Yes, math nerds can teach you how to be more attractive

A lot of people know about the online dating site OKCupid. What many people don’t know is it was built by four Harvard trained mathematicians who wanted to build a compatibility algorithm based on survey questions. So they’re very focused on data.

Singles have been mingling on the site for over a decade. What can all the behind the scenes number crunching tell us about how to be more attractive?

In an interview for the book The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It So Well, the site’s four founders offered a lot of insight into what works.

What the data says about how to be more attractive:

• Ask a prospective date if she likes the taste of beer. If the answer is yes, she is 30 percent more likely than women who say they don’t like the taste of beer to sleep with you on the first date.

• …your profile photo needs to start a conversation. If you’re playing a guitar up on stage, then we know something about you. You’re in a band. Now, we have a conversation: “Oh, you play guitar? I do, too.” If you’re standing in front of the pyramids of Egypt, someone can say, “Oh, I’ve been there.” Now you’ve got something started. Our statistics show that profile pictures of people actually doing something interesting lead to a much higher quality of contacts.

• Getting people to kind of like you is a waste of time. You’re looking for the two or three people who will love you as you really are. If Dungeons and Dragons is your thing, you want that person who will say, “Oh my god! You love D and D? I do too!” And the same goes for your photo. We see so many images that are designed to minimize some supposedly unattractive trait, like the close-cropped picture of a person who’s overweight. Women with tattoos and piercings have an intuitive understanding that when they show off what makes them different some people won’t like it, but they’ll get lots of attention from the men who do. We have mathematical evidence that men will message women that they believe appeal only to them before messaging women they believe will appeal to everyone. 

• If you could have one lie, age might be the one to go with. It can help you avoid being filtered out… If you’re an older woman in the singles’ scene the odds are not in your favor. But here’s the good news: according to our research, attractiveness trumps age. So, if you’re attractive, you’re still fine. You might think that once you reach a certain age you should look more sophisticated, but we’ve found that older women who wear provocative clothing in their photos get more messages. 

• We’ve found with photos, using flash skews your attractiveness to that of someone seven years older, so go for natural light.

• The most successful pose for women is the MySpace angle, holding your camera above your head and being coy. Women flirting into the camera get the most messages; women flirting to someone off camera, the least. The cleavage shot garners women 49 percent more contacts, and the ratio goes up with age to 79 percent for 32-year-old women.

• Best pose for men is mysteriously aloof, unsmiling, looking off camera. A 19-year-old showing his abs gets twice as many contacts, but the rate falls off sharply for older men.

• When it comes to messaging, reply rates plummet for misspellings, bad grammar and Netspeak. And, general compliments like “awesome” and “fascinating” have much higher reply rates than physical compliments like “sexy” and “beautiful.”

• There are a few common lies to look out for. The more highly a picture is rated attractive, the more likely it is out of date. Eighty percent of self-identified bisexuals are only interested in one gender. Both men and women inflate their income by 20 percent.

• Three questions tested above all others in determining if you and someone else have long-term potential are: “Do you like horror movies?” “Have you ever traveled around another country alone?” and “Wouldn’t it be fun to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?” If you find someone that answers all three the same way you do, the two of you might just belong together.

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The post How to be more attractive: 10 insights from the founders of OKCupid appeared first on Barking Up The Wrong Tree.

Brainstorming is broken.

We all know the standard method of brainstorming:

1. Get a bunch of people together.
2. Generate lots of ideas.
3. Don’t be critical.

There’s one problem with this system.

It’s totally wrong.

1) Don’t work in a group

The research consistently shows that individuals who generate ideas on their own and then meet afterward come up with more (and better) ideas.

Via Imagine: How Creativity Works:

There’s just one problem with brainstorming: it doesn’t work. Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, summarizes the science: “Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.” In fact, the very first empirical test of Osborn’s technique, which was performed at Yale in 1958, soundly refuted the premise. The experiment was simple: Forty-eight male undergraduates were divided into twelve groups and given a series of creative puzzles. The groups were instructed to carefully follow Osborn’s brainstorming guidelines. As a control sample, forty-eight students working by themselves were each given the same puzzles. The results were a sobering refutation of brainstorming. Not only did the solo students come up with twice as many solutions as the brainstorming groups but their solutions were deemed more “feasible” and “effective” by a panel of judges. In other words, brainstorming didn’t unleash the potential of the group. Instead, the technique suppressed it, making each individual less creative.

Performance gets worse as group size increases.

Via Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking:

The results were unambiguous. The men in twenty-three of the twenty-four groups produced more ideas when they worked on their own than when they worked as a group. They also produced ideas of equal or higher quality when working individually. And the advertising executives were no better at group work than the presumably introverted research scientists. Since then, some forty years of research has reached the same startling conclusion. Studies have shown that performance gets worse as group size increases: groups of nine generate fewer and poorer ideas compared to groups of six, which do worse than groups of four. The “evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups,” writes the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham. “If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

2) Don’t generate as many ideas as possible.

Don’t write down every idea “no matter how crazy.” Rules help.

Focusing your efforts on being as creative as possible reduces the number of ideas but increases the number of good ideas.

Via Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration:

Researchers next looked for idea-generating rules that would work even better than Osborn’s. They told their subjects: “The more imaginative or creative your ideas, the higher your score will be. Each idea will be scored in terms of (1) how unique or different it is— how much it differs from the common use and (2) how valuable it is— either socially, artistically, economically, etc.” These instructions are very different from those given for classic brainstorming because people are being told to use specific directions in judging which ideas they come up with. Groups working with these instructions have fewer ideas than brainstorming groups, but they have more good ideas. What’s most important is being explicitly told to be imaginative, unique, and valuable; then, it’s okay if your critical faculties are still engaged. Osborn had one thing right: Most people use the wrong criteria to evaluate their ideas; they think about what will work, about what worked before, or about what is familiar to them. This discovery— that when subjects are told they’ll be evaluated for creativity, they’re more creative than when they’re told not to use any criteria at all— has been reproduced repeatedly in the laboratory. When groups are asked to suggest good, creative solutions, they have fewer ideas but those ideas are better than those generated by groups using the brainstorming rules.

