Can being underpaid give you a heart attack?
is paper investigates physiological responses to perceptions of unfair pay. In a simple principal agent experiment agents produce revenue by working on a tedious task. Principals decide how this revenue is allocated between themselves and their agents. In this environment unfairness can arise if an agent’s reward expectation is not met. Throughout the experiment we record agents’ heart rate variability. Our findings provide evidence of a link between perceived unfairness and heart rate variability. The latter is an indicator of stress related impaired cardiac autonomic…
1 min read
Are our snap decisions more ethical?
veral theories, both ancient and recent, suggest that having the time to contemplate a decision should increase moral awareness and the likelihood of ethical choices. Our findings indicated just the opposite: greater time for deliberation led to less ethical decisions. Post-hoc analyses and a followup experiment suggested that decision makers act as if their previous choices have created or lost moral credentials: after an ethical first choice, people acted significantly less ethically in their subsequent choice but after an unethical…
1 min read
What’s a quick and easy way to improve learning?
e gestures children spontaneously produce when explaining a task predict whether they will subsequently learn that task. Why Gesture might simply reflect a child’s readiness to learn a particular task. Alternatively, gesture might itself play a role in learning the task. To investigate these alternatives, we experimentally manipulated children’s gesture during instruction in a new mathematical concept. We found that requiring children to gesture while learning the new concept helped them retain the knowledge they had gained during instruction. In…
1 min read
Research Shows Trying To Look Smart Makes You Seem Stupid
st texts on writing style encourage authors to avoid overly-complex words. However, a majority of undergraduates admit to deliberately increasing the complexity of their vocabulary so as to give the impression of intelligence. This paper explores the extent to which this strategy is effective. Experiments 1–3 manipulate complexity of texts and find a negative relationship between complexity and judged intelligence. This relationship held regardless of the quality of the original essay, and irrespective of the participants' prior expectations of essay…
1 min read
Is artwork of higher quality when we’re not paid to create it?
a Daniel Pink's very interesting book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Teresa Amabile, the Harvard Business School professor and one of the world’s leading researchers on creativity, has frequently tested the effects of contingent rewards on the creative process. In one study, she and two colleagues recruited twenty-three professional artists from the United States who had produced both commissioned and noncommissioned artwork. They asked the artists to randomly select ten commissioned works and ten noncommissioned works. Then Amabile and…
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Can you tell which criminals are more likely to reoffend just by looking at their tattoos?
e purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between prison tattoos and the criminal lifestyle and recidivism. Participants consisted of 81 male inmates with prison tattoos (i.e., prison-themed or prison-made tattoos), 75 inmates with nonprison tattoos (e.g., animal tattoos, tattoos of ethnic origin), 52 male inmates with no tattoos, and 66 college students with tattoos. Results indicated that inmates with prison tattoos differed from inmates with nonprison tattoos, inmates without tattoos, and college students with tattoos with regard…
1 min read
Are angry people more creative than sad people?
ecdotes and introspective reports from eminent scientists and artists aside, a systematic test of the putative creativity-enhancing effect of anger is missing. This article fills this void with three experiments examining creativity as a function of anger (vs. sad or mood-neutral controls). Combining insights from the literatures on creativity and on mood and information processing the authors predicted that anger (vs. sadness and mood-neutral control) triggers a less systematic and structured approach to the creativity task, and leads to initially…
1 min read
What’s a quick trick to help you spend less money?
a Journal of Consumer Research: To examine consumers‟ feelings of constraint, Spiller assigned study participants to a monthly budget group or a weekly budget group and gave them the opportunity to make 20 purchases. Those in the monthly group were given a sum of money at the beginning that they could spend throughout, whereas those in the weekly group were given a smaller amount four times throughout the study. “Compared to those in the monthly budget group, those in the weekly budget group looked at future…
1 min read
