Category: Psychology

Conscientiousness and Openness Matter More than Intelligence

(p. 2) In a 2014 paper, the Australian psychology professor Arthur E. Poropat cites research showing that both conscientiousness (which he defines as a tendency to be “diligent, dutiful and hardworking”) and openness (characterized by qualities like creativity and curiosity) are more highly correlated with student performance than intelligence is. And, he notes, ratings of students’ personalities by outside observers — teachers, for instance — are even more strongly linked with academic success than the way students rate themselves. The strength of the personality-performance link is good news, he writes, because “personality has been demonstrated to change over time to a far greater extent than intelligence.”

For the full commentary, see:
ANNA NORTH. “Should Schools Teach Personality?” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., JANUARY 11, 2015): 2.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JANUARY 10, 2015.)

Relevant articles by Poropat are:
Poropat, Arthur E. “A Meta-Analysis of the Five-Factor Model of Personality and Academic Performance.” Psychological Bulletin 135, no. 2 (March 2009): 322-38.
Poropat, Arthur E. “Other-Rated Personality and Academic Performance: Evidence and Implications.” Learning and Individual Differences 34 (August 2014): 24-32.

Former Nebraskan Writes that Football Breaks the Soul

(p. C1) The poet Erin Belieu was born in Nebraska. It’s a place where, she once wrote,

football is to life what sleep deprivation is

to Amnesty International, that is,
the best researched and the most effective method
of breaking a soul.

Ms. Belieu got out, soul entirely unbroken. She’s spent the past two decades composing smart and nettling books of poems, beginning with “Infanta” (1995), which was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Hayden Carruth. I’ve admired her three previous books, but her new one, “Slant Six,” seems to me better by an order of magnitude. It’s got more smoke, more confidence, more wit and less tolerance for obscurity. Her crisp free verse has as many subcurrents as a magnetic field.

For the full review, see:
DWIGHT GARNER. “From a Slim Book, Many Observations.” The New York Times Book Review (Weds., DEC. 10, 2014): C1 & C4.
(Note: italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date DEC. 9, 2014, and has the title “From a Slim Book, Many Observations.” The name of the interviewer, presumably the author of the italicized passage above, is not given in either the online or print versions.)

The book under review is:
Belieu, Erin. Slant Six. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2014.

Stalin Was “a People Person”

(p. 12) In “Stalin. Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928,” a masterly account that is the first of a projected three-volume study, Kotkin paints a portrait of an autodidact, an astute thinker, “a people person” with “surpassing organizational abilities; a mammoth appetite for work; a strategic mind and an unscrupulousness that recalled his master teacher, Lenin.”

For the full review, see:
JENNIFER SIEGEL. “‘Stalin,’ by Stephen Kotkin.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., NOV. 30, 2014): 12.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date NOV. 26, 2014, and has the title “‘Stalin,’ by Stephen Kotkin.”)

The book under review is:
Kotkin, Stephen. Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928. New York: Penguin Press, 2014.

“It Is the Individual Who Is the Agent of the Action”

(p. C6) Mr. Mischel begins by describing how, in the late 1960s, he and his colleagues devised a straightforward experiment to measure self-control at the Bing Nursery School at Stanford University. In its simplest form, children between the ages of 4 and 6 were given a choice between one marshmallow now or two marshmallows if they waited 15 minutes. Some kids ate the marshmallow right away, but most would engage in unintentionally hilarious attempts to overcome temptation.
. . . About a third of the original subjects, the researchers reported, deferred gratification long enough to get the second treat.
. . . in 2006, . . . Mr. Mischel published a new paper in the prestigious journal Psychological Science. The researchers had done a follow-up study with the students they had tested 40 years before, examining the sort of adults they had grown into. They found that the children who were able to delay gratification had higher SAT scores entering college, higher grade-point averages at the end of college and made more money after college. Perhaps not surprisingly, they also tended to have a lower body-mass index.
. . .
In his commencement address, Adm. McRaven explained his final life lesson with an anecdote: “In SEAL training there is a bell,” he explained. “A brass bell that hangs in the center of the compound for all the students to see. All you have to do to quit–is ring the bell. Ring the bell and you no longer have to wake up at 5 o’clock. Ring the bell and you no longer have to do the freezing cold swims. Ring the bell and you no longer have to do the runs, the obstacle course, the PT–and you no longer have to endure the hardships of training. Just ring the bell.” To ring the bell is to give up.
Interestingly, one of Mr. Mischel’s lesser-known marshmallow experiments had a similar setup, with a bell that the children could ring to call back the experimenter and save them from themselves. For the children, though, ringing the bell was not giving up but calling in the cavalry. His book is an encouraging reminder that, despite all the factors that urge us to indulge, “at the end of that causal chain, it is the individual who is the agent of the action and decides when to ring the bell.” You are ultimately in control of your self.

