Do you think you know why you think and act in a certain way? You are probably wrong. Decades of psychological research suggest that people behave in mysterious and absurd ways, which leave even themselves perplexed.

We sifted through the conversation on Quora (a social network on which users can post questions and answers) on: "What are some of the most shocking things about social psychology?" and we came up with the most fascinating discoveries. (Some don't really fall into the field of social psychology, but we thought it appropriate to include them).

Read on and find out why we judge other opinions while we consider ourselves victims of circumstances; because people in power eat more disorderly and because we would be more likely to get an electric shock than to sit alone for more than 15 minutes(really!).

1. Herd effect: we often adapt the opinion of the majority, even when the majority is clearly wrong.

People often get to do amazing things just to conform to the majority opinion. In the 1950s, Asch had planned an experiment in which participants saw three lines and were asked which one was the longest. One line was obviously longer than the others.

With each repetition of the experiment, a single participant was surrounded by a group of accomplices, who unanimously claimed that one of the shortest lines was actually the longest. Well, at least once three quarters of the participants lined up with the rest of the group.

In 2005 the psychiatrist and neuroscientist Gregory Berns replicated the experiment and obtained similar results. Bern also scanned the participants brains during the experiment and thus determined that the pressure group is actually the cause of the change in perception of reality that occurs in people, while dissenting from the group causes people to feel emotionally uncomfortable.

2. We don't always realize that the environment has a huge impact on our behavior

According to a research, in countries where driving licenses have a box that must be crossed to deny consent to organ donation, the consent rate is significantly higher than in countries where there is a box to tick to say to say "Yes".

Making a decision is difficult so people often resort to the default option.

3. The beam and the straw: we are much more severe with others than with ourselves.

The "fundamental attribution error", also known as "correspondence bias", explains our tendency to believe that other people's mistakes are the result of personality defects,while our mistakes are the result of circumstantial factors.

So, if someone hits us on the sidewalk, we take it for granted that he is an idiot,rather than thinking that he can go in a hurry so as not to miss his son's school play. But if we hit someone on the sidewalk, we know we are good people and that we simply hurry to not miss a meeting.

The phenomenon is an elementary part of how we think and process information and how we experience what surrounds us.

4. We hate sitting alone so much that many of us would rather be subjected to electric shock.

A Quora user reported a 2014 study that found that sitting alone without stimulation for 10-20 minutes is more painful for some people than receiving electric shock. An incredible 64% of men have inflicted at least one shock during the time they should have simply spent thinking. Fifteen percent of women did the same.

This happened despite the fact that, in an earlier part of the study, the men had said that the shock was something so annoying that they would pay to avoid the experience.

The study authors wrote that "it may be particularly difficult to direct our thoughts to pleasant things and keep them there," which is why many people try to control their thoughts through techniques such as meditation. "Without this training, people prefer to do rather than think, even if what they do is so unpleasant that they would normally pay for not doing it."

5. We can easily be tricked into paying more than we want.

Basically, we all tend to take the bait effect.

6. When we feel powerful, we are more greedy, rude and overbearing.

Kevin Coe puts the spotlight on a study that examines how power affects behavior.

The researchers divided the participants into groups of three and named some people as leaders, who are expected to score others based on how much they contribute.What comes out, when the experimenter appears with a plate with five biscuits, is that those named leaders are more likely to take a second biscuit and chew it with their mouths open, dirtying the table with crumbs.

In a meta-analysis of multiple studies like these, the researchers argue that "power also triggers more pernicious forms of aggression" such as sexual harassment, in cultures where women are subordinated to men, or crimes against minorities.

7. We rely too heavily on the first "piece" of information we hear when making a decision.

Imagine someone asking if Gandhi was 100 years older when he died; now imagine someone asking if Gandhi was younger than 20 when he died. If in both cases you tried to estimate how old Gandhi was when he died, you will tend to give a higher estimate in the first case since the anchor (100) was higher.

Even experts can still fall victim to the effect without realizing it. In a 1987 research,the experimenters sent a group of undergraduates and volunteer realtors to visit a property for sale and then later show them the market value. Some participants saw a higher price than others.

Obviously when the participants were asked to estimate the value of the property and the purchase price, those who had seen a higher price provided higher numbers.Interesting is how real estate agents were generally less sensitive than undergraduates to the fact that the market value seen had influenced their estimates.

8. It is easier to behave unethically when you are part of a "pack" that guarantees anonymity.

Dylan James refers to "de individualization" and specifically to a brilliant 1976 study of that phenomenon, described in detail in Scientific American.

