Psychology – Laura M. Martin

May 20, 2015

The Limits of Introspection

On our journey towards self-knowledge, our first impulse is often to turn inward, introspect and self-reflect. We give great weight to our introspections. Most of us are confident that our perceptions of ourselves are more accurate than others’ perceptions of them. Yet psychological research tells us that introspection is often a highly inaccurate source of self-knowledge. An over-reliance on introspection trips one up — decreasing performance, reducing decision quality and even undermining self-insight. 2 […]

January 13, 2015

Putting Leaders on the Couch

View more from the Leadership is the global obsession. Thousands of recent books—many of them best sellers—have dissected the leadership styles of great leaders from Jesus to Jefferson. Business writers, too, have joined the frenzy. The trouble is, much of the business literature on leadership—unlike the broader literature on the subject—starts with the assumption that leaders are rational beings. In part, that’s because readers come to these business books for advice, so they get […]

January 2, 2015

Want To Conquer A New Skill? Do It Every Day

When you’re learning a new skill—whether developing dance moves or websites —quantity is way more important than quality. Why? Over at Medium , entrepreneur-essayist Herbert Lui expounds on expansion: Quantity should be a higher priority than quality, because it leads to higher quality. The shorter path to maximized quality is in maximized quantity, and executing on the feedback after each finished product. To put it into startup terms , you’re making yourself maximally iterative. […]

January 1, 2015

The Underlying Psychology of Office Politics

Loading… All organizations are political – and to some degree, they always will be. The underlying reasons are psychological. First, work involves dealing with people. That means finding a compromise between what they want and what we want; and it’s often a zero-sum game. Second, humans are emotional creatures, biased by unconscious needs and riddled with insecurities. As the great Dale Carnegie, who probably knew more about the art of politics than anyone else, […]

December 27, 2014

Critical Thinking in Psychology

Defining Critical Thinking Sample Weekly Essays from Psychology 101 Classes How To Be A Critical Thinker (based on Critical and Creative Thinking by Carole Wade and Carol Tavris) “The philosopher Richard Paul has described three kinds of people: vulgar believers, who use slogans and platitudes to bully those holding different points of view into agreeing with them; sophisticated believers, who are skilled at using intellectual arguments, but only to defend what they already believe; […]

December 25, 2014

40 Psychological Facts You Should Know About Yourself

See Also The ‘Shark Tank’ Investors Share Their New Year’s Resolutions Here’s What People Eat On Christmas In 25 Countries Around The Globe NBA MVP POWER RANKINGS: Where The Top Players Stand After 8 Weeks I’ve decided to start a series called “100 Things You Should Know about People.” As in: 100 things you should know if you are going to design an effective and persuasive website, web application or software application. Or maybe […]

August 1, 2014

Three Secrets of Organizational Effectiveness

How the practices of “pride builders” can help you build a high-performance culture. Illustration by Lars Leetaru When the leaders of a major retail pharmacy chain set out to enhance customer satisfaction, market research told them that the number one determinant would be friendly and courteous service. This meant changing the organizational culture in hundreds of locations—creating an open, welcoming atmosphere where regular customers and employees knew one another’s names, and any question was […]

July 19, 2014

Inclusion, Engagement, Collaboration — An Inconvenient Truth?

Much talk is generated about the value that the behaviors of inclusion, engagement and collaboration bring to organizations but we only need to dig a bit deeper to see what the evidence is for how these behaviors are practiced by those who do the talking. Before we do this it is necessary to understand, what inclusion, engagement and collaboration mean? And, if practiced, examine whether these activities make a difference to organizations and employees […]

May 29, 2014

The new rules of persuasion

Dr BJ Fogg has been in the behaviour-changing game for more than 15 years. He shows how the latest technology is providing tools that can influence how people Can computers be designed to change people’s beliefs and behaviours? It was this question that brought me to Stanford in 1993 as a doctoral student. I admit that at first some people thought me a bit crazy: at the time, computers were used mostly for crunching numbers […]