Author: Lloyd Morgan
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Personal Responsibility and Our Irresponsible Behaviours
Even though we may be reluctant to pay a premium for our insurance because of others who engage in irresponsible behaviours (for example: smoking, overeating and health insurance), Sandeep Jauhar, M.D. reminds us of some pertinent results from the health care field. Jauhar provides evidence that “punitive measures to force healthy behavior” do not work;…
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Scores and Comparisons: Most Persuasive Feedback Method
Numeric and normative feedback (scores and comparative information) is more persuasive and effective than text feedback with only “self-relevant data”, regardless of the source. That’s according to a 2006 study looking at the best methods for providing feedback to ‘leaders’: This study investigated the influence of feedback format (text versus numeric/normative) on leaders’ reactions to…
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Underestimating Others’ Willingness to Help
We vastly underestimate how likely people are to provide assistance when asked, in both social settings and when soliciting funds. That’s the verdict coming from research conducted by associate professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Frank Flynn. Flynn found that we underestimate how much others are willing to provide in…
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Succeeding With Freemium (Case Studies)
A look at how to succeed with freemium, through a number of case studies: Experiment with different freemium models: When Pandora offered 10 hours of free radio before requiring users to pay an annual subscription, the vast majority of their users left once their allocation of free time expired. The company then experimented with a…
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Sleep for Creativity
Dreams are not “meaningless narratives” but are “layered with significance and substance”, laments insomniac Jonah Lehrer as he considers the importance of dreaming for creativity: A group of students was given a tedious task that involved transforming a long list of number strings into a new set of number strings. This required the subjects to…
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Information Foraging and The Fold
Even though users are now accustomed to scrolling down web pages, we know thatĀ the fold still exists and is important–and how we can design to take advantage of it. In light of this, Jakob Nielsen has conducted research to see what prompts users use to decide whether to scroll or not (the answer: the information…
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Negotiating Over ‘Sacred Values’
When requested to give up a “sacred value”, the inclusion of a financial incentive incites moral outrage, decreases general support for a compromise, increases anger and increases a subject’s approval of “violent opposition”. Research looking at our reactions to such proposalsĀ offersĀ sameĀ suggestions for negotiating over sacred values. A more successful tack for negotiating over sacred values,…
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Summarising Joel on Software
Now that Joel Spolsky has ‘retired’ from blogging at Joel on Software (in the format the site has been known for, at least), Jan Willem Boer is reading the entire back-catalogue of entries and condensing the knowledge within each essay into a single sentence (or two). The result is a stunning list of tips on…
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Technological Affluence and Happiness (Everything Except TV is Good)
In a study probing the association between ‘technological affluence’ and general well-being it was found that computers, mobile phones and music players increased self-reported levels of happiness, while television ownership decreased it. That is: the ownership of most modern technological goods makes us happy, except for televisions, which make us sad. Using self-reported life satisfaction…
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The Checklist Advantage
To ensure that extremely complex tasks–tasks too complex even for “super-specialists”–are performed effectively, accurately and with minimal mistakes, checklists are an invaluable tool, suggested Atul Gawande in a 2007 article in The New Yorker (and everywhere else since, it seems). Gawande illustrates (in an inordinate amount of detail) how seemingly unnecessary checklists can make huge…