Do playful people get better grades in school?
s: The study examines the relation between subjectively assessed adult playfulness and psychometric and self-estimated intelligence in a sample of 254 students. As expected, playfulness existed widely independently from psychometric intelligence. Correlations pointed in the direction of higher expressive playfulness and numeric intelligence and lower creative playfulness and figural intelligence. However, the size of the coefficients suggests that the results should not be over-interpreted. The same was true for self-estimates of intelligence. Those scoring lower in the total score of…
2 minutes
A good reputation pays off
conducted the first randomized controlled field experiment of an Internet reputation mechanism. A high-reputation, established eBay dealer sold matched pairs of lots -- batches of vintage postcards -- under his regular identity and under new seller identities (also operated by him). As predicted, the established identity fared better. The difference in buyers’ willingness-to-pay was 8.1% of the selling price. A subsidiary experiment followed the same format, but compared sales by relatively new sellers with and without negative feedback. Surprisingly,…
1 min read
Do companies pay women more if a male CEO has a daughter?
men's salaries are higher when the boss has a daughter Drawing on research in sociology and economics suggesting that fathers' gender-related attitudes and behaviors are shaped by the gender of their children, we hypothesize that having daughters prompts male CEOs to implement wage policies that are more equitable to female employees. To test this hypothesis, we use a 12-year panel of Danish workforce data and an empirical specification with CEO–employee fixed effects, creating a quasiexperimental setting whereby the gender of…
1 min read
Is there a connection between posture and power?
ree experiments explored whether hierarchical role and body posture have independent or interactive effects on the main outcomes associated with power: action in behavior and abstraction in thought. Although past research has found that being in a powerful role and adopting an expansive body posture can each enhance a sense of power, two experiments showed that when individuals were placed in high- or low-power roles while adopting an expansive or constricted posture, only posture affected the implicit activation of power,…
1 min read
Does fairness in the workplace improve your health?
bsp; Objectives Previous studies have suggested that the extent to which employees are treated with justice at the workplace contributes to their health. We examined whether justice at work predicted incidence of deaths from cardiovascular disease. Methods Participants were 804 factory workers whose mortality data were collected from the Finnish national mortality register (73 deaths; mean follow-up, 25.6 years). Justice perceptions of the participants were measured using a postal survey at baseline year 1973. Results Cox proportional hazards models adjusted…
2 minutes
Is getting people to behave better a matter of what pictures you hang on the wall?
examined the effect of an image of a pair of eyes on contributions to an honesty box used to collect money for drinks in a university coffee room. People paid nearly three times as much for their drinks when eyes were displayed rather than a control image. This finding provides the first evidence from a naturalistic setting of the importance of cues of being watched, and hence reputational concerns, on human cooperative behaviour. Source: "Cues of being watched enhance…
1 min read
Does repeating yourself make you more influential?
spite the importance of doing so, people do not always correctly estimate the distribution of opinions within their group. One important mechanism underlying such misjudgments is people's tendency to infer that a familiar opinion is a prevalent one, even when its familiarity derives solely from the repeated expression of 1 group member. Six experiments demonstrate this effect and show that it holds even when perceivers are consciously aware that the opinions come from 1 speaker. The results also indicate that…
1 min read
Does seeing altruism make you more altruistic?
elings of elevation, elicited by witnessing another person perform a good deed, have been hypothesized to motivate a desire to help others. However, despite growing interest in the determinants of prosocial behavior, there is only limited evidence that elevation leads to increases in altruistic behavior. In two experiments, we tested the relationship between elevation and helping behavior. Prior to measuring helping behavior, we measured elevation among participants in an elevation-inducing condition and control conditions in order to determine whether witnessing…
1 min read
