Erased De Kooning Drawing by Rauschenberg

I found this blog on NPR about erasing space, which lead to this story from Robert Rauschenberg. He visited the famous De Kooning and asked him if he could erase one of his drawings. De Kooning gave him one, but only one that he would really miss.

Why is Trader Joe's so successful?

This is from Los Angeles magazine:
Enchanted Aisles - Features - Los Angeles magazine

Its about the secretive ownership of Trader Joe's and why it is so successful. In a nutshell:

Joe Coulombe’s (original owner) singular gift to consumers was to evaluate groceries as a museum director would art. More than anything else, this distinction sets Trader Joe’s apart.

Fear is the greatest destroyer of attention

In Judith Warner's follow-up to Perfect Madness, called We've got Issues, Edward M. Hallowell is quoted about ADT (Attention deficit trait).

ADT is caused at base by overload, by having impossible amounts of work to do and being haunted by the awful sense of the impossibility of getting it done.  Fear is the greatest destroyer of attention, because emotion is the on/off switch for executive functioning.

It is interesting in observing attention deficit symptoms, that executive functioning is not solely the responsibility of the prefontal cortex.  Fear is limbic.

Japanese firms shop abroad: Armed with a strong yen | The Economist

Japanese firms shop abroad: Armed with a strong yen | The Economist
When old people retire, they tend to live off their savings. They supply capital to younger, sprightlier, cash-strapped folk, who put it to work and pay dividends or interest to the retirees. That is, roughly speaking, what Asia’s aging archipelago is starting to do.

Physical postures of dominance and the endocrine system

More on Harvard Social Psychologist Amy Cuddy's research about snap judgements and physical posture:

Cuddy's research has demonstrated that different physical postures are directly linked to the endocrine system showing the links between stances, gestures, and hormones.

 Recently, she has begun to study nonverbal cues that drive perceptions of competence, which relate directly to one’s position in the social pecking order: a star athlete, for example, enjoys far higher status than a journeyman. “Dominance and power are highly correlated with perceived competence,” she says, “and people make inferences of competence based on how dominant someone appears.”
“In all animal species, postures that are expansive, open, and take up more space are associated with high power and dominance,” she says. “Postures that are contractive—limbs touching torso, protecting the vital organs, taking up minimal space—are associated with low power, being at the bottom of the hierarchy. Any animal you can think of, when it’s prey, makes itself as small as possible.”
In primates, these postures also correlate with testosterone and cortisol levels. Expansive, high-power postures mean (in both sexes) high testosterone, a hormone that animal and human studies connect with dominance and power, and low levels of cortisol (the “stress” hormone), while the inverse holds for contractive, low-power postures. “Those endocrine profiles are associated with disease resistance,” Cuddy says. “Low testosterone and high cortisol make you very vulnerable to diseases, so you’re more likely to be picked off by whatever comes through. At the top, you’re more disease-resistant.”
Until recently, primatologists believed that those who inherited high-power neuroendocrine profiles became the dominant creatures in their groups, the so-called alpha males or females. “But it turns out that those hormone levels change when you take on the dominant role,” Cuddy explains. “If an alpha is killed and another primate has to take over that position, his or her testosterone and cortisol levels will change in just a few days. Likewise, if you get pushed to the bottom, your hormone profile shifts. It’s both cause and effect. It’s possible that slight innate differences in neuroendocrine profiles are greatly exaggerated by role assignment.”
In a recent paper published in Psychological Science, Cuddy, Dana R. Carney, and Andy J. Yap (both of Columbia) report how they measured hormone levels of 42 male and female research subjects, placed the subjects in two high-power or low-power poses for a minute per pose, then re-measured their hormone levels 17 minutes later. They also offered subjects a chance to gamble, rolling a die to double a $2 stake. The results were astonishing: a mere two minutes in high- or low-power poses caused testosterone to rise and cortisol to decrease—or the reverse. Those in high-power stances were also more likely to gamble, enacting a trait (risk taking) associated with dominant individuals; they also reported feeling more powerful. “If you get this effect in two minutes, imagine what you get sitting in the CEO’s chair for a year,” Cuddy says.

Judging Competence

Here's a Profile of social psychologist Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School from Harvard Magazine Nov-Dec 2010


Her work is about how a person's physical posture gives immediate social cues for others to judge. 
Our first impressions register far too quickly for any nuanced weighing of data: “Within less than a second, using facial features, people make what are called ‘spontaneous trait inferences.'"

That's just interpreting body language, one might say?

