Why we procrastinate and how to stop | Eureka! Science News
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/01/12/why.we.procrastinate.and.how.stop

It's a new year and many of us have started thinking about various resolutions: updating that resume, cleaning out the attic, starting that exercise routine. But the sad reality is that most of us will not follow through on these commitments, not because we're insincere, but because tomorrow is always a better time to get going. Procrastination is a curse, and a costly one. Putting things off leads not only to lost productivity but also to all sorts of hand wringing and regrets and damaged self-esteem. For all these reasons, psychologists would love to figure out what's going on in the mind that makes it so hard to actually do what we set out to do. Are we programmed for postponement and delay? Led by Sean McCrea of the University of Konstanz in Germany, an international team of psychologists wanted to see if there might be a link between how we think of a task and our tendency to postpone it. In other words, are we more likely to see some tasks

merely thinking about the task in more concrete, specific terms makes it feel like it should be completed sooner and thus reducing procrastination

The authors note that "merely thinking about the task in more concrete, specific terms makes it feel like it should be completed sooner and thus reducing procrastination."

"Even though all of the students were being paid upon completion, those who thought about the questions abstractly were much more likely to procrastinate--and in fact some never got around to the assignment at all. By contrast, those who were focused on the how, when and where of doing the task e-mailed their responses much sooner, suggesting that they hopped right on the assignment rather than delaying it."

It's a new year and many of us have started thinking about various resolutions: updating that resume, cleaning out the attic, starting that exercise routine. But the sad reality is that most of us will not follow through on these commitments, not because we're insincere, but because tomorrow is always a better time to get going.

portant implic

Impact des réseaux sociaux sur les ados américains...

teens in networked social spaces. danah boyds dissertation.

"While teenagers primarily leverage social network sites to engage in common practices, the properties of these sites configured their practices and teens were forced to contend with the resultant dynamics. Often, in doing so, they reworked the technology for their purposes. As teenagers learned to navigate social network sites, they developed potent strategies for managing the complexities of and social awkwardness incurred by these sites. Their strategies reveal how new forms of social media are incorporated into everyday life, complicating some practices and reinforcing others. New technologies reshape public life, but teens’ engagement also reconfigures the technology itself."

Dr danah boyd's newly-minted PhD from UC Berkeley was awarded based on her fantastic thesis project, "Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics." danah's ground-breaking research on how kids (especially marginal kids) use the Internet has been featured here a lot -- she was one of the contributors to Mimi Ito's gigantic Digital Youth Project, and the attorneys general's report on the relative absence of pedophiles online.

"I wrote these principles after reflecting on the content of contemporary newspapers and broadcast media and why that content disquieted me. I saw that I was not disturbed so much by what was written or said as I was by what is not. The tacit assumptions underlying most popular content reflect a worldview that is orthogonal to reality in many ways. By reflecting this skewed weltanschauung, the media reinforces and propagates it. I call this worldview the American Cargo Cult, after the real New Guinea cargo cults that arose after the second world war. There are four main points, each of which has several elaborating assumptions. I really do think that most Americans believe these things at a deep level, and that these misbeliefs constantly underlie bad arguments in public debate."

Minimalist satire on ordinary attitudes

A global perspective on Americans’ religiosity offers a few surprises

Great charts.

"A global perspective on Americans’ religiosity offers a few surprises"

What they found, in short, is that the worst team member is the best predictor of how any team performs. It doesn't seem to matter how great the best member is, or what the average member of the group is like. It all comes down to what your worst team member is like. The teams with the worst person performed the poorest.

in some of the groups, the fourth member of their team isn't a student. He's an actor hired to play a bad apple, one of these personality types: The Depressive Pessimist will complain that the task that they're doing isn't enjoyable, and make statements doubting the group's ability to succeed. The Jerk will say that other people's ideas are not adequate, but will offer no alternatives himself. He'll say "you guys need to listen to the expert: me." The Slacker will say "whatever", and "I really don't care." The conventional wisdom in the research on this sort of thing is that none of this should have had much effect on the group at all. Groups are powerful. Group dynamics are powerful. And so groups dominate individuals, not the other way around. There's tons of research, going back decades, demonstrating that people conform to group values and norms. But Will found the opposite. the worst team member is the best predictor of how any team performs.

Groups that have a "bad apple" perform worse. A good leader, who asks questions, solicits opinions and makes sure everyone is heard can make a difference. See also http://liberalorder.typepad.com/the_liberal_order/files/bad_apples_rob.pdf

"What also struck Dr Marlow, however, was that the number of people on an individual’s friend list with whom he (or she) frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more “active” or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group."

