Does a CEO’s personal life predict how he’ll run a company?
sk-takers at home are risk-takers in the office. Via the New York Times: ...research has shown that a top executive’s personality can have powerful effects on how a corporation is operated. For example, Henrik Cronqvist, Anil K. Makhija and Scott E. Yonker found that the level of debt for a company was related to how much a chief executive was willing to borrow to buy a house. Matthew Cain and Stephen B. McKeon looked at chief executives who had pilot…
1 min read
How happy is the word “happiness”? How sad is the word “sadness”?
a Harper's: Happiness was found to be the second-happiest word in English and sadness the thirty-first-saddest. Join 25K+ readers. Get a free weekly update via email here. Related posts: 10 things you need to know to be happier 8 ways that money can buy happiness How to make yourself happier in just a few seconds
1 min read
If super-sizing makes us fat, can “downsizing” make us thinner?
stead of asking fast food patrons if they'd like to "super-size", they asked if they'd downsize their portions. 14-33% said yes and they ended up eating fewer calories overall: Policies that mandate calorie labeling in fast-food and chain restaurants have had little or no observable impact on calorie consumption to date. In three field experiments, we tested an alternative approach: activating consumers’ self-control by having servers ask customers if they wanted to downsize portions of three starchy side dishes at…
2 minutes
Can Saturday Night Live affect how you vote?
na Fey changed attitudes with her Palin imitation: Using panel data of young adults, we find evidence that exposure to Tina Fey’s impersonation of Sarah Palin’s performance in the 2008 vice-presidential debate on Saturday Night Live is associated with changes in attitudes toward her selection as VP candidate and presidential vote intentions. These effects are most pronounced among self-identified Independents and Republicans. Source: "The Fey Effect, Young Adults, Political Humor, and Perceptions of Sarah Palin in the 2008 Presidential Election…
1 min read
What’s the key to radically changing your life?
iends that support you. From Charles Duhigg's excellent book The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business: In a 1994 Harvard study that examined people who had radically changed their lives, for instance, researchers found that some people had remade their habits after a personal tragedy, such as a divorce or a life-threatening illness. Others changed after they saw a friend go through something awful, the same way that Dungy’s players watched him struggle.…
2 minutes
What do we know about sexual masochists?
. Mark Griffiths has an interesting post on his blog. Here are some highlights: Dr Charles Moser (Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, California, USA) claims about 10% of the adult population engages in sadomasochistic activity. 46% of men had sexual fantasies of being kidnapped and raped by a woman, 12% had fantasies relating to being humiliated, and 36% fantasized about being bound and sexually stimulated by a woman. ...a number of more recent studies among sadomasochists (1985-2002) have…
1 min read
Which words in your Facebook profile do people look at to learn about your personality?
ne of them. They just look at your photo. Via Eurekalert: In most cases, your profile photo on Facebook tells viewers what they need to know to form an impression of you – no words are necessary, new research suggests. College students who viewed a Facebook photo of a fellow student having fun with friends rated that person as extraverted – even if his profile said he was "not a big people-person." "Photos seem to be the primary way we…
1 min read
Does the color of your plate affect how sweet dessert tastes?
bsp; Via Miller-McCune: In the journal Food Quality and Performance, Spanish researchers describe an experiment in which 53 volunteers rated two samples of strawberry mousse for sweetness, flavor intensity, and overall quality. For half the participants, the first serving was on a black plate, the second on a white one; for the others, the order was reversed. They consistently rated the mousse on the white plate — of course identical to the mousse on the black plate — as sweeter…
2 minutes
