5 things you didn’t know about the power of colors:
bsp; 1) Green can make you more creative. 2) Blondes are better at fundraising and they do have more fun. 3) Countries with lots of colors in their flags are less happy. 4) A yellow price tag makes people think they're getting a discount -- even if they aren't. 5) The color red has all kinds of interesting, athletic, angry, very very sexy and seemingly magic powers. Join 25K+ readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.
1 min read
How can you increase your IQ?
om the WSJ: New tasks stimulate the brain most. When researchers at the University of Hamburg subjected 20 young adults to one month of intense training in juggling, they found an increase in the corresponding gray matter in the brain as early as seven days after the training began. The added gray matter receded when the training was stopped, although the participants were still able to juggle, says the study, published in 2008 in PLoS One. And: Fluctuations in IQ…
2 minutes
Who would you rather have on your team: a loveable fool or a competent jerk?
en though many might like to believe they'd pick the competent jerk to work with, more often than not they went with the lovable fool. It turns out if people are disliked it's almost irrelevant to us how competent they may be: Ask managers about this choice—and we’ve asked many of them, both as part of our re- search and in executive education programs we teach—and you’ll often hear them say that when it comes to getting a job done,…
2 minutes
Can we really multitask? Are women better at it than men?
can't multitask -- it makes us dumber, less productive and ends up taking more time. It's just not how our brains work best. Neither gender is better at it: We find that multitasking significantly lowers performance in cognitive tasks compared to a sequential execution. This suggests that the costs of switching, which include recalling the rules, details and steps executed thus far, outweigh the benefit of a ’fresheye’. Note that this effect differs from the one found by Coviello…
2 minutes
5 things you didn’t know about Facebook:
The main reasons for Facebook "un-friending" are too many unimportant posts and discussion of controversial tops like politics and religion. 2) Do Facebook profiles show people's real personalities? Yes. 3) People can tell how happy you'll be in the future by looking at your Facebook pictures. 4) Facebook will not mean you end up only having friendships via the computer. It actually increases the amount of real world social support you get. 5) There is at least one downside to…
1 min read
5 things you didn’t know about Twitter:
Twitter trends can help you beat the stock market. 2) Twitter users don't just send short messages, they also have shorter relationships. 3) Twitter's more philosophical than you think: extraverts use it to relieve existential anxiety. 4) 80% of users tweet about themselves. 20% send links and info. 5) Among politicians, Republicans are more likely to use Twitter than Democrats. Join 25K+ readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.
1 min read
How much do Yelp scores affect a restaurant’s bottom line?
one star increase in the Yelp rating provides a 5-9% increase in revenue, unless it's a chain restaurant: Do online consumer reviews affect restaurant demand? I investigate this question using a novel dataset combining reviews from the website Yelp.com and restaurant data from the Washington State Department of Revenue. Because Yelp prominently displays a restaurant's rounded average rating, I can identify the causal impact of Yelp ratings on demand with a regression discontinuity framework that exploits Yelp‟s rounding thresholds.…
2 minutes
Do the US News college rankings really mean anything?
nd of. Moving up the chart does increase applications. What's more interesting is that the effect of the rankings is completely dependent on how the information is presented -- if colleges are listed alphabetically, rather than by order of quality, the rank doesn't effect application decisions at all: How do rankings affect demand? This paper investigates the impact of college rankings, and the visibility of those rankings, on students’ application decisions. Using natural experiments from U.S. News and World Report…
1 min read
