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We Know Why You’re Always Late
The Wall Street Journal: Chronically late people can be frustrating and baffling to anyone stuck waiting for them. One main explanation for their behavior is deceptively simple, psychologists say: People simply underestimate how long a task will take. That’s a little-known concept called the planning fallacy, which is a strong tendency to chronically underestimate task completion. The planning fallacy is one of the most difficult behavioral patterns to change, experts say. “This is a judgment that you’d think that people would be motivated to get right,” said Justin Kruger, a social psychologist and professor in the marketing department at NYU’s Stern School of Business.
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The Logic of Long Lines
The Atlantic: Earlier this week, Chipotle had a one-day buy-one-get-one-free special to promote their new-ish (and hugely unpopular) tofu tacos. Critics have been taking down the "free"-ness of this promotion in two ways: One, claiming the free burrito requires saving the receipt and—much like a coupon—many will inevitably get lost in bags, eaten by dogs, or thrown away accidentally. Secondly, critics say, the crowds during free-food promotions will make waiting in line not worth it simply due to opportunity cost. ... But long lines aren't always unproductive: Some waits increase the appeal of a product.
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On Tinder, Taking a Swipe at Love, or Sex, or Something, in New York
The New York Times: On a recent night, with Valentine’s Day looming, I went out for drinks with a woman I know and a few of her friends. It was a Thursday, and the bar they chose, Bondurants, on the Upper East Side, was packed with people just like them: good-looking, semi-affluent millennials, downing craft beer and milling about in hungry-looking, monosexual clusters. My acquaintance, Dana, who is 25 and works in public relations, is an enthusiastic, some might say obsessive, user of the dating app Tinder. She, like her friends, will often spend hours blithely swiping through its gallery of digitized faces — at work, at home, even in busy pickup bars.
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Evolution of the Human Brain: What’s Love Got To Do With It?
With our uniquely large brains and extended childhoods, humans are a bit of an evolutionary puzzle. According to a recent article published in Perspectives in Psychological Science, romantic love and the pair-bonding that it motivates may be part of the answer to this evolutionary riddle. Researchers Garth Fletcher of Victoria University in Wellington New Zealand and collaborators Jeffry A. Simpson, Lorne Campbell, and Nickola C. Overall argue that the adaptation of romantic love may have played a key role in the evolution of our big, sophisticated brains and social aptitude. “Evolutionary adaptations typically have a jury-rigged nature, and romantic love is no exception,” says Fletcher.
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How Real Are Facebook Friendships?
The Atlantic: Editor of the New York Times Book Review Pamela Paul’s recent column “How to Be Liked By Everyone Online” describes how social media “has upended social and psychological norms” by changing some words to their opposite, or at least giving them a very different gist than they initially had. With Facebook, "to friend" has become a verb, and yet to do so, in the social-media sense, is a fairly passive act, Paul said. In real life, when a friendship ruptures, it’s a major event. But just as it’s easy to start a Facebook relationship, it’s virtually effort-free to end one. The personal investment on either side of “unfriending” somebody is infinitely lower than offline.
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We Know How You Feel
The New Yorker: Three years ago, archivists at A.T. & T. stumbled upon a rare fragment of computer history: a short film that Jim Henson produced for Ma Bell, in 1963. Henson had been hired to make the film for a conference that the company was convening to showcase its strengths in machine-to-machine communication. Told to devise a faux robot that believed it functioned better than a person, he came up with a cocky, boxy, jittery, bleeping Muppet on wheels. “This is computer H14,” it proclaims as the film begins.
