What’s the reason most people want to leave their jobs?
whopping 48 percent of those who want to change jobs are mainly motivated by a loss of trust in their employers, according to Deloitte’s fourth annual "Ethics & Workplace Survey." “With lack of trust and transparency factoring into the employment decision of roughly half of the respondents who plan to job hunt in the coming months, business leaders must be mindful of the importance of both on talent management and retention strategies, as well as the bottom line impact,”…
1 min read
Can you tell what a politician thinks about an issue just by watching their hands?
in 25K+ readers. No spam, ever. Enter your email here: "In laboratory tests, right- and left-handers associate positive ideas like honesty and intelligence with their dominant side of space and negative ideas with their non-dominant side," says Daniel Casasanto of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands. To find out whether people link 'good' with 'dominant' beyond the laboratory, Casasanto and co-author Kyle Jasmin examined spontaneous gestures during positive and negative speech in the final debates of…
2 minutes
Do rain and assassination promote democracy?
ck of rain can: According to the economic approach to political transitions, transitory negative economic shocks can open a window of opportunity for democratic improvement. Testing the theory requires a source of transitory shocks to the aggregate economy. We use rainfall shocks in Sub-Saharan African countries and find that negative rainfall shocks are followed by significant improvement in democratic institutions. Instrumental variable estimates indicate that following a transitory negative income shock of 1 percent, democracy scores improve by 0.9 percentage…
2 minutes
Can you reduce corruption by sending people to London?
y do some people choose corruption over honesty and others not? Do the social norms and values prevailing in the societies in which they grew up affect their decisions? In 2005, we conducted a bribery experiment and found that, among undergraduates, we could predict who would act corruptly with reference to the level of corruption in their home country. Among graduate students we could not. In 2007, we replicated our result and also found that time spent in the UK…
1 min read
Are lawyers any good at predicting the outcomes of their cases?
. They're overconfident. And they don't get any better with experience. Female lawyers are slightly better than males: Lawyers' litigation forecasts play an integral role in the justice system. In the course of litigation, lawyers constantly make strategic decisions and/or advise their clients on the basis of their perceptions and predictions of case outcomes. The study investigated the realism in predictions by a sample of attorneys (n = 481) across the United States who specified a minimum goal to achieve…
2 minutes
Do our decision-making abilities decline with age?
llow @bakadesuyo Some of our decision-making skills decline while others can improve. What's more interesting is older adults definitely perceive themselves as worse decision makers because they don't take the skills that improve into consideration: Studies on aging-related changes in decision making report mixed results. Some decision-making skills decline with age, while others remain unchanged or improve. Because fluid cognitive ability (e.g., reasoning, problem solving) deteriorates with age, older adults should perform worse on decision-making tasks that tap fluid cognitive…
2 minutes
Is money or sociability more important to happiness?
ing longitudinal data on households living in Germany, we quantify what part of the change in subjective well-being observed over the last two decades is predicted by changes in variables which typically show strong cross-sectional correlation with subjective well-being. We especially focus on absolute income, income comparisons, income adaptation, and sociability, finding that all have some predictive power. The increase in sociability indicators predicts the largest positive change in subjective well-being. Absolute income, income comparisons and income adaptation also predict…
2 minutes
If the “extreme male brain” is autistic, is the “extreme female brain” psychotic?
e empathising–systemising (E–S) theory proposes that many sex differences can be explained by females typically demonstrating greater empathising abilities (understanding of the social world) and males typically demonstrating greater systemising abilities (understanding of the non-social world). Autism is argued to represent an ‘Extreme Male Brain’, with impaired empathising alongside preserved or enhanced systemising producing a hypo-empathising profile. A recent account hypothesised that a hyper-empathising ‘Extreme Female Brain’ would be characterised in terms of psychosis. The present study tests this hypothesis…
2 minutes