For the full review, see:
MICHAEL SHERMER. “Willpower and Won’t Power; To resist the tempting treat, kids looked away, squirmed, sang or simply pretended to take a bite.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Sept. 20, 2014): C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Sept. 19, 2014, and has the title “Book Review: ‘The Marshmallow Test’ by Walter Mischel; To resist the tempting treat, kids looked away, squirmed, sang or simply pretended to take a bite.”)

The book under review is:
Mischel, Walter. The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2014.

Successful Discoverers “Follow the Evidence Wherever It Leads”

(p. 314) Why are particular people able to seize on such opportunities and say, “I’ve stumbled upon a solution. What’s the problem?” Typically, such people are not constrained by an overly focused or dogmatic mindset. In contrast, those with a firmly held set of preconceptions are less likely to be distracted by an unexpected or contradictory observation, and yet it is exactly such things that lead to the blessing of serendipitous discovery.
Serendipitous discoverers have certain traits in common. They have a passionate intensity. They insist on trying to see beyond their own and others’ expectations and resist any pressure that would close off investigation. Successful medical discoverers let nothing stand in their way. They break through, sidestep, or ignore any obstacle or objection to their chosen course, which is simply to follow the evidence wherever it leads. They have no patience with dogma of any kind.
The only things successful discoverers do not dismiss out of hand are contradictory–and perhaps serendipitously valuable–facts. They painstakingly examine every aspect of uncomfortable facts until they understand how they fit with other facts. Far from being cavalier about method, serendipitous discoverers subject their evidence and suppositions to the most rigorous methods they can find. They do not run from uncertainty, but see it as the raw material from which new scientific and medical certainties can be wrought.

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.

Resilience of Ordinary People Matters Most in Early Stages of Crisis

(p. A11) Throughout “The Resilience Dividend,” Ms. Rodin pays particular attention to the influence that ordinary people can have in a crisis, especially in the early stages, when it may not be clear what has happened and the professionals haven’t had time to put a plan into place. In the minutes after Boston Marathon bombing last year, citizens rushed forward to help the injured. In New York City on 9/11, hundreds of privately owned boats carried thousands of stranded commuters off the island of Manhattan and across the Hudson River to New Jersey.

For the full review, see:
MELANIE KIRKPATRICK. “BOOKSHELF; Never Waste a Crisis; How was the city of Medellín transformed from the murder capital of South America into a thriving urban center? Escalators.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Nov. 21, 2014): A11.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Nov. 20, 2014.)

The book being reviewed is:
Rodin, Judith. The Resilience Dividend: Being Strong in a World Where Things Go Wrong. New York: PublicAffairs, 2014.

Loewi Proved a Slow Hunch after 17 Years

(p. 243) Loewi had long been interested in the problem of neurotransmission and believed that the agent was likely a chemical substance and not an electrical impulse, as previously thought, but he was unable to find a way to test the idea. It lay dormant in his mind for seventeen years. In a dream in 1921, on the night before Easter Sunday, he envisioned an experiment to prove this. Loewi awoke from the dream and, by his own account, “jotted down a few notes on a tiny slip of thin paper.” Upon awakening in the morning, he was terribly distressed: “I was unable to decipher the scrawl.”
The next night, at three o’clock, the idea returned. This time he got up, dressed, and started a laboratory experiment.

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.

“People Don’t Like Open Plans”

(p. A1) Originally conceived in 1950s Germany, the open-plan office has migrated from tech start-ups to advertising agencies, architecture firms and even city governments. Now it has reached what is perhaps its most unlikely frontier yet: book publishing.
Few industries seem as uniquely ill suited to the concept. The process of acquiring, editing and publishing books is rife with moments requiring privacy and quiet concentration. There are the sensitive negotiations with agents; the wooing of prospective authors; the poring over of manuscripts.
. . .
(p. B6) Even as the walls of America’s workplaces continue to come crashing down, leaving only a handful of holdouts — like corporate law firms — a number of recent studies have been critical of the effects of open-plan offices on both the productivity and happiness of cube dwellers.
“The evidence against open-plan offices is mounting,” said Nikil Saval, the author of “Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace.” “The idea is that these offices encourage collaboration and serendipitous encounters. But there’s not a lot of evidence behind these claims. Whereas there is a lot of evidence that people don’t like open plans.”
The notion of cookie-cutter cubicles is especially anathema to a certain breed of editors who see themselves more as men and women of letters than they do as businesspeople.
“It’s a world of words that we’re working towards, not an intellectual sweatshop,” said Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux and an opponent of open-plan offices.
For book editors, offices provide more than just privacy. They like to fill the bookcases inside with titles that they’ve published, making for a kind of literary trophy case to impress visitors.

