Until rather recently, philosophers and scientists have been reluctant to grant a mind to any nonhuman entity. Feelings and emotions, hope and pain and a sense of self were deemed attributes that separated us from the rest of the living world.To René Descartes in the 17th century, and to behavioural psychologist BF Skinner in the 1950s, other animals were stimulus-response mechanisms that could be trained but lacked an inner life. To grant animals “minds” in any meaningful sense was to indulge in a crude anthropomorphism that had no place in science.

The Minds Of Animals Were Disregarded Earlier

If other animals behave like us, that’s no basis to assume that they do so for the same reasons and with the same experiences and mental representations of the world. But as countless careful experiments like this study of pigs reveal ever more about the inner world of animals, there comes a point where it looks far more contrived to suppose that their behaviour just happens to look like ours in all kinds of ways while differing utterly in its explanation. Maybe, instead, they have minds that are not really so different after all.

The Reason Of Animal Behaving Like Humans

The challenge, then, becomes finding a way of thinking about animal minds that doesn’t simply view them as like the human mind with the dials turned down: less intelligent, less conscious, more or less distant from the pinnacle of mentation we represent. We must recognise that the mind is not a single thing that beings have more or less of. There are many dimensions of mind and the space of minds has multiple coordinates, and we exist in some part of it, a cluster of data points that reflects our neurodiversity.

A New Look At Animal Minds

Birds’ minds are scattered widely in mind-space, their differences and specialities tremendously varied. Some birds excel at navigation, others at learning complex songs or making elaborate nests. Scrub jays are expert food storers, able to stash hundreds of caches around their habitat and find them all flawlessly, returning first to the most perishable items. They are cunning: cache thieving is common, and the birds might employ deceptive measures such as returning soon after depositing a store to move it to another location – but only if they know they were observed while caching it.

The Birds

We award pride of place in the hierarchy of bird minds to tool-using species, especially corvids (crows, ravens, rooks). The most masterful of them is the New Caledonian crow of the south Pacific, which will design and store custom-made hooks for foraging, and even make tools with multiple parts. Among animals, great apes, dolphins, sea otters, elephants and octopuses are the only others known to use tools. The challenge is to figure out which qualities of mind corvids bring to bear on the task.

Animals Using Tools

It was long assumed that the anatomy of the bird brain (lacking a neocortex) is too different from ours to support any conscious experience, but recently those differences have been found to be less pronounced. How do you test, though, if another animal has a sense of self? One approach is to see if it shows an ability to assess its own state of knowledge: can a bird “look into” its own mind and acknowledge what it doesn’t know? Recent experiments with crows suggest they can.

Birds Are Self-Aware

Lars Chittka of Queen Mary University of London and his colleagues have trained bees to manipulate a small ball into a hole at the centre of the “pitch” for a sugary reward. Bees can train one another in the task, and can find better solutions than their demonstrator: they don’t blindly follow rules but adapt them to the circumstances. It is also seen that the honeybee conveys information about a distant food source to its hive members by dancing.

Bees That Play Football

Bees can be trained to feel good or bad using flowers: blue ones carry a sugar reward, green ones don’t, but will a bee interpret an ambiguously blue-green flower optimistically or pessimistically? Again, behaviour seems to be coloured by experience: bees that have just been given an unexpected sugar treat seem more inclined to optimism, as though put in a good mood. We can’t know if the behaviour is accompanied by a “feeling” – but machines don’t do stuff like this.

The Optimistic Bee

The octopus is “probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.” Octopuses interact with us, apparently with neither fear nor aggression. But in contrast to a dog or a chimpanzee, it’s hard to fathom what the agenda might be. They are great problem-solvers: they unscrew jars, navigate mazes in the murky gloom of the seabed, and fuse bright laboratory lights with jets of water. They seem playful – but who knows, really, what the antics are for?

The Octopus Is Really Smart And Has Feelings

The octopus has a similar number of neurons as a dog, but instead of being mostly collected in a central brain they are distributed throughout the body in a ladder-like network. There is a centralised brain in the head, but more than half of the nervous system is in the arms, gathered into clusters called ganglia that seem to operate largely autonomously: the arms do things of their own accord while the brain watches, perhaps as if observing another creature.

