Kind of cool talk, I’m sure its posted elsewhere but I think several of you might like it anyways.
About this talk (via Ted)
Sugar pills, injections of nothing — studies show that, more often than you’d expect, placebos really work. At TEDMED, magician Eric Mead does a trick to prove that, even when you know something’s not real, you can still react as powerfully as if it is. (Warning: This talk is not suitable for viewers who are disturbed by needles or blood.)
About Eric Mead (Via Ted)
Eric Mead is a prolific magician, mentalist and comedian who worked his way up from doing magic on the street to appearing at exclusive events around the world.
When it comes to encouraging employees to be productive workers, managers seemingly have many tools in their motivational toolbox at their disposal. For example, perhaps they can increase worker motivation by offering to pay more to workers who are especially productive. Or maybe they can try to enhance overall employee morale by including them in a profit-sharing program. Or perhaps they could try to provide recognition to the best workers by offering rewards such as toasters, iPhones, and vacations. Although all of these tactics have the potential to be effective, they can be extremely costly to implement. However, some new research suggests a recipe for success without spending a dime, all in five easy minutes.
Adam Grant, a scholar in the field of organizational behavior, realized that workers often fail to live up to their potential because they’ve lost track of the significance and meaningfulness of their own jobs. He figured that if he could remind employees of why their jobs are important, they might become more highly motivated, and therefore, more productive individuals.
Reading this story requires you to willfully pay attention to the sentences and to tune out nearby conversations, the radio and other distractions. But if a fire alarm sounded, your attention would be involuntarily snatched away from the story to the blaring sound.
New research from Vanderbilt University reveals for the first time how our brains coordinate these two types of attention and why we may be temporarily blinded by surprises.
The research was published March 7, 2010, in Nature Neuroscience.
“The simple example of having your reading interrupted by a fire alarm illustrates a fundamental aspect of attention: what ultimately reaches our awareness and guides our behavior depends on the interaction between goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention. For coherent behavior to emerge, you need these two forms of attention to be coordinated,” René Marois, associate professor of psychology and co-author of the new study, said. “We found a brain area, the inferior frontal junction, that may play a primary role in coordinating these two forms of attention.”
The researchers were also interested in what happens to us when our attention is captured by an unexpected event.
Additional Excerpt (via Science Daily)-
What we show is the dark side or negative impact of the orienting response. We found it blinds you to other events that can occur soon after the presentation of the surprise stimulus,” Marois said.
The researchers hypothesize that we may be temporarily blinded by surprise because the surprise stimulus and subsequent response occupies so much of our processing ability.
“The idea is that we can’t attend to everything at once,” Asplund said. “It seems that the inferior frontal junction is involved in this limitation in attention.”
Introduction & Excerpt
Dr. Robert Cialdini: Practical Ways to Influence Your Prospects or Customers in Any Market
Dr. Cialdini is a New York Times best-selling author whose books Influence and Yes! have collectively sold over three million copies. He’s the President of Influence at Work, which provides corporate programs worldwide, and I have to say as we lead into this, too, that I think influence is on my Top 2 list of all-time favorite marketing books. So with that, welcome, Bob!
Robert Cialdini: Well, thank you, Bob. I’m gratified to hear that.
Bob: I know that goes for many, many people I’ve spoken to. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t cite Influence, and Yes!, being the newer book, I’m sure that will join the list soon.
So my question for you today is there are many different what you call “weapons of influence”, and if you were told that from now on, you could use only one of those weapons of influence, what would it be?
Robert: Well, you know, I think I’m going to answer that question a little differently than most of your interviewees in the past, and that is to say we have to consider what the circumstances are under which people are operating — the people we want to influence.
And right now, I think the state of the economy, the markets — they suggest that the people we’re dealing with are uncertain about what to do, and when people are uncertain, they freeze. They sit on the fence. They just don’t want to move because they’re just unsure of what they should do under those circumstances.
There are two principles of social influence that work very powerfully under these circumstances, when people are unsure.
The first is social proof, or what we can call “consensus” — the idea that people will follow the lead of those around them, especially those around them who are like them, who have similar circumstances or have a similar situation. I just saw an article in an academic journal from Beijing. That shows you the reach of this principle — the cross-cultural reach of it.
If restaurant owner put on the menu, “These are our most popular items”, they immediately become twenty percent more popular.
Bob: That’s a great example because I know that I’ve certainly been strongly influenced by that in restaurants, and I think everybody has.
