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New Research: Rituals Make Us Value Things More
Harvard Business Review: Rituals in the workplace can reinforce the behaviors we want, create focus and a sense of belonging, and make change stick. I have gone on and on in the past about the benefits of established rituals and routines for personal productivity – how they capitalize on our brains’ ability to direct our behavior on autopilot, allowing us to reach our goals even when we are distracted or preoccupied with other things. And there are plenty of companies who’ve been smart enough to harness this power.
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This Test Can Determine If Your Marriage Will Last
TIME: The measure isn’t the high tech detector of romantic emotions that you might expect. Instead, it looks a lot like that familiar thing we know as our gut feeling. Next time somebody who just went through a messy breakup says that they always knew that the relationship would never work, it may not just be hindsight talking. In an intriguing new experiment on how much our automatic responses can tell us about what we really feel, a group of researchers discovered that there may be a test that predicts whether a marriage will last. First, they asked more than 100 recently married people in Tennessee to rate their spouse. Unsurprisingly, everybody declared that their spouses were swell.
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Bonuses More Satisfying When Spent on Others, Study Suggests
The holiday bonuses that employers began giving to their staffs at the turn of the last century have been shrinking — and even disappearing at some organizations — ever since the economy tumbled several years ago. But it turns out those end-of-the-year cash rewards may not be an effective way to motivate workers, anyway. A recent study suggests that encouraging employees to give money to others is a better morale booster than simply giving them cash to spend on themselves. In a recent report on PLOS One, a team of psychological scientists and business scholars discussed their findings on the effectiveness of “prosocial bonuses,” such as donations to charities on an employee’s behalf.
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A Psychologist’s Guide to Online Dating
The Atlantic: Edward Royzman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, asks me to list four qualities on a piece of paper: physical attractiveness, income, kindness, and fidelity. Then he gives me 200 virtual “date points” that I’m to distribute among the four traits. The more I allocate to each attribute, the more highly I supposedly value that quality in a mate. This experiment, which Royzman sometimes runs with his college classes, is meant to inject scarcity into hypothetical dating decisions in order to force people to prioritize. I think for a second, and then I write equal amounts (70) next to both hotness and kindness, then 40 next to income and 20 next to fidelity.
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No Fate! Or Fate. What’s Your Choice?
High on my list of guilty pleasures are the Terminator movies, especially T2, which I just watched again the other day. In a crucial scene in this futuristic thriller, hero Sarah Connor is close to despair in a Mexican desert camp, beaten down by the daunting responsibility of saving the world. Sitting alone at a picnic table, she dozes off and dreams of the nuclear devastation that has been foretold and of all the people who will perish. When she wakes with a start, she grabs her Bowie knife and begins carving into the table. She then jumps into action, as the camera lingers on the words she has scratched out: “No fate.” This epiphany transforms Sarah.
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When Sex Doesn’t Sell
Fast Company: Sex sells, but only at a high price, according to a new study. Overtly sexual advertising can make women downright angry, but they tend to view a sexualized ad for a luxury product more positively than the same ad selling a discount item, marketing researchers from the University of Minnesota, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the University of British Columbia found.
