Something I find fascinating is that being consistent (and trustworthy) is less effective than being 80/20% consistent (classical vs operant conditioning) at training dogs where there are contextual/environmental cues at play. It’s personally counter-intuitive, but I’ve seen it work and am convinced (I attribute it to evolutionary mechanisms, my goto in biology).
I’m wondering what other psychology as a science results have solid statistics behind them that I’m unaware of (I’m compsci with a physics/maths background, so it’s probably most), and are interesting…
Yup, I suspect the lack of consistency, especially for dependant animals and gamblers, drives anxiety, which is disproportionately relieved by a successful outcome, which is a recurring survival driver in the wild (again I blame evolution, where persistence can be rewarded by survival)
“Diffusion of responsibility” is a good one, guessing it’s testable.
In that vein, we have the Stanford prison experiment, though it’s repeatability seems to be questioned.