Robert: Sure, and when you go into a restaurant, you’re not quite sure what the best thing is there. Well, if you find out what the other people around you have been doing or are doing in that situation, it’s a good choice to follow their lead, and that reduces uncertainty for people when they get information about what those around them are doing.
When people are unsure, they don’t look inside themselves for answers. After all, all they see is that lack of confidence — that lack of certainty. They look outside, and one place they look is to the evidence of people like them.
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely’s research has found that the cumulative impacts of various forms of cheating has a significant impact on the world economy. His experiments show that people, across a wide range of situations, will cheat just a little bit, even when given the opportunity to get away with more; but reminders of core values, such as codes of ethics, can reduce cheating. He discusses the implications of these ideas for managers and professional organizations.
Q: There’s an ongoing discussion about whether business could or should be a profession. What does your research show about whether professions in general lead to honest or ethical behavior?
We don’t have direct research on professions. It’s very hard to compare people before they become professionals and after. But we do find that codes of ethics of the sort that professions often have are, on the one hand, very important and, on the other hand, very dangerous. The good side is that they guide you to stay away from potentially ethically compromised situations. On the bad side, if professionals see their peers stretching boundaries and they go along, there’s a chance for very quick deterioration.
People have two goals: We want to look in the mirror and feel good about ourselves, and we want to benefit from cheating. You would think you couldn’t get both, but our psychology is sufficiently flexible that we can as long as we cheat just a little bit. We have found this to be the case in experiment after experiment.
In my view, most people who behave badly are not bad people. They’re just good people who are put in bad situations—where it’s tempting and easy to cheat a little bit. Look at the whole financial crisis, if you and I were getting paid $8 million a year to view mortgage-backed securities as good products, we could do it. It’s inhumane to put people in situations that have tremendous conflict of interest and expect them to be unswayed by it. Ideally, professions eliminate these problems by not making people face them.
My favorite Question (via QN)
Q: How regularly do we have to be reminded in order to have that impulse to act more honestly?
Sadly, I think quite frequently. But we don’t have to be highly thoughtful about morality all the time. We really need to do it at important points in time. For example, I proposed to the Israeli IRS to move the Israeli tax day to be next to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. I don’t know if it would work, but the idea is that you have people already contemplating their decisions, so they may be more inclined to be more honest. Similarly, you might be thinking that April 15th is not a good day for American tax day. If you linked it with New Year’s when people set resolutions and try to turn a new page, people might actually report different taxes.
Below are some of my favorite videos from the archive. I recommend watching the 3rd video...Farnam St you will like it.
1. Ione Fine on Neuroplasticity – Part I
In this first part of her interview, Dr. Ione Fine from the University of Washington explains the basic mechanisms underlying neural plasticity – how the brain can change in response to the specific processing demands of an individual (e.g., by building expertise, after cortical lesions early in life, etc.). The interviewer is Jade Francetich, an undergraduate student of psychology at the University of Idaho. Enjoy
2. Alym Amlani on Psychology and Magic
GoCognitive interviewed Alym Amlani, practicing magician out of Vancouver, BC, in October 2008. Through some simple examples of magic tricks that are in the public domain, Alym draws interesting parallels between the study of magic and the study of cognitive psychology. He points out that many of the basic elements of good magic tricks rely on controlling an observer’s attention and expectations – both topics that have been central to cognitive psychology.
3. David Strayer on “Supertaskers”
In this last part of his interview with goCognitive, Dr. David Strayer from the University of Utah talks about a small subgroup of people who seem to be able to multitask extremely well. These “supertaskers” show little or no impairment when dividing attention between driving and talking on the cell phone. The interview was conducted by Mike Teske, beginning graduate student at the University of Idaho’s Human Factors Psychology program
Consider the classic hypothetical scenario: Your house is on fire and you can take only three things with you before the entire structure becomes engulfed in flames. What would you take? Laptops and external hard drives aside, people’s responses to this question differ wildly. This diversity results from people’s flexibility in ascribing unique value to objects ranging from a hand-scrawled note from a loved one to a threadbare t-shirt that others might consider worthless.
The critical quality that leads people to treat rookie cards like rosaries is that of the sacred, whereby an object becomes worthy of boundless reverence, commitment, and protection. As diverse as people are in ascribing sacred status to possessions, they are equally varied in which values they consider sacred, a diversity that can breed substantial conflict. The abortion debate, for example, often presents a divide between those who consider woman’s “right to choose” sacred versus those who consider a fetus’ “right to life” sacred.
