned time in their calendar a week in advance, when they thought more big picture about time allocation, they found two and a half more hours to work on their goal, in contrast to when people were thinki…”
Balcetis: Overcommitment stems from evaluating distant tasks by desirability over feasibility
“We start thinking about what's feasible when we're in a more psychologically close point in time or a moment of consideration, and we're thinking about what's desirable when it's further removed from time. So that's just another tactic we have to sort of take …”
Balcetis: Google Reduced Unhealthy Snacking by Altering Visual Accessibility
“What they found was that just by changing what it is that people could see easily, they changed consumption patterns. People people ate less of the unhealthier stuff, even though it was still there, simply because it was sort of out of sight.”
Balcetis: Goal Abandonment Stems from Treating Setbacks as Identity Failures
“That's sometimes why people also stop working on the goal is that they feel like they failed and they avoid that. They don't want to feel like a failure. They don't want that label put on them. That can be really challenging. And I think the problem is because…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Dr.'s full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 KNOWLEDGE PROJECTLEDGER | Associate Professor of Psychology, New York University | 2 | 18 | 100% 12/12 | full record on the Knowledge Project → |