Letters Remain

Category: psychology

  • The Heritability of Happiness

    A study looks at how much of our happiness can be attributed to our genes? Neither socioeconomic status, educational attainment, family income, marital status, nor an indicant of religious commitment could account for more than about 3% of the variance in well-being (WB). From 44% to 52% of the variance in WB, however, is associated…

  • Questioning (Not Telling) Ourselves is the Best Call-to-Action

    Thinking about whether we will do a task or not (“Will Iā€¦?”) rather than focusing on actually performing the task (“I willā€¦.”) has been shown to increase both the probability of us eventually undertaking the task and how successfully we will perform it. The idea seems that “interrogative self-talk”, rather than declarative statements, leads to…

  • Self Affirmations Boost Self-Control

    I’ve written before onĀ positive self-affirmations and how they are not of much use, but now it seems that if we are succumbing to temptation and we want to exercise self-control but are finding it difficult to do so, we should recite positive self-affirmationsĀ to help us resist. A novel experiment has now shown that positive self-affirmations…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • Our Reluctance to Trust Driving Computers

    The advanced radar systems that are slowly making their way into modern cars are already advanced enough to drive our cars for us and save thousands of lives a year, says Robert Scoble as he discusses the safety systems currently available in Ford and Toyota models. The features Scoble describes (and Ford’s Global Chief Safety…

  • Improving Intelligence by Knowing About Intelligence

    Lecturing students on the fact that general intelligence can be improved and that certain races and genders are not naturally more intelligent than others (in-line with current research) can improve test scores–especially for members of the groups typically thought of as having limited intelligence. It’s not just theoretical: the findings were applied successfully to schools…