Would you be happier if you were rich?
obably, but not nearly as happy as you're guessing. In his paper "Would you be happier if you were richer?" Nobel prize winner and author of "Thinking, Fast and Slow" Daniel Kahneman explains that we often fall prey to "focusing illusions." He eloquently defines the term: “Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.” So when we think about money, it looms large and we overestimate its affect on our…
1 min read
Can you use hostage negotiation techniques to improve your life at work and at home?
's called the Behavioral Change Stairway Model and it was developed by the FBI's Crisis Negotiation Unit. Check out the chart above. It's not something that's only useful with barricaded perps wielding assault rifles -- it can be applied to almost any form of disagreement. How does it work? BCSM consists of five stages: active listening, empathy, rapport, influence, and behavioral change. Progression through these stages occurs sequentially and cumulatively. Specifically, the negotiator proceeds in sequence from Stage 1 (active…
3 minutes
Is self-esteem sexy?
men, absolutely. High self-esteem was the most attractive. In women, moderate self-esteem was more attractive than high self-esteem: The provision of information appears to be an important property of self-esteem as evidenced by previous research concerning the status-tracking and status-signaling models of self-esteem. The present studies examine whether there is an implicit theory of self-esteem that leads individuals to assume targets with higher levels of self-esteem possess more desirable characteristics than those with lower levels of self-esteem. Across 6…
1 min read
Is your name screwing up your love life?
ople with unpopular names received notably less attention on online dating sites: Can negative first names cause interpersonal neglect? Study 1 (N = 968) compared extremely negatively named online-daters with extremely positively named online-daters. Study 2 (N = 4,070) compared less extreme groups—namely, online-daters with somewhat unattractive versus somewhat attractive first names. Study 3 (N = 6,775) compared online-daters with currently popular versus currently less popular first names, while controlling for name-popularity at birth. Across all studies, negatively named individuals…
1 min read
Are Mondays really that bad?
d stuff does consistently happen on Mondays. Stock market returns are lower, suicides are higher and more people call sexually transmitted disease hotlines: The so-called ‘‘weekend effect’’is a well-known phenomenon in the stock market (Keim & Stambaugh, 1984). This relates to significantly lower stock returns on Monday in comparison with other days of the week. It is suggested that this effect could be a result of traders’ fading optimism between Friday and Monday. Interestingly, similar ‘‘weekend effects’’ can also be…
3 minutes
Do we bounce back quickest when life hurts us the most?
s. Often we bounce back from painful events more quickly than we would guess: Intense hedonic states trigger psychological processes that are designed to attenuate them, and thus intense states may abate more quickly than mild states. Because people are unaware of these psychological processes, they may mistakenly expect intense states to last longer than mild ones. In Study 1, participants predicted that the more they initially disliked a transgressor, the longer their dislike would last. In Study 2, participants…
2 minutes
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
How can the slumdwellers, prostitutes and homeless people of the poorest place on Earth be happy?
bsp; Calcutta, India is regarded as one of the poorest and most unpleasant places to live: There is, perhaps, no city in the world that is so commonly thought of as synonymous with “poverty” than Calcutta, India. By some estimates forty per cent of India’s population and as many as fifty per cent of the children in Calcutta live beneath the poverty line (OFFER, 1999). Its notorious nickname, “the black hole of Calcutta” conjures an image in the minds of…
3 minutes