The Amazing Creatures Of The Sea

Biopsychism supposes that every living being from bacteria up has sentience of a sort.Plants don’t have a nervous system, or even neurons. But their cells, like many non-neural cells, do communicate with one another electrically, and there’s evidence that cellular channels in plants called phloem can transport not only sugars but also electrical pulses. Some plants show distinctly animal-like behaviour: witness the carnivorous jaws of the Venus flytrap, which even displays a primitive ability to “count” the number of impulses it senses before closing on an insect.

On Plants Being Sentient

Plants can sense and respond to stimuli, as when flower heads move to track the progress of the sun across the sky. The South American “sensitive plant” Mimosa pudica, a member of the pea family, folds its leaves when touched and displays a kind of learning called habituation, where it eventually ignores a repeated stimulus that proves harmless. Pea plants can be trained in an almost Pavlovian fashion to associate a neutral signal such as the flow of air with a beneficial signal such as light.

The Sunflower Follows The Sun

Conceiving a universe of possible minds can discourage human hubris, and advises erring on the side of generosity in considering the rights and dignity of other beings. But it also enables a literally broad-minded view of what other minds could exist. Mindedness needn’t be a club with rigorously exclusive entry rules. We might not (and may never) agree about whether plants, fungi or bacteria have any kind of sentience, but they show enough attributes of cognition to warrant a place somewhere in this space.

A Sentient Universe

To suppose that something like artificial consciousness will emerge simply by making computer circuits bigger and faster is, as one AI expert put it to me, like imagining that if we make an aeroplane fly fast enough, eventually it will lay an egg. Computers and AI are taking off in the “intelligence” direction of mind-space while gaining nothing on the “experience” axis. If we want AI to be more human-like, many experts believe we will need explicitly to build human qualities into it – which in turn requires that we better understand what those are and how they arise.

AI Consciousness Is More Than Just Computing Speed

Most of our fantasies about advanced alien intelligence suppose it to be like us but with better tech. That’s not just a sci-fi trope; the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence typically assumes that ET carves nature at the same joints as we do, recognising the same abstract laws of maths and physics. But the more we know about minds, the more we recognise that they conceptualise the world according to the possibilities they possess for sensing and intervening in it; nothing is inevitable. We need to be more imaginative about what minds can be.

Aliens Are Not Going To Be Like We Imagine Them

Animals, birds and plants are sentient beings with feelings, memory, adaptiveness and emotions.

Meet the footballing bees, optimistic pigs and alien-like octopuses that are shaking up how we think about minds

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

Animal magic: why intelligence isn’t just for humans

When people use the term hot mess, they generally don’t mean they’re running from the Mob, entangled in a deadly love triangle, or waking up after a bender missing a kidney. Instead, they mean that they feel steaming, churning emotional disarray—they’re unsure of themselves, insecure, and neurotic. Everyone can see them for the disaster they are.

Being In A Hot Mess

Most people experience self-criticism in<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886903001065"> two ways</a>. First, there is comparative self-criticism, in which they contrast themselves negatively with others, whom they conclude are superior. Second, there is internalized self-criticism, in which they don’t live up to their own high personal standards and expectations and thus experience a lot of daily failure.<a href="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.386.5404&rep=rep1&type=pdf">Studies show</a> that you are the best judge of your neuroticism; those close to you are the best judges of your intellect; meanwhile, everyone can accurately judge your extraversion.

Self-Criticism: The Two Kinds

Many people abet this asymmetry by believing that if they admit to weakness, others will perceive them more negatively than they actually do. We are generally unforgiving of our own weaknesses and thus keep them hidden. At the same time, we are blasé about others’ shortcomings, and even find them attractive. Some psychologists <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-34832-002">call</a> this the “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/01/beautiful-mess-vulnerability/579892/">beautiful mess effect</a>.” We incorrectly think that others will judge us harshly for admitting to a mistake or for asking for help, when in reality people see vulnerability as sweet, or as a mark of character.

Admitting Our Asymmetric Behaviour

Comparing ourselves with others makes all of these effects worse. Thinking about how others see us—called “metaperception”—seems like it should help us understand ourselves better. Unfortunately, the conclusions we draw while doing so tend to be inaccurate.Social media massively magnifies the problem by encouraging everyone to post only happy, self-flattering things. You see your friends hiking on a sunny day—smiling, social, and cheerful. They might have been crying their eyes out or yelling at a loved one earlier in the day, but you would never know.