Here's The Economist article on FB. The best quote: ...people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are "broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

How much do we colloborate or manage our weak and strong ties? This report suggests not as much as is often touted.

’s “In-House Sociologist” Shares Stats on Users’ Social Behavior

Facebook’s “In-House Sociologist” Shares Stats on Users’ Social Behaviorhttp://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/02/27/facebooks-in-house-sociologist-shares-stats-on-users-socia

Facebook users comment on stuff from only about 5-7% of their Facebook friends. And as has been shown by many other studies, women communicate with more people in all cases than men. “People who are members of online social networks are not so much ‘networking’ as they are ‘broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,’” Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, says. - Tac Anderson

"...Facebook users comment on stuff from only about 5-10% of their Facebook friends."

windows theory

But what about a site's physical appearance? Does the aesthetic appearance of a blog affect what's written by the site's commenters? My sense is that the establishment of social norms through moderation, both by site owners and by the community itself, has much more of an impact on the behavior of commenters than the visual design of a site but aesthetics does factor in somewhat. Perhaps the poor application of a default MT or Wordpress template signals a lack of care or attention on the part of the blog's owner, leading readers to think they can get away with something. Poorly designed advertising or too many ads littered about a site could result in readers feeling disrespected and less likely to participate civilly or respond to moderation. Messageboard software is routinely ugly; does that contribute to the often uncivil tone found on web forums?

Social psychologists know that one way to be viewed as a leader in any group is simply to act like one. Speak up, speak well and offer lots of ideas, and before long, people will begin doing what you say. This works well when leaders know what they're talking about, but what if they don't? If someone acts like a boss but thinks like a boob, is that still enough to stay on top? - "More-dominant individuals achieved influence in their groups in part because they were seen as more competent by fellow group members," Anderson and Kilduff write.

"Speak up, speak well and offer lots of ideas, and before long, people will begin doing what you say" - Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Found at http://www.speakingaboutpresenting.com/presentation-research/speaking-enhance-career/

speaking up makes you look intelligent

info relationship on facebook

Size of friend networks maintained on Facebook

Yet another datapoint proving the Dunbar number?

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Foverstated.net%2F2009%2F03%2F09%2Fmaintained-relationships-on-facebook

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we think it's OK to cheat or steal (sometimes). Clever studies help make his point that we're predictably irrational -- and can be influenced in ways we can't grasp.

TED Talks Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we think it's OK to cheat or steal (sometimes). Clever studies help make his point that we're predictably irrational -- and can be influenced in ways we can't grasp.

the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has nearly doubled since 1990, rising from 8 to 15 percent. Then came the point he could not get out of his mind: while the unaffiliated have historically been concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, the report said, "this pattern has now changed, and the Northeast emerged in 2008 as the new stronghold of the religiously unidentified." As Mohler saw it, the historic foundation of America's religious culture was cracking.

The percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 points in the past two decades. How that statistic explains who we are now—and what, as a nation, we are about to become.

Well written and interesting American culture study.

Roger Ebert discusses Bill O'Reily

Glenn Beck

The same techniques were used during the late 1930s to study another prominent voice in a war-era, Father Charles Coughlin. His sermons evolved into a darker message of anti-Semitism and fascism, and he became a defender of Hitler and Mussolini. In this study, O'Reilly is a heavier and less-nuanced user of the propaganda devices than Coughlin. * Name calling -- giving something a bad label to make the audience reject it without examining the evidence; * Glittering generalities -- the opposite of name calling; * Card stacking -- the selective use of facts and half-truths; * Bandwagon -- appeals to the desire, common to most of us, to follow the crowd; * Plain folks -- an attempt to convince an audience that they, and their ideas, are "of the people"; * Transfer -- carries over the authority, sanction and prestige of something we respect or dispute to something the speaker would want us to accept; and * Testimonials --

Psychology

Why is this no big surprise? "EVER wondered why the pundits who failed to predict the current economic crisis are still being paid for their opinions? It's a consequence of the way human psychology works in a free market, according to a study of how people's self-confidence affects the way others respond to their advice."

good stuff

"Suelo's been here for three years, and it smells like it. " http://tr.im/vasK [from http://twitter.com/techpr/statuses/3088661236]

"When I lived with money, I was always lacking. Money represents lack. Money represents things in the past (debt) and things in the future (credit), but money never represents what is present."

