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Facebook Snooping on Job Candidates May Backfire for Employers
Scientific American: It’s 2014, which means that Facebook will be 10 years old this February. Since the site launched it has become standard procedure for companies to screen job candidates based on their social media profiles. A recent study, however, suggests that the practice may actually drive away qualified applicants who feel that their privacy has been compromised. Researchers at North Carolina State University have found that when job applicants realize an organization has viewed their social media profile, they are less likely to perceive the hiring process as fair, regardless of whether they were offered the position.
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Is Your Impatience Costing You?
US News & World Report: Impatience, it turns out, can be costly. Research suggests that people who opt for smaller rewards today over bigger rewards later tend to have lower credit scores. In the study by Columbia Business School associate professor Stephan Meier, the most impatient people had credit scores below 620, which means they pay more for loans. In the 2011 study published in the journal Psychological Science, Meier and his co-authors offered 437 low- to moderate-income participants bigger cash rewards if they were willing to receive the money later. They correlated the participants' willingness to delay their cash rewards with their FICO score, a commonly used credit score.
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The Prospect Of Losing Financial Incentives Can Motivate Healthy Eating: Study
The Huffington Post: The prospect of losing out on a deal really can be an effective motivator when it comes to eating healthfully, a new study suggests. Researchers from Tulane University and Duke University found that people were more apt to buy healthy foods at the grocery store if they risked losing a cash-back discount for purchasing such foods by not doing so. For the study, more than 6,500 households in South Africa enrolled to be part of the Discovery Health Vitality Rewards program, which entailed receiving a cash-back discount for purchasing healthy foods at the grocery store.
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Are You Vain Enough to Get Ahead?
The Wall Street Journal: You don’t have to be a total narcissist to be a successful executive – but a solid dash of ego can help. Self-aggrandizing individuals with a need for impact and power are slightly more likely to become leaders than the general population, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and personality testing firm Hogan Assessment Systems. But while a dose of self-confidence is necessary to raise your hand for the top job and steer a big corporation, too much can cause a leader and company to falter. ...
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Feeling mad? New devices can sense your mood and tell — or even text — others.
The Washington Post: Cognitive psychologist Mary Czerwinski and her boyfriend were having a vigorous argument as they drove to Vancouver, B.C., from Seattle, where she works at Microsoft Research. She can’t remember the subject, but she does recall that suddenly, his phone went off, and he read out the text message: “Your friend Mary isn’t feeling well. You might want to give her a call.” At the time, Czerwinski was wearing on her wrist a wireless device intended to monitor her emotional ups and downs. Similar to the technology used in lie detector tests, it interprets signals such as heart rate and electrical changes in the skin.
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Averting the Motherhood Penalty
Whether they’re willing to admit it or not, hiring managers tend to doubt working mothers’ dedication to the job. Previous studies have revealed that the so-called “motherhood penalty” is rather rampant in the job market. People generally assume that working mothers are less committed, and therefore less capable, on their jobs. One of the most telling studies on this mindset was published in 2007, when a team of researchers had a group of women, some of them wearing a prosthesis to make them appear pregnant, pose as either job applications or customers at retail stores. Store employees were generally more rude toward pregnant applicants vs.