The researchers wanted to know under what conditions children who turned around for trick or treat would get extra candy. On Halloween, the investigators lurked in the Seattle homes and opened the doors to the children. Halfway through the experiment,the experimenter asked the children for their names and where they lived. For the other half, he asked for nothing. In both cases, the experimenter told the children that they could take only one candy from the plate, and then went away to do something. As a result,children tended to take extra candy if they were part of an anonymous group, while they tended not to do it if they revealed their name or went around the houses alone.

The lesson here seems to be that when we are in a group, we tend to be less inhibited and to act in a less socially acceptable way.

9. We pay attention only to what we are paying attention to at that moment.

The invisible gorilla experiments

We are not observers at all as we think we are. We don't pay attention to most of our surroundings because we are too focused on what catches our attention at any given moment.

Schwekendiek cites a classic experiment known as "the gorilla test". For the experiment, psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons created a short film in which a team dressed in white and one dressed in black pass the basketball.

Participants are asked to count the number of passes made by both whites and blacks. Halfway through the video, a woman dressed as a gorilla crosses the field, beating her chest and then disappears from the screen. It is on the screen for a total of 9 seconds.

About half of the thousands of people who watched the video don't notice the gorilla, presumably because they are so focused on counting ball passes. Obviously when asked if they would notice the gorilla in this situation almost everyone said yes.

10. We like someone more after we have done him a favor.

James Saker emphasizes the psychological phenomenon known as the "Ben Franklin Effect". Apparently, Franklin asked one of his detractors to borrow a book from his library;the man felt flattered and soon became his friend. The moral of the story is: ask someone to do you a favor and they will like you more, rather than less than you might have thought.

Researchers tested this theory in 1969 and found confirmation.

For the experiment, some volunteers would participate in a study where they could win money.

A third of the volunteers were approached by the secretary who explained to them that the psychology department had paid for the study and that the funds were running out, thus asking the volunteers to return the payment. Another third was approached by the investigator who told him that he himself had paid for the study and the funds were running out, asking them to return the payment. At the last third the money was left.

The results showed that the volunteers who had to return the money liked the experimenter more than those who kept the money.

11. Our unwavering self-motivation can be undermined by external and unrelated influencers.

Self-determination theory is a framework used by psychology to understand human motivation. The theory was developed by Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan, and has since been expanded by other researchers. According to research by Deci and Ryan, when you perform an intrinsically interesting activity and are then rewarded for it, the intrinsic motivation (do something because we like it) can, in some cases, then decrease.

Think ofreceiving a monetary bonus for reaching your goals on the job and feeling less inclined towork hard immediately afterwards. Nicolas Connault writes that this idea is often unpopular "because it essentially means you cannot directly control someone's motivation". And he adds: "Although this effect has been extremely well researched and is also cross-cultural, most people simply don't accept it because it seems too counter intuitive."

➢ Contracted jaw, tight neck or frowning face show stress.

All of these are "limbic responses" associated with the limbic system in the brain."Emotion, detection and reaction to threats, as well as ensuring our survival, are all heavy responsibilities of the limbic system," writes former FBI law enforcement agent Joe Navarro.

"The bus leaves without us, and we clench our jaws, rub our necks. We are asked to work another weekend and the orbits of our eyes narrow as our chin drops. " Humans have shown unease in this way for millions of years, Navarro says.

The bad news is that nobody is totally immune to anxiety. There are those who suffer more and less, but stress and worries affect everyone indiscriminately. In Europe,according to data released by the EPA (European Association of Psychiatry), the number of anxiety sufferers would be 61 million, including eight in Italy. The good news, however, is that there are tools to fight it. Numerous researches show that a variety of activities,hobbies, are able to reduce anxiety levels in people.

If people repeatedly touch their face or hands, they are probably nervous

Navarro told Business Insider that we have evolved to show nervousness without having to use words. Some of the most common manifestations of our anxiety? Touch our face and rub the skin on our hands. Both can be soothing behaviors when you feel uncomfortable.

"It's funny how often we touch each other under stress," said Navarro.

If they laugh with you, they probably like you!

If someone is receptive to your mood, they are probably interested in you.Evolutionary psychologists say that humor - and the positive reception of humor - play a fundamental role in human development. They serve as a way to signal desire for a relationship, both platonic and romantic.

➢ The expansive and authoritative positions show an attitude of leadership.

Whether they are innate or learned, there are a number of signs and behaviors that people use when they feel they are leaders, or at least try to convince others that they are leaders. These include maintaining an upright posture, walking with decision, drumming the fingers and other gestures with the palms of the hands down, and generally open and expansive body positions.

During the holidays it is best to avoid any discussion, at least when possible. But if it were really impossible, then you might want to use some scientific argument that proves you right.

It would seem, in fact, that if you want to convince someone that your explanation -of whatever it is - is the best possible, you should stick to some useless (though accurate)information that comes from a secondary connected scientific field.