3) Be critical and fight.

Don’t be open and accepting. Fight. When people debate, they are more creative.

Via Imagine: How Creativity Works:

Which teams did the best? The results weren’t even close: while the brainstorming groups slightly outperformed the groups given no instructions, people in the debate condition were far more creative. On average, they generated nearly 25 percent more ideas. The most telling part of the study, however, came after the groups had been disbanded. That’s when researchers asked each of the subjects if he or she had any more ideas about traffic that had been triggered by the earlier conversation. While people in the minimal and brainstorming conditions produced, on average, two additional ideas, those in the debate condition produced more than seven. Nemeth summarizes her results: “While the instruction ‘Do not criticize’ is often cited as the [most] important instruction in this appears to be a counterproductive strategy. Our findings show that debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to every other condition.”

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The post Brainstorming: 3 reasons why everything you know is wrong. appeared first on Barking Up The Wrong Tree.

Adam Alter

Adam Alter is an assistant professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business. His new book Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave explores the incredible (and vastly underestimated) power of context in our lives.

Adam and I spoke about the color that can make you appear sexy and powerful, what money means to your brain, and how the weather influences your ability to think.

My conversation with Adam was over an hour long, so for brevity’s sake I’m only going to post edited highlights here.

If you want the extended interview I’ll be sending it out with my weekly newsletter on Sunday.

Join here.

———————————————

The Power of Context – Little things can make a big difference

Adam Alter:

In “Drunk Tank Pink“, I open with an anecdote that I think is a good emblem for a lot of the things that I talk about in the book. And that’s the effect of this shade of pink, in the beginning it was on prisoners in a naval prison. And this shade of pink some psychologists realized actually calmed down the prisoners and made them much more well-behaved and tranquilized them. And even the most aggressive of them, when they came out of the holding cell that had been painted this bright bubblegum pink shade were calmer, more manageable, more malleable. And I think the reason that it’s a good emblem for the other effects is that it’s something that no one expected ahead of time.

Everyone knows that pink is different from blue is different from red; and we have a pretty good sense that colors matter in some way. But what we don’t realize is the extent to which they seem to matter. So, this shade of pink, the effects that it has on people I think are far greater than anyone would imagine. It’s just one case of many in the book showing how much greater the effects are of these contextual factors than we imagine them to be.

Money means possibilities

Adam Alter:

I talk about symbols and how symbols influence us. I think the most striking part of that chapter is probably the effect of money on us. And there is some evidence that when you see money being destroyed, that it’s metaphorically like watching possibilities being extinguished. The brain actually registers pain when you watch money being destroyed.

Also, seeing money makes us less likely to help people. If we’re keeping a count of money or we happened to see an image of money, we are less helpful. We’re also less willing to ask for help. We experience less physical pain. We are able to withstand physical pain more than we could if we hadn’t just been exposed to money. So it is an incredibly powerful symbol.

Red makes you appear sexy and powerful

Adam Alter:

I talk a lot about the color red, because it has fascinating effects for all sorts of biological reasons. The color red is associated most strongly with blood. And blood in different settings means very different things. In the context of romance, the rush of blood to someone’s face signals romantic interest. And if a woman puts up six photos of herself online, each where she’s wearing a different color shirt that are otherwise identical, she will have more hits very reliably, if she’s wearing a red shirt. It’s actually true for men as well; the color red stimulates sexual interest in people. It gives them the sense that you’re sexually interested. And so in an online dating context, red is very powerful.

Of course, the color red means different things in other settings. It can mean that you’re aggressive, and you’re ready to fight. A rush of blood to the face is no longer about sexual interest. In some contexts it means that you’re angry. There’s some pretty good evidence from Olympic events to suggest that when Olympic athletes who are in combat even like tae kwon do, wrestling or judo, when those athletes are randomly assigned to wear either red or blue for their bouts, it turns out that even when they’re evenly matched the ones who wear red tend to do better than the ones who wear blue. Their win rate goes up because they are wearing red. And that could be because they behave more aggressively when they see the color red on themselves, because their opponent sees them and feels that they are more aggressive and imposing. Or there’s actually good evidence to suggest that the referee sees a person who is wearing red as more dominant than the one wearing blue. And so if you give a referee the same bout, they are watching the same event that you Photoshop the uniforms, they will give the win to the person wearing red even if it’s a different person across different conditions. And so they really are swayed by this stuff.

The weather affects your ability to think

Adam Alter:

On sunny days we actually think a little bit less clearly. We think more clearly on cloudier days because that makes us a little bit less happy. It tempers our moods, and when our mood is tempered we automatically seek ways to improve our moods, and it makes us more thoughtful. So in one experiment people left a small shop in Sydney, Australia. And when they left that shop on cloudy days, they were more observant and did a better job of remembering the features of the shops, of the layout of the shops than they did on sunny days.

Nature is a painkiller

Adam Alter:

As a scientist who studies human functioning and the way we think and feel and behave, I was skeptical about the research on nature and how nature could make us feel happier and better and think more clearly and recover from illness more quickly. I always found that to be a little hard to believe, but in doing the research for the book I’m completely convinced by these effects. I’m not 100% sure exactly of the mechanisms in nature that lead to these effects, but I think there are some fascinating ideas. But the effects are striking. And one of them is that people who are recovering in hospital who happen to be looking out at a stand of trees rather than a brick wall recover a day more quickly, in this case from bladder surgery.