HE WASN'T ALWAYS THIS WAY. SUELO graduated from the University of Colorado with a degree in anthropology, he thought about becoming a doctor, he held jobs, he had cash and a bank account. In 1987, after several years as an assistant lab technician in Colorado hospitals, he joined the Peace Corps and was posted to an Ecuadoran village high in the Andes.

A symbiotic relationship with industrialised society. He's almost as heavily dependent on everybody else as everybody else is. I'm not impressed at all. Nor is he all that bright: "Gold is pretty but virtually useless" - wrong. Gold is dense, soft, and therefore malleable, like lead, and both are very useful. Chimps would find such a metal (if they were bright enough to mine it, smelt it, etc.) rather handy. Then other chimps would get jealous... eventually they'd start trading it. A few thousand years later, some chimp would decide that gold is silly and go back to living in a tree (or a cage in a research facility).

"In leaner times, Suelo's gatherings include ants, grubs, termites, lizards, and roadkill. He recently found a deer, freshly run over, and carved it up and boiled it. "The best venison of my life," he says." ... ""I'll do what creatures have been doing for millions of years for retirement," he says. "Why is it sad that I die in the canyon and not in the geriatric ward well-insured?"

They can’t make any decisions, because they don’t know what they want, and they don’t know what they want because they don’t know who they are, and they don’t know who they are because they’re allowed to be anyone they want.

been thinking about this since moving back to sf — this quote is nice, and not just for guys: " 'And that you’re never going to have any fun again, because you have to work. You’re never going to have sex again because you’re going to get married. Your life is over.' So why bother? Literal and figurative fucking around is infinitely more appealing to men who are still sorting out what they want their lives to look like."

I wish I didn't appreciate this, but I can't help it.

An interesting article on how many 20-somethings see the world.

Tongue in cheek Beschreibung der Lebensverhältnisse junger PhD und schlimmerer Versager.

Definitely one to read if you're twenty-something and less than content.

"Clusters of happy and unhappy people are visible in the network, and the relationship between people’s happiness extends up to three degrees of separation (for example, to the friends of one’s friends’ friends). People who are surrounded by many happy people and those who are central in the network are more likely to become happy in the future. Longitudinal statistical models suggest that clusters of happiness result from the spread of happiness and not just a tendency for people to associate with similar individuals. A friend who lives within a mile (about 1.6 km) and who becomes happy increases the probability that a person is happy by 25% (95% confidence interval 1% to 57%). Similar effects are seen in coresident spouses (8%, 0.2% to 16%), siblings who live within a mile (14%, 1% to 28%), and next door neighbours (34%, 7% to 70%). Effects are not seen between coworkers. The effect decays with time and with geographical separation."

Since he’s a Pisces and I’m a Virgo, Chris and I of course think the Zodiac is total bullshit, and it was very gratifying to have the data bear this out. Here are the grouped match percentages for a random pool of 500,000 users. Astrological sign has no effect whatsoever on how compatible two people are.

data mining of how people describe themselves on a dating sight

The rise of overparenting. Insightful and amusing.

The literature on overparenting raises a number of sticky questions. For example, is it really wrong for us to push our children to excel in areas where they are talented?

“Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.” The article reviews books about the new "crisis" of overparenting. There are some helpful comments, but it is nice that the author acknowledges the pendulum swings in pop psychology and in parenting. Would be nice to follow some of the implications of these movements. The article briefly touches on the implications of the selfishness of current parents, but it is only hypothesis. I'd be intersted in a thorough analysis of implications from a historical perspective. Every generation seems to believe the next generation is spoiled and lazy, which seems to be the real critique behind the overparenting books.

The rise of overparenting.

Robert Harris', Twenty Pieces of Music That Changed the World

One of the most popular features on The Sunday Edition this past year and a half has been, 20 Pieces of Music that Changed the World. The Sunday Edition's very own musical guru, Robert Harris took us on a cultural journey -- discussing the importance of music from Beethoven to Disco, and from Depression-era classics to rap. The entire series is soon to be released as a boxed set of CDs. In the meantime, click here and have and listen!

Rich, Black, Flunking Cal Professor John Ogbu thinks he knows why rich black kids are failing in school. Nobody wants to hear it. By Susan Goldsmith May 21, 2003 Chris Duffey John Ogbu has been compared to Clarence Thomas, denounced by the Urban League, and criticized in The New York Times. Amy Weiser It wasn’t socioeconomics, school funding, or racism that accounted for the students' poor performance, Ogbu says; it was their own attitudes, and those of their parents. Chris Duffey Lionel Fluker John McWhorter believes academia too readily blames white people. The black parents wanted an explanation. Doctors, lawyers, judges, and insurance brokers, many had come to the upscale Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights specifically because of its stellar school district. They expected their children to succeed academically, but most were performing poorly. African-American students were lagging far behind their white classmates in every measure of academic success: grade-point average, stand

John Ogbu attributes more of the responsibility for the achievement gap to Black people than other academics do.

