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Peer-to-peer insurer Lemonade launches in New York
New York Post: A New York startup aims to disrupt the insurance industry — and the key, it says, is to get folks to behave. One-year-old Lemonade went live Wednesday in New York with a slick mobile app that offers homeowner’s insurance for as little as $35 a month and renter’s insurance starting at $5 a month. ... Lemonade’s solution is to charge a flat fee of 20 percent for coverage so it has no incentive to fight payouts. At the end of the year, Lemonade will instead give any excess cash from its monthly premiums to a charity chosen by the customer. “Our model suggests we’ll be giving more to charity than to our own profits,” Schreiber said. “But we do that not out of altruism.
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A psychologist has honed a subliminal tactic to get what you want before you’ve asked for it
Quartz: Robert Cialdini made his name on counseling everyday people about how to avoid being manipulated by advertisers, politicians, and lobbyists. Now, the Arizona State University psychology professor is advising people on how to become the manipulator. Cialdini’s new book, Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade, is directed at people who want to be more influential, in business or among colleagues and friends. He focuses on a particularly vulnerable window of human interaction: the moment before you ask for what you want. Read the whole story: Quartz
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Psychological Science Explores the Minds of Dogs
A special issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science explores all that psychological scientists have learned about dog behavior and cognition in recent years.
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We aren’t meant to be happy all the time—and that’s a good thing
Quartz: In the 1990s, a psychologist named Martin Seligman led the positive psychology movement, which placed the study of human happiness squarely at the center of psychology research and theory. It continued a trend that began in the 1960s with humanistic and existential psychology, which emphasized the importance of reaching one’s innate potential and creating meaning in one’s life, respectively. Since then, thousands of studies and hundreds of books have been published with the goal of increasing well-being and helping people lead more satisfying lives. So why aren’t we happier? Why have self-reported measures of happiness stayed stagnant for over 40 years? Read the whole story: Quartz
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Metaphorically Speaking, Men Are Expected to be Struck by Genius, Women to Nurture It
The New York Times: Try searching for “top inventors of all time” on Google. Start counting the images along the top of your search page, and you’ll go through 29 photos of men before you reach Hedy Lamarr, an Austrian actress from Hollywood’s golden age. In 1942, she shared a patent for a technology to prevent enemies from detecting messages in radio signals. This “Secret Communication System” eventually led to today’s mobile phone technology and to secure military communications. ... Kristen Elmore, a developmental and social psychologist at Cornell University and lead author of the study, saw metaphors about ideas everywhere.
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How To Spark Learning Everywhere Kids Go — Starting With The Supermarket
NPR: Picture this: You're in the supermarket with your hungry preschooler in tow. As you reach into the dairy case, you spot a sign with a friendly cartoon cow. It reads: "Ask your child: Where does milk come from? What else comes from a cow?" In a small study published last year, signs like these, placed in Philadelphia-area supermarkets, sparked a one-third increase in conversations between parents and children under 8. The extra family chatter happened only in low-income neighborhoods. Research shows that's exactly the place where it's needed most: Studies have documented a "word gap" that can lead, ultimately, to poor kids starting school months behind in language development. ...
