Good Grooming Can Increase Your Income
is well understood that personal grooming provides an important source of communication about individuals, their values and personalities. From an economic point of view, grooming is a non-market activity. The standard view is that time spent in non-market activities is counterproductive as it reduces work effort and job commitment. But grooming is different. There is reason to believe that certain productive personality traits may be inferred on the basis of personal grooming. Using data from the American Time Use…
1 min read
Is “tit-for-tat” the best way to deal with people?
recent episode of the consistently excellent Radiolab explored the idea, covering the work of Robert Axelrod. Turns out the age old cliche can be an incredibly powerful way to deal with others: A tit-for-tat strategy plays the iterated prisoners' dilemma game by cooperating on the first move, and then making the same choice as the other player did on the previous move. This strategy has been shown to be a very robust in that it does well with a…
2 minutes
How To Reduce Worry And Increase Performance On Challenging Tasks
a Eurekalert: Students can combat test anxiety and improve performance by writing about their worries immediately before the exam begins, according to a University of Chicago study published Friday in the journal Science. And: ...for students given the opportunity to write before the exam, those highest in test anxiety performed just as well as their less anxious classmates. "Writing about your worries for 10 minutes before an upcoming exam leveled the playing field such that those students who usually get…
1 min read
Here’s How Little Sleep Can You Get Away With
e New York Times has an interesting article on the subject but the takeaway is here: In what was the longest sleep-restriction study of its kind, Dinges and his lead author, Hans Van Dongen, assigned dozens of subjects to three different groups for their 2003 study: some slept four hours, others six hours and others, for the lucky control group, eight hours — for two weeks in the lab... ...Not surprisingly, those who had eight hours of sleep hardly had…
2 minutes
Is expecting others to be selfish a self-fulfilling prophecy?
a Eurekalert: The expectations people have about how others will behave play a large role in determining whether people cooperate with each other or not. And moreover that very first expectation, or impression, is hard to change. "This is particularly true when the impression is a negative one," says Michael Kurschilgen from the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, summarising the key findings of a study in which he and his colleagues Christoph Engel and Sebastian…
1 min read
Do positive expectations and fantasies help you achieve goals?
sitive expectations do. Positive fantasies don't: Two forms of thinking about the future are distinguished: expectations versus fantasies. Positive expectations (judging a desired future as likely) predicted high effort and successful performance, but the reverse was true for positive fantasies (experiencing one's thoughts and mental images about a desired future positively). Participants were graduates looking for a job (Study 1), students with a crush on a peer of the opposite sex (Study 2), undergraduates anticipating an exam (Study 3), and…
2 minutes
Being Ethical Can Hurt Your Income
is paper empirically investigates the link between ethics, earnings and gender. Using a self-reported measure from a longitudinal survey of registrants for the Graduate Management Admissions Test, we find that ethical character is negatively associated with males’ wages. For females, however, this relationship doesn’t hold. In addition, using measures of the degree to which ethics is emphasized in business school curricula as an indicator for enhancement of individual ethical standards of graduates, we investigate variation in the returns to an…
1 min read
Do hungry judges give harsher sentences?
e judicial rulings based solely on laws and facts? Legal formalism holds that judges apply legal reasons to the facts of a case in a rational, mechanical, and deliberative manner. In contrast, legal realists argue that the rational application of legal reasons does not sufficiently explain the decisions of judges and that psychological, political, and social factors influence judicial rulings. We test the common caricature of realism that justice is “what the judge ate for breakfast” in sequential parole decisions…
1 min read