Ogbu's work on the black middle class in Shaker Heights OH

Teen pregnancy. October/November 2008.

Why do so many evangelical teen-agers become pregnant?

Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.

This is pretty funny, and true.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1078529

"This article presents some common behaviors I've observed from my past few years of interactions with geeks, nerds, and other highly-smart technical people. For brevity, I will simply use the term "geek" throughout this article as a catch-all term for such people. I don't mean to pass any value judgments on people who exhibit such behaviors; these are simply my observations and personal theories for why these behaviors occur."

email use primarily for positive and intelligent sharing

But it turns out that readers have more exalted tastes, according to the Penn researchers, Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman. People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics. Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list. In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.” (I swear, the science staff did nothing to instigate this study, but we definitely don’t mind publicizing the results.)

readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list. In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles ... two criteria for an awe-inspiring story: Its scale is large, and it requires “mental accommodation” by forcing the reader to view the world in a different way. “It involves the opening and broadening of the mind,” people who share this kind of article [are] seeking emotional communion, Dr. Berger said. “Emotion in general leads to transmission, and awe is quite a strong emotion,” he said. “If I’ve just read this story that changes the way I understand the world and myself, I want to talk to others about what it means. I want to proselytize and share the feeling of awe. If you read the article and feel the same emotion, it will bring us closer together.”

Sociologists have developed elaborate theories of who spreads gossip and news — who tells whom, who matters most in social networks — but they’ve had less success measuring what kind of information travels fastest. Do people prefer to spread good news or bad news? Would we rather scandalize or enlighten? Which stories do social creatures want to share, and why?

the spread of articles/content online...leading the way: awe!

The more friends you have, the more you earn, says a study. But modern life can allow little time to maintain meaningful relationships, so what's the optimum number of friends?

Get New Orleans, Louisiana latest news. Find photos and videos, comment on the news, and join the forum discussions at NOLA.com

"As part of his experiment, Myers decided to play the game by the designers' rules -- disregarding any customs set by the players. His character soon became very unpopular."

Interesting blog about Professor Myers' research and paper on MMO rules vs MMO social norms

David Myers, a Loyola professor and computer game scholar, looks at his computer screen with his "City of Heroes" online computer game character "Twixt" reflected in his glasses at his home in Slidell Friday, July 3, 2009. "Twixt" became perhaps the game's most reviled, abused player because his playing methods were unpopular.

Dude. We did this EXACT experiment last night!

a movie about chat roulette.

a movie about chat roulette. i don't know what really know what else could be said. a movie by casey neistat NaSA Entertainment 2010

«It's time to declare the end of adolescence. As a social institution, it's been a failure. The proof is all around us: 19% of eighth graders, 36% of tenth graders, and 47% of twelfth graders say they have used illegal drugs, according to a study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the University of Michigan. One of every four girls has a sexually transmitted disease, suggests a recent study for the Centers for Disease Control. A methamphetamine epidemic among the young is destroying lives, families, and communities. And American students are learning at a frighteningly slower rate than Chinese and Indian students.»

"Adolescence was invented in the 19th century to enable middle-class families to keep their children out of sweatshops. But it has degenerated into a process of enforced boredom and age segregation that has produced one of the most destructive social arrangements in human history: consigning 13-year-old males to learning from 15-year-old males." Good point.

an graduate a year early get the 12th year's cost of schooling as an automatic scholarship to any college or technical school they want to a

Smart people are good if you need to do a lot of really hard things, and we did a lot of really hard things. But it's not all upside. For one thing, smart people tend to systematically overestimate the value of being smart. In fact, it is really valuable, but they still tend to weight it too heavily compared to other virtues you might also value, such as consistency, focus, attentiveness to the emotional needs of your customers, and so on. One of the problems with really smart people is that they can talk themselves into anything. And often they can talk you into it with them. And if you're smart yourself, you can talk them into stuff. The tendency to drift and lack of focus can be really extreme unless you have a few slower people in the group to act as a kind of intellectual ballast.

interesting insight into people and psychology

Zuckerberg and gang may think that they know what’s best for society, for individuals, but I violently disagree. I think that they know what’s best for the privileged class. And I’m terrified of the consequences that these moves are having for those who don’t live in a lap of luxury.

