Imagine that you’re sitting in a restaurant with a friend and he takes his smartphone out of his pocket, turns off the sound, and puts it off to the side, face down, on the table. He doesn’t touch it all through the meal you have…

There’s a lot of research about how talking or texting on a cell phone is distracting and leads to lower performance on cognitive (thinking) tasks, but research by Bill Thornton (2014) shows that people don’t even have to be using the cell phone for it…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…