Here’s What People Really Think Of Men Who Are Modest
a Daily Mail (Hat tip: David DiSalvo): Research has revealed women don't like modesty in a man...Other men also find male modesty an unattractive trait - perhaps because they believe that bashful boys are letting the side down. The three female researchers showed more than 200 people videotapes of a man and a woman applying for a job as a computer lab manager. The male and female actors both followed the same script in the mocked-up interview and were equally humble…
2 minutes
Can witnessing rudeness make you less creative?
three experimental studies, we found that witnessing rudeness enacted by an authority figure (Studies 1 and 3) and a peer (Study 2) reduced observers’ performance on routine tasks as well as creative tasks. In all three studies we also found that witnessing rudeness decreased citizenship behaviors and increased dysfunctional ideation. Negative affect mediated the relationships between witnessing rudeness and performance. The results of Study 3 show that competition with the victim over scarce resources moderated the relationship between observing…
1 min read
Does how popular you were in high school affect how much money you make later in life?
.We then analyze the effect of the in-degree and out-degree of friendship on adult economic success as measured by each individual's level of earnings some 35 years later. While the out-degree (gregariousness) has no effect, we find a positive effect for in-degree (popularity). One additional friendship nomination in high school is associated with a 2 percent higher wage 35 years later. This is roughly equivalent to almost half the gain from an extra year of education. Shifting somebody from the…
1 min read
Is money a lousy way to motivate people?
e paper studies the determinants of regular volunteering departing from previous literature on extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. It contributes to the literature investigating the role of monetary rewards to influence intrinsic motivation. Using a simple framework that allows me to study the effect of monetary rewards on intrinsic motivation, the paper shows, controlling for endogenous bias, that monetary rewards crowd-out intrinsic motivation. Source: "Do monetary rewards crowd-out intrinsic motivations of volunteers? Some empirical evidence for Italian volunteers" from University of…
7 minutes
Does it help companies if their employees are friends?
present evidence on social incentives in the workplace, namely on whether workers’ behavior is affected by the presence of those they are socially tied to, even in settings where there are no externalities among workers due to either the production technology or the compensation scheme in place. To do so we combine data on individual worker productivity from a firm’s personnel records with information on each worker’s social network of friends in the firm. We find that compared to…
2 minutes
Your Phone Distracts You So Much You Won’t Notice Unicycling Clowns
don't do the studies, I just post them, folks: We investigated the effects of divided attention during walking. Individuals were classified based on whether they were walking while talking on a cell phone, listening to an MP3 player, walking without any electronics or walking in a pair. In the first study, we found that cell phone users walked more slowly, changed directions more frequently, and were less likely to acknowledge other people than individuals in the other conditions. In…
1 min read
Want to increase creativity and innovation? Get on a plane.
ile business surveys often find that managers prefer face-to-face communication for negotiating deals and selling their product, there is reason to believe that face-to-face meetings are particularly important for the transfer of technology, because technology is best explained and demonstrated in person. This paper examines the role of inward business travelers in raising a country's rate of innovation by looking at business travel from the United States to seventy-four other countries during the years 1993-2003. We find that international business…
1 min read
Are there too many psychopaths in corporate America?
, this isn't going to be some anti-capitalist, internet crank rant. Not all psychopaths are running around stabbing people. Some are quite successful: Despite increasing interest in psychopathy research, surprisingly little is known about the etiology of non-incarcerated, successful psychopaths. This review provides an analysis of current knowledge on the similarities and differences between successful and unsuccessful psychopaths derived from five population sources: community samples, individuals from employment agencies, college students, industrial psychopaths, and serial killers. An initial neurobiological model…
2 minutes
