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07 Nov 09

Ellen Langer: Read Chapter One

  • In the 1970s my colleague Judith Rodin and I conducted an experiment with nursing home residents.1 We encouraged one group of participants to find ways to make more decisions for themselves. For example, they were allowed to choose where to receive visitors, and if and when to watch the movies that were shown at the home. Each also chose a houseplant to care for, and they were to decide where to place the plant in their room, as well as when and how much to water it. Our intent was to make the nursing home residents more mindful, to help them engage with the world and live their lives more fully.
  • A second, control group received no such instructions to make their own decisions; they were given houseplants but told that the nursing staff would care for them. A year and a half later, we found that members of the first group were more cheerful, active, and alert, based on a variety of tests we had administered both before and after the experiment. Allowing for the fact that they were all elderly and quite frail at the start, we were pleased that they were also much healthier: we were surprised, however, that less than half as many of the more engaged group had died than had those in the control group.
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The Limits of Control - Happy Days Blog - NYTimes.com

"Eliminate control, and people experience depression, stress and the onset of disease. In a study of elderly nursing home patients[1] , one group was told they could decide how their room would be arranged, and could choose a plant to care for. Another group had their rooms set up for them and a plant chosen and tended to for them. Eighteen months later 15 percent of the patients in the group given control had died, compared with 30 percent in the passive group."

happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-limits-of-control - Preview

psychology happiness services

14 Oct 09

Technology Review: Blogs: Predictably Irrational: A Fictional historic view of the future

  • this painful and expensive lesson caused businesses and policy makers to recognize three main lessons: 1) human beings have many irrational tendencies, fallibilities, and quirks; 2) we often have bad intuitions and a limited understanding of our irrational tendencies and; 3) if we want to create effective policies we shouldn’t rely on our intuitions for finding recommendations nor on the assumption that people behave rationally; instead, we should ground our recommendations in how people actually behave.
  • After a few years spent watching in awe as business productivity improved,  government policymakers followed suit by implementing experiments with the Education-Forward Initiative (formerly No Child Left Behind). These experiments showed that basing teachers’ salaries on student performances had minor short-term benefits and caused substantial long-term damage on teacher and student motivation; that creating interest in education was more important than grades; and that shifting the curriculum focus from calculus to statistics and probability had a wonderful impact on students.
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12 Oct 09

Innovation: The psychology of Google Wave - tech - 09 October 2009 - New Scientist

  • "We need to ask what opportunity Wave allows people to express themselves and to understand what other people mean when they contribute a message to a conversation,"
  • The creators of Wave pitch it as "what email would look like if it were invented today"
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11 Oct 09

Positive psychology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  • for the half century clinical psychology "has been consumed by a single topic only - mental illness",[8] echoing Maslow’s comments.[9] He urged psychologists to continue the earlier missions of psychology of nurturing talent and improving normal life.[1]
    • Research into the Pleasant Life, or the "life of enjoyment", examines how people optimally experience, forecast, and savor the positive feelings and emotions that are part of normal and healthy living (e.g. relationships, hobbies, interests, entertainment, etc.).
    • The study of the Good Life, or the "life of engagement", investigates the beneficial affects of immersion, absorption, and flow that individuals feel when optimally engaged with their primary activities. These states are experienced when there is a positive match between a person's strength and the task they are doing, i.e. when they feel confident that they can accomplish the tasks they face.
    • Inquiry into the Meaningful Life, or "life of affiliation", questions how individuals derive a positive sense of well-being, belonging, meaning, and purpose from being part of and contributing back to something larger and more permanent than themselves (e.g. nature, social groups, organizations, movements, traditions, belief systems).
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18 Sep 09

Get Mental Notes

showcards to surface bias/heuristics

getmentalnotes.com - Preview

bias behaviour psychology research design

05 Jul 09

Made to Stick: In Defense of Feelings | Fast Company

  • But what if unethical behavior is actually spurred, rather than prevented, by reason?

  • Consider a provocative series of experiments conducted by Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto. He put test subjects into interactions with an anonymous partner where they had two options: to treat their partners fairly or to lie to them. If they decided to lie, they would gain at the expense of their partners.



    Before making the decision to cheat or be fair, the test subjects were given some guidance. Some were encouraged to think rationally about the situation and to ignore their emotions. Equipped with this advice, the great majority (69%) analyzed the situation and con-cluded that they should screw their partners. Others were primed to "make decisions based on gut feelings." Their guts were pretty trustworthy: Only 27% lied.

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The Guardian | Oliver Burkeman on how to think yourself young

  • In September 1979, the psychologist Ellen Langer took a group of frail, elderly men on a week-long retreat, during which she asked them to live as if it were 20 years earlier. The men stayed in a converted monastery, which Langer furnished in a 1950s style; they listened to 1959's music (Hank Williams, Nat King Cole) and 1959 sports games on old-fashioned radios.
  • Instead, Langer organised discussions on "recent" events and "new" books, such as Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus; she screened Some Like It Hot. Participants who'd become dependent on carers were encouraged to dress, clean and serve meals as if they were younger. By week's end, Langer's dizzyingly audacious hunch had been confirmed. The men were standing straighter, walking better, and demonstrating more joint flexibility. They had stronger grips and better hearing; they scored higher in intelligence tests. (They outperformed a control group, who'd been on a parallel retreat without the time-travel aspect.) In turning back their psychological clock, it appeared, Langer had turned back their physiological one, too.
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