That was the experiment done. And they required fewer painkillers. They complained to the nurses much less often. And the patients were identical to patients in other rooms with brick wall views. This view of nature is enough to make them feel better and to hasten their recovery. And the same is true about children in the long run. Children who happen to have experienced great stress as young kids do much better when they have a buffer in nature. So if they happen to live in a natural setting or their parents happen to have potted plants in the home or they just generally play outdoors in a natural setting, they like to play games that take place outdoors like soccer on a green field. All of that has major effects in buffering them against stress, against the negative effects of stress. So to me, that was the single biggest takeaway. And as someone who lives in New York City, I’m trying to bring in potted plants into my home because that’s really my only option here, unfortunately. I’m going to be running in Central Park more than I do right now.

How does context affect who you are?

Adam Alter:

As people move to different locations they become different versions of themselves. And the most extreme version of social psychology suggests we are always at the mercy of situations, of contexts, and that obviously resonates for you because you talked about it a lot on your blog. I think what the book suggests is that there is no single version of who we are, that we are malleable. We are different people in different contexts. We are more likely to leave litter on the ground when we happen to be in a dirty place. We are more likely to be honest when we see ourselves in the mirror or when there is a blue light shining that reminds us of the police, or when there’s a pair of eyes nearby that makes us feel like we’re being watched — even if it’s just an image on a billboard. What’s important about all of this is that we have this sense that there is a thread that runs through us, through time and who we are that ties us together from moment to moment. And I do think there is to some extent a thread and that people are different. Some people are going to be different in enduring ways and in chronic ways. But at the same time I think there’s far more within a person’s variance than we think or that we recognize. So I would say that’s the main striking point through all of this study. There are different versions of us. There is no single version of us.

———————————————

If you want the extended interview (where Adam discusses how your name can dramatically affect your life and the ways in which context can make us hate or like murderers) I’ll be sending it out with my weekly newsletter on Sunday.

Join here.

Join 45K+ readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.

Related posts:

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The post Adam Alter interview: Can the color red make you look sexy? appeared first on Barking Up The Wrong Tree.

Great creative teams — what do they all have in common? What can we learn from them?

Keith Sawyer got his PhD studying under Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — the researcher who coined the idea of Flow. Sawyer looked at how creativity came about in collaborations vs. individuals. He analyzed jazz ensembles, improv comedy groups and other great creative teams to see what worked.

What did he find?

Via Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration:

1. Innovation Emerges over Time

No single actor comes up with the big picture, the whole plot. The play emerges bit by bit. Each actor, in each line of dialogue, contributes a small idea. In theater, we can see this process on stage; but with an innovative team, outsiders never see the long chain of small, incremental ideas that lead to the final innovation. Without scientific analysis, the collaboration remains invisible. Successful innovations happen when organizations combine just the right ideas in just the right structure.

2. Successful Collaborative Teams Practice Deep Listening

Trained improv actors listen for the new ideas that the other actors offer in their improvised lines, at the same time that they’re coming up with their own ideas. This difficult balancing act is essential to group genius. Most people spend too much time planning their own actions and not enough time listening and observing others.

3. Team Members Build on Their Collaborators’ Ideas

When teams practice deep listening, each new idea is an extension of the ideas that have come before. The Wright brothers couldn’t have thought of a moving vertical tail until after they discovered adverse yaw, and that discovery emerged from their experiments with wing warping. Although a single person may get credit for a specific idea, it’s hard to imagine that person having that idea apart from the hard work, in close quarters, of a dedicated team of like-minded individuals. Russ Mahon— one of the Morrow Dirt Club bikers from Cupertino— usually gets credit for putting the first derailleur on a fat-tired bike, but all ten members of the club played a role.

4. Only Afterwards Does the Meaning of Each Idea Become Clear

Even a single idea can’t be attributed to one person because ideas don’t take on their full importance until they’re taken up, reinterpreted, and applied by others. At the beginning of Jazz Freddy’s performance, we don’t know what John is doing: Is he studying for a test? Is he balancing the books of a criminal organization? Although he was the first actor to think of “studying,” the others decided that he would be a struggling umpire, a man stubbornly refusing to admit that he needed glasses. Individual creative actions take on meaning only later, after they are woven into other ideas, created by other actors. In a creative collaboration, each person acts without knowing what his or her action means. Participants are willing to allow other people to give their action meaning by building on it later.

5. Surprising Questions Emerge

The most transformative creativity results when a group either thinks of a new way to frame a problem or finds a new problem that no one had noticed before. When teams work this way, ideas are often transformed into questions and problems. That’s critical, because creativity researchers have discovered that the most creative groups are good at finding new problems rather than simply solving old ones.

6. Innovation Is Inefficient

In improvisation, actors have no time to evaluate new ideas before they speak. But without evaluation, how can they make sure it’ll be good? Improvised innovation makes more mistakes, and has as many misses as hits. But the hits can be phenomenal; they’ll make up for the inefficiency and the failures. After the full hourlong Jazz Freddy performance, we never do learn why Bill and Mary are making copies for John— that idea doesn’t go anywhere. In the second act, a brief subplot in which two actors are in the witness protection program also is never developed. Some ideas are just bad ideas; some of them are good in themselves, but the other ideas that would be necessary to turn them into an innovation just haven’t happened yet. In a sixty-minute improvisation, many ideas are proposed that are never used. When we look at an innovation after the fact, all we remember is the chain of good ideas that made it into the innovation; we don’t notice the many dead ends.

