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New Research: Rituals Make Us Value Things More
Harvard Business Review: Rituals in the workplace can reinforce the behaviors we want, create focus and a sense of belonging, and make change stick. I have gone on and on in the past about the benefits of established rituals and routines for personal productivity – how they capitalize on our brains’ ability to direct our behavior on autopilot, allowing us to reach our goals even when we are distracted or preoccupied with other things. And there are plenty of companies who’ve been smart enough to harness this power.
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This Test Can Determine If Your Marriage Will Last
TIME: The measure isn’t the high tech detector of romantic emotions that you might expect. Instead, it looks a lot like that familiar thing we know as our gut feeling. Next time somebody who just went through a messy breakup says that they always knew that the relationship would never work, it may not just be hindsight talking. In an intriguing new experiment on how much our automatic responses can tell us about what we really feel, a group of researchers discovered that there may be a test that predicts whether a marriage will last. First, they asked more than 100 recently married people in Tennessee to rate their spouse. Unsurprisingly, everybody declared that their spouses were swell.
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A Psychologist’s Guide to Online Dating
The Atlantic: Edward Royzman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, asks me to list four qualities on a piece of paper: physical attractiveness, income, kindness, and fidelity. Then he gives me 200 virtual “date points” that I’m to distribute among the four traits. The more I allocate to each attribute, the more highly I supposedly value that quality in a mate. This experiment, which Royzman sometimes runs with his college classes, is meant to inject scarcity into hypothetical dating decisions in order to force people to prioritize. I think for a second, and then I write equal amounts (70) next to both hotness and kindness, then 40 next to income and 20 next to fidelity.
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When Sex Doesn’t Sell
Fast Company: Sex sells, but only at a high price, according to a new study. Overtly sexual advertising can make women downright angry, but they tend to view a sexualized ad for a luxury product more positively than the same ad selling a discount item, marketing researchers from the University of Minnesota, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the University of British Columbia found.
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Fotos können Erinnerung stören (Photos can interfere with memory)
ORF Austria: Wer Fotos von schönen Momenten im Urlaub macht, will eigentlich die Erinnerung festhalten. Das könnte aber eine Täuschung sein: Laut einer neuen Studie vergessen wir Erlebnisse eher, wenn wir sie fotografieren. Die Studienautorin und Psychologin Linda Henkel von der Fairfield University im US-Bundesstaat Connecticut nennt das "Aufnahme-Beeinträchtigungs-Effekt". Um das Phänomen zu untersuchen, bat die Forscherin Studienteilnehmer zu einer Tour durch ein Museum. Dabei sollten sie bestimmte Ausstellungsgegenstände beobachten, die eine Hälfte zudem Fotos von ihnen machen. Am nächsten Tag überprüfte Henkel ihr Gedächtnis.
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Retailers Fine-Tune Store Music to Reflect Brand, Make You Want to Shop
The Wall Street Journal: It is the factor that can keep shoppers happily browsing in the store for hours—or drive them out the door in a huff. Retailers are fine-tuning their stores' playlists as they wake up to the power of music to communicate a brand message and put shoppers in the mood to spend. One shopper's favorite song can make another shopper cringe. Big chains turn to specialists like Mood Media, based in Austin, Texas, and PlayNetwork, in Redmond, Wash., to design store playlists that match the values and design aesthetic of the brand and the lifestyle of its shoppers. Retailers might offer specific descriptions of their core customers and suggest specific artists and songs. ...
