Category: behavior

The trick to not giving a terrible gift this year

When you’re buying gifts for people this holiday season, you might be thinking about how your loved ones will react the moment they open them. Will they be truly happy and thankful — or will you see disappointment flicker across their faces?

If you’ve given terrible gifts in the past, this focus on the moment of exchange might be why. A new paper that reviews decades of research on gift-giving suggests one common mistake people make is thinking too much about how recipients will react to their gift initially, rather than how it might benefit them in the long run.

Washington Post

How to Beat Procrastination

Procrastination comes in many disguises. We might resolve to tackle a task, but find endless reasons to defer it. We might prioritize things we can readily tick off our to-do list—answering emails, say—while leaving the big, complex stuff untouched for another day. We can look and feel busy, while artfully avoiding the tasks that really matter. And when we look at those rolling, long-untouched items at the bottom of our to-do list, we can’t help but feel a little disappointed in ourselves.

The problem is our brains are programmed to procrastinate. In general, we all tend to struggle with tasks that promise future upside in return for efforts we take now.That’s because it’s easier for our brains to process concrete rather than abstract things, and the immediate hassle is very tangible compared with those unknowable, uncertain future benefits. So the short-term effort easily dominates the long-term upside in our minds—an example of something that behavioral scientists call present bias.

How can you become less myopic about your elusive tasks? It’s all about rebalancing the cost-benefit analysis: make the benefits of action feel bigger, and the costs of action feel smaller. The reward for doing a pestering task needs to feel larger than the immediate pain of tackling it.

Harvard Business Review

Listen to her purr… how to train your cat

Iam a few days into training my cat and things aren’t going too well. She has been sick all over the carpet and her blanket. My attempts at making her perform simple tasks are met with bafflement and tail flicking. The custom-made toys I have crafted for her are summarily ignored. At one point, she starts chewing on the copy of the training book I’m using, looking me in the eye as if to say: “Just you try.”

The book in question is The Trainable Cat by biologist John Bradshaw and Sarah Ellis, a feline behaviour specialist at the charity International Cat Care. The duo’s BBC Horizon programmes, The Secret Life of the Cat (2013) and Cat Watch (2014), aimed to demystify cat behaviour and their new book sets out detailed instructions on how to help cats deal with the sources of stress inherent to life as a pet: trips to the vet, visits from strangers and new and potentially upsetting situations such as moving house or the arrival of a baby.

After dogs, cats are the UK’s second most popular pet choice, with 17% of households owning one or more of the 7.6m cats in the country. Yet they are seen as mysterious and unpredictable; it’s not a coincidence that sphinxes are symbols of inscrutability. Cats, we are told, are independent creatures and, as a result, owners largely leave them to their own devices.

The Guardian

Daddies, “Dates,” and the Girlfriend Experience: Welcome to the New Prostitution Economy

A growing number of young people are selling their bodies online to pay student loans, make the rent, or afford designer labels. Is it just an unorthodox way to make ends meet or a new kind of exploitation?

…

“The girlfriend experience” is the term women in the sex trade use for a service involving more than just sex. “They want the perfect girlfriend—in their eyes,” says Miranda, the young woman at our table.* “She’s well groomed, cultured, classy, able to converse about anything—but not bringing into it any of her real-world problems or feelings.”

Vanity Fair

Can changing your mealtimes make you healthier?

Many people want to eat more healthily but find it difficult to change their diet. So what happened when Michael Mosley altered not what he ate, but when he ate?

We’ve known for some time that altering the time at which you eat can affect your weight and metabolism. At least if you are a mouse.

Based on mice studies, it seems the secret to improving your health is to restrict the time window within which you eat, and by doing so extend the amount of time you go without food.

A few years ago Prof Satchidananda Panda, from the world-famous Salk Institute in California, showed that mice fed on a high-fat diet, but only allowed to eat within an eight-hour window, were healthier and slimmer than mice that were given exactly the same food but allowed to eat it whenever they wanted.

BBC.com

The Akrasia Effect: Why We Don’t Follow Through on What We Set Out to Do (And What to Do About It)

By the summer of 1830, Victor Hugo was facing an impossible deadline. Twelve months earlier, the famous French author had made an agreement with his publisher that he would write a new book titled, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Instead of writing the book, Hugo spent the next year pursuing other projects, entertaining guests, and delaying his work on the text. Hugo’s publisher had become frustrated by his repeated procrastination and responded by setting a formidable deadline. The publisher demanded that Hugo finish the book by February of 1831—less than 6 months away.

Hugo developed a plan to beat his procrastination. He collected all of his clothes, removed them from his chambers, and locked them away. He was left with nothing to wear except a large shawl. Lacking any suitable clothing to go outdoors, Hugo was no longer tempted to leave the house and get distracted. Staying inside and writing was his only option. 

The strategy worked. Hugo remained in his study each day and wrote furiously during the fall and winter of 1830. The Hunchback of Notre Dame was published two weeks early on January 14, 1831.

JamesClear

Is Facebook Luring You Into Being Depressed?

In his free time, Sven Laumer serves as a referee for Bavaria’s highest amateur football league. A few years ago, he noticed several footballers had quit Facebook, making it hard to organize events on the platform. He was annoyed, but as a professor who studies information systems, he was also intrigued. Why would the young men want to give up Facebook? Social scientists had been saying the social network was a good thing.

Nautil.us

Are Cats Domesticated?

“The cat does not offer services,” William Burroughs wrote. “The cat offers itself.” But it does so with unapologetic ambivalence. Greet a cat enthusiastically and it might respond with nothing more than a few unhurried blinks. Later, as you’re trying to work, it will commandeer your lap, keyboard, and attention, purring all the while. A cat will mew at the food bowl in the morning and set off on a multiple-day trek in the afternoon. Dogs are dependent on us to the point of being obsequious, but cats seem to be constantly reëvaluating the merits of our relationship, as well as their role in domestic life. “Are cats domesticated?” is one of the most frequently Googled questions about the animals, based on the search engine’s autocomplete suggestions.

It’s a question that scientists have been asking, too. The latest answer, based on insights from recent archeological discoveries and genome-sequencing studies, is that cats are semi-domesticated…

The New Yorker

What the Hell Is Wrong With America? 7 Myths That Prop Up Mass Shooting Culture

When is America going to wake up and realize that as long as we as a society allow easy access to guns, we are complicit in mass killings?

Tragedies like the Umpqua Community College carnage are not inevitable facts of life in America.They are a consequence of a society that doesn’t want to take a hard look at the roots and causes of violence, and understands that you don’t make deadly force widely and readily available to human beings.

Another gun-wielding young guy has left a trail of death, mayhem, injuries and maimed lives in a murderous spree, this time at a rural community college. The unfolding media coverage has featured residents of Roseburg, Ore., saying they didn’t think that could happen there. Others have replied that violence in America is just like violence anywhere else. Pro-gun advocates say the tragedy could have been stopped if students were armed. (Some were nearby but said they didn’t want to intervene because they feared getting shot by SWAT teams.) On the political front, almost everyone has expressed sympathy for victims but predicted that, yet again, Congress will not act to end easy access to guns.

These reactions reveal what is deeply wrong with America, from myths about where violence occurs to ignoring the ways in which traumatized people act out. Let’s start with the myths that perpetuate the cycle of gun violence:

AlterNet