7. Innovation Emerges from the Bottom Up

Improvisational performances are self-organizing. With no director and no script, the performance emerges from the joint actions of the actors. In the same way, the most innovative teams are those that can restructure themselves in response to unexpected shifts in the environment; they don’t need a strong leader to tell them what to do. Moreover, they tend to form spontaneously; when like-minded people find each other, a group emerges. The improvisational collaboration of the entire group translates moments of individual creativity into group innovation. Allowing the space for this self-organizing emergence to occur is difficult for many managers because the outcome is not controlled by the management team’s agenda and is therefore less predictable. Most business executives like to start with the big picture and then work out the details. In improvisational innovation, teams start with the details and then work up to the big picture. It’s riskier and less efficient, but when a successful innovation emerges, it’s often so surprising and imaginative that no single individual could have thought of it.

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The post Creative Teams – What 7 elements do they all share? appeared first on Barking Up The Wrong Tree.

Michael Norton

Michael Norton is an associate professor of marketing at Harvard Business School. He is co-author of the new book, Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending, which explains how the latest social science research can help you spend your money in ways that improve your happiness. (More on the book here.)

Mike and I spoke about how time affects happiness, why money is so motivating and how Netflix might just be making us less happy.

My conversation with Mike was over an hour long, so for brevity’s sake I’m only going to post edited highlights here.

If you want the extended interview I’ll be sending it out with my weekly newsletter on Sunday.

Join here.

———————————————

Why are we so obsessed with money?

Mike:

It’s one of the most fascinating things that humans do: we can know something and yet it doesn’t influence our behavior at all. It’s amazing how good we are at that. I know I should exercise and I don’t. I know I should eat healthy and I don’t. I know I should spend time with my kids and I don’t. I know that, yes, money isn’t going to make me happy and I still keep trying to make money. It’s an amazing thing about humans that we have these mistakes that we make all the time and it’s not lack of information.

So, one of the things that we want to feel about ourselves is that we’re getting better over time. My life is getting better or I’m making progress or I’m growing or learning. It would stink if you felt every year was worse than the year before.

Eric:

So money is a metric?

Mike:

Yes. Exactly. We’re looking around for, “Am I better off than I was last year?” Some things are hard to measure. So, “Am I a better dad than I was last year?” Well, there’s no objective scale where I can look back and someone says, “Last year you were a 71 dad. This year, you’re a 74 dad.” Or spouse or whatever it might be, it’s very, very hard to know. The things that we can know are things we can count, and one thing that is really, really easy to count is money. So, if I want to know if I’m better off this year than last year, one of the first things I can do is say, “Do I have more money?” I think that alone makes it very, very motivating.

It works with things like the size of your TV, the square footage in your house, all of these things that we can . . . The number of cars you have. “Am I better than I was five years ago? Well, I have five cars. I had no cars. I guess I’m better.” We’re just unable to correct for it because the other things that are important are hard to count and counting is great. It feels like math and math feels like science and we feel like we’re better off because there’s a confidence that I’m doing better, and it also works better with other people: “Am I better off than you? I don’t know, but if I have a bigger house than you, I beat you.“

“Is life nasty, brutish and short?”

Eric:

So, in a very Hobbesian turn, you did a study on “Is life nasty, brutish and short?” Can you talk about that?

Mike:

We started with the Hobbesian “Is life nasty, brutish and short?” and we tested it in a very simple way, which is we just asked people two questions and you can answer them yourself. One is, “Is life short or long?” The second question is, “Is life easy or hard?” Of course Hobbes said life is “nasty, brutish and short.”

It turns out that a massive majority of people agree with him that life is short and hard, something usually 50, 60, 70% of people agree, life is short and hard. Only 5% think the opposite, long and easy. So, very, very few people, if we ask them, say, “Life is long and easy,” including people for whom life is long and easy.

If we ask, for example, MBAs, who are a group of people who have extraordinary life outcomes. In human history, very few classes of people in the world have better average outcomes than people getting their MBA, because they all end up doing something interesting and they have enough money and things like that. Even they say life is short and hard. So, it’s not about, really, your life experience. It’s about what you bring to the table, and people seem to mainly have this theory that life is going to be short and hard. What’s sad about it is that’s associated with being unhappy, with being not civically engaged, with not volunteering, that when you have this view of life as short and hard, you tend to sort of ogre down and be sad. And this little tiny group of people, the 5% to say “Life is long and easy,” are incredibly happy people, totally engaged, tons of friends. There are huge fascinating differences on the basis of whether you think life is short and hard or long and easy.

Stop counting

Mike:

We talked earlier about the curse of counting things, which is fundamental, I think, to what we’re trying to say in the book, which is, “Knock it off. Knock off counting how much money you have and start thinking about what you’re doing with it. What you’re doing with your money and time is a lot more important than how much money and time you have,” and that has really changed my life.

“Knock it off, because it’s not good for your happiness and you’re probably focusing on the wrong dimensions for what will really make you happy.” It’s very hard to apply, but that’s something that I actually try to apply in my life, really, every day.

Which books do you recommend?

