I wonder if it's worth tracking academic papers that are also highly accessible to the common reader?
"You are a good drawer" vs "You did a good drawing". More specific praise is better psychologically. When the generic case receives criticism, it affects self-worth.
Praising a student’s inherent ability has been shown to promote the fixed mindset, or the belief that intelligence is unchangeable, while praising a student’s strategies or effort promotes the growth mindset, or the belief that intelligence is malleable.
Believe you have will power, and you will have more will power.
It is thus well documented that self-control often suffers when self-control demands are high, both in laboratory and in everyday life settings.
Using a screen during symphony interviews has a positive effect on hiring women. They're 50% more likely to progress beyond the preliminary round. For final rounds, there is a "sevaral fold" increase in the likelihood of progression.
We show four primary empirical results. First, for differentiated products like wines, lowering the cost of search for quality information reduced price sensitivity.
Second, pricesensitivity for wines common to both stores increased whencross-store comparison was made easy, as many analystshave assumed. However, easy cross-store comparison hadno effect on price sensitivity for unique wines."
Third, makinginformation environments more transparent by lowering allthree search costs produced welfare gains for consumers.They liked the shopping experience more, selected winesthey liked more in subsequent tasting, and their retentionprobability was higher when they were contacted twomonths later and invited to continue using the electronicshopping service from home.
Fourth, we examined the implicationsof these results for manufacturers and examinedhow market shares of wines sold by two stores or one wereaffected by search costs. When store comparison was diffi-cult, results showed that the market share of common wineswas proportional to share of distribution; but when storecomparison was made easy, the market share returns to distributiondecreased significantly. All these results suggestincentives for retailers carrying differentiated goods tomake information environments maximally transparent, butto avoid price competition by carrying more uniquemerchandise."
There are wealthy gentleman in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line in the summer because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work, and then they would resign.
Mark Twain
A long history of research has demonstrated that rewards can decrease motivation and attitudes (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959), alter self-perception (Bem, 1965), increase overjustification (Lepper et al., 1973), and turn feelings of competence into feelings of being controlled (Deci & Ryan, 1985). The debate over these findings (Eisenberger & Cameron, 1996; Ryan & Deci, 2000) has generally shifted to the question of what specific circumstances give rise to these counterintuitive effects.
..
One possible implication of the current results is that social rewards do not easily undermine intrinsic motivation.
A second implication is that the social aspects of reward are fragile and a social reward can easily be made into a nonsocial extrinsic reward by merely mentioning monetary circumstances or perhaps just promoting comparisons to other tasks or other individuals’ reward levels.
Adding money destroys social motivation, and turns the exchange into a financial one.
When payments were given in the form of gifts (candy) or when payments were not mentioned, effort seemed to stem from altruistic motives and was largely insensitive to the magnitude of the payment. In contrast, when payments were given in the form of cash, effort seemed to stem from reciprocation motives and was sensitive to the magnitude of the payment.
Finally, in mixed markets (payment was in the form of gifts but cost was also mentioned), the mere mention of monetary payment was sufficient to switch the perceived relationship from a social-market relationship to a money-market relationship. That is, money itself can be a cue to the type of exchange that individuals consider themselves to be in, which in turn influences their propensity to exert effort.
Paying someone to do a mentally challenging task reduces effort. In the experiment, participants with no pay (or only social rewards) performed the task significantly longer.
[..] an experiment conducted in 2003 with business students. The researchers presented the students with a story of a successful entrepreneur. They told half the students that the entrepreneur's name was Heidi; they told the other half that it was Howard. Then they asked students their impressions of Heidi or Howard and discovered that though the participants rated them both as competent and worthy of respect,
Howard came across as a more appealing colleague. Heidi, on the other hand, was seen as selfish and not "the type of person you would want to hire or work for." The same data with a single difference--gender--created vastly different impressions.
The Stanford marshmallow experiment[1] was a series of studies on delayed gratification in the late 1960s and early 1970s led by psychologist Walter Mischel, then a professor at Stanford University. In these studies, a child was offered a choice between one small reward provided immediately or two small rewards (i.e., a larger later reward) if they waited for a short period, approximately 15 minutes, during which the tester left the room and then returned. (The reward was sometimes a marshmallow, but often a cookie or a pretzel.) In follow-up studies, the researchers found that children who were able to wait longer for the preferred rewards tended to have better life outcomes, as measured by SAT scores,[2] educational attainment,[3] body mass index (BMI),[4] and other life measures.[5]
Evolutionary biologists Richard Alexander and Robert Trivers have recently emphasized that it is deception rather than information that often plays the decisive role in systems of selective pressures. Yet most of our thinking continues to treat deception as something of a perturbation on the exchange of pure information, leaving us unprepared to contemplate a world in which fakery may reliably crowd out the genuine. In particular, humanity's future selective pressures appear likely to remain tied to economic theory which currently uses as its central construct a market model based on assumptions of perfect information.
