How To Stay Motivated With Difficult Goals, Backed By Research
u can measure progress by how much you've completed or how much you have left to do. Research says you'll be more motivated if you focus on whichever of those two is smaller: Via Eurekalert: "We predict that individuals will express greater motivation to pursue actions when they focus on whichever is smaller in size—the area of their completed actions or of their remaining actions—because motivation increases with the perceived impact of each new step, and each new step will…
1 min read
Is the smell of pizza the key to creativity?
eep has been shown to facilitate creativity. Researchers wanted to see if they could coax the brain into continuing work on a problem while people were unconscious. Scientists put an odor in the air while subjects were working on a challenging task. While the subjects slept that night, the odor was again diffused into the room. This stimulated their brains to keep working on the problem while they slept. When they awoke they were more creative: Both scientists and artists…
2 minutes
Beautiful People Are More Successful. Here’s Why.
a Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful: Using these large random samples of women and men, we can compare their earnings to the ratings of their looks. Compared to the average group (people rated as 3 on the 5 to 1 scale), below-average looking women (rated 2 or 1 on the scale) earn 3 percent less, while below-average looking men earn 22 percent less. Above-average looking women (rated 4 or 5 on the scale) earn 4 percent more…
3 minutes
Nice Guys Make Less Money
ce guys don't make the big bucks: Sex and agreeableness were hypothesized to affect income, such that women and agreeable individuals were hypothesized to earn less than men and less agreeable individuals. Because agreeable men disconfirm (and disagreeable men confirm) conventional gender roles, agreeableness was expected to be more negatively related to income for men (i.e., the pay gap between agreeable men and agreeable women would be smaller than the gap between disagreeable men and disagreeable women). The hypotheses were…
1 min read
Does facing off against rivals increase your performance?
vals do increase performance -- but they also make us more likely to cheat. Via The Boston Globe: Then, analyzing three years of race data, he objectively identified rivals, by finding which runners frequently competed, finished close together, and shared certain basic demographic similarities. Then he analyzed an additional three years of data — including 1,263 road races for 82 runners. When runners raced against one or more rivals, he found, they sped up — increasing their average speed by five seconds per kilometer.…
2 minutes
The Attractiveness Of Your Real Estate Agent Affects How Much Your House Sells For
nder and attractiveness can affect how much a house sells for and how long it is on the market. Via Marina Adshade: It turns out having a male agent is bad for the selling price of a house. Both male listing agents (those acting on behalf of the seller) and male selling agents (those acting on behalf of the buyer) are associated with lower house prices than their female counterparts. The gender of the agent, however, has no effect on…
1 min read
How can you learn to speed-read without decreasing comprehension?
u can't. Via 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior: Equally popular are speed reading courses, many of which promise to increase people’s reading speeds from a mere 100 or 200 words per minute to 10,000 or even 25,000 words per minute (Carroll, 2003). Yet researchers have found that none of these courses boost people’s reading speeds with out decreasing their reading comprehension (Carver, 1987). What’s more, most of the reading speeds advertised by these…
1 min read
3 Quick Tips That Will Make You More Charismatic
a The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism: Lower the intonation of your voice at the end of your sentences. Reduce how quickly and how often you nod. Pause for two full seconds before you speak. Why do these work? I've posted a number of times on the power of your voice. You can predict who will be elected president by how deep their voice is. Men with deeper voices are more attractive…
1 min read
