This post is part of our Learning Round-up series, designed to showcase informative and trending content from the last month or so, mainly revolving around HR, learning & development, productivity, psychology, and decision making.
5 Signs That Your HR Department is a Failure
By Ronald E. Riggio | Psychology Today | 26 August 2018
- "I used to do a workplace Q&A column for a major newspaper, and 'go to HR' was often my first piece of advice. Yet, all too often, employees would tell me that going to HR made things worse.”
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The Most Common Challenges Learning & Development Professionals Face
By Darleen DeRosa | Business2Community | 15 August 2018
- "As the people charged with implementing these policies and programs, Learning and Development (L&D) professionals face an ever-shifting array of challenges. Here are just a few of the most common issues they encounter."
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The Most Important Skill For 21st-Century Success
By Kevin H. Johnson | The Ladders | 31 July 2018
- "Corporate leaders would be wrong to dismiss learning and development as just something to make employees 'happy.' Companies with a learning-driven culture reap the rewards in plenty of ways that go straight to the bottom line.”
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How Your Personality Affects Your Pay-check
By Tyler Cowen | Bloomberg | 10 August 2018
- "One striking result is how much the trait of conscientiousness matters. Men who measure as one standard deviation higher on conscientiousness earn on average an extra $567,000 over their lifetimes, or 16.7 percent of average lifetime earnings.”
- "[for women] extroversion is more strongly correlated with higher earnings than is conscientiousness…"
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A Study of Thousands of Dropbox Projects Reveals How Successful Teams Collaborate
By Adam Pah, Brian Uzzi and Rebecca Hinds | HBR | 26 July 2018
- "We know a lot about how teams collaborate face-to-face, with regard to leadership, communication, conflict resolution, and other areas. But less is known about how groups work together virtually.”
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101 Time Management Tips to Boost Productivity Every Day
By John Rampton | Entrepreneur | 21 August 2018
- "There is much, large and small, you can do to eliminate inefficiencies and get more done every hour you work.”
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Psychology’s 10 Greatest Case Studies – Digested
By Christian Jarrett | Big Think | 30 August 2018
- "These ten characters have all had a huge influence on psychology and their stories continue to intrigue each new generation of students."
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More Social Science Studies Just Failed to Replicate. Here’s Why This is Good.
By Brian Resnick | Vox | 27 August 2018
- "For the past several years, social scientists have been deeply worried about the replicability of their findings. Incredibly influential, textbook findings in psychology — like the 'ego depletion' theory of willpower, or the 'marshmallow test' — have been bending or breaking under rigorous retests. And the scientists have learned that what they used to consider commonplace methodological practices were really just recipes to generate false positives. This period has been called the 'replication crisis' by some."
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Bad Self-Help and the ‘Myth of Perfect Perfectibility’
By Charles Chu | Medium | 26 August 2018
- "The New Thought movement is alive and well, with Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret selling over 30 million copies. Too skeptical for this voodoo mumbo-jumbo? Don’t worry, there’s a version for 'intelligent' skeptics too. Take the same idea, repackage it with scientific salad dressing, and you get terms like grit, growth mindset ('successful kids believe'), ego depletion ('willpower is a muscle'), and the 10,000-hour rule. Same magical thinking, but sugar-coated with science to help the voodoo go down.”
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Why the Most Important Idea in Behavioural Decision-Making Is a Fallacy
By David Gal | Scientific American | 31 July 2018
- "Loss aversion, the idea that losses are more psychologically impactful than gains, is widely considered the most important idea of behavioural decision-making and its sister field of behavioural economics."
- "However, as documented in a recent critical review of loss aversion by Derek Rucker of Northwestern University and myself, published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, loss aversion is essentially a fallacy."
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This is The Difference Between Being a Contrarian and An Independent Thinker
By Praveen Tipirneni | The Ladders | 10 July 2018
- “… there’s not necessarily any value in being a purely contrarian thinker. People tend to choose this style of thinking in order to be different. They want to stand out, not to figure things out."
- "Independent thinking isn’t about taking the opposite stance or going with the crowd. Instead, it’s about looking at a problem in a fundamentally different way and drawing your own conclusion—whether it’s the same as everyone else’s or completely different is irrelevant.”
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Harvard Followed 800 People Over The Course of Multiple Decades and Found 6 Things That Make People Live Longer, Happier Lives
By Eric Barker | Business Insider | 27 August 2018
- "With almost a century of data on nearly 1,000 people, there are plenty of insights. We'll cover 6 big ones that can get you on your path to awesomeness.”
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Just 10 Minutes of This Activity Boosts Brainpower, Says New Yale Research
By Jessica Stillman | Inc. | 22 August 2018
- "The researchers asked a group of college students, before completing tests of mental function, to either listen to a 10-minute guided meditation or listen to a control recording discussing sequoia trees. Both options might strike the newbie as pretty boring, but only one of the options produced notable effects. Those who engaged in mindfulness meditation saw a significant jump in their cognitive performance."
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