Research Shows Trying To Look Smart Makes You Seem Stupid
st texts on writing style encourage authors to avoid overly-complex words. However, a majority of undergraduates admit to deliberately increasing the complexity of their vocabulary so as to give the impression of intelligence. This paper explores the extent to which this strategy is effective. Experiments 1–3 manipulate complexity of texts and find a negative relationship between complexity and judged intelligence. This relationship held regardless of the quality of the original essay, and irrespective of the participants' prior expectations of essay…
1 min read
Is artwork of higher quality when we’re not paid to create it?
a Daniel Pink's very interesting book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Teresa Amabile, the Harvard Business School professor and one of the world’s leading researchers on creativity, has frequently tested the effects of contingent rewards on the creative process. In one study, she and two colleagues recruited twenty-three professional artists from the United States who had produced both commissioned and noncommissioned artwork. They asked the artists to randomly select ten commissioned works and ten noncommissioned works. Then Amabile and…
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Can you tell which criminals are more likely to reoffend just by looking at their tattoos?
e purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between prison tattoos and the criminal lifestyle and recidivism. Participants consisted of 81 male inmates with prison tattoos (i.e., prison-themed or prison-made tattoos), 75 inmates with nonprison tattoos (e.g., animal tattoos, tattoos of ethnic origin), 52 male inmates with no tattoos, and 66 college students with tattoos. Results indicated that inmates with prison tattoos differed from inmates with nonprison tattoos, inmates without tattoos, and college students with tattoos with regard…
1 min read
Are angry people more creative than sad people?
ecdotes and introspective reports from eminent scientists and artists aside, a systematic test of the putative creativity-enhancing effect of anger is missing. This article fills this void with three experiments examining creativity as a function of anger (vs. sad or mood-neutral controls). Combining insights from the literatures on creativity and on mood and information processing the authors predicted that anger (vs. sadness and mood-neutral control) triggers a less systematic and structured approach to the creativity task, and leads to initially…
1 min read
What’s a quick trick to help you spend less money?
a Journal of Consumer Research: To examine consumers‟ feelings of constraint, Spiller assigned study participants to a monthly budget group or a weekly budget group and gave them the opportunity to make 20 purchases. Those in the monthly group were given a sum of money at the beginning that they could spend throughout, whereas those in the weekly group were given a smaller amount four times throughout the study. “Compared to those in the monthly budget group, those in the weekly budget group looked at future…
1 min read
What improves performance more: envy or admiration?
ur studies tested the hypothesis that the emotion of benign envy, but not the emotions of admiration or malicious envy, motivates people to improve themselves. Studies 1 to 3 found that only benign envy was related to the motivation to study more (Study 1) and to actual performance on the Remote Associates Task (which measures intelligence and creativity; Studies 2 and 3). Study 4 found that an upward social comparison triggered benign envy and subsequent better performance only when people…
1 min read
Married Baseball Players Make More Money
s: Using a sample of professional baseball players from 1871 - 2007, this paper aims at analyzing a longstanding empirical observation that married men earn significantly more than their single counterparts holding all else equal (the “marriage premium”). Baseball is a unique case study because it has a long history of statistics collection and numerous direct measurements of productivity. Our results show that the marriage premium also holds for baseball players, where married players earn up to 16 percent more…
1 min read
Are there tricks to detecting deception?
a Science Daily: Geiselman and his colleagues have identified several indicators that a person is being deceptive. The more reliable red flags that indicate deceit, Geiselman said, include: When questioned, deceptive people generally want to say as little as possible. Geiselman initially thought they would tell an elaborate story, but the vast majority give only the bare-bones. Studies with college students, as well as prisoners, show this. Geiselman's investigative interviewing techniques are designed to get people to talk. Although deceptive people…
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