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100 More Things #150: WHEN PEOPLE FEEL CONNECTED, THEY WORK HARDER
Gregory Walton is a professor at Stanford who has studied the important effects of belonging on behavior. In one of his experiments, Walton (2012) found that when college students believed they shared a birthday with another student, they were more motivated to complete a task…
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100 More Things #149: OXYTOCIN IS THE BONDING CHEMICAL
Singing and theater are favorite hobbies of mine. At various points in my life I have sung in a choir, played in concert bands, played in a marching band, played and sang in jazz ensembles, and acted and sang in musical theater productions. It’s great…
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100 More Things #148: SURPRISE, BUT NOT SHOCK, ENCOURAGES SHARING
In his book Contagious, Jonah Berger talks about New York Times online articles that get shared. Articles that had elicited strong emotion, whether positive or negative, were shared the most. Jennifer Aaker talks about emotion and passion as being components of what makes messages go…
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100 More Things #147: JOY AND SURPRISE GRAB AND HOLD ATTENTION IN VIDEO ADS
Teixeira’s research shows that joy and surprise are the emotions that keep people watching a video ad. Because people don’t like ads and want to skip them, ads that stimulate both joy and surprise early on are the ones that grab and hold attention best.…
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100 More Things #146: PEOPLE DON’T LIKE VIDEO ADS
Companies spend a lot of money on video marketing and video advertising, so it’s not surprising that there’s a significant body of research on these subjects. Thales Teixeira from Harvard Business School is one of the people conducting research on video ads.People are inundated with…
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100 More Things #145: EMOTIONS ARE CONTAGIOUS
I recently went to an improv theater performance. I’d had a busy week, and it was fairly late at night. I was tired and not that excited to be there. In fact, I’d been thinking of not going at all. As the room began to…
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100 More Things #144: CHANGE THE STORY AND YOU WILL CHANGE THE BEHAVIOR
In his book Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change, Timothy Wilson describes a large body of impressive research on how stories can cause longterm behavior change. Wilson has people rewrite a self-story. He calls this technique “story-editing.” Story-editing has been used to help…
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100 More Things #143: A PUBLIC COMMITMENT LEADS TO STRONGER SELF-STORIES
When people make a public commitment to a product, service, idea, or brand, their self-story about that product, service, idea, or brand becomes stronger. For example, let’s say that Maryanne creates custom bow ties for weddings and sells her bow ties on an arts marketplace…
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Research on laughter
Since laughter seems to be in the news (some politicians in the US are complaining that Kamala Harris, running for President, has a weird laugh and laughs too much) I thought I would re-visit the research on laughter that I posted several years ago in…
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100 More Things #142: SMALL STEPS CAN CHANGE SELF-STORIES
If people filter out information that doesn’t match their self-stories, how can you ever get people to change? Can you ever get people to take an action that doesn’t fit their self-stories? The answer is yes, but you have to start small. A Crack In…