Overview: Psychology

I spoke to seven news organizations - Recode, The Verge, Reuters, Mic, Popular Science, The Week, and USA Today's FTW - about their decision to suspend comments, the results of that change, and how they manage reader engagement now... Here's how they're all using social media to encourage reader discussion. - What happened after 7 news site…

Storytelling at its finest... should evoke a visceral reaction in its audience. There's something to be said about inviting that audience to participate in a story ...the options for how to do so are infinite... Here, we explore some great examples of interactive and crowd-sourced storytelling at its finest. - Crowd-sourced storytelling: How…

First, some useful definitions: "Imagination is envisioning things that don’t exist... Creativity is applying imagination to address a challenge. Innovation is applying creativity to generate unique solutions. And entrepreneurship is applying innovations, scaling the ideas, by inspiring others’ imagination... the way to innovate is to look a…

Technology First starts by selecting a very specific medium for communication, then creatively exploits its full potential.... the opposite of blank slate.... Enable creative thinking by embracing arbitrary constraints. ... Put emotional adjectives in front of specific technologies... Pick an everyday interaction and internet-enable it. - Ne…

In our busy modern world, I’ve found one very surprising key to bringing more quiet to the mind and in turn practicing more mindfulness, and that is using a good task management system, such as the productivity methodology GTD... knowing that I have everything captured in a trusted GTD system gives my mind space to rest and focus on whatever is…

Oh my, how patronising. Nothing here about the genuine benefits that curation brings. Everything is painted with the same sneering brush in a world where everything is wrong is driven by narcissm and neoliberal capitalism. Still, definitely worth a read: "how did curating, a highly specialized line of museum work involving the care, accessio…

"what people really want is to be treated like individuals and given the tools to help themselves.... Rigour is the cold, hard fact of insight. Magic is the creative talent ... Without great insight, creative may be ill-informed or poorly targeted.... Meanwhile, a data-based body of evidence that isn’t supported by creativity fails to creat…

"by simply learning from disciplines like urban planning, zoning regulations, crowd control, effective and humane policing, and the simple practices it takes to stage an effective public event, we can come up with a set of principles to prevent the overwhelming majority of the worst behaviors on the Internet... Businesses that run cruise ships …

Social and mobile have fundamentally altered attention. Platforms for self-expression and communication are the largest and most important media companies of the millennial age, dominating share of attention and engagement for young people. And the behavior of the young is predictive of the future. - May I Have Your Attention, Please? — Medium

We seem to be suckers for a happy ending ... Upworthy and Viral Nova, have become skilled in coming up with headlines that turn a sad tale on its head. Shifting the focus away from sadness changes a story’s emotional footprint, helping it travel further on social networks... While bad news is a mainstay of the media, people tend to avoid passin…

In studies, people report that they feel better after venting. But researchers find they actually become angrier and more aggressive. People who vent anonymously may become the angriest and most aggressive.... We typically sound angrier in print. And when we write down something, we can reread it, over and over, and stew. With e-venting you don…

social media platforms are ... the main avenue through which we make comparisons with our peers, acquaintances, celebrities ... those comparisons are often what we base our life-expectations on, these platforms can lead to anxiety about our place in the world... Most of the content on social media wasn’t improving my life — in fact, by taking u…

"@NASA is the 104th most popular Twitter account in the world... and 3.5 million on Instagram. The Department of the Interior, whose stunning wildlife and nature pictures make it the only government agency with cool visual content to rival NASA’s, has just 654,000 ... John Yembrick and Jason Townsend are veterans of other government agencies...…

A good tour of theories of creativity, concluding with results from two recent studies: "With these widely accepted theories of creativity in mind, it is rather jarring to see two brand studies, both of which suggest that creativity is closely linked with inherent neurological and personality traits rather than methodology or practice. The impl…

Distributed intelligence means you need to find a social process, not a data-driven solution... You cannot outsource leadership to your analytics group. - Thinking Small: 3 Ways To Remain Creative In A World Of Big Data | Co.Create | creativity + culture + commerce

Some really advanced techniques in handling trolls here - The Internet’s Most Trolled Cartoonist — The Nib — Medium

From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.

"There are many kinds of intelligence, and many kinds of stupidity. But not all are created equal. The intelligence of a computer is not the stupidity of a human, and vice versa. Which one would you rather be? ... One can be smart in stupid ways... or stupid in smart ways... technology’s making us stupid stupid — not just stupider, but stupider…

The Decorah Eagles “nest cam” is the most watched live stream channel of all time, spawning a sliver under 300 million live views (298,652,320 at time of writing), mainstream media coverage and eagle-watching communities worldwide. The limbic system is a part of the brain that drives our emotions. When we’re around other people–especially crowds–…

arranging for others to tout your expertise before you make your case can increase the likelihood of people paying attention and acting on your advice... Despite the experience deficit, the candidate who had scored highly on the leadership potential test was rated as more likely to be a successful hire, even though they were objectively much le…

"Nice way of bringing creatives in to think (ugh) out of the box - run a science fiction contest: "The Art Of Future Warfare ...is based on the idea that writers, artists and game designers have a lot to offer policy wonks... “Unconventional,imaginative thinking and expression can contribute meaningfully to the study and professional conduc…

If you ever wondered why meetings so often lead to the wrong decision ... "... we are wired in certain ways ... that can block groups from processing information effectively, which leads to bad decisions... Gilbert explains how to use diversity and inclusion to get better results from product ideation efforts... One of the most fundamental …

"... infographics are often taken at face value... And it is hard to fact check infographics... Fast Company republished 10 facts from Buffer. Fact checking one of the facts in that list went like this: The fact quoted an infographic -> that quoted a blog post at Huffington Post -> which in turn quoted another infographic -> which quoted a blog…

I totally see myself in this excellent post: "it genuinely feels like the act of deciding is ruining my life. Even with low-stakes decisions, I feel viscerally bound to weigh every possible outcome to ensure that I’m making the best choice. Sounds responsible, right? Maybe. But it also feels like I’m trapped by my own compulsion to not fuck up …

"Switzerland, Iceland, Denmark and Norway are the world's happiest countries, according to the 2015 World Happiness Report, ... Bringing countries together in a big bloc such as the EU doesn't help increase social capital. And when some countries in such a union do worse than others, their social fabric rips in a dramatic way, trust erodes and th…

This is NOT just about gender equality! Sure, it starts as such: "The more we look into the cognitive basis of team and business performance, the more we learn about the strengths of women relative to men..." But look: "... Teams with higher average I.Q.s didn’t score much higher on our collective intelligence tasks than did teams w…

While an excellent takedown of 'traditional' (group-focused) brainstorming techniques, this article should mention that individuals applying brainstorming techniques get good results. "In every case, four people working individually generated between 30 to 40 percent more ideas than four people working in a group. Their results were of a higher q…

"many of us tend to sabotage creativity more than we cultivate it. Here are some of the self-sabotaging things you’re probably doing every day. "

"All interesting theories are an attack on the taken-for-granted... We accept beliefs that align with our biases, but reject the value of these findings. Why? Because they don’t teach us anything new. In order to grab the attention of an audience, you must make a proposition that negates an accepted one."

A great riposte to Joe Keohane’s "In Praise of Meaningless Work", which descried "meaning-mongering as the new greenwashing". "The problem isn’t that corporate leaders are talking about meaning too much. It’s that they aren’t taking it seriously enough.... It should come as no surprise that the corporate machines that are populated by such inter…