Studies Worth Knowing About by David Krueger MD

In over two decades of practicing and teaching Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis, I followed numerous scientific journals for current research (the thinking was often as brilliant as the writing was bad). In the last decade, working and writing as an Executive Mentor Coach, I follow a far greater and more diverse body of work from numerous disciplines and from around the world via the Internet. Some of the most fascinating research comes from some of the premiere neuroscience labs. I am privileged to collaborate with one of them.

Although it’s hard for me to be succinct (but you already knew that), here’s my list of ten studies during the past year worth knowing about. I hope you find them of interest and benefit.

1. You can offer too many choices. An upscale gourmet food store offered a display of six jams for tasting. On an alternative weekend, they offered 24 jams for tasting. For both of the weekends, customers were given a coupon for $1 off if they purchased any jam. The larger display of jams attracted more potential customers. But when 24 varieties were available for testing, 3% purchased; when only 6 varieties were available for tasting, 30% purchased. Too many choices resulted in a ten-fold decline of actual purchases. (Dr. Barry Schwartz)

When you offer your services and products, narrow the focus to a very few choices (2-3), and make a specific recommendation of which, in your professional judgment, you suggest.

2. Both greater wealth and actual purchases have little permanent impact on happiness. Events that we expect to make us happy often prove less exciting than we anticipated (Dr. Daniel Gilbert).

After an initial excitement with a burst of good fortune, such as inheritance, lottery, or job advance, people revert to their initial set point of happiness or gloom. (Dr. David Myers)

3. What really matters? People quickly accommodate to experiences and gadgets and need more pleasure to be equally satisfied – the “hedonic treadmill.” (Dr. Daniel Kahneman)

A survey of 1,000 American men and women examined what most correlated with happiness. The finding: the things you own can’t make you as happy as the things that you do. An experience, unlike possession of an object, usually involves other people that fosters and strengthens relationships, which trumps ownership. (San Francisco State University)

4. What are you really up to? Feelings of negative self-worth can predispose people to act morally in an effort to fill a sagging sense of self-worth, or a recent feeling of guilt. This means that if you feel compelled to do something, ask if you’re compensating for something else (Psychological Science).

5. Prepare specifically for a challenge and not ones generally like it. Chess players who naturally practice specific moves in preparation for a match, as opposed to practicing general chess skills, not only preformed better in their matches, but performed better than expected given their general skill level. Specialization exceeds general problem solving in preparation. (Cognitive Science)

6. Emotional mimicry – mirroring the emotions of someone interacted with – makes it difficult to identify deception. Mimicry – not empathy – makes it hard to identify liars. Mimicry reduces the psychological distance between two people and lowers defenses. The application: to be aware of this process when you are purchasing a significant item, such as a car. (Psychological Science)

7. Resolve conflict with a significant other for your health. Findings show that an argument not only affects the other person, but also significantly impacts your health. With stressful conflict, your brain releases a stress-chemical cocktail that counters immune responses, so that you become more susceptible to infection and other immune related maladies. (Health Psychology)

8. Creative stimulation and exercise can grow your brain. The hippocampus is the portion of the midbrain involved in both memory and creativity. Two factors in laboratory mice significantly increased the size of the hippocampus: stimulating ideas and innovative exercises increase its size by 15%; exercise increases its size almost 100%. Recent studies involving German medical students and London taxi drivers using sophisticated noninvasive measures have replicated in humans this earlier finding in laboratory mice.

9. Another reason for being honest. One group of young women wore sunglasses from a box labeled “authentic.” The other group wore sunglasses from a box labeled “counterfeit.” The women were given a set of simple math problems, but under heavy time pressure. Later they were asked to assess their work and told they would be paid for each answer they reported getting right. This created an incentive to inflate their scores.

Although math performance was the same for the two groups, 30% of those in the “authentic” group inflated their scores, while a whopping 71% of the “counterfeit” wearing participants inflated their scores. The researchers concluded, “When one feels like a fake, he or she is likely to behave like a fake.” (Psychological Science, in press)

10. Protect your ethics and values from social contagion. Mirror neurons have a role in everything from inducing a yawn to cheating behavior. Two conditions have been shown to increase cheating behavior. a) The more people move into abstraction, such as dealing with derivatives like options and mortgage-backed securities instead of real money; e.g., Madoff and Stanford dealt with derivatives of derivatives that even professionals didn’t understand. b) A social environment where you see cheating around you; e.g., the contagion effect in Enron’s executive suite. (Dan Ariely, Personal Communication).

Copyright 2010 David Krueger MD Executive Mentor Coach www.MentorPath.com