Mike:

Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational

Danny Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow

Adam Grant’s Give and Take

The books of Malcolm Gladwell

Don Campbell’s Unobtrusive Measures

Think about time

Mike:

One of the chapters in Happy Money is all about buying time. So, everything you buy, think about how it’s going to affect your time. Not the product itself, but what you’re going to do with it later and that massively changes your decision-making. So, not to come back to TVs, but buying a TV, you think, “Oh. This is going to be great. I’m going to have friends over and we’re going to watch TV and the kids will be there. We’ll have family movie night.” It turns out, when you buy a TV, what you do is you watch it by yourself in a dark room. It’s not good for you. If you think about, “Wait. How am I actually going to use this TV? How will it actually change my time?” you might say, “Maybe I don’t want to get a TV.“

Those kinds of decisions, alone, are very important to think about, not your fantasy of what it’s going to do, but “How will this actually change the time I spend in the weeks going forward?” and a TV commits you to thousands of hours by yourself, and that is not good for our happiness. I use this in my own life.

Really think about everything you buy. If you want to buy a huge house, that’s great. If it’s adding a two-hour commute, that’s not great, and think about not just, “Oh. Commute’s fine. I can do a commute.“ Think about two hours every day for the rest of your life. Do you really want to add that to your time or do you want to stay in the house that you’re in? It’s really an important thing to think about.

“Make it a treat”

Mike:

The idea is that the things that you really like a lot, stop. Stop it. So, if you love, every day, having the same coffee, don’t have it for a few days and, when you wait, and then you have it again, it’s going to be way more amazing than all of the ones that you would have had in the meantime.

The problem with that is, on any given day, it’s better to have a coffee than not, but if you wait three days and don’t have it, it’s going to be way better once you finally do. Interrupting our consumption is free. It actually saves you money and gets you more happiness out of the money spent. It’s like the best of all worlds, but we’re completely unable to do it, because we always want to watch the thing or eat the thing right now. It’s not “give it up forever.” It’s “give it up for short periods of time, and I promise you you’re going to love it even more when you come back to it.”

Eric:

Dammit, Netflix, stop giving me the whole season in one drop. You’re reducing my happiness.

Mike:

Exactly.

———————————————

If you want the extended interview (where Mike discusses how to increase free time, as well as a simple trick that can boost the enjoyment you get from life’s little pleasures) I’ll be sending it out with my weekly newsletter on Sunday.

Join here.

Join 45K+ readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.

Related posts:

What 10 things should you do every day to improve your life?

Here are the things that are proven to make you happier 

Can money buy happiness? 5 smart ways to spend it

The post Harvard professor Michael Norton explains how to be happier appeared first on Barking Up The Wrong Tree.

Being delusional is bad 

Which person does everyone think is going to get into heaven?

“Me.”

Via Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to the Plan:

One of my favorite examples of this human tendency comes from a survey conducted by U.S. News and World Report in 1997. The survey asked one thousand Americans the following question: “Who do you think is most likely to get into heaven?” Respondents indicated a 52 percent likelihood for then president Bill Clinton; they gave Michael Jordan a 65 percent chance (maybe partly because the Bulls had won the NBA championship that year); and they gave a 79 percent chance to Mother Teresa. But guess who received the highest likelihood for getting into heaven? It was the person completing the survey, with a score of 87 percent! Apparently, most of the respondents taking the survey thought, “Mother Teresa has a pretty good chance of getting into heaven. In fact, there is only one person I can think of who has a better chance than she does, and that’s me.”

David Brooks, author of The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, explains just how extreme our delusion can be:

Via The New Yorker:

Human beings are overconfidence machines. Paul J. H. Schoemaker and J. Edward Russo gave questionnaires to more than two thousand executives in order to measure how much they knew about their industries. Managers in the advertising industry gave answers that they were ninety-per-cent confident were correct. In fact, their answers were wrong sixty-one per cent of the time. People in the computer industry gave answers they thought had a ninety-five percent chance of being right; in fact, eighty per cent of them were wrong. Ninety-nine per cent of the respondents overestimated their success.

You might be better off asking your friends to evaluate you than doing it yourself:

In general, people’s self-views hold only a tenuous to modest relationship with their actual behavior and performance. The correlation between self-ratings of skill and actual performance in many domains is moderate to meager—indeed, at times, other people’s predictions of a person’s outcomes prove more accurate than that person’s self-predictions. In addition, people overrate themselves. On average, people say that they are ‘‘above average’’ in skill (a conclusion that defies statistical possibility), over-estimate the likelihood that they will engage in desirable behaviors and achieve favorable outcomes, furnish overly optimistic estimates of when they will complete future projects, and reach judgments with too much confidence. Several psychological processes conspire to produce flawed self-assessments.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink, Outliers and The Tipping Point, gives an excellent talk about how the overconfidence of smart people can be far more dangerous than the incompetence of dumb people.

But if there are all these reasons why delusion and overconfidence are bad, why in the world would this be our default state in so many situations?

Being delusional can be good

Overconfident, deluded people are better at work.

…moderate overconfidence is both pervasive and advantageous and that people maintain such beliefs by underweighting new information about their ability.

But doesn’t it turn people into intolerable cocky bastards? Nope, it improves teamwork:

…the presence of overconfident workers in teams is beneficial for firms since it raises effort provision and team output. We also find that overconfidence leads to a Pareto improvement in workers’ payoffs. In contrast, underconfidence is detrimental to firms as well as workers.

Deluded people are happier.

Via Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom:

…evidence shows that people who hold pervasive positive illusions about themselves, their abilities, and their future prospects are mentally healthier, happier and better liked than people who lack such illusions.

And a little delusion is necessary for another important thing — love.

• Those with positive illusions about their relationship are more fulfilled, score higher on love and trust, and have fewer difficulties.

• “…people who were unrealistically idealistic about their partners when they got married were more satisfied with their marriage three years later than less idealistic people.”