The motivation is simple: people consider an explanation more credible when you can attach additional information from a respected field of study to it.

And although it is a new result, it is only one of the many cognitive distortions that we have in favor of certain types of explanations.

In particular, we tend to believe that longer explanations are better than short ones and we prefer explanations that highlight a goal or a reason why things happen, even if these things don't actually help us understand the phenomenon.

Like the authors of this most recent document, other researchers before them have shown that we prefer psychology explanations that contain "logically irrelevant neuroscientific information": it is something known as the "seductive recall effect".

As former Tech Insider correspondent Drake Baer said, writing about a previous study on the same topic, "if you're trying to explain why someone did something, you can count on the neurobabble (the jargon used by neuroscientists) to make it sound more convincing".

All those references to the brain sound like they could really explain the ways in which our head works, although neuroscience is still a field we know little about.

Explanations that refer to what happens in the brain are believed to be most convincing.

But so far researchers have not known whether this strategy for winning in debates was limited to the use of neuroscience to "explain" psychology, or whether it can be used to explain other areas of science as well.

The Upenn team theorized that people might generally prefer arguments that refer to the most basic sciences, even if those references do not contribute to the explanation.

They call this type of argument a reductive explanation "since it reduces a science to more fundamental parts).

To test this theory, researchers created a hierarchy of sciences in increasing order of importance: social sciences, psychology, neuroscience, biology, chemistry and ultimately physics.

They recruited college students and people on "Amazon Mechanical Turk " and presented them with a survey designed to understand if unnecessary reductive information would push them to consider the "best" explanations.

In any case, the researchers offered four possible explanations for a scientific concept: a good explanation, a good explanation that also includes additional reductive information, a bad explanation and a bad explanation that includes reductive information.

What would have happened if Trump's opponents had used "unnecessary information to support their arguments"?

As a general rule, their hypotheses have not been successful - people think that explanations that have useless information containing details about a more "fundamental"science are usually better.

Good explanations count and have been voted better than bad explanations (even if bad explanations had reductive information).

Adding unnecessary reductive information really made a difference when researchers added neuroscience to an explanation of psychological science.

Participants trusted psychology less and - in the exception to the general rule - did not believe that adding psychological explanations to the social sciences could make those explanations more credible (although these results in particular were not statistically relevant).

The study participants actually considered the most rigorous and prestigious neuroscience of the sciences considered as more fundamental by researchers (biology,chemistry and physics).

This may explain the great effect that neuro-scientific explanation has when added to psychological science explanations.

Those summoned by Mechanical Turk felt that the explanations with reductive information were better than the students believed. That information made a big difference to them, but it was less significant for the students.

Different groups of people will end up evaluating information in different ways, and none of these groups of people can accurately represent how the whole population evaluates information.

People who are more inclined to logical reasoning have better managed to evaluate the explanation carefully (giving less credit to reductive information).

Researchers believe this could mean that philosophers who have studied logic are less susceptible to this cognitive distortion.

People who knew more about science were also more able to recognize a good explanation from a bad one.

So, the next time you read an explanation of something, check to see if the author is adding unnecessary information to support his argument, making you more inclined to believe it for all the wrong reasons.

And if you can convince someone of something, you can check if adding a little detail from the scientific background helps you to bring the discussion to your side.

Theonly thing tries to rely on a science other than psychology.

➢ An agitated leg signals an agitated inner state.

The legs are the largest area of our body, so when they move, it's hard for others to miss it. A trembling leg signals anxiety, irritation, or both.

➢ A smile mentioned along with direct eye contact could be an attempt at seduction.

Riggio's research suggests that there is a specific type of smile when trying to act seductively.

Typically, they show a positive interest with a slight smile that accompanies direct eye contact, then slowly look away, but always keeping the smile.

It is interesting to note that the seductive smile could be accompanied by submissive behavior (tilting the head downwards), or by dominant behavior - looking away with pride and slowness.

If the inner corners of the eyebrows don't move up and inward, people are probably not as sad as they seem

Psychologist Paul Ekman uses the term "reliable muscles" for face muscles that cannot be contracted voluntarily.

Psychologist Matthew Hertstein, explained how to apply Ekman's research: "If you observe a person who expresses sadness both verbally and with his face, but the inner corners of the eyebrows do not move down and towards the inside, it might not be sad at all. He is unable to contract those muscles voluntarily despite his best efforts."

If one side of their face is more active than the other side, people may be faking their feelings.

Hertstein writes: "The vast majority of facial expressions of emotions are bilateral,that is, they occur equally on both sides of the face ... The next time you tell a joke, look to see if the listener's smile is symmetrical when he laughs."