Andrew Lyons's List: psychology

• In an effort to identify unhappy staff, Google’s program sorts through personnel files - appraisals, salary and promotion history - to determine who might be ready to leave. The algorithm operates under the assumption that employees who feel underutilized are the most likely candidates for seeking new jobs, giving management an opportunity to intervene and redefine their roles before this happens.

  • Of course, the assumption here is that managers are using the date to take positive action to improve the employee's experience on the job instead of using it to attack those they don't like. At google this may be the case, but from what I remember from other companies, this sort of tech can be used to shove off those already unpopular with managers for other reasons.
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• Neuroscience, too, is being used to study how to manipulate customer demand. Lucid Systems, a marketing-research company visited for this special wired investigation, promises its clients “the unspoken truth” about people’s innermost thoughts: “Objective scientific data to help you discover not just what people say, but what they... feel about advertising and marketing messages, brands and products – even before they are aware they are doing so.”

  • Companies with the ability to read comsumer minds.
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• Sense Networks, a San Francisco company covered in our report, is already tracking mobile-phone users via global positioning satellites, phone masts that catch their signals, or local Wi-Fi networks that detect their presence. The company tracks consumers as dots moving across a map and then analyses each user’s behaviour to place him or her in a designated “tribe” – “young and edgy” night owls, or “barflies” who stay loyal to their local bar.

  • Market research firms replace the government as Big Brother.
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• “Many of the people-manipulating activities of persuaders raise profoundly disturbing questions about the kind of society they are seeking to build,” he wrote. They have, he said, the power to do good or evil “on a scale never before possible... It is this right to privacy in our minds – privacy to be either rational or irrational – that I believe we must strive to protect.”

  • This seems a bit pandering to the subject of the story. Give me an example of the potential good.
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• A study by Joanne Wood and John Lee of the University of Waterloo and Elaine Perunovic of the University of New Brunswick asked participants to say "I am a lovable person" to themselves sixteen times in four minutes. People with low self-esteem actually felt worse about themselves after the four minutes were up. Time's John Cloud offers several explanations for this failure of a commonly recommended mood-lifting technique. For one thing, he writes, "when people hear something they don't believe, they are not only often skeptical but adhere even more strongly to their original position." So if you think you're terrible, but tell yourself you're lovable, you may end up feeling even more terrible as a kind of rebellion.

  • So, concurrently, couldn't self-deprecating humor and humility signify confidence and a better sense of self worth after all?
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• The military psychologist is merely a foot soldier in psychology’s participation in torture. It goes much deeper. We now know that psychologists helped design and implement significant segments of George Bush’s torture program.
• The military psychologist is merely a foot soldier in psychology’s participation in torture. It goes much deeper. We now know that psychologists helped design and implement significant segments of George Bush’s torture program.

• Dr Richard Stephens, who conducted the study at the university's school of   psychology, believes it may explain why swearing is still common place in   languages around the world. 

   

   He suggests that swearing could have evolved as a way of raising aggression   levels and reducing the feeling of pain to allow our ancestors to flee or   fight back when attacked by predators. 

  • Survival of the foulest. For fuck sake, at last a playing field on which I can compete!
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• Do activists lead happier and more fulfilled lives than the average person? Two online surveys using a sample of college students (N = 341) and a national sample of activists matched with a control group (N = 718) demonstrated that several indicators of activism were positively associated with measures of hedonic, eudaimonic, and social well-being. Furthermore, in both studies, activists were more likely to be "flourishing" (Keyes, 2002) than were nonactivists. A third study of college students (N = 296) explored the possible causal role of activism by measuring well-being after subjects either engaged in a brief activist behavior, a brief nonactivist behavior, or no behavior. Although well-being did not differ substantially between these three groups, the subjects who did the brief activist behavior reported significantly higher levels of subjective vitality than did the subjects who engaged in the nonactivist behavior. Potential mediators of the relationship between activism and well-being and the usefulness of these findings are discussed.

• Specifically, the findings indicate lower levels of trust and support within virtual as compared to conventional relationships, and lower levels of trust within free-agent versus regular-employee virtual relationships. Implications for future research and management practice are discussed.

  • Hardly shocking, but is the lack of trust based on perceptions of online dealings (we all know people goof off more when work involves the web, etc.), direct experience or the psychological impact that comes with a lack of physical interaction?
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• Society now defaults to a relentless Proustian remembrance of all things past.

  • Lost time uploaded
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• And society suffers when people stop taking risks.
• Mayer-Schönberger thinks all social software should be designed like Drop.io—to at least ask when we want our posts and uploads to be deleted. That way, we'd be more inclined to meditate for a second about whether something ought to live forever.

  • Which brings up another interesting notion that we can calendar our memories for loss. Like, I'd like to know what I did for couple of weeks to enjoy it, but I figure I'll want to start forgetting it in another couple of months.
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• For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs. Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing.

