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Greater Performance Improvements When Quick Responses Are Rewarded More Than Accuracy Itself
ScienceBlogs: Last month's Frontiers in Psychology contains a fascinating study by Dambacher, Hübner, and Schlösser in which the authors demonstrate that the promise of financial reward can actually reduce performance when rewards are given for high accuracy. Counterintuitively, performance (characterized as accuracy per unit time) is actually better increased by financial rewards for response speed in particular. The authors demonstrated this surprising result using a flanker task. In Dambacher et al's "parity" version of the flanker, subjects had to determine whether the middle character in strings like "149" or "$6#" were even or odd.
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Lunch break: Experience vs. memory
The Washington Post: Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate and one of the founders of behavioral economics, explains in a TED talk how our “experiencing selves” and “remembering selves” perceive happiness differently: Read the whole story: The Washington Post
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Understanding Your Mind Is Mission Critical
Scientific American: Earlier this year, Senator Tom Coburn published a report called “Under the Microscope,” in which he criticized the funding of any research he couldn’t immediately understand as important. Of particularly dubious value, in Coburn’s opinion, are the behavioral and social sciences—including my own field, psychology.
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Can head shape determine chances of business success?
The Guardian: A new line of American-British research suggests that the shape of a chief executive officer's head can indicate how well his firm will prosper. The shape also predicts whether the chief executive will act immorally. The research offers a mathematical tool that financial analysts can add to their professional kit bag: the chief executive officer's facial width-to-height ratio. The "chief executive facial WHR", for short. The research and its financial implications are outlined in a study called A Face Only an Investor Could Love: Chief Executive Facial Structure Predicts Firm Financial Performance, to be published in the journal Psychological Science.
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Punishment without spanking
CNN: Noël Plummer can't imagine making a conscious decision to inflict physical pain on her 8-year-old daughter as a punishment. She's only slapped her daughter once, without thinking, when her then-5-year-old was having an enormous tantrum. She's never hit her again. While she recognizes that physical punishment may encourage immediate fear-based compliance, "I'm interested in my child respecting my authority and decisions, and adopting my values about appropriate behavior," says Plummer, an attorney living in Albany, California.
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How to find true friends (and love) in 45 minutes
WIRED UK: Can you make someone become intimately close to you -- even fall in love with you -- in less than an hour? Just ask Arthur Aron. Dr Aron -- known to friends as Art -- runs the Interpersonal Relationships Lab at Stony Brook University in upstate New York, and he has love on his mind. Passionate love, unreciprocated love, romantic attraction, unexpected arousal, pure lust -- all aspects of human intimacy that fascinate this much-published psychology professor specialising in what causes people to fall in and out of love and form other deep relationships ("the self-expansion model of motivation and cognition in personal relationships", as his CV puts it).
