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Money And The Brain: More Weirdness - Planet Money Blog : NPR
reports some experiments by Kathleen Vohs
Don't Dismiss Taibbi : CJR
Mainstream financial journalism is doing its level, eye-rolling, heavy-sighing best to stuff Matt Taibbi back into the alt-press hole he came from, but he’s not going along with it, and the mainstreamers in any case are making a big mistake.
The Rolling Stone writer cemented his status as the enfant terrible of the business press with “The Great American Bubble Machine,” a 10,000-word excoriation of Goldman Sachs, a muckraker’s-eye view of Goldman history, exploring the bank’s and Wall Street’s contributions to various financial disasters
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The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle, who doesn’t lay a glove on Taibbi in this attack, is unintentionally revealing of a certain strain of financial journalism thinking:
Taibbi is a gifted narrative journalist, whose verbal talents I greatly admire. But financial meltdowns don’t offer villains, for the simple reason that no one person or even one group is powerful enough to take down a whole system.
“Financial meltdowns don’t offer villains?” Does anyone believe that?
And wait a minute: Are we really so sure that “one group,” Wall Street, was not central to this crisis and that its increasing influence over government at all levels—what gives, for instance, with ex-Goldmanite Neil Levin deciding as New York State banking commissioner in 2000 not to regulate credit default swaps as insurance?—was not decisive? And isn’t Goldman Wall Street’s leading firm?
Breaking Habits for Fun and Profit | No Map. No Guide. No Limits.
They go on to cite the work of Ben Fletcher, a British psychologist and business consultant. In his work helping managers become more flexible and tolerant, Fletcher found that while the managers could understand and accept the need to change the way they interacted with subordinates, they could rarely actually do so. Fletcher’s theory? That people are so conditioned to act the same way every day, that much of our behavior—even what we know is bad behavior—is habitual.
How to Stick to Your Exercise Routine | The Greater Good Blog
The results, published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, showed that participants who formulated intentions to overcome obstacles were twice as physically active—exercising nearly one hour more per week—as participants in the control group, who received information about the importance of physical exercise but did not formulate implementation intentions.
OnFiction: Inoculation as Inuring: Considering Narratives and Counter-narratives
In narrative contexts, inoculation refers to the function that opposing ideas may have in strengthening the ideas they critique. The Boy Who Cried Wolf is a classic example: his false cries for help inured (or inoculated) his listeners to real cries;
University Diaries » The Ghost in the Management
I recently looked at the c.v. of a distinguished professor of medicine and saw that he had authored (most usually had co-authored) about 800 articles in peer-reviewed journals, an average of nearly 30 per year over his career....How can a scientist author and publish 40 articles in a year? Year after year? In my fields (Science and Technology Studies, Philosophy, Sociology), five peer-reviewed articles in a year is a lot, and most researchers would be happy to write one truly good article each year.
[0907.0455] The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study
In the late sixties the Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter advanced the apparently paradoxical principle, named since then after him, which can be summarized as follows: "Every new member in a hierarchical organization climbs the hierarchy until he/she reaches his/her level of maximum incompetence". Despite its apparent unreasonableness, such a principle would realistically act in any organization where the way of promotion rewards the best members and where the competence at their new level in the hierarchical structure does not depend on the competence they had at the previous level, usually because the tasks of the levels are very different between each other. Here we show, by means of agent based simulations, that if the latter two features actually hold in a given model of an organization with a hierarchical structure, then not only the "Peter principle" is unavoidable, but it yields in turn a significant reduction of the global efficiency of the organization. Within a game theory-like approach, we explore different promotion strategies and we find, counter intuitively, that in order to avoid such an effect the best ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are either to promote each time an agent at random or to promote randomly the best and the worst members in terms of competence.
Why your dog is smarter than a wolf | csmonitor.com
After a decade studying dogs in their human habitat, Mr. Miklosi and his colleagues have accumulated a body of evidence suggesting that dogs have far greater mental capabilities than scientists had thought. Dogs' smarts, it turns out, come out in their relationships with people.
Late Pleistocene Demography and the Appearance of Modern Human Behavior -- Powell et al. 324 (5932): 1298 -- Science
The origins of modern human behavior are marked by increased symbolic and technological complexity in the archaeological record. In western Eurasia this transition, the Upper Paleolithic, occurred about 45,000 years ago, but many of its features appear transiently in southern Africa about 45,000 years earlier. We show that demography is a major determinant in the maintenance of cultural complexity and that variation in regional subpopulation density and/or migratory activity results in spatial structuring of cultural skill accumulation. Genetic estimates of regional population size over time show that densities in early Upper Paleolithic Europe were similar to those in sub-Saharan Africa when modern behavior first appeared. Demographic factors can thus explain geographic variation in the timing of the first appearance of modern behavior without invoking increased cognitive capacity.
Overcoming Bias : Why Signals Are Shallow
Geoffrey Miller says we try too hard to collect shallow signals that don’t say much to those who know us well. But a boss who has known you for years may not promote you unless you get a better degree, even if school teaches you nothing useful on your job. He might not hire you without that degree, even if he knows and trusts folks who have known you for years. Why do people who know us well care so much about shallow signals?
Do you suffer from Internet fatigue? - CNN.com
Well, you're not alone, according to a recent report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a nonprofit research group in Washington.
The report, written by John Horrigan, the project's associate director of research, says 7 percent of Americans use the Internet as their primary means of social communication and also feel conflicted about that fact. These online social network users, which Horrigan calls "ambivalent networkers," are so connected they feel like they can't quit.
Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm › Get 40% more done, keep it secret
These studies suggest that public revealing of our intentions undermines our follow through. These studies are all very simple. Let’s look at one. They get a group of students who really want to become psychologists and having them filled out a survey. On the last page they ask them to write down what the intend to study next week in service of their goal. The subjects are randomly split into two groups public, and private. The kids in the private group are told that intend-to-study question was included by mistake, the experimenter tears it off and throws it away. For the public group the experiment reads over the survey with the kid. Nominally this is to check for errors, but in reality it just assures the kid knows that the experimenter knows of his study plans.
A week later they have the kids fill out a form to on which days they studied. Those who’s intentions remained private studied 40% more!
The "Bitch" Evolved: Why Girls Are So Cruel to Each Other: Scientific American
Findings from this study indicated a clear difference in aggressive responses between the genders, with women overwhelmingly compelled to retaliate by attacking the offender’s reputation, mostly through gossip. This gender effect panned out even after controlling for participants’ evaluation of the social appropriateness of such acts.
What Your Shopping Really Says About You - Bullish on Books Blog - CNBC.com
In the new book, SPENT: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller reveals the unseen logic behind the chaos of consumerism and suggests new ways we can become more responsible friends and lovers and happier consumers.
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