Interesting insight from female scholar

Must read: Facebook and “radical transparency” (a rant) by researcher Danah Boyd http://j.mp/9EjHul – Jean-Luc Raymond (jeanlucr) http://twitter.com/jeanlucr/statuses/14000875802

brilliant review (and comments) on Shirky's "Here comes Everybody

"Coase, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics, answered the question by noting a market's transaction costs: buyers and sellers need to find one another, then reach agreement, and so on. The Coase theorem implies that if these transaction costs are low enough, direct markets of individuals make a whole lot of sense. But if they are too high, it makes more sense to get the job done by an organization that hires people. What's new is something consultant and social technologist Clay Shirky calls "Coase's Floor," below which we find projects and activities that aren't worth their organizational costs -- things so esoteric, so frivolous, so nonsensical, or just so thoroughly unimportant that no organization, large or small, would ever bother with them. Things that you shake your head at when you see them and think, "That's ridiculous." Sounds a lot like the Internet, doesn't it?"

Review of Clay Shirky's book, with useful new insights in the first couple of paragraphs.

In 1937, Ronald Coase answered one of the most perplexing questions in economics: if markets are so great, why do organizations exist? Why don't people just buy and sell their own services in a market instead? Coase, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics, answered the question by noting a market's transaction costs: buyers and sellers need to find one another, then reach agreement, and so on. The Coase theorem implies that if these transaction costs are low enough, direct markets of individuals make a whole lot of sense. But if they are too high, it makes more sense to get the job done by an organization that hires people.

"[Clay Shirky's] new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, explores a world where organizational costs are close to zero and where ad hoc, loosely connected groups of unpaid amateurs can create an encyclopedia larger than the Britannica and a computer operating system to challenge Microsoft's."

introducing the WHUFFY :-)

Meredith Chivers is a 36-year-old psychology professor at Queen’s University in the small city of Kingston, Ontario.

From Pedro on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/pedrobeltrao/ee8c9d29/seventh-graders-describe-scientists-before

[Found via Pedro Beltrão] "Seventh graders describe scientists before and after a visit to Fermilab."

percepcion de los científicos

Scientists - they CAN be col. Sweet before and after drawings of what kids think scientists are about

Seventh graders describe scientists before and after a visit to Fermilab. Lovely.

"Seventh graders describe scientists before and after a visit to Fermilab" AWESOME

Great blog!

You are not so smart.

via Subgenius Spice :D

Humans make errors. We make errors of fact and errors of judgment. We have blind spots in our field of vision and gaps in our stream of attention. Sometimes we can’t even answer the simplest questions. Where was I last week at this time? How long have I had this pain in my knee? How much money do I typically spend in a day? These weaknesses put us at a disadvantage. We make decisions with partial information. We are forced to steer by guesswork. We go with our gut.

Does anybody really believe that long hours at a desk are a vocational ideal?

Gary Wolf, of Wired and The Quantified Self, describes personal data collection and analysis in NYT magazine.

Whether Cahn and Carbone are right will take time and subsequent scholarship to learn; but their story is both plausible and sobering. Plausible, because it brings so many aspects of the culture wars into sharper focus. Sobering, because the economic and cultural forces battering traditional family norms show no signs of abating -- but the new, education-centered pathway to adulthood is often least accessible to those who need it most.

In red America, families form adults

"New norms arise for this environment, norms geared to prevent premature family formation. The new paradigm prizes responsible childbearing and child-rearing far above the traditional linkage of sex, marriage, and procreation. Instead of emphasizing abstinence until marriage, it enjoins: Don't form a family until after you have finished your education and are equipped for responsibility. In other words, *adults form families*. Family life marks the end of the transition to adulthood, not the beginning. Red America still prefers the traditional model."

RT @brainpicker: Do "family values" weaken families? Very compelling read from National Journal http://is.gd/c3p5t [from http://twitter.com/bfwriter/statuses/13765341391]

Can it be? One of the oddest paradoxes of modern cultural politics may at last be resolved. The paradox is this: Cultural conservatives revel in condemning the loose moral values and louche lifestyles of "San Francisco liberals." But if you want to find two-parent families with stable marriages and coddled kids, your best bet is to bypass Sarah Palin country and go to Nancy Pelosi territory: the liberal, bicoastal, predominantly Democratic places that cultural conservatives love to hate.