Which incentives best increase productivity in the office?
ney and feedback are great but both work best when combined with acknowledgement of an employee's accomplishments. From Richard Conniff's interesting book, The Ape in the Corner Office: How to Make Friends, Win Fights and Work Smarter by Understanding Human Nature: ...researchers have demonstrated that feedback alone can increase productivity by 10 percent. This may seem merely logical, since feedback clarifies both the task and the expectations. But getting acknowledged for accomplishments can enhance performance by 17 percent, apparently for…
1 min read
What four psychological techniques did the government use to increase Navy SEAL passing rates?
bsp; Ever since reading The Warrior Elite: The Forging of SEAL Class 228 I've been interested in Navy SEAL training, particularly the psychological aspects. In his blog at Psychology Today, Bakari Akil covers a History channel documentary The Brain and what it revealed about the four techniques the Navy used to increase passing rates in the elite SEAL program: Goal Setting "With goal setting the recruits were taught to set goals in extremely short chunks. For instance, one former Navy…
2 minutes
Where do we really find the most happiness: money, marriage or children?
rvard happiness expert Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness says the research definitely points to marriage: Studies have shown that people who are married are happier than people who are unmarried or cohabiting, suggesting there is a “marriage advantage” when it comes to life satisfaction. Mom’s second requirement, a good paycheck, is known to be much less important. Research shows that money has diminishing marginal utility: “Anybody who says money can’t buy happiness has never met someone who lives…
2 minutes
Were humans ever an endangered species?
s. Via Rob Brooks' interesting book Sex, Genes & Rock 'n' Roll: How Evolution Has Shaped the Modern World: For most of history, the human population hardly grew at all. Some small bands of people flourished, but others dwindled and petered out. As a result, humans came close to extinction many times. For more than 100,000 years we would have featured on any list of endangered species that had been around at the time. Around 70,000 years ago drought very…
1 min read
What do we regret most? Why?
ucation, career, and romance top the list. In general we're more inclined to regret things that offered us new opportunities. Via Kellogg: In another paper Roese examined eleven other studies regarding regret, in which people ranked the parts of life they regret the most. Education was the biggest inducer of regret, followed by career, romance, parenting, the self, and leisure. The rankings turned out to be remarkably consistent across studies of people in different age groups and locations. Roese thought…
2 minutes
How can you enjoy good moments more and feel less pain from bad experiences?
plaining emotional experiences reduces the intensity of our feelings. Explain the bad things that happen but just enjoy the good moments. Via Eurekalert: People who are explaining and sharing hedonic (sensory or emotional) experiences have their emotions dampened, Moore found. "Explaining why a chocolate cupcake tasted so divine makes us love the cupcake a little less, while explaining why a movie was so horrible makes us hate the movie a little less," Moore explains. And people who share about hedonic…
1 min read
Does having more potential mates make us focus on deep qualities or shallow ones?
allow ones. Via APA: A study published in Psychological Science found that volunteers who have the choice of many potential mates pay less attention to important characteristics that take more time to elicit and pay more attention to trivial characteristics that are quickly and easily assessed. And: ...Results found that in small speed-dating sessions, people made choices based primarily on important characteristics that take more time to evaluate while those in large speed-dating sessions made choices based on quick and…
1 min read
What are the three ways to find happiness?
bsp; Each of these three were predictive of happiness: Pleasure Engagement Meaning People low on all three were extremely unhappy: Different orientations to happiness and their association with life satisfaction were investigated with 845 adults responding to Internet surveys. We measured life satisfaction and the endorsement of three different ways to be happy through pleasure, through engagement, and through meaning. Each of these three orientations individually predicted life satisfaction. People simultaneously low on all three orientations reported especially low life…
1 min read
