psychology Archives - Page 5 of 12

Half a Minute

In 1993 two Harvard psychologists, Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, published a study called “Half a Minute.” Nine undergraduates watched three 10-second clips of each of 13 college teachers, “with the audio turned down completely.” They rated each teacher on traits such as “confident,” “competent,” “enthusiastic” and “professional.”

Their ratings predicted the evaluations the teachers’ own students gave at the end of the semester. In a later part of the study, even shorter clips still predicted the evaluations.

Conversational Turn-Taking

In 2010 researchers from Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Union College published a study of 699 people working in small groups in the journal Science. They found a “general collective intelligence factor” that explained how well a group did across many tasks. It was linked to “the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.”

The lead author, Anita Williams Woolley, said that “in groups where one person dominated, the group was less collectively intelligent than in groups where the conversational turns were more evenly distributed.”

Givers, Takers and Matchers

In 2013 Adam Grant, a professor at the Wharton School, published Give and Take. He sorts people at work into three types. Takers like to get more than they give. Givers pay more attention to what other people need from them. Matchers try “to preserve an equal balance of giving and getting.” Grant puts the share of matchers at about 55 to 60 percent.

One of his examples of a giver is Adam Rifkin, a serial entrepreneur whom Fortune named its best networker in 2011. Rifkin follows a rule he calls the five-minute favor: “You should be willing to do something that will take you five-minutes or less for anybody.”

Specific Goals and “Do Your Best”

In 2002 the psychologists Edwin Locke and Gary Latham reviewed their research on goals in American Psychologist. The article was subtitled “A 35-Year Odyssey.” “We found that specific, difficult goals consistently led to higher performance than urging people to do their best,” they wrote. They added: “when people are asked to do their best, they do not do so.”

The reason, they explained, is that “do-your-best goals have no external referent and thus are defined idiosyncratically.” This “allows for a wide range of acceptable performance levels, which is not the case when a goal level is specified.” The findings covered “well over 100 different tasks involving more than 40,000 participants” in “at least eight countries.”

Calling In Favors

In his book Influence, first published in 1984, the psychologist Robert Cialdini states the rule of reciprocation: “we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us.” He describes an experiment by Dennis Regan of Cornell University. His assistant posed as a subject. He bought some subjects a Coke and later asked them to buy raffle tickets. They bought twice as many as those who got nothing.

Cialdini then turns to Washington. Lyndon Johnson, he writes, produced a remarkable amount of legislation as president “by calling in those favors.” Jimmy Carter had trouble with Congress from the start. Cialdini suggests that much of it may be traced to the fact that “no one there was indebted to him.”

Maximizers and Satisficers

In 2002 the Swarthmore psychologist Barry Schwartz and five colleagues published a study of “maximizers,” who look for the best option, and “satisficers,” who stop at good enough. Across seven samples they found “negative correlations between maximization and happiness” and “positive correlations between maximization and depression.” In one study, maximizers were “more sensitive to regret.”

In his book The Paradox of Choice, Schwartz wrote: “To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough …” In a 2014 Reddit Q&A, he gave short advice: “‘Good enough’ is almost always good enough.” The Atlantic quoted it in 2015.

Satisficing

In 1956 Herbert Simon published “Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment” in Psychological Review. He wrote: “Evidently, organisms adapt well enough to ‘satisfice’; they do not, in general, ‘optimize.'”

The term joins satisfy and suffice. A person who satisfices stops searching when an option meets the need. In 1978 Simon received the Nobel Prize in economics “for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations.”

The Eagles and the Rattlers

In the summer of 1954, the psychologist Muzafer Sherif and his colleagues took 22 boys to a camp at Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma. The boys were 11 and 12 years old and did not know each other. They were split into two groups. The groups called themselves the Eagles and the Rattlers.

The staff then set up a tournament. The winning group would get a trophy, and each winner a medal and a pocket knife. The losers got nothing. The Eagles burned the Rattlers’ flag. Later the staff created problems that neither group could solve alone, such as a blocked water supply and a stuck food truck.

The study has critics. In her 2018 book The Lost Boys, Gina Perry argues that the staff shaped events more than the published account admits.

My Name Is Kim

“Good Morning. My name is Kim, and I’ll be serving you this morning.” K. Garrity and D. Degelman tested this greeting at a Charlie Brown’s restaurant in Southern California. Their study appeared in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology in 1990. Introducing herself by name brought the server much higher tips.

The study was small. It used one server and 42 dining parties over two days. A study published in 2016 went further. The servers “introduced themselves by name and then invited customers to do likewise.” Then they used the customers’ names. Their tips rose by 6 percent.

Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, Adjourning

In 1965 the American psychologist Bruce Tuckman published “Developmental sequence in small groups” in the Psychological Bulletin. He was then at the Naval Medical Research Institute. The paper named four stages in the life of a group: forming, storming, norming and performing.

In 1977 Tuckman and Mary Ann Jensen added a fifth stage, adjourning. A summary on infed.org, drawing on Donelson Forsyth’s textbook, describes it this way: “Adjourning involves dissolution. It entails the termination of roles, the completion of tasks and reduction of dependency.”