When I interviewed Dan Ariely he talked about the “IKEA effect” — our irrational attachment to the things we create. What did he think was the best example of this?  How we love our children:

So this is a great example of something that is irrational but wonderful. And what we’ve basically found is that the moment that you invest something of yourself into something, you start overvaluing it… And I think this is because kids are an ideal example of the IKEA effect. We love our kids. I have two kids; I think they’re the most adorable kids in the world. We just went skiing and I couldn’t believe anybody wanted to do anything on the mountain besides watching my kids ski. How could they find anything else more adorable? If you want, I’ll send you the video. But the realization I think is we love them so much because they’re our kids. We think that IKEA furniture comes with better instructions. Kids really come with no instructions. Very tough to deal with, difficult, complex, but incredibly involving and time-consuming and I think the love that comes out of it is an example of the effect of a tremendous investment.

Let yourself be a little delusional today.

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Can Money Buy Happiness?

Yes. But you might be surprised by the ways you should spend it.

Harvard professor Michael Norton and co-author Elizabeth Dunn have a new book out, Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending, that details the research on the 5 best ways to turn your dollars into lasting smiles. What are they?

1) Buy Experiences

Via Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending:

“…57 percent of Americans reported that the experiential purchase made them happier than the material purchase, while only 34 percent reported the opposite. This difference was more pronounced among women, young people and those living in cities and suburbs. But the same basic pattern emerged even for men, the elderly, and country dwellers. In study after study, people are in a better mood when they reflect on their experiential purchases, which they describe as “money well spent.”

2) Make It A Treat

Via Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending:

“…knowing you can’t have access to something all the time may help you appreciate it more when you do… When you love a television show — say, The Office — you might think the best way to maximize your happiness is to buy the DVD set and watch all the episodes straight through. Getting rid of the commercials and eliminating the weeklong wait between episodes seems sensible. But research suggests that taking breaks between episodes can increase your enjoyment. Perhaps most amazingly, commercials can improve the experience of watching television. Even entertaining shows can start to drag after five to seven minutes, decreasing our enjoyment. Commercials disrupt that adaptation process, so when the show comes back on, we can fall in love with Jim and Pam all over again.”

3) Buy Time

Via Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending:

“People who feel they have plenty of free time are more likely to exercise, do volunteer work, and participate in other activities that are linked to increased happiness. Although money can be used to buy “free time,” in part by outsourcing the demands of daily life such as cooking, cleaning and even grocery shopping, wealthier individuals report elevated levels of time pressure… Wealthier individuals tend to spend more of their time on activities associated with relatively high levels of tension and stress, such as shopping, working and commuting.“

4) Pay Now, Consume Later

Via Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending:

“Delay can enhance the pleasure of consumption not only by providing an opportunity to develop positive expectations, but also by enhancing what we call the “drool factor.” The very best stimulus for studying the drool factor? Chocolate. In a recent experiment, college students chose whether they wanted a Hershey’s Kiss or a Hershey’s Hug. They either ate their chosen chocolate immediately or waited thirty minutes. When students had to wait for their candy, they enjoyed it more and expressed more interest in buying additional Hershey’s chocolates. Even though they didn’t learn anything new about the chocolates, the delay provided an opportunity to build visceral desire, to drool a bit.“

5) Invest In Others

Via Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending:

“By the end of the day, individuals who spent money on others were measurably happier than those who spent money on themselves — even though there were no differences between the groups at the beginning of the day. And it turns out that the amount of money people found in their envelopes — $5 or $20 — had no effect on their happiness at the end of the day. How people spent the money mattered much more than how much of it they got.”

More from Michael Norton’s TEDx talk here:

To learn more check out Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending.

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Ten research-based steps to a happier life

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I went through a number of great books on happiness and pulled together ten research-based tips that can help build a happier life:

1) Cut the small talk. Discuss what matters.

Via Pursuing the Good Life: 100 Reflections on Positive Psychology:

First, happier participants spent more time talking to others, unsurprising finding given the social basis of happiness. Second, the extent of small talk was negatively associated with happiness. And third, the extent of substantive talk was positively associated with happiness. So, happy people are socially engaged with others, and this engagement entails matters of substance.

2) Make sure to have at least five friends you can discuss your problems with.

Via Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life:

“National surveys find that when someone claims to have five or more friends with whom they can discuss important problems, they are 60 percent more likely to say that they are ‘very happy.’“

3) Don’t just cheer people up. Celebrate their good news.

Via The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn’t, What Shouldn’t Make You Happy, but Does:

The surprising finding is that the closest, most intimate, and most trusting relationships appear to be distinguished not by how the partners respond to each other’s disappointments, losses, and reversals but how they react to good news. Flourishing relationships have been revealed to be those in which the couple responds “actively and constructively”— that is, with interest and delight— to each other’s windfalls and successes… people who strove to show genuine enthusiasm, support, and understanding of their partner’s good news, however small— and did so three times a day over a week— became happier and less depressed.

4) Write down your hopes and dreams.

Via The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn’t, What Shouldn’t Make You Happy, but Does:

…keeping a journal regularly for ten to twenty minutes per day, in which we write down our hopes and dreams for the future (e.g., “In ten years, I will be married and a home owner”), visualize them coming true, and describe how we might get there and what that would feel like. This exercise— even when engaged in as briefly as two minutes— makes people happier and even healthier.

5) Live a month like it’s your last.

Via The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn’t, What Shouldn’t Make You Happy, but Does:

I’m currently conducting a one-month-long “happiness intervention” in which participants are instructed to live the month as if it’s their last month. Their instructions are not to pretend that they have a terminal disease but rather to imagine as fully and faithfully as possible that they are about to move a very long way from their jobs, schools, friends, and families for an indefinite period of time. Previous research hints that this exercise should prompt us to appreciate in a profound way what we are preparing to give up. When we believe that we are seeing (or hearing, doing, or experiencing) things for the last time, we will see (or hear, do, or experience) them as though it’s the first time.

