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A Study Encourages You to Have Fun First and Finish Your Work Later
New York Magazine: It seems like the natural order of things: first work, then fun. If you finish your dinner, you can have dessert; if you finish your homework, you can play your video games. It’s what parents teach children, and it’s how adults typically run their own lives, too — you have to get your work done sometime, after all, and, anyway, you wouldn’t be able to enjoy your chosen leisure activity if some unfinished project was still hanging over your head. And yet the results of a recent set of experiments suggest that although people expect that they will enjoy goofing off more if they’ve finished their work first, that’s not exactly true.
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Why Government ‘Nudges’ Motivate Good Citizen Behavior
Working Knowledge: Most governments aren’t subtle when they want citizens to do something. The United States spends close to $1 billion annually on advertising--trying to convince citizens to do everything from taking flu prevention shots to reporting unattended suitcases at the airport. But now agencies are finding that subtle “nudges” can motivate behavior much better than ads, fines, or deadlines. Nudges, or small changes to the context in which decisions are made, are the subject of a new analysis by Harvard Business School Associate Professor John Beshears and colleagues, recently published in the journal Psychological Science.
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Glückliche Jagd nach sinnlosen Punkten (Happy Hunting for Senseless Points)
Süddeutsche Zeitung: Der Ernst des Lebens tarnt sich heute als unendlicher Spaß. Sogar bei der CDU, die kaum als vergnügungssteuerpflichtige Vereinigung gilt, setzen Strategen auf den Spieltrieb des Menschen. Per App hat die Partei im Wahlkampf Nordrhein-Westfalens Unterstützer mobilisiert, indem diese mit Punkten belohnt wurden für diverse Tätigkeiten, etwa bei Facebook posten, Freunde behelligen oder an fremden Haustüren klingeln. Die CDU-Fans wurden dadurch belohnt, dass sie ihren Status von "Lehrling" bis auf "Wahlkampf-Legende" steigern konnten - Wahlkampf als Spiel, in dem Punkte und die Jagd nach einem Highscore motivieren. ...
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New Research Finds Lonely People Have Superior Social Skills
NPR: Intuitively, many of us might think lonely people are lonely because they have poor social skills. New research turns this thinking on its head and offers a potential cure for loneliness. A number of experiments find, Audie, that when you bring people into a laboratory, people who are lonely are actually better at detecting social cues, reading expressions and being generally plugged into the social world than people who aren't lonely. I was speaking with Megan Knowles. She's a psychologist at Franklin & Marshall College. And she told me that she and her colleagues, Gale Lucas, Roy Baumeister and Wendi Gardner, were drawn to a paradox here. Read the whole story: NPR
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How Vanity Could Save the Planet
The Atlantic: Whether you follow a vegan diet or are a devoted carnivore, carry canvas or plastic, you are one of 7.5 billion people. The ecological effect of your choices is minuscule. And yet they have a big effect on how others see you, and how you see yourself. Psychologists found that prodding people to worry about social status increased their interest in buying green versus nongreen items—but only if they were shopping in public. People in Washington State and Colorado were willing to pay a premium of $430 to $4,200 (results varied by zip code) for the green-signaling Prius over an equally efficient car that didn’t broadcast its virtue Read the whole story: The Atlantic
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One Way to Make Better Decisions: Rely on Your Imagination More Than Your Willpower
New York Magazine: Maybe you can relate to this particular struggle: When the alarm goes off in the morning, some people use the snooze button for five more sweet, sweet minutes of sleep. I use it for 30 of them, give or take. I gorge on the snooze button. It’s gotten so bad that I now set my first alarm for much earlier than I actually need to be awake, just so I can keep on snoozing a little while longer. Yes, I know I really should be getting up and starting the day and all that, but it’s so hard when you’re just so cozy. Which might actually be the root of the problem: I’m thinking about the trade-offs all wrong.