Important Point (Via Sciam)
What truly distinguishes sacred values from secular ones is how people behave when asked to compromise them. When people are asked to trade their sacred values for values considered to be secular—what psychologist Philip Tetlock refers to as a “taboo tradeoff”—they exhibit moral outrage, express anger and disgust, become increasingly inflexible in negotiations, and display an insensitivity to a strict cost-benefit analysis of the exchange. What’s more, when people receive monetary offers for relinquishing a sacred value, they display a particularly striking irrationality. Not only are people unwilling to compromise sacred values for money—contrary to classic economic theory’s assumption that financial incentives motivate behavior—but the inclusion of money in an offer produces a backfire effect such that people become even less likely to give up their sacred values compared to when an offer does not include money. People consider trading sacred values for money so morally reprehensible that they recoil at such proposals.
The human brain is a biological pattern making machine. At birth, a baby’s brain contains 100 billion neurons, roughly as many nerve cells as there are stars in the Milky Way. These billions of neurons in human brain have extraordinary capacity to construct and weave strings of useful information patterns which gets ever more complex as cognitive thought process increases. These neural patterns help the brain to recognize, organize, store and retrieve information patterns when needed. It has been noticed that leaders engage in activities which provide the time, space and structure to facilitate the construction of such neural patterns. People who are open minded to experience new concepts or procedures and who are exposed to more rich information sources such as print, television, news media, internet, seminars and interactive conferences — are able to build more rich and dense neural networks and hence reveal themselves as natural leaders. On the other hand, people who are averse to new models, metaphors, information, concepts or interactive discussions, remain as followers.
Excerpt (via Brain Blogger)
Reflective intelligence of human brain has also been found to increase by provoking deliberate critical and creative thinking. Provoking critical analysis and creative thinking engages natural ability of the human brain to detect relationships between seemingly unrelated objects, link seemingly unrelated information into useful revelation, and create innovative products with new information. While people with leadership tendencies have been extensively found to be in indulging in lateral & critical thinking, innovative inventions, and analyzing errors in positions by interactive discussions, followers have often been found to tread the beaten path and avoiding social interacting on controversial positions.
A capacity for reflective intelligence does not translate into intelligent behavior and thought automatically. The constructive and reflective dimensions of human intelligence need to be consciously cultivated and continuously exercised if its true potential is to be realized. The constructive and reflective intelligence have to developed and refined to a degree where the person is naturally inclined to use it every time, in his every action and thought. Leaders have a natural disposition to cultivate and maximize such constructive and reflective intelligence by indulging in meta-cognition, reflection on specific thinking strategies, seeking social opportunities for sharing of challenging ideas and optimizing physiological intelligence by choosing to exercise, eat only healthy food, and live in conducive environment which allows adequate light, fresh air and no distractions.
Are we over estimating remembering and underestimating learning?
Current research by Nate Kornell, an assistant professor of psychology at Williams College, and Robert A. Bjork of the University of California, Los Angeles address this question and was recently published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.
In their paper titled A Stability Bias in Human Memory: Overestimating Remembering and Underestimating Learning, Kornell and Bjork write: “To manage one’s own conditions of learning effectively requires gaining an understanding of the activities and processes that do and do not support learning.”
In psychology, experts use the term metacognition to talk about how people think about their own cognitive processes – in essence, thinking about thinking.
To probe the way people think about their capacity for remembering, Kornell and Bjork asked people to look at a list of words and predict how well they would be able to remember the words after subsequent periods of study and testing.
Their results led the researchers to the suggestion that people are under confident in their learning abilities and overconfident in their memories. That is, people failed to predict that they would be able to remember more words after studying more – although in reality, they learned far more — instead basing their predictions on current memory. Kornell and Bjork call this a “stability bias” in memory.
Kornell’s work also has been published in Scientific American, Psychological Science, Current Directions in Psychological Science, and Applied Cognitive Psychology, among other journals.
A person’s physical appearance, along with his sexual identity, is the personal characteristic that is most obvious and accessible to others in social interaction. The present experiment was designed to determine whether physically attractive stimulus persons, both male and female, are (a) assumed to possesss more socially desirable personality traits than physically unattractive stimulus persons and (b) expected to lead better lives (eg, be more competent husbands and wives, be more successful occupationall, etc) than unattractive stimulus persons….the present results indicate a “what is beautiful is good” stereotype along the physical attractiveness dimension… The implications of such a sterotype on self-concept development and the course of social interaction are discussed.
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