O2 #3 Are Sex And Religion Natural Enemies? (via Psychology Today)

Loving thoughts might increase religious belief, and sexy thoughts decrease it.

An interesting research study (Förster, Epstude, & Özelsel, 2009) found that asking people to think about sex subsequently improved their performance on analytical tasks requiring attention to detail. Getting them to think about love improved their performance on creative tasks. The underlying theory is that people think about sex in concrete and specific ways involving the present moment which facilitates analytical thinking. On the other hand, people tend to think of love in a more abstract and global way that involves thoughts about the long-term future, which facilitates creativity. Previous studies have found that priming tasks that activate analytical thinking tend to weaken religious beliefs. This raises the intriguing possibility that thinking about sex could weaken religious belief, whereas thoughts about love might strengthen it. If this is true, this might shed some light on why most religions take such a negative view of sex, especially lust without love. 

Read the rest here: Sex&Religion 

O2 #2 Move Over Economists: We Need a Council of Psychological Advisers (via The Atlantic)

Much of governing involves predicting behavior or getting people to change it. Lawyers and economists need some help with both.

Though President Obama won reelection decisively, he won't have much time to celebrate. Many of the nation's problems -- stimulating employment, reducing the deficit, controlling health-care costs, and improving the quality of education -- are very serious, and some of them must be addressed with great urgency. And none of these problems can be addressed simply by waving a magic government wand. To a significant degree, they all involve understanding what motivates current practices -- of business-people, financiers, doctors, patients, teachers, students -- and what levers we may be able to use to change those practices.

Historically, when the need has arisen to change behavior, political leaders have turned to economists. That's one reason why presidents have a Council of Economic Advisers. When economists speak, presidents listen. And when economists have the president's ear, all their whispers are predicated on a set of assumptions about human behavior. Whether it's increasing GDP, reducing unemployment, sustaining Social Security, making sure people are financially prepared for retirement, or stabilizing the financial sector, economists commonly hold certain beliefs. They will for example argue that people are motivated by self-interest and are rational calculators of their interests, and that the most effective way to get people to change the way they behave is by creating the right material incentives.

Now, people are sometimes rational calculators, but often they are not. And self-interest and incentives certainly matter, but they aren't all that matters. The perspective of economists is importantly incomplete, sometimes even misguided.

Read this article, which I consider decisive, about the importance of Psychology to Public Policy: CouncilPsychologicalAdvisers

O2 #1 Academic ‘Dream Team’ Helped Obama’s Effort (via NYT)

Late last year Matthew Barzun, an official with the Obama campaign, called Craig Fox, a psychologist in Los Angeles, and invited him to a political planning meeting in Chicago, according to two people who attended the session.

“He said, ‘Bring the whole group; let’s hear what you have to say,’ ” recalled Dr. Fox, a behavioral economist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

So began an effort by a team of social scientists to help their favored candidate in the 2012 presidential election. Some members of the team had consulted with the Obama campaign in the 2008 cycle, but the meeting in January signaled a different direction.

“The culture of the campaign had changed,” Dr. Fox said. “Before then I felt like we had to sell ourselves; this time there was a real hunger for our ideas.”  

Read the complete article about Obama and Behavioral Economics here: DreamTeamObama 

O2 #3 Facebook reveals the 4 factors that decide News Feed content (via PR Daily)

One of the great mysteries of social media was revealed last Friday:
The factors that determine what items appear in a Facebook user’s News Feed.
During a press event last week, Facebook News Feed Product Manager Will Cathcart explained these factors to a roomful of reporters.
TechCrunch’s Josh Constine was there to document the action and listed the four items:

“If you interacted with an author’s posts before: If you ‘like’ every post by a page that Facebook shows you, it will show you more from that page.
“Other people’s reactions to a specific post: If everyone else on Facebook shown a post ignores it or complains, it’s less likely to show you that post.
“Your interaction with posts of the same type in the past: If you always ‘like’ photos, there’s a better chance you’ll see a photo posted by a page.
“If that specific post has received complaints by other users who have seen it, or the page who posted it has received lots complaints in the past, you’ll be less likely to see that post. This factor became a lot more prevalent starting in September 2012.”

Read more about it here: 4FactorsNewsFeed

O2 #2 Urban Analysis and Modeling (via MIT Media Lab)

Did you know that people’s perception of the safety and class of a neighborhood is significantly associated with homicide rates?

Urban Analytics focuses on data-driven analyses of economic activity, urban perception, human behavior, mobility patterns, and resource consumption to inform the city design process. 

Parametric urban design tools and computer simulations will enable the creation of rapid prototyping tools for the placement of mobility nodes, street typologies, and resource allocation.
Targeted interventions for existing cities and phasing strategies for the development of new cities will be generated in an evidence-based fashion, influenced by the findings of living laboratory experiments, and sophisticated data analysis.

Please check here the City Science Initiative of MIT Media Lab: CityScience

O2 #1 The Human Side of Decision Making: Thinking Things Through with Daniel Kahneman (via SSRN)

Daniel Kahneman is widely considered the most influential psychologist in the world today. He is best known in the financial realm for pioneering work that helped to lay the foundation for behavioral economics, which studies the psychology of judgment and economic decision making and its impact on the financial markets. Together with his long-time collaborator Amos Tversky, Dr. Kahneman explored the ways in which human judgment systematically departs from the basic principles of decision theory when evaluating economic risk, consequently creating the concept of prospect theory. 

Their findings challenged fundamental economic assumptions and expanded the boundaries of research by introducing psychologically realistic models into economic theory. In 2002, Dr. Kahneman’s work was recognized with the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his integration of insights from psychological research into economic science.

In February 2012, Dr. Kahneman spoke with members of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Investment Consulting about his investigations into decision making in the context of a dual-process model, loss aversion and risk tolerance, adversarial collaboration, and financial advisors’ impact on investors’ well-being.

Read the complete interview here: HumanDecisionKahneman

CO2 #3 Be Happier: 10 Things to Stop Doing Right Now (via Inc.)

Sometimes the route to happiness depends more on what you don't do.

Happiness--in your business life and your personal life--is often a matter of subtraction, not addition.

Consider, for example, what happens when you stop doing the following 10 things:

1. Blaming.

People make mistakes. Employees don't meet your expectations. Vendors don't deliver on time.

So you blame them for your problems.

But you're also to blame. Maybe you didn't provide enough training. Maybe you didn't build in enough of a buffer. Maybe you asked too much, too soon.

Taking responsibility when things go wrong instead of blaming others isn't masochistic, it's empowering--because then you focus on doing things better or smarter next time.

And when you get better or smarter, you also get happier.

Check the remaining 9 things here: 10ThingsStopDoing