Forbes: Earlier this year I wrote about the motivational power games can play in the workplace. A new study, published in Psychological Science, underlines the power of having targets to aim for, even if the targets themselves are largely meaningless. The only caveat is that your scores have to be improving. “We all know More
From typing to exercising, racking up meaningless digital points can serve as an effective motivator, as long as the scores are accelerating. More
A sample of new articles exploring implicit sense of agency over somatosensory events and the motivational effects of contingent and noncontingent rewards. More
The Guardian: Here’s a story about a man with a machiavellian genius for psychological manipulation. (It comes from the US educator Alfie Kohn, so I’ll Britishise it here.) This man is elderly and lives near a school. Every afternoon a group of pupils subject him to merciless taunts as they walk More
The Wall Street Journal: When 14-year-old Brian O’Neill of Washington, D.C., wanted to find out what his friends had been up to over summer vacation, he did something radical: He asked them. Unlike most kids his age, Brian isn’t on social media. He doesn’t scroll through his friends’ Instagram shots More
NPR: So if you’re freaking out because you think social media is running your life, I recommend that you do not listen to the next four minutes or so of radio. My colleague, social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam, is here to talk about the effects that social media has on More
