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Cognitive
Why Are Resolutions So Hard To Follow? Willpower Isn’t The Only Determinant of Resolution Success
January 1, 2015
While setting New Year’s resolutions is routine for many of us, research from the University of Scranton shows while 45% of Americans usually make New Year’s resolutions, only 8% actually stick to them. So, why are resolutions so quickly discarded? The easy answer is because most resolutions require a change in habit. Starting a new habit is hard, and breaking a bad habit is even harder. While many of us assume that the key to changing our habits is having enough willpower, social scientist...
January 1, 2015
While setting New Year’s resolutions is routine for many of us, research from the University of Scranton shows while 45% of Americans usually make New Year’s resolutions, only 8% actually stick to them. So, why are resolutions so quickly discarded? The easy answer is because most resolutions require a change in habit. Starting a new habit is hard, and breaking a bad habit is even harder. While many of us assume that the key to changing our habits is having enough willpower, social scientist...
Cognitive Biases: The Elephant In The Room
December 31, 2014
No matter how rational and fair lawyers believe they are, like all people they have biases and blind spots that they are unaware...
December 31, 2014
No matter how rational and fair lawyers believe they are, like all people they have biases and blind spots that they are unaware...
How Our Brain Determines if the Product is Worth the Price
December 28, 2014
"We were interested in whether considering the price first changed how people thought about the decision process, and whether it changed the way the brain coded the value of a product," says Uma R. Karmarkar, a neuroscientist and assistant professor in the Marketing unit at Harvard Business School, who conducted the research with Baba Shiv, a marketing professor and neuroeconomics expert at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, and Brian Knutson, an associate professor of psychology...
December 28, 2014
"We were interested in whether considering the price first changed how people thought about the decision process, and whether it changed the way the brain coded the value of a product," says Uma R. Karmarkar, a neuroscientist and assistant professor in the Marketing unit at Harvard Business School, who conducted the research with Baba Shiv, a marketing professor and neuroeconomics expert at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, and Brian Knutson, an associate professor of psychology...
How Your State of Mind Affects Your Performance
December 24, 2014
So how do leaders shift from lower states of mind to higher states of mind and improve their effectiveness and performance? And how can they help other people in their organizations who tend to default to lower states of mind do the same? We’ve consolidated the best practices into four categories: Thoughts and feelings. Acknowledge your emotions to reduce their intensity. Allow your thoughts to be transient. Visualize positive images to generate positive feelings. Refocus your attention on different...
December 24, 2014
So how do leaders shift from lower states of mind to higher states of mind and improve their effectiveness and performance? And how can they help other people in their organizations who tend to default to lower states of mind do the same? We’ve consolidated the best practices into four categories: Thoughts and feelings. Acknowledge your emotions to reduce their intensity. Allow your thoughts to be transient. Visualize positive images to generate positive feelings. Refocus your attention on different...
To Get Over Something, Write About It
December 4, 2014
The unconscious working of the brain makes interpretation of what a painful experience is all about difficult. We all have an inner world of thoughts and sensations, habits, fantasies, and dreams, and much of what happens to us is beyond conscious awareness. This makes many of us strangers to ourselves, unaware of how we truly feel at any one moment of our lives. Indeed, much of our behavior is automatic; we tend to resort to repetitive habits and attitudes that don’t really express who we are,...
December 4, 2014
The unconscious working of the brain makes interpretation of what a painful experience is all about difficult. We all have an inner world of thoughts and sensations, habits, fantasies, and dreams, and much of what happens to us is beyond conscious awareness. This makes many of us strangers to ourselves, unaware of how we truly feel at any one moment of our lives. Indeed, much of our behavior is automatic; we tend to resort to repetitive habits and attitudes that don’t really express who we are,...
What Maslow’s Hierarchy Won’t Tell You About Motivation
December 3, 2014
Despite the popularity of Maslow’s Hierarchy, there is not much recent data to support it. Contemporary science — specifically Dr. Edward Deci, hundreds of Self-Determination Theory researchers, and thousands of studies — instead points to three universal psychological needs. If you really want to advantage of this new science – rather than focusing on a pyramid of needs – you should focus on: autonomy, relatedness, and competence. Autonomy is people’s need to perceive that they have...
December 3, 2014
Despite the popularity of Maslow’s Hierarchy, there is not much recent data to support it. Contemporary science — specifically Dr. Edward Deci, hundreds of Self-Determination Theory researchers, and thousands of studies — instead points to three universal psychological needs. If you really want to advantage of this new science – rather than focusing on a pyramid of needs – you should focus on: autonomy, relatedness, and competence. Autonomy is people’s need to perceive that they have...
The Teen Brain “Shuts Down” When It Hears Mom’s Criticism
November 30, 2014
We all know that teen-parent relations can be a tricky business. Now neuroscientists from several leading US universities think they’ve found some new brain evidence that helps explain why. * * * Here’s the main take-away: when listening to Moms’ criticism, and for a period afterwards, the teens’ brains showed more activity in areas involved in negative emotions (no surprise there), but they actually showed reduced activity in regions involved in emotional control and in taking other...
November 30, 2014
We all know that teen-parent relations can be a tricky business. Now neuroscientists from several leading US universities think they’ve found some new brain evidence that helps explain why. * * * Here’s the main take-away: when listening to Moms’ criticism, and for a period afterwards, the teens’ brains showed more activity in areas involved in negative emotions (no surprise there), but they actually showed reduced activity in regions involved in emotional control and in taking other...
Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias?
November 28, 2014
Britannica and Wikipedia are sources that aspire to provide comprehensive information. They both face similar challenges...
November 28, 2014
Britannica and Wikipedia are sources that aspire to provide comprehensive information. They both face similar challenges...
When Do Crowds Provide Wisdom?
November 26, 2014
Finding appropriate economic benchmarks for individual firms is a fundamental issue. Firms, managers, investors, and researchers all need to identify fundamentally similar benchmarks for such tasks as performance evaluation, executive compensation, equity valuation, statistical arbitrage, and portfolio construction. While traditional benchmarking methods rely primarily on industry classification schemes, more recent approaches introduce new dimensions by utilizing novel data sources or fresh data...
November 26, 2014
Finding appropriate economic benchmarks for individual firms is a fundamental issue. Firms, managers, investors, and researchers all need to identify fundamentally similar benchmarks for such tasks as performance evaluation, executive compensation, equity valuation, statistical arbitrage, and portfolio construction. While traditional benchmarking methods rely primarily on industry classification schemes, more recent approaches introduce new dimensions by utilizing novel data sources or fresh data...
Does Your Computer Need a Law Degree
November 19, 2014
“The Formula” is a new book by the author of “The Apple Revolution,” Luke Dormehl, which tackles the rise of algorithms...
November 19, 2014
“The Formula” is a new book by the author of “The Apple Revolution,” Luke Dormehl, which tackles the rise of algorithms...
