How can you know who to trust?
you know nothing about them you might want to look for whether they're emotionally expressive. People who showed more emotion - positive or negative - were more cooperative in research studies: Previous research has suggested that the spontaneous display of positive emotion may be a reliable signal of cooperative tendency in humans. Consistent with this proposition, several studies have found that self-reported cooperators indeed display higher levels of positive emotions than non-cooperators. In this study, we defined cooperators and…
1 min read
The 3 Techniques The US Army Uses To Instill Mental Toughness
a Annie Murphy Paul's very interesting article in Time: 1) "Mental toughness comes from thinking like an optimist." The program’s key message: Mental toughness comes from thinking like an optimist. “People who don’t give up have a habit of interpreting setbacks as temporary, local and changeable,” notes Penn psychology professor Martin Seligman, describing the intervention in a recent journal article. When such individuals encounter adversity, they think to themselves: “It’s going away quickly; it’s just this one situation, and I…
1 min read
6 research based tips on how to increase creativity:
om Jeremy Dean's great book How to Be Creative: 1. Knowledge: with expertise come the tools you need for creativity, but expertise can also get you stuck in a rut. Acknowledge this and find ways to break out of old routines. 2. Problem construction: decisions made early on can make or break a project. Don't be too keen to rush in, whatever your instincts might tell you. More creative people tend to spend longer constructing the problem. Use constraints and…
2 minutes
The Fast Way To Make Better Decisions, Backed By Research
ke the perspective of someone else. Think about what your smartest friend might do in that situation. We investigated how perspective-taking might be used to overcome bias and improve advice-based judgments. Decision makers often tend to underweight the opinions of others relative to their own, and thus fail to exploit the wisdom of others. We tested the idea that decision makers taking the perspective of another person engage a less egocentric mode of processing of advisory opinions and thereby improve their…
2 minutes
How To Stay Motivated With Difficult Goals, Backed By Research
u can measure progress by how much you've completed or how much you have left to do. Research says you'll be more motivated if you focus on whichever of those two is smaller: Via Eurekalert: "We predict that individuals will express greater motivation to pursue actions when they focus on whichever is smaller in size—the area of their completed actions or of their remaining actions—because motivation increases with the perceived impact of each new step, and each new step will…
1 min read
Is the smell of pizza the key to creativity?
eep has been shown to facilitate creativity. Researchers wanted to see if they could coax the brain into continuing work on a problem while people were unconscious. Scientists put an odor in the air while subjects were working on a challenging task. While the subjects slept that night, the odor was again diffused into the room. This stimulated their brains to keep working on the problem while they slept. When they awoke they were more creative: Both scientists and artists…
2 minutes
Beautiful People Are More Successful. Here’s Why.
a Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful: Using these large random samples of women and men, we can compare their earnings to the ratings of their looks. Compared to the average group (people rated as 3 on the 5 to 1 scale), below-average looking women (rated 2 or 1 on the scale) earn 3 percent less, while below-average looking men earn 22 percent less. Above-average looking women (rated 4 or 5 on the scale) earn 4 percent more…
3 minutes
Nice Guys Make Less Money
ce guys don't make the big bucks: Sex and agreeableness were hypothesized to affect income, such that women and agreeable individuals were hypothesized to earn less than men and less agreeable individuals. Because agreeable men disconfirm (and disagreeable men confirm) conventional gender roles, agreeableness was expected to be more negatively related to income for men (i.e., the pay gap between agreeable men and agreeable women would be smaller than the gap between disagreeable men and disagreeable women). The hypotheses were…
1 min read