6) Know what makes everyone happy and everyone sad.

Via Engineering Happiness: A New Approach for Building a Joyful Life:

Their findings confirm what had been found previously: happiness is high during sex, exercise, or socializing, or while the mind is focused on the here and now, and low during commuting or while the mind is wandering.

7) Join a group.

Via Engineering Happiness: A New Approach for Building a Joyful Life:

The sociologist Ruut Veenhoven and his team have collected happiness data from ninety-one countries, representing two-thirds of the world’s population. He has concluded that Denmark is home to the happiest people in the world, with Switzerland close behind… Interestingly enough, one of the more detailed points of the research found that 92 percent of the people in Denmark are members of some sort of group, ranging from sports to cultural interests. To avoid loneliness, we must seek active social lives, maintain friendships, and enjoy stable relationships.

8) For a happier life, set goals.

Via Engineering Happiness: A New Approach for Building a Joyful Life:

In his studies, the psychologist Jonathan Freedman claimed that people with the ability to set objectives for themselves—both short-term and long-term—are happier. The University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard Davidson has found that working hard toward a goal and making progress to the point of expecting a goal to be realized don’t just activate positive feelings—they also suppress negative emotions such as fear and depression. According to Michael Argyle, simply having a long-term plan or goal gives people a sense of meaning in life. Progressing toward goals not only gives a purpose to life as a whole but also provides a structure and meaning to daily routines, strengthens social relationships, and helps us weather hard times.

9) Optimism can save your life.

Via Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being:

Within eight and a half years, half the men had died of a second heart attack, and we opened the sealed envelope. Could we predict who would have a second heart attack? None of the usual risk factors predicted death: not blood pressure, not cholesterol, not even how extensive the damage from the first heart attack. Only optimism, eight and a half years earlier, predicted a second heart attack: of the sixteen most pessimistic men, fifteen died. Of the sixteen most optimistic men, only five died. This finding has been repeatedly confirmed in larger studies of cardiovascular disease, using varied measures of optimism…

Men with the most optimistic style (one standard deviation above average) had 25 percent less CVD than average, and men with the least optimism (one standard deviation below the mean) had 25 percent more CVD than average. This trend was strong and continuous, indicating that greater optimism protected the men, whereas less optimism weakened them.

10) Anticipating happiness will double your happiness.

Via Stumbling on Happiness:

In one study, volunteers were told that they had won a free dinner at a fabulous French restaurant and were then asked when they would like to eat it. Now? Tonight? Tomorrow? Although the delights of the meal were obvious and tempting, most of the volunteers chose to put their restaurant visit off a bit, generally until the following week. Why the self-imposed delay? Because by waiting a week, these people not only got to spend several hours slurping oysters and sipping Château Cheval Blanc ’47, but they also got to look forward to all that slurping and sipping for a full seven days beforehand. Forestalling pleasure is an inventive technique for getting double the juice from half the fruit.

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What’s it take to win a Nobel prize? How about “being nice”?

The other day I posted the research for and against “nice guys finish last.” Turns out there’s one more area where being good pays off.

How do we know?

Researchers who hog the credit on scientific papers are less likely to win a Nobel prize. Those who give younger academics a bit of the spotlight are more likely to have a trip to Stockholm in their future.

Via The Half-life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date

One striking finding was the beneficence of Nobel laureates, or as Zuckerman termed it, noblesse oblige. In general, when a scientific paper is published, the author who did the most is listed first. There are exceptions to this, and this can vary from field to field, but Zuckerman took it as a useful rule of thumb. What she found was that Nobel laureates are first authors of numerous publications early in their careers, but quickly begin to give their junior colleagues first authorship. And this happens far before they receive the Nobel Prize.

As one generous Nobel laureate in chemistry put it: “It helps a young man to be senior author, first author, and doesn’t detract from the credit that I get if my name is farther down the list.” On the other hand, those peers of Nobel laureates who were not as successful tried to maintain first authorship for themselves far more often, garnering more glory for themselves. By their forties, Nobel laureates are first authors on only 26 percent of their papers, as compared to their less accomplished contemporaries, who are first authors 56 percent of the time. Nicer people are indeed more creative, more successful, and even more likely to win Nobel prizes.

Want a Nobel Peace Prize? You need a trustworthy face.

They gave people pictures of Nobel Peace Prize winners and American’s Most Wanted criminals. The Nobel Prize winners could often be guessed after seeing a picture for only 100 milliseconds:

Although trustworthiness judgments based on a stranger’s face occur rapidly (Willis & Todorov, 2006), their accuracy is unknown. We examined the accuracy of trustworthiness judgments of the faces of 2 groups differing in trustworthiness (Nobel Peace Prize recipients/humanitarians vs. America’s Most Wanted criminals). Participants viewed 34 faces each for 100 ms or 30 s and rated their trustworthiness. Subsequently, participants were informed about the nature of the 2 groups and estimated group membership for each face. Judgments formed with extremely brief exposure were similar in accuracy and confidence to those formed after a long exposure. However, initial judgments of untrustworthy (criminals’) faces were less accurate (M=48.8%) than were those of trustworthy faces (M=62.7%). Judgment accuracy was above chance for trustworthy targets only at Time 1 and slightly above chance for both target types at Time 2. Participants relied on perceived kindness and aggressiveness to inform their rapidly formed intuitive decisions. Thus, intuition plays a minor facilitative role in reading faces.

So what if you’re a jerk with an untrustworthy mug but you still want to win a Nobel Prize?

I’d eat a lot of chocolate. I’m being serious.