The Magnifier Effect Of Social Media

Accurate self-perception and metaperception require knowledge of your biases. Left to your devices, you might find it easy to think of yourself as messy in comparison with others. But being mindful of the errors that lead you to that conclusion can help you reevaluate. Next time you feel ashamed of your inadequacies, meditate on two facts:1. You are the only person who sees inside your head.2. Others are suffering inside their head, just like you.

Two Things To Remember

Being open about your suffering in others’ service is a form of self-compassion as well. <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2003-03727-001">It allows you</a> to understand your pain nonjudgmentally and treat it as part of a normal human experience. This kind of self-compassion has <a href="https://self-compassion.org/wptest/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/JRP.pdf">been</a><a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12671-020-01363-0"> found</a> to improve your mental health more than self-esteem approaches in which you try to change your subjective evaluation of yourself. For example, next time you are nervous about a conversation with someone, instead of trying to psych yourself into being confident, tell the other person you are nervous.

Self-Compassion

Embrace your hot messiness as a gift. It might be encouraging creativity and lead you to seek out new experiences, which can <a href="https://www.proquest.com/openview/7124e880d8ed7c86b0e0ca581ef9bcca/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=47758">raise your happiness</a>. To understand this, consider studies of people’s rooms, which<a href="http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/tidy-desk-or-messy-desk-each-has-its-benefits.html"> have shown</a> that although physical tidiness may have benefits such as encouraging us to eat right and give to charity, a little bit of clutter can encourage the generation of creative ideas. Messiness releases you from conventionality and thus inspires fresh insights.

A Radical Approach

No one’s judging you as harshly as you judge yourself.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

mentalhealth

Mental Health

The Perks of Being a Hot Mess

Research shows that people who believe they can develop their talents through hard work, good strategies and input from others have a growth mindset. They often achieve more than people who believe their talents are innate gifts. Employees feel more empowered and committed when their companies embrace a growth mindset and give organisational support for innovation and collaboration. Companies with a fixed mindset report more cheating and deception. This is most likely to gain an advantage.

The growth mindset

<ul><li>You believe you have a growth mindset. In truth, people tend to confuse a growth mindset with being open-minded or having a positive outlook. Everyone is a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets.</li><li>A growth mindset is about praising and rewarding effort. However, it's vital to reward effort, learning and progress.</li><li>People think just desiring a growth mindset is enough to make things happen. For example, organisations believe they have a growth mindset by creating mission statements that include innovation or growth empowerment, but they fail to implement policies to make them happen.</li></ul>

Growth mindset misconceptions

<ul><li>Encourage appropriate risk-taking.</li><li>Reward employees for useful lessons learned even if the project does not meet its goals.</li><li>Support collaboration across organizational boundaries rather than competing among employees.</li><li>Commit to the growth of every member.</li><li>Reinforce growth mindset values with policies.</li></ul>

How to encourage a growth mindset

If we correct these misconceptions, it's still difficult to get a growth mindset, partly because we all have fixed mindset triggers, such as criticism, facing challenges, being compared with others that can push us into defensiveness.It's hard for people to stay in a growth mindset. However, organisation and people can increase their understanding of growth mindset concepts and the processes to put them in place.

A growth mindset is challenging

Individuals who believe their talents can be developed through hard work, good strategies, and input from others tend to achieve more than those who believe their talents are innate gifts. 00:00 The meaning of "growth mindset" has become distorted 00:59 Misconception 1: "I already have it, and I always have" 01:27 Misconception 2: A growth mindset is just about praising and rewarding effort 01:54 Misconception 3: Just espouse a growth mindset, and good things will happen 02:16 Here are some traits of companies that encourage growth mindset 02:50 But, we all have our own fixed-mindset triggers to overcome This is because they worry less about looking smart and they put more energy into learning. When entire companies embrace a growth mindset, their employees report feeling far more empowered and committed; they also receive far greater organizational support for collaboration and innovation. In contrast, people at primarily fixed-mindset companies report more of only one thing: cheating and deception among employees, presumably to gain an advantage in the talent race. Based on the HBR article by Carol Dweck: What Having a “Growth Mindset” Actually Means (https://hbr.org/2016/01/what-having-a-growth-mindset-actually-means). This video is co-produced with @Emeritus. You can find more co-productions from HBR and Emeritus on the Emeritus app: https://emrt.us/HarvardBusinessReview Follow HBR: https://hbr.org/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/harvard-business-review/ https://www.facebook.com/HBR/ https://twitter.com/HarvardBiz https://www.instagram.com/harvard_business_review Sign up for Newsletters: https://hbr.org/email-newsletters #HarvardBusinessReview #Explainer #GrowthMindset

problemsolving

Problem Solving

videos

Videos

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Individuals who believe their talents can be developed through hard work, good strategies, and input from others tend to achieve more than those who believe their talents are innate gifts. 

