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Using Smartphones and Apps to Enhance Loyalty Programs
The New York Times: Nearly as long as there have been coffee shops and carwashes, all manner of businesses have handed out buy-10-get-one-free punch cards and hoped to reap the rewards of this simplest of loyalty marketing campaigns. But a new day is dawning. Smartphones and loyalty apps have begun offering small businesses enhanced program features and automated administration capabilities once affordable only to large companies like airlines and hotel chains. These capabilities also offer the equivalent of a real-world psychology lab for easily evaluating the effects of offerings and incentives on customer loyalty.
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THE SURPRISING AND POWERFUL LINKS BETWEEN POSTURE AND MOOD
Fast Company: The next time you’re feeling sad and depressed, pay close attention to your posture. According to cognitive scientists, you’ll likely be slumped over with your neck and shoulders curved forward and head looking down. While it’s true that you’re sitting this way because you’re sad, it’s also true that you’re sad because you’re sitting this way. This philosophy, known as embodied cognition, is the idea that the relationship between our mind and body runs both ways, meaning our mind influences the way our body reacts, but the form of our body also triggers our mind.
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The Sound of Intellect
Richard Nelson Bolles, a former Episcopal pastor, decided to self-publish his advice for job hunters in 1970, in the midst of a tough job market for newly-minted college graduates. The handbook—What Color is Your Parachute?—immediately gained popularity by word-of-mouth, and was soon on its way to the best-seller list. In the decades since, it has become the bible for young professionals entering the world of work. It has been revised almost every year, and has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.
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Analysis of Social Cognition Predicts Dangerous Drivers
A team of psychological scientists in the Czech Republic is looking at the brains of bad drivers to understand why some of us flout the rules--putting others at risk of serious injury or death--while the rest of us abide by them. In a recent study published in the journal NeuroImage, lead author Jana Zelinková of the Central European Institute of Technology found that while watching videos on traffic safety, people with a history of dangerous driving show relatively less activation in brain areas associated with social cognition and empathy compared to their law-abiding counterparts.
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Americans Overestimate Class Mobility
Pacific Standard: America, we learn as children, is the land of opportunity—a place where anyone who works hard and saves their money can climb their way into a higher social class. While statistics do not bear out this belief, newly published research suggests it remains stubbornly entrenched in our minds. Across four studies, Americans offered “substantial and consistent overestimates of class mobility, overestimating the amount of income mobility and educational access by a wide margin,” write University of Illinois psychologists Michael Kraus and Jacinth Tan.
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Companies Wanting Immediate Sales Should Pass On Super Bowl Ads
NPR: Researchers asked this question: Is a company better off spending big money for a Super Bowl ad or buying several spots for that same amount of money at a less expensive time of the year? Well, there are a couple of different reasons. One, Geisenberg thinks that being in sort of the hyper-excited state that people are as they're watching these big sporting events might not actually make you very conducive to processing the content of the ads. But there's also something else. Sascha Topolinski in Germany recently conducted a study. He wasn't studying the Super Bowl, but his research is spot on when it comes to describing how most Americans watch the Super Bowl.
