February 2012
1 post
3 tags
For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside...
73 percent of black children are born outside marriage, compared with 53 percent of Latinos and 29 percent of whites. And educational differences are growing. About 92 percent of college-educated women are married when they give birth, compared with 62 percent of women with some post-secondary schooling and 43 percent of women with a high school diploma or less, according to Child Trends.
Source
January 2012
2 posts
1 tag
Right-Ear Advantage
Marzoli & Tommasi (2009) had a female confederate visit a disco and approach 176 random people asking for a smoke. Clubbers were about twice as likely to hand one over if the request was directed at the right ear, whether or not the clubber was male or female.
These findings confirm previous studies which have found a right-ear preference for attending to and processing verbal stimuli. It is...
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Light swearing can be useful
To see whether swearing can help change attitudes, Scherer and Sagarin (2006) divided 88 participants into three groups to watch one of three slightly different speeches.
The only difference between the speeches was that one contained a mild swear word at the start:
“…lowering of tuition is not only a great idea, but damn it, also the most reasonable one for all parties involved.”
...
December 2011
2 posts
1 tag
“But with the approach of modern times, when the stupid craze for signature came...”
– Giovanni Papini - The Unknown Man [24 Cervelli]
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“For better and worse, telling stories is how we make sense of the world, and...”
– Duncan Watts
November 2011
2 posts
4 tags
Bad is stronger than good
Researchers examined the impact of team members who were deadbeats (“withholders of effort”), downers (who “express pessimism, anxiety, insecurity and irritation”) and jerks (who violate “interpersonal norms of respect”). They found that having just one slacker or jerk in a group can bring down performance by 30% to 40%.
Source: How a Few Bad Apples Ruin...
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Self-promotion will be a skill that produces...
I’m not concerned that women don’t engage in enough building of self-confidence or self-esteem. I’m worried about something much simpler: not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks.
Source: A rant about women
October 2011
6 posts
2 tags
Ugly fonts
In a Princeton study, 18-40 year old test subjects were allowed to read short descriptions of aliens either in a “disfluent font” like Comic Sans or Bodoni or a “fluent font” like Arial. After a 15 minute delay, participants were able to recall 14% more information if it was presented in the disfluent font.
Source
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Skills & the internet
The Internet, like all intellectual technologies has a trade off. As we train our brains to use it, as we adapt to the environment of the internet, which is an environment of kind of constant immersion and information and constant distractions, interruptions, juggling lots of messages, lots of bits of information. As we adapt to that information environment, so to speak, we gain certain skills,...
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Why is it so uncomfortable to stand really close... →
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How Friends Ruin Memory: The Social Conformity... →
We bullshit for each other. We tweak our stories so that they become better stories. We bend the facts so that the facts appeal to the group. Because we are social animals, our memory of the past is constantly being revised to fit social pressures.
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“With so many opportunities and so many constraints, successfully picking what to...”
– Seth Godin
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“As content becomes free and media becomes free, the only truly priceless...”
– Intel @ DDBSummit
September 2011
8 posts
4 tags
Envy may hurt, but is good for you
“By hurting, the emotion of envy forces us to focus our thoughts on the source of our agitation. That’s a reasonable interpretation from the data, but the fact is that envy does change our cognitive function - it boosts mental persistence and memory.”
Source.
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The Yogurt Made Me Do It →
Nietzsche was right: “There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom.”
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“People still like [TV] because it lets them just sit back, relax and veg out....”
– Olivia Johnson
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“Engagement is not a metric that anyone understands… Why? Because it is not...”
– Avinash Kaushik
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Social stickiness
You are at a party, and you get bored. You say “This isn’t doing it for me anymore. I’d rather be someplace else. I’d rather be home asleep. The people I wanted to talk to aren’t here.” Whatever. The party fails to meet some threshold of interest. And then a really remarkable thing happens: You don’t leave. You make a decision “I don’t like...
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Different languages are spoken at varying speeds but thanks to correlated differences in data-density, the same amount of information is conveyed within a given time period.
