What’s the most important part of a job interview?
rst impressions. Via BPS Occupational Digest: Initial impressions also correlated with volunteers' self-perception of how qualified they were for the job, and also with an independent measure of verbal skill. The latter was assessed through a separate task where the volunteers interacted face-to-face with a series of peers who rated features such as articulacy of speech. These findings suggest that the rapport-building stage was giving early insight into some sense of perceived fit to the specific role, as well as…
1 min read
Can skipping breakfast lead to murder?
e book Willpower: Resdiscovering the Greatest Human Strength points out some fascinating connections between eating, self-control and violent behavior. Kids who skip breakfast misbehave more than kids who eat their Wheaties. After given a snack, all the children are little angels again: All the children in a class were told to skip breakfast one morning, and then, by random assignment, half of the children were given a good breakfast at school. The others got nothing. During the first part of…
3 minutes
Does too much computer time degrade social skills?
o much time at the keyboard and not enough time with people may reduce the ability to read nonverbal signals, to judge the intent of others and influence them: Via Harvard Business Review: Today's young digital natives may be ill-suited for jobs in high-trust fields such as diplomacy and sales, because prolonged exposure to computers is reconfiguring their neural networks and possibly diminishing their empathy and social skills, says John K. Mullen of Gonzaga University. With 55% of person-to-person communication…
1 min read
Are you more creative when you’re drunk?
oks like it: That alcohol provides a benefit to creative processes has long been assumed by popular culture, but to date has not been tested. The current experiment tested the effects of moderate alcohol intoxication on a common creative problem solving task, the Remote Associates Test (RAT). Individuals were brought to a blood alcohol content of approximately .075, and, after reaching peak intoxication, completed a battery of RAT items. Intoxicated individuals solved more RAT items, in less time, and were…
1 min read
Should we never trust economics majors?
hat did you major in at college?" might be a good questions for that next first date or before starting a business partnership. Economics majors were consistently: More likely to accept bribes Less inclined to pro-social behavior. More likely to free-ride in public-goods experiments. Offered less in ultimatum games. More likely to defect in prisoner's dilemma games. More likely to place profit over employee well-being in business simulations. Less likely to donate to charity. The abstract: A substantial body of…
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Is a Rocky training montage what you need to improve performance?
inking about what you have to do to prepare for a challenge was more likely to lead to success than imagining the victory. Via PsyBlog: Outcome and process have been put head-to-head experimentally by Pham and Taylor (1999) who had students either visualise their ultimate goal of doing well in an exam or the steps they would take to reach that goal, i.e. studying. The results were clear-cut. Participants who visualised themselves reading and gaining the required skills and knowledge,…
1 min read
Can Moneyball statistics be used to beat Jeopardy?
R covers the fascinating story of Roger Craig, a PhD in computer science, who used data-mining and statistics to make hundreds of thousands of dollars on Jeopardy: Using data-mining and text-clustering techniques, Craig grouped questions by category to figure out which topics were statistically common — and which weren't. "Obviously it's impossible to know everything," Jones says. "So he was trying to decide: What things did he need to know? He prepared himself in a way that I think is…
2 minutes
How To Get People To Be More Honest With You
ght want to Skype more often. People lie more often via text message. We're more honest via video than we are in the other mediums tested -- including in face to face. Via Science Daily: Sending a text message leads people to lie more often than in other forms of communication, according to new research by David Xu, assistant professor in the W. Frank Barton School of Business at Wichita State University. And I found this surprising: The authors then…
1 min read
