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Why You Should Bet Against Your Candidate
The New York Times: When your favorite sports team is defeated, you’re disappointed, even dismayed. The same is true when your preferred political candidate doesn’t win. It hurts when your side loses. Fortunately, you can insure yourself against such unhappiness: just place a bet for your side to lose. This strategy, which has become easy to do with the rise of online prediction markets, creates a consolation prize — say, $1,000 (or whatever it takes) — to reduce your pain in the event of a defeat. ... But in practice, as my colleagues Richard P.
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How ‘Bias’ Went From a Psychological Observation to a Political Accusation
The New York Times Magazine: In 2004, 57 police officers of different races were divided into two groups for a simple experiment. Half of them were shown two photo lineups, one with an array of white faces and one with black faces. This group was more visually attuned to the white faces. A second group looked at the same lineups after words like “violent,” “crime” and “shoot” flashed on their screens, at the edge of their field of vision. This group of officers’ eyes were mostly drawn to the black faces. In a similar test, using pictures of guns and knives instead of words, a group of white college students exhibited a similar shift in attention. ...
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Peer-to-peer insurer Lemonade launches in New York
New York Post: A New York startup aims to disrupt the insurance industry — and the key, it says, is to get folks to behave. One-year-old Lemonade went live Wednesday in New York with a slick mobile app that offers homeowner’s insurance for as little as $35 a month and renter’s insurance starting at $5 a month. ... Lemonade’s solution is to charge a flat fee of 20 percent for coverage so it has no incentive to fight payouts. At the end of the year, Lemonade will instead give any excess cash from its monthly premiums to a charity chosen by the customer. “Our model suggests we’ll be giving more to charity than to our own profits,” Schreiber said. “But we do that not out of altruism.
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A psychologist has honed a subliminal tactic to get what you want before you’ve asked for it
Quartz: Robert Cialdini made his name on counseling everyday people about how to avoid being manipulated by advertisers, politicians, and lobbyists. Now, the Arizona State University psychology professor is advising people on how to become the manipulator. Cialdini’s new book, Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade, is directed at people who want to be more influential, in business or among colleagues and friends. He focuses on a particularly vulnerable window of human interaction: the moment before you ask for what you want. Read the whole story: Quartz
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Psychological Science Explores the Minds of Dogs
A special issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science explores all that psychological scientists have learned about dog behavior and cognition in recent years.
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We aren’t meant to be happy all the time—and that’s a good thing
Quartz: In the 1990s, a psychologist named Martin Seligman led the positive psychology movement, which placed the study of human happiness squarely at the center of psychology research and theory. It continued a trend that began in the 1960s with humanistic and existential psychology, which emphasized the importance of reaching one’s innate potential and creating meaning in one’s life, respectively. Since then, thousands of studies and hundreds of books have been published with the goal of increasing well-being and helping people lead more satisfying lives. So why aren’t we happier? Why have self-reported measures of happiness stayed stagnant for over 40 years? Read the whole story: Quartz
