The Sneaky Way You Can Give Good Answers To Hard Questions
a Harvard Business Review, 11/10: The finding: People who dodge questions artfully are liked and trusted more than people who respond to questions truthfully but with less polish. The study: Todd Rogers and Michael Norton showed subjects different videos of a political debate. In the first, one of the candidates answered the question asked. In the second, he dodged it by answering a similar question. In the third, he dodged it by answering a completely different one. When the candidate answered…
2 minutes
How much of your behavior is unconsciously determined by your surroundings?
great deal of it, potentially. People primed with ideas (like "rudeness") demonstrated those behaviors more readily (interrupting the experimenter) without realizing it: Previous research has shown that trait concepts and stereotype become active automatically in the presence of relevant behavior or stereotyped-group features. Through the use of the same priming procedures as in previous impression formation research, Experiment 1 showed that participants whose concept of rudeness was printed interrupted the experimenter more quickly and frequently than did participants primed…
1 min read
Does leadership matter?
ere's a strong argument that in most cases leaders don't make much of a difference and that results are more due to the team: Leader succession studies show that managerial change has little impact on team performance. In general, these studies support a skeptical view of the significance of organizational leaders (Thomas, 1993, pp. 126–128). Hogan et al. (1994, p. 494) claim that “some coaches can move from team to team transforming losers into winners is, for most people, evidence…
3 minutes
What are science based tips for increasing your ability to learn?
a Robert A. Bjork at APA: ON TAKING NOTES “In taking notes in class and from readings, to the extent possible, try to listen or read the entire idea, then write down notes based on what you’ve heard or read. Often we are tempted to write quickly to get down as much as possible while the professor is speaking or while we are reading paragraph by paragraph. Waiting to write down notes until the entire ‘idea’ has been presented can…
4 minutes
Why can we predict other people’s behavior more accurately than our own?
en predicting other people's behavior we always consider the context. With our own behavior we like to believe that we won't be affected by context. Via BPS Research Digest: Psychologists have identified an important reason why our insight into our own psyches is so poor. Emily Balcetis and David Dunning found that when predicting our own behaviour, we fail to take the influence of the situation into account. By contrast, when predicting the behaviour of others, we correctly factor in the influence of the…
1 min read
Do you need a “to-do” list or a “not-to-do” list?
m Collins, author of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't, makes an interesting suggestion -- you may need to worry less about your to-do list and focus on a "stop doing" list: Rochelle's lesson came back to me a number of years later while puzzling over the research data on 11 companies that turned themselves from mediocrity to excellence, from good to great. In cataloguing the key steps that ignited the transformations, my research…
2 minutes
If talking to yourself improves performance, what should you be saying?
at you need to know: Talking to yourself does help performance. Self-talk is best used in trying to learn new skills than covering things you are already familiar with. In terms of physical activity, it helps more with fine, subtle tasks than big movements. Via Eurekalert: But the researchers teased out more - different self-talk cues work differently in different situations. For tasks requiring fine skills or for improving technique "instructional self-talk", such as a technical instruction ("elbow-up" which Hatzigeorgiadis…
2 minutes
How do you get others to lie and cheat less?
st people cheat just enough to get an edge but not so much that they feel like a bad person. Subtly making them aware their own morality can nudge them back to being good: Via APS: The program began with a lively talk about dishonest decisions by Dan Ariely of Duke University, the popular behavioral economist and author of Predictably Irrational, who is as comfortable dropping jokes as he is delivering research findings. Ariely and his colleagues found that, given…
1 min read