Source
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We're actually much better at rocket science than... →
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Sex and creativity
So when men first got to view sexy women and thought they might get sex, they boosted up their displays of creativity, and it didn’t matter how little or how much sex was being offered. Women however only increased their creativity when they thought they had a chance of getting a trustworthy long-term partner that their friends liked.
Source: Peacocks, Picasso, and Parental Investment: The...
August 2011
5 posts
3 tags
“Curation is one of the big changes in blog characteristics that I’ve noticed in...”
– Jonathan Harris in an interview for Design Mind
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Iraq war veterans vs. heroes from ancient Greek...
There is an interesting psychiatrist, Dr. Jonathan Shay, who studies post-traumatic stress by comparing the experience of Iraq war veterans with heroes from ancient Greek tragedies coming home from war. He concludes that what is missing now is the crucial decompression period of the soldiers’ journey home. In ancient Greece after battle, soldiers had a two-month boat trip home during which they...
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The Workplace Arrogance Scale
Far from being the most able, arrogant workers were judged weaker in almost every way by one rating group or other. Some of the findings are less surprising: people who think their managers are arrogant grade them as poorer across the board, which may be influenced by a reverse halo effect (overgeneralising a negative feature) or using the rating process to punish those they resent. Some are...
5 tags
Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) (May 2011) View more presentations from JWTIntelligence
July 2011
15 posts
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“* The adult personality - including political views - is forever defined in...”
– The social animal - David Brooks
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“They moved first from iPod to iPhone to iPad, and if Steve Jobs had come out...”
– David Brooks
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What Caricatures Can Teach Us About Facial... →
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List of cognitive biases →
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“A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and...”
– William James
“It doesn’t matter how much you know. It matters how clearly others can...”
– Simon Sinek
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“Advertising = Idea! Talk. Talk. Talk. Talk. Talk. Talk. Talk. Talk. Talk. Talk....”
– @funkmastabaker
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The Seven Classic Types of Workplace Behavior →
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Shyness: Evolutionary Tactic? →
Shyness and introversion share an undervalued status in a world that prizes extroversion.
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Scarcity produces its own cognitive traits
A quick question: What is the starting taxi fare in your city? If you are like most upper-middle-class people, you don’t know. If you are like many struggling people, you do know. Poorer people have to think hard about a million things that affluent people don’t. They have to make complicated trade-offs when buying a carton of milk: If I buy milk, I can’t afford orange juice. They have to decide...
4 tags
Parents are a whole lot like their teenagers when...
The researchers found adolescents reveal more than older users, but only because they spend more time on Facebook, not because they care less about privacy. Teens spend on average 55 minutes a day on Facebook, compared to 38 minutes for adults.
Adults were actually less conscious of the consequences of sharing personal information on Facebook, the study revealed. For both groups, spending more...
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The brain as a timekeeper
Hoagland proposed one of the first models for how the brain keeps time, based partly on his wife’s behavior when she had the flu. She complained that he’d been away from her bedside too long, he later recalled, when he’d been gone only a short while. So Hoagland proposed an experiment: she would count off sixty seconds while he timed her with his watch. It’s not hard to imagine her annoyance at...
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6 ways the internet may save civilization →
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“Deliciousness is simply an index of usefulness.”
– Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.
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Sir Ken Robinson - What You Didn't Learn In School
June 2011
7 posts
1 tag
“In God We Trust. Anyone else, please bring data!”
– Diego Zambrano
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100+ Beautiful Slides from Cannes Lions 2011
100+ Beautiful Slides from Cannes Lions 2011 View more presentations from @JESSEDEE
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Welcome to the post PC era!
Mobile Trends - June 2011 View more presentations from space150
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WatchAaron Dignan,the CEO of Undercurrent and author of ‘Game Frame’ talks about how to make life more interesting and engaging through the use of game mechanics.
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Commutes & happiness
A commute longer than 45 minutes for just one partner in a marriage makes the couple 40% more likely to divorce.
Source: Long commutes cause obesity, neck pain, loneliness, divorce, stress, and insomnia
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Imitation of cigarette smoking: An experimental... →
May 2011
20 posts
“God said let there be light, and the client saw it and said it was good.”
– Stuart Eccles
3 tags
If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick. You may find...