Lone Gunman

The Mac­beth effect is the ten­dency for peo­ple who have acted or thought in an immoral or uneth­i­cal man­ner to want to clean them­selves phys­i­cally as a kind of sur­ro­gate for actual moral cleansing.

Researchers look­ing at this effect won­dered about other inter­est­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics of moral psy­chol­ogy which led them to devis­ing a test for implicit links between dif­fer­ent colours and moral­ity. For exam­ple, the colour black is com­monly con­nected with evil and white with good, and the researchers won­dered whether this would present itself. It did:

Psy­chol­o­gists have long known that if peo­ple are pre­sented with, say, the word “blue” printed in a blue font, they will be able to state the colour of the font much faster than if the word “red” is printed in the same blue font.

The study con­ducted by Mr Sher­man and Dr Clore pre­sented words of moral good­ness, like “vir­tu­ous” and “hon­esty”, and of bad­ness, like “cheat” and “sin”, in either black or white fonts on a com­puter screen. As they report in Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence, the two researchers found that when “good” words were pre­sented in black it took the par­tic­i­pants about 510 mil­lisec­onds to state the colour of the word. When these same words were pre­sented in white it took roughly 480 milliseconds—a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence. A sim­i­lar effect was seen with “bad” words. Respond­ing to white ones took around 525 mil­lisec­onds, whereas black ones needed only about 500. These results are remark­ably sim­i­lar to those found when words are printed in colours that clash with their meaning.

I’m a real sucker for book lists.

Entre­pre­neur­ial Reads is a wiki list of sug­gested read­ing for entre­pre­neurs. The list con­tains books writ­ten specif­i­cally for entre­pre­neurs (e.g. The E-Myth Revis­ited) in addi­tion to much fic­tion con­tain­ing entre­pre­neur­ial lessons (e.g. The Foun­tain­head).

That link came via What Books Are Worth Read­ing Once Per Year?–a post by Alex Mann com­pil­ing the answers he received when he asked that very ques­tion. Answers included:

• Suc­cess Prin­ci­ples by Jack Canfield
• The Starfish and the Spi­der by Ori Braf­man and Rod Beckstrom
• The Power of Now by Eck­hart Tolle
• Med­i­ta­tions by Mar­cus Aurelius
• This Is Water by David Fos­ter Wal­lace (the book of Wallace’s 2005 Com­mence­ment Speech at Kenyon Col­lege)

While read­ing about the his­tory of the East­man Kodak Com­pany (more com­monly known just as Kodak) I came across this tit­bit about the Kodak name which seemed like sound advice for nam­ing a prod­uct or brand:

The let­ter “K” had been a favorite of Eastman’s, he is quoted as say­ing, “it seems a strong, inci­sive sort of let­ter”. He and his mother devised the name Kodak with an ana­gram set. He said that there were three prin­ci­pal con­cepts he used in cre­at­ing the name: it should be short, one can­not mis­pro­nounce it, and it could not resem­ble any­thing or be asso­ci­ated with any­thing but Kodak.

To reit­er­ate:

• Short.
• Can­not be mispronounced.
• Could not resem­ble any­thing or be asso­ci­ated with any­thing but your brand.

In what appears to be a bit of an adver­tise­ment for climateprediction.net–a dis­trib­uted com­put­ing project to test the accu­racy of var­i­ous com­puter mod­els of cli­mate change–The Econ­o­mist looks at the impact of com­put­ing on the envi­ron­ment; specif­i­cally car­bon diox­ide emis­sions.

Accord­ing to a report pub­lished by the Cli­mate Group, a think-tank based in Lon­don, com­put­ers, print­ers, mobile phones and the wid­gets that accom­pany them account for the emis­sion of 830m tonnes of car­bon diox­ide around the world in 2007. That is about 2% of the esti­mated total of emis­sions from human activ­ity. And that is the same as the avi­a­tion industry’s con­tri­bu­tion. Accord­ing to the report, about a quar­ter of the emis­sions in ques­tion are gen­er­ated by the man­u­fac­ture of com­put­ers and so forth. The rest come from their use.

via More Intel­li­gent Life

Start­ing with two great exam­ples of mar­ket­ing through curios­ity (the Hot Wheels mys­tery car and Cal­i­for­nia Pizza Kitchen’s Don’t Open It thank you card), Stephen Ander­son looks at how you can use ‘infor­ma­tion gaps’ to drive curios­ity and then inter­ac­tion with your cus­tomers.

Infor­ma­tion can be pre­sented in a man­ner that is straight­for­ward or curi­ous. If we opt for the lat­ter, we are guar­an­teed not only atten­tion, but likely higher engage­ment as well—curiosity demands we know more! What was known infor­ma­tion (a sim­ple coupon or another toy car option) that might have been ignored has been con­verted into some­thing unknown, some­thing mys­te­ri­ous, some­thing that demands resolution.

The arti­cle goes on to dis­cuss George Loewen­stein and his information-gap the­ory before offer­ing some advice on incit­ing curios­ity in your product:

If you want to make some­one curi­ous, make them aware of some­thing they don’t know. Find that infor­ma­tion you can use to tease peo­ple. Chances are, you’re either with­hold­ing all the spe­cific infor­ma­tion or giv­ing it all away. To get atten­tion and engage the senses, look for ways to turn these direct mes­sages into a quest to be completed.

It’s no sur­prise that curios­ity can be a pow­er­ful tool, as some recent research is sug­gest­ing that infor­ma­tion is as much a reward as thirst, neu­ro­log­i­cally speaking.

Dopamine neu­rons are thought to be involved in learn­ing about rewards — by adjust­ing the con­nec­tions between other neu­rons, they “teach” the brain to seek basic rewards like food and water. Bromberg-Martin and Hikosaka think that these neu­rons also teach the brain to seek out infor­ma­tion so that their activ­ity becomes a sort of “com­mon cur­rency” that gov­erns both basic needs and a quest for knowledge.

via @bfchirpy