00:00 The meaning of "growth mindset" has become distorted
00:59 Misconception 1: "I already have it, and I always have" 
01:27 Misconception 2: A growth mindset is just about praising and rewarding effort
01:54 Misconception 3: Just espouse a growth mindset, and good things will happen
02:16 Here are some traits of companies that encourage growth mindset
02:50 But, we all have our own fixed-mindset triggers to overcome

This is because they worry less about looking smart and they put more energy into learning. When entire companies embrace a growth mindset, their employees report feeling far more empowered and committed; they also receive far greater organizational support for collaboration and innovation. In contrast, people at primarily fixed-mindset companies report more of only one thing: cheating and deception among employees, presumably to gain an advantage in the talent race.

Based on the HBR article by Carol Dweck: What Having a “Growth Mindset” Actually Means (https://hbr.org/2016/01/what-having-a-growth-mindset-actually-means). 

This video is co-produced with @EMERITUS. You can find more co-productions from HBR and Emeritus on the Emeritus app:  https://emrt.us/HarvardBusinessReview

Follow HBR:
https://hbr.org/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/harvard-business-review/
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Sign up for Newsletters: https://hbr.org/email-newsletters

#HarvardBusinessReview #Explainer #GrowthMindset

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Harvard Business Review

What Having a "Growth Mindset" Actually Means

Community marketing is the process of designing and implementing programs to engage the customer, company, and other groups in a mutually beneficial way.
Today's businesses attempt to grow their social media following but only consider half the picture. Instead of trying to gain followers, they should connect with people beyond transactional relationships. It's an indirect way to promote your business without using a 'push' marketing strategy.

Building a community around your brand

<ul><li>Start a Facebook group. You can start a private group where content is only visible to members. You can connect your audience to a support network and share files and resources.</li><li>Email marketing is a low-cost, personal way to reach your customers by providing engaging content in their inboxes. You can engage readers by asking them a question at the end of the email.</li><li>Create a membership site where only registered users can communicate with each other.</li><li>Host events and meetings with the help of online conferencing tools.</li><li>Create live videos.</li></ul>

How to build your community

Indirectly promote your business with community marketing.

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

business

Business

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

Why Your Business Needs Community Marketing

More than ever, people struggling with mental health issues are turning to therapy apps. While some applications connect you with a licensed therapist, many apps have gone humanless - from friendly chatbots that offer cognitive behavioural therapy to apps that claim to help people through acute stress with deep breathing exercises.
While studies suggest that some of these applications are effective treatments for mental illness, experts are concerned with the rapid growth of unregulated apps.

Digital therapy

Since 2016, mental health apps have exploded in number and popularity. Currently, there are about 10,000 to 20,000 mental health apps available. Studies also show that, overall, smartphone apps helped people feel moderately less depressed and anxious. But, many mental health apps make unsubstantiated treatment claims. Because the risks associated with using the apps are small, no one seems to be checking the validity of their claims.

Not all mental health apps are legit

In a review of 52 apps for anxiety, psychologists found that 67% had been developed without guidance from a healthcare professional. Another review found that none of the 25 highest-rated apps for anxiety had content in line with evidence-based treatments. Some of the advice offered by the apps are harmful. One app for bipolar disorder advised users that experienced a manic episode to take a shot of hard liquor to help them fall asleep. Another app said you could "catch" bipolar disorder.

Harmful mental health apps

It's unlikely that these mHealth apps will replace in-person healthcare professionals. While regulation would eliminate most health apps, that is not likely to happen soon. When choosing apps, users should go to a medical professional and see what they would recommend. The professional can see if the app is consistent with evidence-based treatments.

Caution when choosing a mHealth app

Therapy apps are booming, but mental health experts have vetted precious few. With no regulatory body actively vetting mental health apps, users are left to navigate an explosion of options that range from expert-recommended to potentially harmful.

health

Health

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

computerscience

Computer Science

Mental wellness apps are basically the Wild West of therapy | Popular Science

The Study web is a gigantic, interconnected super-network of study-oriented content with a community of students of all ages, countries, all types of ethnicity, and all kinds of discipline.
On the study web, students can watch each other study, becoming study buddies on communities like Discord, Tiktok, Youtube and Reddit. It is the go-to place for their study resources and tips, along with social and moral support.

