Here’s What Your Facebook Profile Tells People About Your Job Performance
a WSJ: After spending roughly 10 minutes perusing each profile, including photos, wall posts, comments, education and hobbies, the raters answered a series of personality-related questions, such as "Is this person dependable?" and "How emotionally stable is this person?" Six months later, the researchers matched the ratings against employee evaluations from each of the students' supervisors. They found a strong correlation between job performance and the Facebook scores for traits such as conscientiousness, agreeability and intellectual curiosity. Raters generally gave…
1 min read
What everyday object can motivate you to work harder and be a better person?
mirror. From Willpower: Resdiscovering the Greatest Human Strength: When people were placed in front of a mirror, or told that their actions were being filmed, they consistently changed their behavior. These self-conscious people worked harder at laboratory tasks. They gave more valid answers to questionnaires (meaning that their answers jibed more closely with their actual behavior). They were more consistent in their actions, and their actions were also more consistent with their values. And: Whenever people focused on themselves,…
2 minutes
Is postponement the key to resisting temptation?
lling yourself "Not now, but later" is far more powerful than "No, you can't have that." From Willpower: Resdiscovering the Greatest Human Strength: ...people who had told themselves Not now, but later were less troubled with visions of chocolate cake than the other two groups... And: Those in the postponement condition actually ate significantly less than those in the self-denial condition...The result suggests that telling yourself I can have this later operates in the mind a bit like having it…
2 minutes
What’s an easy way to increase self-control?
rk on improving your posture. From Willpower: Resdiscovering the Greatest Human Strength: Unexpectedly, the best results came from the group working on posture. That tiresome old advice—“Sit up straight!”—was more useful than anyone had imagined. By overriding their habit of slouching, the students strengthened their willpower and did better at tasks that had nothing to do with posture. The improvement was most pronounced among the students who had followed the advice most diligently (as measured by the daily logs the…
1 min read
How To Quickly And Easily Make Any Task Seem Easier
an back instead of leaning forward. Via Harvard Business Review: People who leaned back so that their eyes were an average of 38.8 inches from a computer screen found the task of pronouncing meaningless strings of letters easier than people who leaned forward to 12.5 inches, say Manoj Thomas of Cornell and Claire I. Tsai of the University of Toronto. That's because increasing the physical distance from a complex task also increases the psychological distance, which mitigates the sense of…
1 min read
Why is it so hard finding a spouse in NYC?
o many choices makes people ridiculously picky. From Willpower: Resdiscovering the Greatest Human Strength: For a column in 1995, Tierney did a semiscientific survey to investigate a New York phenomenon: the huge number of intelligent and attractive people who complained that it was impossible to find a romantic partner. Manhattan had the highest percentage of single people of any county in America except for an island in Hawaii originally settled as a leper colony. What was keeping New Yorkers apart?…
2 minutes
Is envy our default setting?
s. It requires mental effort to not be envious. Via Peer Reviewed By My Neurons: Envy is a shitty thing. In addition to feeling bad that there’s something you don’t have, you often feel bad about how stupid it is that you’re envious. The good news is that a new study by Jan Crusius and Thomas Mussweiler should alleviate the negative feelings that stem from the latter situation. Through a series of experiments they found that envy appears to be our…
2 minutes
Do jerks make more money?
s. Via Harvard Business Review: Using earnings data, the researchers found that men who rank high in agreeableness make substantially less than men who are less agreeable. Across studies, this difference was as high as $10,000 per year. Join over 271,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here. Related posts: How To Get People To Like You: 7 Ways From An FBI Behavior Expert New Neuroscience Reveals 4 Rituals That Will Make You Happy New Harvard Research Reveals A Fun…
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