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Irrational Game Aims to Steer Consumers Toward Rational Choices
The New York Times: In his 2008 best-selling book, “Predictably Irrational,” Dan Ariely, a Duke University professor of psychology and behavioral economics, proposed the idea of a “self-control credit card.” In theory, this card would hinder one’s ability to spend excessively by initiating warning alerts to designated overseers or shutting down completely if certain budgets were exceeded. Mr. Ariely has yet to persuade any financial institution that reining in spendthrifts this way is a rational business proposition. But he continues to experiment with products that might improve consumers’ decision-making. This time around, Mr. Ariely designed playing cards, not credit cards.
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How Fairness Develops in Kids Around the World
The Atlantic: You're sitting at a table with a friend and a stranger offers you some candy. Hooray! Who doesn't like candy? But wait! You're not getting the same amounts. One of you gets four delicious pieces, and the other gets a measly one. Does that feel unfair? Do you bristle? Do you forfeit your candy and your friend’s candy, because they’re unevenly distributed? ... McAuliffe and Blake caution that this doesn't mean that some countries are fairer than others. For a start, the children in the study might all eventually come to reject their own unfair advantages during adolescence or later in life. “We also don’t know precisely why some children reject advantageous offers,” says Blake.
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THE SECRET TO SOUNDING SMART? USING SIMPLE LANGUAGE
Fast Company: It might sound counterintuitive, but using four-syllable textbook words to demonstrate your smarts will actually make you appear less capable. "So often, our intuitions about what will impress others are wrong," says Daniel M. Oppenheimer, professor of psychology at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. He led a series of studies on how the use of language can make one appear more or less intelligent. ... The reason for this phenomenon, Oppenheimer explains, is that the ease of processing information is strongly associated with positive qualities such as confidence, intelligence, and capability.
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Eyeing college stress, sleep patterns
The Boston Globe: MIT professor Rosalind Picard is worried about campus stress. After a handful of suicides in recent years, Picard started thinking about how her own work might be able to help change MIT’s emotional climate. The founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the university’s Media Lab, Picard has long tried to turn emotions into something that can be counted and measured — following the “old engineering principle that for something to be controllable, it has to be observable.” Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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Beyond Taste Buds: The Science of Delicious
National Geographic: JULIE MENNELLA, A BIOLOGIST who studies the sense of taste in babies and toddlers, often records her experiments on video. When I visited her recently at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, she showed me a video of a baby in a high chair being fed something sweet by her mother. Almost as soon as the spoon is in the baby’s mouth, her face lights up ecstatically, and her lips pucker as if to suck. Then Mennella showed me another video, of a different baby being given his first taste of broccoli, which, like many green vegetables, has a mildly bitter taste. The baby grimaces, gags, and shudders. He pounds the tray of his high chair.
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The Key to Political Persuasion
The New York Times: IN business, everyone knows that if you want to persuade people to make a deal with you, you have to focus on what they value, not what you do. If you’re trying to sell your car, you emphasize the features of the sale that appeal to the buyer (the reliability and reasonable price of the vehicle), not the ones that appeal to you (the influx of cash). This rule of salesmanship, as we demonstrated in a series of experiments detailed in a recent article in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, also applies in political debate — i.e., you should frame your position in terms of the moral values of the person you’re trying to convince.
