December 2009
6 posts
Why Colombian Soccer Players Get More Yellow Cards
It’s not the latin temper. A new study suggests it could be the exposure in one’s home country to civil war.
“We find that the extent of a player’s home country’s recent record of civil conflict (our proxy for exposure) is strongly associated with violent behavior on the soccer pitch, as captured in yellow and red cards, but not other dimensions of play, such as goals...
A Liar from Utah County? Could it be?
The Utah Flash, a D-League NBA basketball team in Orem, Utah, may have committed the year’s worst marketing snafu by heavily implying His Airness Michael Jordan would be playing a one on one game against Brian Russell, a retired Jazz player, during halftime of the Flash’s opening game.
The Flash released a viral video of Jordan (look alike) eating at a nearby restaurant and made...
Buying Green Makes You More Likely to Steal
A classic case of moral licensing:
Students shopped in one of two stores- a traditional store, and a store with just green products- and then were asked to share $6 with an unknown partner. Green store shoppers were far less generous.
In another experiment, students were found to be much more likely to steal money after shopping at a green store than students who shopped at a conventional...
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Design Linkage
-45 Design & Developer blogs worth following
-A font I like
-Turn your pitiful handwriting into a pitiful font.
-70s style user manual designs for social networks.
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Tall women are the smartest
“Once height (measured in inches) is controlled, women have significantly higher IQs than men. Net of height, women score 2.14 points higher on the PPVT. In contrast, each inch in height is worth more than half an IQ point (0.56). A comparison of standardized coefficients shows that the effect of height is more than twice as large as that of sex. Because American men on average are 5 inches...
On public commitment and achievement
Women who made a public commitment to lose weight achieved 102% of their weight loss goals and 97% kept the weight off, compared to 88% achievement levels for people with no public commitment.
I find the measurement used to track subjects susceptibility to normative influence (how people behave based on social approval) somewhat flawed, but otherwise Nyer and Dellande have confirmed what could...