Month: July 2010
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The Personal Business of Recommending Books
For book recommendations, most of us rely on the suggestions of trusted friends and on word of mouth. This, at least, allows us to hold someone accountable for those inevitable poor recommendations. But what of ‘professional’ book recommenders (writers in publications, not algorithmic ‘recommenders’)? Laura Miller–author of the book recommendation Slate column, –looks at what…
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Oil Spills and Nature’s Resilience
Faced with an oil spill of the Deepwater Horizon‘s magnitude, nature is resilient and well-adapted to cope with the consequences–that is, provided we don’t try to clean it using methods that will do more damage. Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist (and many of my favourite popular science books), discusses what we should remember…
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Privacy and Identity on the Internet
Jeffrey Rosen, law professor at George Washington University (GWU), has called the current incarnation of the Internet “a digital world that never forgets” in a recent piece on privacy for the The New York Times. It’s an astute article looking at the idea of segmented identities, the search for a way to safely control our…
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Foreign Accents Make Statements Less Trustworthy
Due to the principles of processing fluency (also known as cognitive fluency, discussed here many times before), we know that information that is easier to process is perceived to be–among other features–more familiar, pleasant, truthful and less risky. A recent study has shown that this is also true for foreign accents: statements spoken by non-native…
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Using Charity to Increase Voluntary Payments
If a business is experimenting with voluntary pricing (‘pay-what-you-want’ pricing), to increase sales and profits give a portion of voluntary payments away to charity (and advertise the fact, naturally). That’s the conclusion from a study by researcher Ayelet Gneezy comparing a number of pricing plans involving–in various combinations–voluntary payments, fixed prices and charitable donations: At…
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Life Advice Through Management Theory and Business Strategy
When Harvard Business School’s class of 2010 invited professor Clayton Christensen (expert on disruptive technology and innovation, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma) to address them, they requested he talk on how to apply management theory principles to one’s personal life. Christensen responded by answering three questions: How can I be sure that I’ll be happy…
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Sergey Brin’s Search for a Parkinson’s Cure
After discovering that he held the LRRK2 mutation on his twelfth chromosome (indicating that his lifetime risk of developing Parkinson’s disease is 30-75% rather than the typical 1%), Google co-founder Sergey Brin became one of the first philanthropists to fund research into a disease based on the results of a genetic test. In Thomas Goetz’s…
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Embodied Cognition and How Objects Influence Our Perceptions
The physical properties of objects we interact with can substantially influence our opinion of unrelated items and people. Through a number of novel experiments, MIT’s Joshua Ackerman has clearly shown how the texture, weight, and other physical properties of objects we touch affect our judgements and decisions (neatly summarised by Ed Yong): Weight is linked…
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An Expert’s an Expert Only When We Agree
In the face of information that is contradictory to our beliefs, not only do we reinforce our position, but we also question the credibility of the source itself. In a study showing that we only agree that there is scientific consensus if that consensus agrees with our viewpoint, researchers from the Cultural Cognition Project also…