The Study Web

Discord, a hangout place that started as a gaming community, is a place to talk and chat. It has many servers which are study homes populated with thousands of Gen Z/millennials and is the virtual workplace and students club we don’t hear about.
Students throng study networks like Study Together to feel less lonely, reduce their anxiety and be inspired by others like them studying alongside, virtually.

The Study Community: Discord

The study network of Discord works due to a three-pronged approach:<ol><li>Gamification of studying, where people get virtual rewards for studying more.</li><li>Peer Pressure, where they are held accountable due to others in the group keeping a tab.</li><li>Data analytics of their study graph in the form of a monthly leaderboard, helping them build their streak and climb upwards.</li></ol>

Discord: Three-Pronged Approach

The decade-old style of monotonous, one-sided tutoring videos on Youtube is skipped by students, who opt for fresh new creators with their own style and interactivity, giving rise to influencers and creators in the Study Web.<ul><li>Creators talk about how to study, what music to listen to, what to eat, how to review, memorize, recall, summarize and file the study material. </li><li>Youtube has endless content on the Study genre(like the Study With Me videos), from creating a study schedule to tips on focusing and getting good grades.</li></ul>

The Study Community: YouTube

To study, many students opt for 'Lo-fi’(low fidelity) music, which is warm, underproduced, homemade and calming, demanding little cognitive attention from the brain.Youtube. Spotify and Apple Music are filled with Lo-Fi music playlists and paired with the right headphones, this kind of sound is great for highly productive study sessions.

The Study Community: Lo-Fi Music

The Study Web is highly pronounced on Twitter, where hashtags like #Studytwit or #Studytwt are used by students and professionals to seek out study partners or to share tips. It offers an open discussion to thousands, giving inspiration, focus and solidarity.

The Study Community: Twitter

<ul><li>One can watch 15-second study videos on TikTok under the hashtag #StudyTok(680 million views) where stuff like note-taking strategies, productivity app suggestions, and other tips are quickly shared by creators.</li><li>The content is inspiring, amateur and fun, where students are encouraged to do more in less time.</li><li>The recommended music playlists, apps, extensions and tips are quickly shared in the Study community and adopted.</li><li>The message reinforced in TikTok is that we don’t have to be a genius or have inborn talent to get good grades.</li></ul>

The Study Community: TikTok

<ul><li>Study Web connects students who sometimes vent their problems as they face the same kind of economic, cultural or emotional hurdles. </li><li>Many students are frustrated due to teenage angst, or an identity crisis fueled by a broken home.</li><li>The Study Web is filled with youngsters who have their own personal therapy sessions with strangers who are now their online kin. </li><li>They pour out their depressive tendencies, sadness and stress-induced anxiety on the chatrooms of Discord, which are now what IRL(internet relay chat) chatrooms were a couple of decades ago.</li></ul>

The Sad Undercurrent Of The Study Web

Exploring Gen Z’s Ambitious and Anxiety-Fuelled Pursuit of Straight A’s Across YouTube, TikTok, Discord, and Twitter

productivity

Productivity

career

Career

Caught in the Study Web - Cybernaut

The belief that societies continue to decline is often linked with rosy retrospection - believing that the past was better and the future more negative.
Declinism can cloud your judgement and steer you toward bad decisions.

Declinism

<ul>
<li>Writer Jemina Lewis described memory bias as an emotional strategy, where we cling to the past when the present seems extremely bleak.</li>
<li>In the late 1700s, Edward Gibbons, an English historian and writer, published The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He argues that the Roman Empire collapsed because of a gradual loss of civic virtue among its citizens.</li>
<li>German historian and philosopher Oswald Spengler claimed that history witnesses the rise and fall of many civilisations and that decline is inevitable.</li>
</ul>

The history of declinism

Illusions created by rosy retrospection can change our memories in ways that affect our current decisions.
<ul>
<li>Declinism can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Constantly worrying about decline can be a good way to ensure it.</li>
<li>A rosy outlook on the past can cause us to ignore past errors and not learn from them. Combined with declinism, it may lead to repeating the same mistakes.</li>
</ul>

When declinism clouds our judgement

<ul>
<li>Beware of rosy retrospection. Keep in mind how biased our memories are. If the past experience is part of a present decision, consider discussing your memory with colleagues or friends.</li>
<li>Practice calculated optimism. Instead of predicting a dim future, explore potential areas of opportunity. The aim is to keep on being part of the game.</li>
<li>Focus on long-term success. Don't confuse a temporary problem as a huge challenge. We will have ups and downs. The only failure is not moving forward.</li>
</ul>

How to avoid the trap of declinism

communication

Communication

Declinism: how rosy retrospection impacts decision-making - Ness Labs

"Others have seen what is and asked why? I have seen what could be and asked why not?"

"Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions."

"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original."

"Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people."

"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while."

writing

Reading & Writing

creativity

Creativity

5 Quotes to Get Your Creative Juices Flowing

We don't have an internal value meter that tells us how much things are worth; we mostly focus on the relative advantage of one thing over another and estimate value accordingly.
For example, we don't know how much a six-cylinder car is worth, but we can assume it's more expensive than the four-cylinder model.)

Humans rarely choose things in absolute terms

We are always looking at the things around us in relation to others. We always compare jobs with jobs, vacations with vacations, lovers with lovers, and wines with wines.
We not only tend to compare things with one another but also tend to focus on comparing things that are easily comparable—and avoid comparing things that cannot be compared easily.

Looking at things in relation to others

It is a cognitive bias: we tend to have a specific change in preferences between two options when also presented with a third option that is asymmetrically dominated.
This is the secret agent in more decisions than we could imagine. It even helps us decide whom to date—and, ultimately, whom to marry.

The decoy effect

The basic idea of arbitrary coherence is this: although initial prices are "arbitrary," once those prices are established in our minds they will shape not only present prices but also future prices.

Arbitrary coherence

Anchoring is a cognitive bias where an individual depends too heavily on an initial piece of information offered to make subsequent judgments during decision making.
Anchoring influences all kinds of purchases. Research found that people who move to a new city generally remain anchored to the prices they paid for housing in their former city.

Anchoring

We should pay particular attention to the first decision we make in what is going to be a long stream of decisions.
When we face such a decision, it might seem to us that this is just one decision, with little to no consequences; but in fact, the power of the first decision can have such a long-lasting effect that it will drip into our future decisions for years to come.

The power of the first decision

Most transactions have an upside and a downside, but when something is FREE ! we forget the downside, FREE ! gives us such an emotional charge that we perceive what is being offered as immensely more valuable than it really is.
And that is because humans are intrinsically afraid of loss. The real allure of FREE ! is tied to this fear. There's no visible possibility of loss when we choose a FREE ! item.

Why FREE! make us so happy

Money is very often the most expensive way to motivate people. Social norms are not only cheaper but often more effective as well.
If corporations started thinking in terms of social norms they would realize that these norms build loyalty and—more important—make people want to extend themselves to the degree that corporations need today: to be flexible, concerned, and willing to pitch in. That's what a social relationship delivers.

Corporations and social norms

Giving up on our long-term goals for immediate gratification, my friends, is procrastination.
Emotions grab hold of us and make us view the world from a different perspective. Procrastination is rooted in the same kind of problem. When we promise to save our money, we are in a cool state. But then the lava flow of hot emotion comes rushing in: just when we promise to save, we see a new car, a mountain bike, or a pair of shoes that we must have.

The problem of procrastination

Without precommitments, we keep on falling for temptation. Resisting temptation and instilling self-control are general human goals, and repeatedly failing to achieve them is a source of much of our misery.
The struggle for control is all around us: books and magazines, the Radio and television airwaves are choked with messages of self-improvement and help. And yet, we find ourselves again and again in the same predicament: failing over and over to reach our long-term goals.

Why we fall for temptation

... and we usually don't make best decisions when it comes to it. Why? Because of three irrational quirks in our human nature:
<ul>
<li>We fall in love with what we already have.</li>
<li>We focus on what we may lose, rather than what we may gain.</li>
<li>We assume other people will see the transaction from the same perspective as we do.</li>
</ul>

Ownership pervades our lives

It's just the way we're wired. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to close them.
We need to drop out of committees that are a waste of our time. We ought to shut them because they draw energy and commitment away keeping doors open from the doors that should be left open—and because they drive us crazy.

