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Think extroverts make the best salespeople? Think again
The Globe and Mail: Outgoing, gregarious, good shmoozers: The people we think of as extroverts are the best people to put into sales roles, right? Wrong, according to this fascinating piece in The Washington Post. The piece, by author Daniel Pink, points to research that has found that extroversion is one of the big traits that hiring managers look for when bringing on sales staff. The only problem, it notes, is that there is no research to support the notion that extroverts do best on the sales floor. In fact, any efforts to make the connection have come up with a “flimsy” correlation, at best, the Post piece says.
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Feeling Anxious? Think Again.
The Huffington Post: Americans' number one fear is public speaking, hands down. Pollsters have reported time and again that the average person dreads public speaking more than disease or even death. These polls merely confirm what our sweaty palms and elevated heart beat make undeniable: Standing up and addressing an audience brings out our worst insecurities about performance and failure and the judgment of others. ... A team of psychological scientists has been exploring the interplay of thinking, attention and physiology in SAD.
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What You Might Be Missing
The Wall Street Journal: People lie. We tell Aunt Linda we like her new hat. We tell a creditor that the check is in the mail. And we don't just lie to others, we lie to ourselves: Those extra pounds look good on me. I can quit smoking anytime I want—I just don't want to. Because we are liars, simply asking people what their innermost thoughts are can produce inaccurate results. This is particularly true for sensitive topics such as racism and bigotry. Psychologists and pollsters have long known that people will offer self-serving answers to questions about such topics and will act in ways that reveal latent biases. ...
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A Match Made in the Code
The New York Times: New Orleans — In the quest to find true love, is filling out a questionnaire on a Web site any more scientific than praying to St. Valentine? Yes, according to psychologists at eHarmony, an online company that claims its computerized algorithms will help match you with a “soul mate.” But this claim was criticized in a psychology journal last year by a team of academic researchers, who concluded that “no compelling evidence supports matching sites’ claims that mathematical algorithms work.” In response, eHarmony’s senior research scientist, Gian C. Gonzaga, went into the academic lions’ den known as S.P.S.P.
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What a Mess: Chaos and Creativity
One of the most influential ideas about crime prevention to come out in recent years is something called the “broken windows theory.” According to this theory, small acts of deviance—littering, graffiti, broken windows—will, if ignored, escalate into more serious crime. In practice, this theory leads to zero tolerance of public disorder and petty crime. Both theory and practice have been embraced by some big city mayors, most notably Rudy Giuliani, who credited the strategy with significantly cutting serious crime in 1990s New York City. The idea has been controversial from the start, for many reasons, but it does get some empirical support from psychological science.
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Being Stoic for the Spouse’s Sake Comes at a High Cost
Among life’s many tragedies, the death of a child is one that is perhaps the greatest for parents. No matter what the age of the child or the cause of death, the irrefutable fact of the loss is one that shatters the normal cycle of life, leaving parents traumatized and often incapacitated by grief. Research on coping with bereavement has focused primarily on the individual, despite the fact that family and married relationships are all profoundly disrupted by the loss. But in the wealth of studies about parental grief, little attention has been paid to precisely how couples relate to each other as they struggle to come to terms with the death of a child.
