City at night, by National Geographic.
These media play off of a very real psychological factor known as operant conditioning, the addictive need to return over and over in hopes of a reward.
The ability to pay attention, focus and strategically disconnect will be a winning discipline of the next generation.
yup.
Mom might actually be happier with a shorter-lived gift card, new social-science research suggests, because she’d be more likely to use it. Paradoxically, people don’t put off only unpleasant tasks like doing taxes or cleaning out the garage. They also procrastinate on enjoyable experiences like going to the spa. Tight deadlines can force people not only to get work done (or to make that Mother’s Day phone call) but to have fun as well. (via The Gift-Card Economy - The Atlantic (May 2009) )
sometimes it’s amazing to me how simple structures dictate and touch so many parts of our lives.
a good look at basic behavioral economics.
i’ve enjoyed the luxury of two members in my immediate family being world-class accountants but finally filing on my own this year, from start to finish, was a much more satisfying experience.
I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to extrapolate on the political impacts we’ll see from a generation growing up seeing elastic artificial intelligence as an important part of keeping harmony in a community of people playing the same game.
I wasn’t just paying him for 30 minutes of his time — I was saving weeks of mine.
classic argument. i’m very much a fan of this. i have no problem paying for something that gives me exactly what i want and need. isn’t that why currency exists in the first place? it’s your fault if you don’t use it to maximize the one thing you can never get more of: time.
recently - everything, in my head, is coming back to a few key words: authority, direction, curation, editing and value.
too many people are missing the point that amazing value might come in a package that, quite simply, saves me time.
Maybe indecisiveness is the price of being an intelligent human being who understands that actions have consequences.
That would be a little too self-congratulatory for me. Indecisiveness means you’re not listening carefully enough to your emotions, which know what you really want and could be whispering, “Go for the Honey Nut Cheerios.”
Long article, but here’s an interesting bit: “The “arousal procrastinator” swears that he works best under pressure, loving—perhaps needing—the rush of a last-minute deadline to get started. Such a person believes procrastinating affords a “peak” or “flow” experience, defined by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi of the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University as being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. Time disappears. The ego dissolves.
But procrastination does not facilitate flow, according to social scientist Eunju Lee of Halla University in South Korea. In 2005 Lee reported surveying 262 students and finding that procrastinators tended to have fewer, not more, flow experiences. After all, a person must be able to let go of herself to “get lost” in an experience, and procrastinators are generally self-conscious individuals who have trouble doing that.”
hmm.
A Theory of Human Motivation by psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote in his paper in 1943, explains why our digital world is driven by non-digital elements, for every word written and spoken has pretext and motive behind it.
Hume thought that morality was rooted in sentiment, not reason, and modern science appears to be giving him a resounding endorsement on that point. Of course, neither Hume nor moral psychologists believe there is no such thing as moral reasoning — merely that ultimately, this reasoning is based on feelings, and most of the time, we start with a feeling and work our way from the conclusion to the argument. Dan Jones:
It’s hard to argue that people are rationally working their way to moral judgements when they can’t come up with any compelling reasons—or sometimes any reasons at all—for their moral verdicts. Haidt suggests that the judgements are based on intuitive, emotional responses, and that conscious reasoning comes into its own in creating post hoc justifications for our moral stances. Our powers of reason, in this view, operate more like a lawyer hired to defend a client than a disinterested scientist searching for the truth.Or, as the philosopher Richard Rorty — and he wrote a lot of foolish stuff, but this particular quote isn’t so stupid — wrote:
From a pragmatist’s point of view, the notion of ‘inalienable rights’ is no better and no worse a slogan than that of ‘obedience to the will of God’. Either slogan, when invoked as an unmoved mover, is simply a way of saying that our spade is turned—that we have exhausted our argumentative resources. Talk of the will of God or of the rights of man, like talk of ‘the honour of the family’ or of ‘the fatherland in danger’ are not suitable targets for philosophical analysis and criticism. It is fruitless to look behind them. None of these notions should be analyzed, for they are all ways of saying, ‘Here I stand: I can do no other.’ These are not reasons for action so much as announcements that one has thought the issue through and come to a decision.Some have even suggested that when people say something is objectively wrong, the “objectively” part is nothing more than a kind of emotional exclamation mark, expressing something like, I really, really do feel this way, and I’m really, really inflexible in my beliefs about this particular matter.
If you’re interested in this sort of thing, there’s also Haidt’s article in Science, and his essay in Edge.
The psychology of trust goes beyond the obvious.