  • this would be within the self-actualization area of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

• The restrictions infantilize workers—they foster resentment, reduce morale, lock people into inefficient routines, and, worst of all, they kill our incentives to work productively. In the information age, most companies' success depends entirely on the creativity and drive of their workers. IT restrictions are corrosive to that creativity—they keep everyone under the thumb of people w
• Here's why: The restrictions infantilize workers—they foster resentment, reduce morale, lock people into inefficient routines, and, worst of all, they kill our incentives to work productively. In the information age, most companies' success depends entirely on the creativity and drive of their workers. IT restrictions are corrosive to that creativity—they keep everyone under the thumb of people who have no idea which tools we need to do our jobs but who are charged with deciding anyway.
• Here's why: The restrictions infantilize workers—they foster resentment, reduce morale, lock people into inefficient routines, and, worst of all, they kill our incentives to work productively. In the information age, most companies' success depends entirely on the creativity and drive of their workers. IT restrictions are corrosive to that creativity—they keep everyone under the thumb of people who have no idea which tools we need to do our jobs but who are charged with deciding anyway.
• Here's why: The restrictions infantilize workers—they foster resentment, reduce morale, lock people into inefficient routines, and, worst of all, they kill our incentives to work productively. In the information age, most companies' success depends entirely on the creativity and drive of their workers. IT restrictions are corrosive to that creativity—they keep everyone under the thumb of people who have no idea which tools we need to do our jobs but who are charged with deciding anyway.
• The restrictions infantilize workers—they foster resentment, reduce morale, lock people into inefficient routines, and, worst of all, they kill our incentives to work productively. In the information age, most companies' success depends entirely on the creativity and drive of their workers. IT restrictions are corrosive to that creativity—they keep everyone under the thumb of people who have no idea which tools we need to do our jobs but who are charged with deciding anyway.

  • Locking down computers has never worked to increase productivity, espacially in the information age when many of the social sites are also the more easily, quickly accessible information research access points.
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• that, in most instances, depression should not be thought of as a disorder at all. In an article recently published in Psychological Review, we argue that depression is in fact an adaptation, a state of mind which brings real costs, but also brings real benefits.

• One surprising and compelling conclusion is that people who experience damage to the parts of their brain responsible for emotional reactions are unable to decide, because their rational mind dithers endlessly over the possible rational reasons for each course of action. The Platonic ideal of a rational being making decisions without recourse to the wordless gut-instinct is revealed as a helpless schmuck who can't answer questions as basic as "White or brown toast?"

• Even though your brain still holds this information, you might not always have access to it
• Maybe you remember breakfast at a certain restaurant, but not what you ate; perhaps you recall a particular conversation, but not what you said. It’s not known whether those details vanish from the mind altogether, or are subsumed by some larger pattern, or remain intact but inaccessible.

• Ninety percent of the single women in an Oklahoma State University study on 'mate poaching' were more interested in dating a man who was already in a relationship than a single man.  

  • A lot of reasons for this. Someone in a relationship shows more signs of desireability and biologically we intuit a more attributes associated with success.
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• most single women actually prefer men who are already in a committed relationship.
• When researchers described the women's match as single, 59 percent of the single women in the study were interested in pursuing him.  However, when they described the exact same man as being in a committed relationship, 90 percent of the women were interested.
• possibly because they are more interested in a guy who's already shown he can commit by being in another relationship, indicating he'd be a reliable mating partner.
• breaking

  • Well, there could be multiple reasons for that, and the indicators of success at a biological level still are there. As a mate he's seen as a more valued commodity in the whole pool. if she sees herself as a more suitable match then she may be projecting that he will see her in the same way.
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• An article in the journal, Sociological Inquiry, ["There Must Be a Reason": Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification, Vol. 79, No. 2. (2009), pp. 142-162. [PDF] casts light on the effectiveness of propaganda.  Researchers examined why big lies succeed where little lies fail.  Governments can get away with mass deceptions, but politicians cannot get away with sexual affairs.

• I start with Plato's critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They're not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down -- the ultimate irony.

  • Throughout time it seems that technophobes have eventually relied on the very things they hammer at. Blogs warning against technology, religious types in search of people with scientific credentials to validify their claims, etc.
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• A local authority in Israel has announced that it is establishing a special team of youth counselors and psychologists whose job it will be to identify young Jewish women who are dating Arab men and "rescue" them.
• A local authority in Israel has announced that it is establishing a special team of youth counselors and psychologists whose job it will be to identify young Jewish women who are dating Arab men and "rescue" them.
• Since the state's founding in 1948, analysts have noted, a series of legal and administrative measures have been taken by Israel to limit the possibilities of close links developing between Jewish and Arab citizens, the latter comprising a fifth of the population.
• In addition, civil marriage is banned in Israel, meaning that in the small number of cases where Jews and Arabs want to wed, they can do so only by leaving the country for a ceremony abroad. The marriage is recognized on the couple's return.
• "The Jewish soul is a precious, all-too-rare resource, and we are not prepared to give up on even a single one," says the website.
• Yad L'achim's founder, Rabbi Shlomo Dov Lifschitz, is quoted on the site saying: "People must understand that Jewish-Arab marriages are part of the larger Israeli-Arab conflict.  They [Arab men] see it as their goal to marry them [Jewish women] and ensure that their childen aren't raised as Jews.

  • And this is what we call the overt racism.

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• The type of advanced remote-control robots imagined in Surrogates likely won’t materialize in the real world for decades, if at all. Yet on a metaphorical level, Mostow, who earlier delved into big-screen robotics when he directed Terminator 3, believes people have already become overly attached to technologies that threaten to make in-person face time obsolete.

   

  Pointing to the near-addictive quality of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, Mostow says: “What this movie is really about is what it means to live in a digital age where we’re connected to all these machines, yet we’re also so isolated from each other.”

  • I love it when action sci-fi has the added little bit of philosophy/psych. It doesn't take much, but it makes all the difference.
    
    Though it's very difficult to make good sci-fi that doesn't actually warn of a distopian outcome,
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