We have an irrational compulsion to keep doors open

A stereotype is a way of categorizing information, in the hope of predicting experiences. The brain cannot start from scratch at every new situation. It must build on what it has seen before. For that reason, stereotypes are not intrinsically malevolent.
They provide shortcuts in our never-ending attempt to make sense of complicated surroundings. But because a stereotype provides us with spécifie expectations about members of a group, it can also unfavorably influence both our perceptions and our behavior.

Expectations shape stereotypes

Expectations are more than the mere anticipation: they enable us to make sense of a conversation in a noisy room, despite the loss of a word here and there, and likewise, to be able to read text messages on our cell phones, despite the fact that some of the words are scrambled.
And although expectations can make us look foolish from time to time, they are also very powerful and useful.

When expectations are useful

Learn to evaluate life and business choices via the lens of Opportunity Costs

moneyandinvestments

Money & Investments

What Is Opportunity Cost

Intelligent, lively, humorous, and thoroughly engaging, "The Predictably Irrational" explains why people often make bad decisions and what can be done about it.

books

Books

<ul> <li>Why do our headaches persist after taking a one-cent aspirin but disappear when we take a 50-cent aspirin? </li> <li>Why does recalling the Ten Commandments reduce our tendency to lie, even when we couldn't possibly be caught? </li> <li>Why do we splurge on a lavish meal but cut coupons to save twenty-five cents on a can of soup?</li> <li>Why do we go back for second helpings at the unlimited buffet, even when our stomachs are already full?</li> <li>And how did we ever start spending $4.15 on a cup of coffee when, just a few years ago, we used to pay less than a dollar?</li> </ul> When it comes to making decisions in our lives, we think we're in control. We think we're making smart, rational choices. But are we? In a series of illuminating, often surprising experiments, MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. Blending everyday experience with groundbreaking research, Ariely explains how expectations, emotions, social norms, and other invisible, seemingly illogical forces skew our reasoning abilities. Not only do we make astonishingly simple mistakes every day, but we make the same types of mistakes, Ariely discovers. We consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. We fail to understand the profound effects of our emotions on what we want, and we overvalue what we already own. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They're systematic and predictable—making us predictably irrational. From drinking coffee to losing weight, from buying a car to choosing a romantic partner, Ariely explains how to break through these systematic patterns of thought to make better decisions. Predictably Irrational will change the way we interact with the world—one small decision at a time.

Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University. He also holds an appointment at the MIT Media Lab where he is the head of the eRationality research group. He was formerly the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT Sloan School of Management.Dan Ariely grew up in Israel after birth in New York. He served in the Israeli army and when 18 suffered third-degree burns over 70 percent of his body from an accidental magnesium flare explosion during training.Ariely recovered and went on to graduate from Tel Aviv University and received a Ph.D. and M.A. in cognitive psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a Ph.D. in business from Duke University.

Dan Ariely

Predictably Irrational

We all have limited time and unlimited things to do, and we try to juggle between work, personal projects, self-care and our social life. As we try to focus on what matters the most, we get in the web of complexities that come from managing a lot of important and competing tasks.
<ul>
<li>If we only focus on a single task, our responsiveness towards the demands of the world suffers. </li>
<li>If we are available to all and extremely responsive to what they need from us, our own progress suffers.</li>
</ul>

The Perils Of Multitasking

The word ‘multitask’ is actually a computer term invented by IBM in 1965, showcasing how a computer chip can handle multiple tasks at the same time.
According to psychiatrist Edward Hallowell, multitasking is a mythical construct of the mind, where we mistakenly believe we can effectively perform more than one task at the same time.

The Origin Of 'Multitasking'

One has to find a balance between optimizing one’s own output while enabling our peers and collaborators to move forward.
Mindful context switching is a scientific way to carry on with your daily tasks in the most efficient manner while not being unresponsive to other matters that need your attention and input.

Mindful Context Switching: A Delicate Balance

<ol>
<li>Defining your level of responsiveness based on the kind of work being done.</li>
<li>Design a realistic ‘chunk’ of work that is meaningful and feels like progress. Breaking down your work into chunks makes it easier and is a modular approach to the tasks at hand.</li>
<li>Ensure that you plan your work calendar based on the broken-down chunks of work.</li>
<li>Ensure you communicate your response times to others.</li>
<li>Review your calendar and improvise on your workweek.</li>
</ol>

The Steps Of Mindful Context Switching

Multitasking has its cost. Learn how to improve your productivity and work better with your team by using mindful context switching.