She also writes about the warmth/competence dichotomy. People will be quick to judge someone as warm and forgive their perceived incompetence; however if they are judged to be lacking in warmth, they better be competent, or will be written off. Cuddy also describes how we want other people to be warm, but we want to be competent.

Warmth is not only perceived first, but accounts for more of someone’s overall evaluation than competence. The warm/cold assessment amounts to a reading of the other’s intentions, positive or negative.

Competence is assayed next: how capable is someone of carrying out those intentions? “If it’s an enemy who’s competent,” Cuddy explains, “we probably want to be vigilant.” Surprisingly, in their self-perceptions, individuals value competence over warmth. “We want other people to be warm, but we want to be competent,” she says. “We’d rather have people respect us than like us.” (Cuddy thinks this human tendency represents a mistaken judgment: “Social connections will take you farther than respect.”)

There’s an interesting asymmetry. Many acts can indicate competence: scoring well on a College Board exam (SAT), for example, or knowing how to handle a sailboat, or deftly navigating through a software application. Demonstrating a single positive-competent behavior tends to broaden into a wider aura of competence: someone with a high SAT score, for example, will be viewed as generally competent. In contrast, a single negative-competent behavior—not knowing how to sail, for example—does not generalize into a perception of overall incompetence: it will simply be dismissed as, say, an unlearned skill. “Positive competence is weighted more heavily than negative competence,” Cuddy summarizes.

With warmth, the inverse applies. Someone who does something nice, like helping an elderly pedestrian across an intersection, is not necessarily seen as a generally nice person. But a single instance of negative-warmth behavior—kicking a dog, say—is likely to irredeemably categorize the perpetrator as a cold person.

In other words, people feel that a single positive-competent, or negative-warmth, act reveals character. “You can purposely present yourself as warm—you can control that,” Cuddy explains. “But we feel that competence can’t be faked. So positive competence is seen as more diagnostic. On the other hand, being a jerk—well, we’re not very forgiving of people who act that way.”

“People tend to see warmth and competence as inversely related. If there’s a surplus of one trait, they infer a deficit of the other.” In a business context, she says, this means that “The more competent you are, the less nice you must be. And vice versa: Someone who comes across as really nice must not be too smart.” This pattern is the opposite of the halo effect: a plus on one dimension demands a minus on the other. The unconscious logic might be: If she were really competent, she wouldn’t need to be so nice; and conversely, the highly competent person doesn’t have to be nice—and may even have reached the top by stepping on others."
 

Why Do Some People Learn Faster? (from Wired.com)

Why Do Some People Learn Faster? | Wired Science | Wired.com
Jonah Lehrer discovers a paper about why people learn faster from their feedback. It has something to do with the anterior cingulate cortex of the limbic region of our brain.

A new study, forthcoming in Psychological Science, and led by Jason Moser at Michigan State University, expands on this important concept. The question at the heart of the paper is simple: Why are some people so much more effective at learning from their mistakes? After all, everybody screws up. The important part is what happens next. Do we ignore the mistake, brushing it aside for the sake of our self-confidence? Or do we investigate the error, seeking to learn from the snafu?

The Moser experiment is premised on the fact that there are two distinct reactions to mistakes, both of which can be reliably detected using electroenchephalography, or EEG. The first reaction is called error-related negativity (ERN). It appears about 50 milliseconds after a screw-up and is believed to originate in the anterior cingulate cortex, a chunk of tissue that helps monitor behavior, anticipate rewards and regulate attention. This neural reaction is mostly involuntary, the inevitable response to any screw-up.

The second signal, which is known as error positivity (Pe), arrives anywhere between 100-500 milliseconds after the mistake and is associated with awareness. It occurs when we pay attention to the error, dwelling on the disappointing result. In recent years, numerous studies have shown that subjects learn more effectively when their brains demonstrate two properties: 1) a larger ERN signal, suggesting a bigger initial response to the mistake and 2) a more consistent Pe signal, which means that they are probably paying attention to the error, and thus trying to learn from it.

In this new paper, Moser et al. extends this research by looking at how beliefs about learning shape these mostly involuntary error-related signals in the brain, both of which appear in less than half a second. More specifically, the scientists applied a dichotomy first proposed by Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford. In her influential research, Dweck distinguishes between people with a fixed mindset — they tend to agree with statements such as “You have a certain amount of intelligence and cannot do much to change it” — and those with a growth mindset, who believe that we can get better at almost anything, provided we invest the necessary time and energy. While people with a fixed mindset see mistakes as a dismal failure — a sign that we aren’t talented enough for the task in question — those with a growth mindset see mistakes as an essential precursor of knowledge, the engine of education.