When to brainstorm and when not to:
plying brainstorming techniques to new product development works best when the collaboration employs participants from varied specialties gathering to develop a less complex product, according to the Management Insights feature in the current issue of Management Science, the flagship journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®). When new products will be highly technical, a better way to develop them is for specialists to do their work in private and collaborate through 'nominal' groups, the study…
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Can lay-offs cause miscarriages?
ey studied the birth records of the state of California from April 1995 to December 2007, and compared these with the number of new claims for unemployment insurance. Based on hints from earlier work, they looked specifically at unemployment claims that had wider social resonance than the firing of a few individuals—namely those in which an employer sacked 50 workers or more in one go... The researchers discovered that mass lay-offs did, indeed, lead to fewer boys being born. Over…
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Show the doctor pictures of kittens before your next surgery:
Experiment 1, participants were 40 female freshman at the University of Virginia who were assigned to one of two groups. The experiment involved playing Operation before and after looking at images of high cuteness (puppies and kittens) or low cuteness (dogs and cats). And as the authors predicted, subjects in the high cuteness condition showed greater improvement after viewing the pictures than did those in the low cuteness condition (p=.05). Experiment 2 did a better job of balancing the…
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How to create false memories:
recent study in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology tested whether showing people photos of completed actions–such as a broken pencil or an opened envelope–could influence them to believe they’d done something they had not, particularly if they were shown the photos multiple times. Participants were presented with a series of objects on a table, and for each object were asked to either perform an action or imagine performing an action (i.e. “crack the walnut”). One week later, the same participants were…
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Tattoos, dueling scars, and other rational acquisitions:
tp://reason.com/archives/2009/12/03/reading-peoples-faces/print Join over 320,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here. Related posts: New Neuroscience Reveals 4 Rituals That Will Make You Happy New Harvard Research Reveals A Fun Way To Be More Successful How To Get People To Like You: 7 Ways From An FBI Behavior Expert
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Can insightful text overcome stereotypical imagery?
the study, conducted by Andrew Mendelson and Fabienne Darling-Wolf of Temple University, 42 undergraduates were presented with a version of the 2003 magazine feature. One-third of the participants read the text only. Another third only saw the accompanying photographs, while the final third saw the text and photographs as they were originally presented in the periodical. Afterward, their impressions were shared in focus-group interviews. The encouraging news is that "all versions of the story successfully managed, at least to…
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Do pro athletes break the law more than average citizens?
a newsweek.com While it's easy to talk about athletes as risk-addicted jocks — see commenter Schloss1 here—at the professional level, the data just don't support that stereotype. You can point out, for instance, that for all their widely and frequently reported shenanigans, NFL players aren't really more crime-prone than the general public: According to The San Diego Union-Tribune, since 2000 an average of one in 45 NFL players a year gets arrested. Comparatively speaking, that number is one in 23…
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Is blogging dominated by the big guys?:
the medium has become more popular, money has flowed in. And while no one would deny that blogging has lowered the barriers to self-publication by average citizens, the free-wheeling fraternal spirit of blogging has become increasingly subject to market disciplines. As a result, as Web critic Nicholas Carr told me, blogging has evolved to become “a lot more like a traditional mass medium.” The data would seem to back this up. First, a clear, stable, class at the top…
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