Countries that eat more chocolate win more Nobels. Chocolate has been shown to increase smarts so there could be a connection. (Correlation, causation, whatever — it’s an excuse to eat chocolate, right?)

Via The New England Journal of Medicine:

There was a close, significant linear correlation (r=0.791, P<0.0001) between chocolate consumption per capita and the number of Nobel laureates per 10 million persons in a total of 23 countries (Figure 1). When recalculated with the exclusion of Sweden, the correlation coefficient increased to 0.862. Switzerland was the top performer in terms of both the number of Nobel laureates and chocolate consumption… since chocolate consumption has been documented to improve cognitive function, it seems most likely that in a dose-dependent way, chocolate intake provides the abundant fertile ground needed for the sprouting of Nobel laureates.

Would love to write more but I’m going to eat a Snickers bar while I study quantum mechanics.

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Want to know how to be a genius?  There are five things you can learn from looking at those who are the very best.

1) Be curious and driven

For his book Creativity, noted professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi did interviews with 91 groundbreaking individuals across a number of disciplines, including 14 Nobel Prize winners. In 50 Psychology Classics Tom Butler-Bowdon summed up many of Csikszentmihalyi’s findings including this one:

Successful creative people tend to have two things in abundance, curiosity and drive. They are absolutely fascinated by their subject, and while others may be more brilliant, their sheer desire for accomplishment is the decisive factor.

2) It’s not about formal education. It’s about hours at your craft.

Do you need a sky-high IQ? Do great geniuses all have PhD’s? Nope. Most had about a college-dropout level of education.

Via Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else:

Dean Keith Simonton, a professor at the University of California at Davis, conducted a large-scale study of more than three hundred creative high achievers born between 1450 and 1850—Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Beethoven, Rembrandt, for example. He determined the amount of formal education each had received and measured each one’s level of eminence by the spaces devoted to them in an array of reference works. He found that the relation between education and eminence, when plotted on a graph, looked like an inverted U: The most eminent creators were those who had received a moderate amount of education, equal to about the middle of college. Less education than that—or more—corresponded to reduced eminence for creativity.

But they all work their asses off in their field of expertise. That’s how to be a genius.

Those interested in the 10,000-hour theory of deliberate practice won’t be surprised. As detailed in Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, the vast majority of them are workaholics.

Via Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

“Sooner or later,” Pritchett writes, “the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.”

In fact, you really can’t work too much.

Via Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else:

If we’re looking for evidence that too much knowledge of the domain or familiarity with its problems might be a hindrance in creative achievement, we have not found it in the research.

Instead, all evidence seems to point in the opposite direction. The most eminent creators are consistently those who have immersed themselves utterly in their chosen field, have devoted their lives to it, amassed tremendous knowledge of it, and continually pushed themselves to the front of it.

3) Test Your Ideas

Howard Gardner studied geniuses like Picasso, Freud and Stravinsky and found a similar pattern of analyzing, testing and feedback used by all of them:

Via Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Ghandi:

…Creative individuals spend a considerable amount of time reflecting on what they are trying to accomplish, whether or not they are achieving success (and, if not, what they might do differently).

Does testing sound like something scientific and uncreative? Wrong. The more creative an artist is the more likely they are to use this method:

Via Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries

In a study of thirty-five artists, Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi found that the most creative in their sample were more open to experimentation and to reformulating their ideas for projects than their less creative counterparts.

4) You Must Sacrifice

10,000 hours is a hell of a lot of hours. It means many other things (some important) will need to be ignored.

In fact, geniuses are notably less likely to be popular in high school. Why?

The deliberate practice that will one day make them famous alienates them from their peers in adolesence.

Via Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking:

…the single-minded focus on what would turn out to be a lifelong passion, is typical for highly creative people. According to the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who between 1990 and 1995 studied the lives of ninety-one exceptionally creative people in the arts, sciences, business, and government, many of his subjects were on the social margins during adolescence, partly because “intense curiosity or focused interest seems odd to their peers.” Teens who are too gregarious to spend time alone often fail to cultivate their talents “because practicing music or studying math requires a solitude they dread.”

At the extremes, the amount of practice and devotion required can pass into the realm of the pathological. If hours alone determine genius then it is inevitable that reaching the greatest heights will require, quite literally, obsession.

Via Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Ghandi:

My study reveals that, in one way or another, each of the creators became embedded in some kind of a bargain, deal, or Faustian arrangement, executed as a means of ensuring the preservation of his or her unusual gifts. In general, the creators were so caught up in the pursuit of their work mission that they sacrificed all, especially the possibility of a rounded personal existence. The nature of this arrangement differs: In some cases (Freud, Eliot, Gandhi), it involves the decision to undertake an ascetic existence; in some cases, it involves a self-imposed isolation from other individuals (Einstein, Graham); in Picasso’s case, as a consequence of a bargain that was rejected, it involves an outrageous exploitation of other individuals; and in the case of Stravinsky, it involves a constant combative relationship with others, even at the cost of fairness. What pervades these unusual arrangements is the conviction that unless this bargain has been compulsively adhered to, the talent may be compromised or even irretrievably lost. And, indeed, at times when the bargain is relaxed, there may well be negative consequences for the individual’s creative output.

5) Work because of passion, not money

Passion produces better art than desire for financial gain — and that leads to more success in the long run.

Via Dan Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us:

“Those artists who pursued their painting and sculpture more for the pleasure of the activity itself than for extrinsic rewards have produced art that has been socially recognized as superior,” the study said. “It is those who are least motivated to pursue extrinsic rewards who eventually receive them.”

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What does nearly every genius have in common when it comes to work habits?

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What does the most comprehensive study of geniuses tell us about creativity?

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