HBR: How to persuade people to change their behavior.
A wealth of studies in consumer psychology attests to the power of sound to affect our decision making. In one famous experiment from the ’90s, British wine shoppers bought five times as many French bottles as German bottles when French accordions played in the store; when an oompah band sounded, German wine outsold the French. Still other studies have suggested that slot-machine noises, often high-pitched and in major keys, can nudge gamblers to keep playing and can even encourage riskier bets.But then there’s the tragedy of commons of sound:
Too many sounds, carefully designed though they may be, runs the risk of turning into an irritant, or worse. Dexter Garcia, a co-founder of Audio UX, pointed me to a 2010 article in The Boston Globe describing “alarm fatigue.” Nurses at Massachusetts General Hospital had become so bombarded by constant alerts, they ignored the critical beeps signaling a dying patient. The problem is pervasive: In a study at Johns Hopkins Hospital, nearly 60,000 alarms were recorded over 12 days—that’s 350 alarms per patient, per day, hammering staff ears.#
Vox: The Stanford Prison Experiment was massively influential. We just learned it was a fraud. “The most famous psychological studies are often wrong, fraudulent, or outdated. Textbooks need to catch up.”
“In people with the condition, the cells were arranged in matching patterns in both eyes, which may be to blame for confusing the brain by producing ‘mirror’ images. […] In non-dyslexic people, the cells are arranged asymmetrically, allowing signals from the one eye to be overridden by the other to create a single image in the brain.”#
Honnold sees it in more pragmatic terms. “With free-soloing, obviously I know that I’m in danger, but feeling fearful while I’m up there is not helping me in any way,” he said. “It’s only hindering my performance, so I just set it aside and leave it be.”#
I quite liked Beau Lotto’s article Look Here in May’s Wired UK. It’s not yet online, but googling it turned up a few other interesting tidbits on perception.
Beau Lotto has just published a book, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently, though reviewer Jonathan Rée hates it.
Michael Shemer’s TED talk, The pattern behind self-deception, explains how “the human tendency to believe strange things—from alien abductions to dowsing rod—boils down to two of the brain’s most basic, hard-wired survival skills. He explains what they are, and how they get us into trouble.”
Buzzfeed: 16 optical illusions even freakier than that damn dress.
Six TED talks about illusion that will make you doubt your own brain.
Is willpower overrated? Achieving goals requires willpower, but this study suggested that “the students who reported experiencing fewer temptations […] achieved more goal success.”
The researchers summed their results up, thusly: “Against popular and scientific wisdom, effortful self-control did not appear to play a role in goal-pursuit, suggesting that the immediate positive consequences of exerting willpower do not translate into long-term goal success.”
WaPo: Loneliness can be depressing, but it may have helped humans survive.
The oxytocin receptor gene comes in several variants… For our ancestors, safety was in numbers, so evolution favored those who craved the bond with others �” and hence the GG genotype may have survived. On the other hand, the group also needed people less upset by being alone �” those who might venture far away, explore the environment �” such as the carriers of the AA genotype.
We will only verify what we hear if we are “motivated and able” to do so. What a well-told story does is circumvent the second stage of what Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert says is our default way of interpreting reality: first, we accept everything as true and only then do we reflect, question and, if necessary, correct our initial perception. If we are presented with a logical argument, we go through that precise process. If, however, we are faced with an emotional story, we get stuck at point one. We assume its truth. We are moved by it. We act on it. We don’t verify or question it. And in that presumption of faith lies narrative’s great strength — and the con artist’s great power.#
Kim Scott talks about radical candor at Cultivate. It’s 40 minutes long but oh so good. The four-by-four framework she presents is illuminating and could be the foundation of establishing and growing a feedback culture.
The axis are “care personally” and “challenge directly” and the quadrants are, from the bottom right in clockwise order, “obnoxious aggression”, “manipulative insincerity”, “ruinous empathy” and “radical candor”.
Here’s another 20 minute version of the talk and a longish write-up with the diagram as well.
“An organization’s structure is reflected in its products,” I mused out loud to a colleague.
“Yes, Conway’s law,” he said.
The way I reflected on the shape of the thought is telling, indicating that I’ve heard it before. It is an odd sensation, however, formulating something without the sense of remembering it.
Across the board, when men’s utterances were assessed, “average individual estimates of strength from the voice were accurate and highly significant,” Sell reports. “This accuracy is similar to the accuracy of strength assessment from static visual images of the face, but lower than estimation from images of the body.”#