For the full story, see:
JONATHAN MAHLER. “Cubicles Rise in a Brave New World of Publishing.” The New York Times (Mon., NOV. 10, 2014): A1 & B6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 9, 2014, and has the title “Climate Tools Seek to Bend Nature’s Path.”)

The Saval book is:
Saval, Nikil. Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace. New York: Doubleday, 2014.

“The World Is Not Only Stranger than We Imagine, It Is Stranger than We Can Imagine”

(p. 238) The British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane once commented, “The world is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” This famous quote is often used to support the notion that the mysteries of the universe are beyond our understanding. Here is another way to interpret his insight: Because so much is out there that is beyond our imagination, it is likely that we will discover new truths only when we accidentally stumble upon them. Development can then proceed apace.

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.
(Note: I have corrected a typo in the Haldane quote. Meyers mistakenly has “that” for the second “than.”)

Edison Claimed an Inventor Needs “a Logical Mind that Sees Analogies”

(p. C3) Thomas Edison famously said that genius requires “1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” Edison’s third criterion for would-be innovators is less well-known but perhaps even more vital: “a logical mind that sees analogies.”
. . .
The art of analogy flows from creative re-categorization and the information that we extract from surprising sources. Take the invention of the moving assembly line. Credit for this breakthrough typically goes to Henry Ford, but it was actually the brainchild of a young Ford mechanic named Bill Klann. After watching butchers at a meatpacking plant disassemble carcasses moving past them along an overhead trolley, Klann thought that auto workers could assemble cars through a similar process by adding pieces to a chassis moving along rails.
Overcoming significant management skepticism, Klann and his cohorts built a moving assembly line. Within four months, Ford’s line had cut the time it took to build a Model T from 12 hours per vehicle to just 90 minutes. In short order, the moving assembly line revolutionized manufacturing and unlocked trillions of dollars in economic potential. And while in retrospect this innovation may seem like a simple, obvious step forward, it wasn’t; the underlying analogy between moving disassembly and moving assembly had eluded everyone until Klann grasped its potential.

For the full essay, see:
JOHN POLLACK. “Four Ways to Innovate through Analogies; Many of history’s most important breakthroughs were made by seeing analogies–for example, how a plane is like a bike.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Nov. 8, 2014): C3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the essay has the date Nov. 7, 2014, and has the title “Four Ways to Innovate through Analogies; Many of history’s most important breakthroughs were made by seeing analogies–for example, how a plane is like a bike.”)

The passages quoted above are related to Pollack’s book:
Pollack, John. Shortcut: How Analogies Reveal Connections, Spark Innovation, and Sell Our Greatest Ideas. New York, NY: Gotham Books, 2014.

We Feel Safer When We Have More Personal Control

(p. C3) So how should we approach risk? The numbers can help, especially if we simplify them. For acute risks, a good measure is the MicroMort, devised by Stanford’s Ronald A. Howard in the 1970s. One MicroMort (1 MM) is equal to a one-in-a-million chance of death.
. . .
In truth, “Don’t do that, it’s dangerous!” is about much more than the numbers. We must also reflect on the full basis for our preferences–such as, to take one small psychological characteristic among many, what we value in life, as well as what we fear.
. . .
In fact, the numbers tend to have the effect of highlighting the psychological factors. Take traveling. For 1 MM, you can drive 240 miles in the U.S., fly 7,500 miles in a commercial aircraft or fly just 12 miles in a light aircraft. We tend to feel safer if we feel more personal control, but we have no control whatsoever in a passenger jet, the safest of all (notwithstanding last week’s terrible tragedy). You could take that as evidence of human irrationality. We take it as evidence that human motives matter more than the pure odds allow.

For the full commentary, see:
MICHAEL BLASTLAND and DAVID SPIEGELHALTER. “Risk Is Never a Strict Numbers Game; We tell children to shun ecstasy but don’t fret about horseback riding–and other foibles of our view of danger.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., July 19, 2014): C3.
(Note: ellipses in original.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 18, 2014.)

The passages quoted above were from a commentary adapted from the book:
Blastland, Michael, and David Spiegelhalter. The Norm Chronicles: Stories and Numbers About Danger and Death. New York: Basic Books, 2014.