What are ten instances when you should trust your gut?
bsp; Does someone seem extraverted and conscientious to you? You're probably right. If the person you're with is attractive you should trust your instincts about their personality even more. There are a number of things you can probably guess about someone's personality from a glance. Trust your gut when determining who is a nice person and who is a criminal. You can probably tell which men are dangerous and which are trustworthy. People can differentiate Nobel Prize winners from America's…
2 minutes
Who cheats more: Americans, Israelis, Italians or the Chinese? Politicians or Wall Street bankers?
bsp; People cheated about the same amount in every country tested. Via Dan Ariely's fascinating new book The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves: I grew up in Israel, I especially wanted to see how Israelis measured up (I admit that I suspected that Israelis would cheat more than Americans). But as it turned out, our Israeli participants cheated in the matrix experiments just as much as the Americans. We decided to check other nationalities, too.…
2 minutes
Do the good really die young?
, they live longer. Via The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study: Over three hundred years ago Daniel Defoe, famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe, asserted, “The best of men cannot suspend their fate: The good die early, and the bad die late.” We did not find this to be true at all, instead finding that many of the most agreeable, thoughtful, and helpful Terman subjects, including Linda, were among the longest…
2 minutes
What makes a company ethical or unethical?
bsp; The people at the top: To understand the impact top managers have on ethics and honesty, we looked at the data we'd collected from 5,268 leaders in five different organizations. The data identified each leader by level (e.g., top management, middle management, lower level management). The graph below shows the average of all leaders, along with the highest- and the lowest-rated organizations. In all three organizations, the rating decreases at every level as you move down the management chain.…
1 min read
If you bet that you’ll lose weight, do you regain it when the bet is over?
ah, usually. (Hat tip) BACKGROUND: Previous efforts to use incentives for weight loss have resulted in substantial weight regain after 16 weeks. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate a longer term weight loss intervention using financial incentives. DESIGN: A 32-week, three-arm randomized controlled trial of financial incentives for weight loss consisting of a 24-week weight loss phase during which all participants were given a weight loss goal of 1 pound per week, followed by an 8-week maintenance phase. PARTICIPANTS: Veterans who were patients…
2 minutes
What can startups do to increase their chance of surviving and thriving?
bsp; Hire women and hire them early. Via Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful: Moving from anecdote to data, some recent evidence shows that start-up companies that employed more women survived longer than others. From the study referenced: In this paper we investigate the relationship between females among the first hires of start-up companies and business success. Our results show that firms with female first hires have a higher share of female workers at the end of the…
2 minutes
What’s the easiest way to predict if someone will end up divorced?
bsp; Were they happy or unhappy in the years leading up to their wedding? Studies show people less happy before marriage are more likely to divorce. Via The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study: Our findings and interpretations of the relevance of early personality traits to marriage satisfaction squared with other studies by researchers investigating marriage and happiness. These studies have found that married people tend to be happier than unmarried people,…
1 min read
What makes you more likely to lie and cheat?
Dan Ariely's fascinating new book The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves he does an excellent job of dissecting what motivates us to cheat or not to. In Ariely's recent piece for the WSJ, a chart does a great job of breaking down the factors he found most influence us when it comes to dishonesty. What are they? (I've included links to related studies): What increases dishonesty: Ability to rationalize Conflicts of interest Creativity Previous…
1 min read
