What do we do with our leisure time: what truly makes us happy or what’s easy?
do what's easy. Via The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work: Studies have found that American teenagers are two and half times more likely to experience elevated enjoyment when engaged in a hobby than when watching TV, and three times more likely when playing a sport. And yet here’s the paradox: These same teenagers spend four times as many hours watching TV as they do engaging in sports or hobbies.…
1 min read
Raise My GPA: The Easiest Secret To Better Grades
ny students would love to know the answer to "How do I raise my GPA?" Studying hard is an obvious answer, but that can be difficult. An easy answer comes from behavioral research. Shawn Achor, who taught and conducted research at Harvard, has the answer: pick a smart roommate. Via The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work: One study of Dartmouth College students by economist Bruce Sacerdote illustrates how powerful this…
1 min read
Is deliberately screwing up the best way to learn?
ing guided into mistakes during training led to greater confidence and overall better learning than being taught to prevent errors. Via The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work: In one experiment where 90 people went through a software training program, half were taught to prevent errors from occurring, while the other half were guided into mistakes during training. And lo and behold, the group encouraged to make errors not only exhibited…
1 min read
Can drinking more beer help you achieve your goals?
ybe. A new study shows that alcohol makes us focus on a goal's desirability instead of its feasiblity. Basically, that means we think more about what we want and less about how realistic our chances of getting it are. If you've ever had one too many and done something stupid, you're probably nodding right now. Peer Reviewed By My Neurons offers an interesting perspective on how, for some, this could be part of a strategy for goal achievement: In other…
1 min read
Divorce Is Contagious
vorce is the dissolution of a social tie, but it is also possible that attitudes about divorce flow across social ties. To explore how social networks influence divorce and vice versa, we utilize a longitudinal data set from the long-running Framingham Heart Study. We find that divorce can spread between friends, siblings, and coworkers, and there are clusters of divorcees that extend two degrees of separation in the network. We also find that popular people are less likely to get…
1 min read
Does doodling actually increase your ability to pay attention?
ve posted before about the positives and negatives of daydreaming. Looks like doodling may increase your ability to pay attention when your mind is tempted to wander: Via The Science of Sin: The Psychology of the Seven Deadlies (and Why They Are So Good For You): Now, we know that mind-wandering can hamper memory performance on such tests. Does doodling offer some protection against this? The results of Andrade’s study: doodlers recalled 29 percent more information than nondoodlers did. Precisely…
1 min read
Are people nicer where the pace of life is slower?
s. Via The Science of Sin: The Psychology of the Seven Deadlies (and Why They Are So Good For You): In 2008, with Stephen Reysen and Ellen Ganz, both also at California State University at the time, Levine asked: does the pace of life in cities have any effect on helping behavior? Here’s what these researchers did to answer this question. First, they measured the pace of life in twenty-four US cities. These cities were sampled from the stereotypically torpid…
2 minutes
What can you tell about someone’s personality just by their clothes and surroundings?
mon Laham summarizes some of the fascinating research of Sam Gosling in The Science of Sin: He can tell you that people with inspirational posters on their walls are neurotic, that people who swing their arms when they walk are extroverted, and that those with uncluttered offices are conscientious. On the sartorial front there are the following encryptions: dark clothes = neurotic; formal dress = conscientious; messy and unconventional clothing = open to new things; cleavage and expensive clothes =…
1 min read
