Overview: Psychology

"the system ... counts the number of incorrect facts within a page ... by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings." - Google wan…

"Crowdsourcing is not about work. Crowdsourcing is about community. Without a solid community, you get not-solid results from your crowdsourcing endeavor.... The goal of many of these tactics is not to stop assholes from being assholes, just to slow them down and demotivate them from destroying your community." - Crowdsourcing isn’t broken — Bac…

This one's a mustread, helping you identify and understand all four 'Dark Tetrad' personality types (everyday sadists, narcissists, Machiavellians & psychopaths). Useful not just for navigating your own organisation, but also that of your client ... "Blessed with a surfeit of confidence and knack for lying, they dazzle in interviews, make great…

"If you spend a lot of your everyday moments and time in the future or the past or you have difficulty focusing and you feel this may have a negative effect on your life then maybe you want to learn to live more in the present moment. Here’s what works for me to do that. Just a few simple things that I use in my normal day." Particularly relevan…

"the majority of participants reported that they found it unpleasant to be alone in a room with their thoughts for just 6 to 15 minutes.... in one experiment, 64 percent of men and 15 percent of women began self-administering electric shocks..." How our mobile-phone-driven flight away from idletime and interiority damages our psychology, physical…

Begins with a beautiful rant on technology's tyranny in individual and collective life: "Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability... Digital expectations of alacrity and ters…

"Q. Is it realistic to think that a European public sphere could ever be created? TGA: My view is that we should try, but we shouldn’t ever kid ourselves that this is going to be like a national public sphere. Apart from anything else, we speak different languages, which is a huge barrier. The key for me, in continuing to make the argument for …

"information consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently ... instead of reaping the benefits of the digital revolution we are intellectually deprived by our inability to filter out sensory junk... we are collectively wiser... but individu…

Interesting research: "Seventy different political posts were randomly either left to their own wild devices, engaged by an unidentified staffer from the station, or engaged by a prominent political reporter. When the reporter showed up, “incivility decreased by 17 percent and people were 15 percent more likely to use evidence in their comments on…

"On the surface, no single factor seems to set Slack apart from a plethora of other collaboration tools. However, a closer look using the model described the book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Product, reveals the user psychology behind the company's success." - The Psychology of a Billion-Dollar Enterprise App: Why Is Slack So Habit-Formi…

"Here's what I've come up with for advice to the 20-year-old version of me on being creative." Particularly like Neil Gaiman's advice: " A lot of times ideas will turn up when you're doing something else. And, most of all, ideas come from confluence - they come from two things flowing together. " Which is why I-Labs is all about bringing peo…

"recent scientific work is putting a much finer point on just how stories change our attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors... to motivate a desire to help others, a story must first ... develop tension during the narrative... it is likely that attentive viewers/listeners will come to share the emotions of the characters in it and continue mimicking t…

"... a new way of measuring the actual attention of readers, as part of a move to get publishers and advertisers to stop focusing only on clicks and pageviews... Unlike pageviews, which simply measure whether a page has loaded, or even unique visitors ... metrics like “active exposure time,” ... can determine how much time a reader spent with a s…

""How to stop trolling online?” is the question of the moment. From [Quora's] inception, its efforts have been geared towards “making quality scale,” ... also meant keep making the application a safe place for users to write... It has introduced a new anti-harassment feature, where users are prompted to flag any comment or post ... Quora moderat…

Last year I decided to get Information Overload under control, setting up a GTD system with a DoIt-driven morning routine and Pocket, Diigo and IFTTT to queue, store and share useful stuff. I was all set. For what, I wasn't sure. But I was sure as hell organised. And then, a couple of days ago, an article on Aeon - What good is information? -…

"A good social media manager doesn’t have to have experience in the subject matter; they know how to do their research, build personas, adapt and be creative... Not understanding target demographics is like playing darts without a bull’s eye." - The Psychology That Informs Social Media | Social Media Today

"The trouble is that information doesn’t nourish us... it turns out to be boring.... if there is an antidote to boredom, it is not information but meaning... Information is ... an undifferentiated stream of sense and nonsense ... the journey from information to meaning involves more than simply filtering the signal from the noise. It is an alchem…

As commented on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/groups/New-Narrative-Europe-closing-event-4203563.S.5916497700450234368), a poll with an interesting set of options to choose from: "Do you: a) Love Europe as a state of mind? b) Love Europe as a solution to the challenges we face together? c) Love Europe for its victory over the barriers which o…

"As #ISISMediaBlackout gathered pace it became one of the world's first anti-viral virals. Tweeted around 20,000 times, it managed to eclipse the content itself. #ISISMediaBlackout might be a sign that social media is taking the step forwards that it most badly needs.... It needs digital citizenship, the realisation that our behaviour online a…

Enjoying this excellent guide to ideation by Krysta Curtis. Something for the weekend: admit it, you won't have time for this much fun during the week: - Paint-by-Idea — Medium

"Canadian researchers have confirmed what most people suspected all along: that internet trolls are archetypal Machiavellian sadists.... via Heather-Anne MacLean's post: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140730175026-5723090-don-t-feed-the-trolls-research-reveals-psychopathy - Online trolls are psychopaths and sadists, psychologists …

Brown Moses made his name crowdsourcing information in conflict zones, such as analysing weapons in Syria ... from his front room in Leicester, England... using social media, open source tools, and public information to verify details that news organizations can miss. Today, he's launching a site to pool his and others knowledge together in one…

How to Spot Liars at Work and How to Deal with Them 45 minutes of psychology, body language, etc. Really insightful into the blind spots we all have, the biases we suffer from which make us distrust honest people with the ‘wrong’ eyebrows or chin, and which make us trust people we shouldn’t on the basis of looks, group membership…

"The absolute worst thing that can happen as a result of this furore is that (a) Facebook keep any and all data they collect private, and run these sorts of studies behind closed doors, and (b) scientists wouldn’t want to touch their data anyway, for fear of public outrage. This would be disastrous, because social media hosts a wealth of informati…

Truly excellent, insightful piece. "if Facebook did make the content that users see more positive, should we simply be happy? ... If Alice is happier when she is oblivious to Bob’s pain because Facebook chooses to keep that from her, are we willing to sacrifice Bob’s need for support and validation? This is a hard ethical choice ... Facebook is…

Fascinating account of a leading scientist's decades-long investigation into creative genius and mental illness. creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way... creative people have shown stronger activations in their association cortices ... This pattern h…

A whole bunch of reasons why the wrong consultants are hired for the wrong reasons: "When we don’t know much about somebody, we ... think about people in over-optimistic ways...what normal individual can stand up against an outsider or expert made up of pixie dust and rainbows? ... when we go looking for a better expert ... we tend to find them…

@digitaltonto on "Cargo Cult Marketers", who - despite the complexity of modern marketing - "offer a false solution ... a simple formula that explains everything." Greg goes into the psychology of this particular breed of marketers with great insight, charting how they come up with and fall in love with their own idea and then, subconsciously, on…

Excellent article, via @joncaswell, pointing out that not only is Mindulness a treatment, not a cure, it's being peddled by those responsible for the disease... "We must subject social media to the kind of scrutiny that has been applied to the design of gambling machines... ... [it's a mistake to assume] that anxiety and insecurity are the nat…

"When reading straight data, only the language parts of our brains work to decode the meaning. But when we read a story, not only do the language parts of our brains light up, but any other part of the brain that we would use if we were actually experiencing what we’re reading about becomes activated as well... it’s far easier for us to remember …