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100 More Things #155: EVERYONE CAN BE CREATIVE
Creativity isn’t a trait that some people have and others don’t. Before I explain why that’s true, let me first define what I mean by creativity. If 100 people looked at the same abstract painting by Jackson Pollock, many of them might say, “Oh, that…
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100 More Things #154: PEOPLE CAN FEEL EMPATHY FOR MACHINES
People’s interactions with machines are moving beyond anthropomorphism and trust. People are now encountering situations in which they’re developing social relationships with machines and robots. Kate Darling is a research specialist at the MIT Media Lab. She conducts research with a dinosaur toy called Pleo…
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100 More Things #153: PEOPLE TRUST MACHINES THAT HAVE SOME HUMAN-LIKE CHARACTERISTICS
How do you design interactions between people and machines when the machines are now doing tasks that humans used to do? What do people expect from these machines, and how do people react to their design? Anthropomorphism And Trust Adam Waytz, Joy Heafner, and Nicholas…
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100 More Things #152: CELL PHONES NEARBY NEGATIVELY AFFECT PERSON-TO-PERSON COMMUNICATION
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…
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100 More Things #151: DEVICES WITH ALERTS LOWER COGNITIVE PERFORMANCE
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…
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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…