WARNING: The following discussion is about the correlation between happiness and many other factors. But it’s just correlation. The factors below are correlated with happiness, but that does not mean they CAUSE happiness. “Correlation does not imply causation”. Now that I’ve posted the warning, I can talk about some of the interesting correlations between happiness…
Category Archives: research
7 Tips To Get A Team To Implement Your Recommendations: Tip #5
This is the 5th in a 7-part series on how to get a team to implement your recommendations. Tip #1 was: Hide Your Top 3 Recommendations. Tip #2 was Say “You”, “They”, “Customers”, “Users”, or “Research”. Don’t say “I”. Tip #3 was Give Them A Presentation, Don’t Send Them A Report. Tip #4 was Use The Word…
7 Tips To Get A Team To Implement Your Recommendations: Tip #4
This is the 4th in a 7-part series on how to get a team to implement your recommendations. Tip #1 was: Hide Your Top 3 Recommendations. Tip #2 was Say “You”, “They”, “Customers”, “Users”, or “Research”. Don’t say “I”. Tip #3 was Give Them A Presentation, Don’t Send Them A Report. Now for Tip #4. The context…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #95 — People Decide Who And What Is Alive By The Eyes
In a previous post, I talked about the special part of the brain that is for recognizing faces. New research by Christine Looser shows that “the eyes have it” when it comes to faces. When is a face human and alive? — Christine Looser takes pictures of people and then morphs them in stages into…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #87 — Speaker and Listener Brains Sync
When you listen to someone talking your brain starts working in sync with the speaker. Greg Stephens (2010) put participants in his research study in an fMRI machine and had them record or listen to recordings of other people talking. What he found is that as someone is listening to someone else talk, the brains…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #81 — Intrinsic Rewards Trump Extrinsic Rewards
Let’s say you are an art teacher, and you want to encourage your students to spend more time practicing their drawing. You create a “Good Drawing Certificate” to give to your students. If your goal is to have them draw more, and for them to stick with it, how should you give them the certificate?…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #75 — The More Difficult Something Is To Attain, The More People Like It
You’ve heard about fraternities that have difficult initiation rituals to get in. The idea is that if an organization is hard to get into, then the people in it like it even more than if entry was not so difficult. More difficult = more like — The first research on this initiation effect was done…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #74 — Listening To Music Releases Dopamine In The Brain
Have you ever been listening to a piece of music and experienced intense pleasure, even chills? Valorie Salimpoor and team (2010) conducted research that shows that listening to music can release the neurotransmitter dopamine. A wide range of music — The researchers used PET (positron emission tomography) scans, fMRI, and psychophysiological measures such as…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #71 — People Like Pastoral Scenes
Walk into any hotel, house, office building, museum, art gallery, or any place where there are paintings or photographs hanging on the wall, and chances are that you will see a pastoral landscape. Looking for protection, food, and water – According to Denis Dutton, a philosopher and the author of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure,…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #70 — People Are Happier Busy And With A Challenge
Consider this scenario: You just landed at an airport and now you have to walk to the baggage claim to pick up your luggage. It takes you 12 minutes to walk there. When you arrive your luggage is coming onto the carousel. How impatient do you feel? Contrast that with this scenario: You just landed…