George Miller famously argued that our brains can hold only about seven pieces of information simultaneously. Even that figure may be too high. Some brain researchers now believe that working memory has a maximum capacity of just three or four elements.
The amount of information entering our consciousness at any instant is referred to as our cognitive load. When our cognitive load exceeds the capacity of our working memory, our intellectual abilities take a hit. Information zips into and out of our mind so quickly that we never gain a good mental grip on it. (Which is why you can't remember what you went to the kitchen to do.) The information vanishes before we've had an opportunity to transfer it into our long-term memory and weave it into knowledge. We remember less, and our ability to think critically and conceptually weakens. An overloaded working memory also tends to increase our distractedness. After all, as the neuroscientist Torkel Klingberg has pointed out, "we have to remember what it is we are to concentrate on." Lose your hold on that, and you'll find "distractions more distracting."
[..] consider the plight of those charged with international standards of weights and measures. There is a lump of metal stored under a glass case in Sèvres, France. It is, by the decree of Le Système International d'Unités, the definition a kilogram. How much does it weigh? Well, by definition whatever it weighs is a kilogram. But the fascinating thing is that it has never weighed exactly the same twice. On those days it weighs less than a kilogram you are not getting such a good deal at the grocery store. On other days you are.
Take an example: A well-established best-seller author has to deliver his long overdue manuscript to his publisher. He has a large audience, and knows very well that people will buy his book just because of his name and anyway, the average reader doesn't read more than the first chapter. His publisher knows it as well…Thus, the author decides to deliver to the publisher the new manuscript with a stunning incipit and a mediocre plot (the Low-quality outcome): she is happy with it, congratulates him as she had received a masterpiece (the High-quality rhetoric) and they are both satisfied. The author's preference is not only to deliver a Low-quality work, but also that the publisher gives back the same, for example by avoiding to provide a too serious editing and going on publishing. They trust each other's untrustworthiness, and connive on a mutual advantageous Low outcome. Whenever there is a tacit deal to converge to Low-quality with mutual advantages, we are dealing with a case of Kakonomics.
Paradoxically, if one of the two parties delivers a High-quality outcome instead of the expected Low-quality one, the other party resents it as a breach of trust, even if he may not acknowledge it openly. In the example, the author may resent the publisher if she decides to deliver a High-quality editing. Her being trustworthy in this relation means to deliver Low-quality too. Contrary to the standard Prisoner Dilemma game, the willingness to repeat an interaction with someone is ensured if he or she delivers Low-quality too rather than High-quality.
In some cases, they can indeed be useful. They’re great for gathering small groups of people; at a conference, there’s no better way to connect with other attendees and read brief summaries of sessions. When kept to a small scale, they can ably perform their service as a filter of relevant tweets (#EastVillage is more manageable than #NYC). They can be useful for subtext; we’ve all sent emails and text messages that should have had #sarcasm attached. The New York Times started the #snowku hashtag to gather snow-themed haikus during a February snowstorm.
I believe hashtags are aesthetically damaging. I believe a tweet free of hashtags is more pleasing to the eye, more easily consumed, and thus more likely to be retweeted (which is a proven way of growing your audience). I believe for every person who stumbles upon your tweet via hashtag, you’re likely turning off many more who are put off by hashtag overuse.
A 1993 study titled "When More Pain Is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End" by Kahneman, Fredrickson, Charles Schreiber, and Donald Redelmeier provided groundbreaking evidence for the peak–end rule. Participants were subjected to two different versions of a single unpleasant experience. The first trial had subjects submerge a hand in 14 °C water for 60 seconds. The second trial had subjects submerge the other hand in 14 °C water for 60 seconds, but then keep their hand submerged for an additional 30 seconds, during which the temperature was raised to 15 °C. Subjects were then offered the option of which trial to repeat. Against the law of temporal monotonicity, subjects were more willing to repeat the second trial, despite a prolonged exposure to uncomfortable temperatures. Kahneman et al. concluded that "subjects chose the long trial simply because they liked the memory of it better than the alternative (or disliked it less)."