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How to Become Great at Just About Anything
Freakonomics: This week on Freakonomics Radio: What if the thing we call “talent” is grotesquely overrated? And what if deliberate practice is the secret to excellence? Those are the claims of the research psychologist Anders Ericsson, who has been studying the science of expertise for decades. Listen the whole story: Freakonomics
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Visual Biases Near the Hands Help Us Perform Specific Actions
Using your hands to perform tasks in specific ways can change the way you see things near your hands, findings from two experiments show.
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What companies get wrong about motivating their people
The Washington Post: A few years ago, behavioral economist Dan Ariely conducted a study at a semiconductor factory of Intel's in Israel. Workers were given either a $30 bonus, a pizza voucher or a complimentary text message from the boss at the end of the first workday of the week as an incentive to meet targets. (A separate control group received nothing.) Pizza, interestingly, was the best motivator on the first day, but over the course of a week the compliment had the best overall effect, even better than the cash. "When I get the money, I’m interested, when I’m not getting the money, I'm not so interested," Ariely said in a recent interview.
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6 Potential Brain Benefits Of Bilingual Education
NPR: Brains, brains, brains. One thing we've learned at NPR Ed is that people are fascinated by brain research. And yet it can be hard to point to places where our education system is really making use of the latest neuroscience findings. But there is one happy nexus where research is meeting practice: bilingual education. "In the last 20 years or so, there's been a virtual explosion of research on bilingualism," says Judith Kroll, a professor at the University of California, Riverside. ...
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An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways
Atlas Obscura: When the cockpit recorder transcript from Air France Flight 447 was leaked to the public in 2011, many startling details emerged. The plane, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009, killing all 228 people on board, had been under the control of pilots who were communicating poorly and not realizing one another’s mistakes. The plane’s speed slowed to dangerous levels, activating the stall alarm—the one, in the words of Popular Mechanics, “designed to be impossible to ignore.” It blared the word “Stall!” 75 times. Everyone present ignored it. Within four minutes, the plane had hit the water. Alarm sounds are engineered to elicit particular responses in humans.
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The Varieties of Anger
The New York Times: Bitterness. Hostility. Rage. The varieties of anger are endless. Some are mild, such as grumpiness, and others are powerful, such as wrath. Different angers vary not only in their intensity but also in their purpose. It’s normal to feel exasperated with your screaming infant and scornful of a political opponent, but scorn toward your baby would be bizarre. Anger is a large, diverse population of experiences and behaviors, as psychologists like myself who study emotion repeatedly discover. You can shout in anger, weep in anger, even smile in anger. You can throw a tantrum in anger with your heart pounding, or calmly plot your revenge.
