Play Cube

A game is not a series of intersting choices though maybe the best games are. Here, behavioral economist Dan Ariely talks about our decisions and the role of choices and staging (such as defaults) in influencing them.

The Journal of Applied Sport Psychology will be publishing a report by Dr. Paul Freeman (University of Exeter) illustrating performance improvements elicited via social support.

…including listening to the golfers as they talked through their problems, offering encouragement and reassurance before competitions, and helping with practical issues, such as organising accommodation during competitions.

The average score improved 1.78 shots in a round so it wasn’t exactly night and day improvement. The sample size: 3 golfers; not exactly a deep study. But it does trend in line with other studies that have shown that people do better when encouraged.  Go figure!

Digging through the old blog, I’m going to re-run a few bits just to capture some things I’d rather not lose. We begin with a couple of videos at a small size…

Dan Gilbert on happiness:

Philip Zimbardo on evil:

Recently spent about a month and a half staying away very late, every night, working on a writing project. After finishing, I was inspired to start blogging again. The only problem: Joomla has just been complete overkill and is slow. So, back to WordPress!

I was able to restart the old blog, spend some time setting things up, and voila! It was really quite easy. Now, the only thing left is for me to post a video of Will Wright and I’m on my way…