Success

Will we succeed?

Can you help you? Recent research by University of Illinois Professor Dolores Albarracin and Visiting Assistant Professor Ibrahim Senay, along with Kenji Noguchi, Assistant Professor at Southern Mississippi University, has shown that those who ask themselves whether they will perform a task generally do better than those who tell themselves that they will. Little research exists in the area of self-talk, although we are aware of an inner voice in ourselves and in literature. From children’s books like “The Little Engine That Could,” in which the title character says, “I think I can,” to Holden Caulfield’s misanthropic musings in “A Catcher in the Rye,” internal dialogue often influences the way people motivate and shape their own behavior. [continue reading…]

RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D. discusses people who repeatedly pursue a path that leads to pain and disappointment, in his article for the New York Times Sabotaging Success, but to What End?

Of all human psychology, self-defeating behavior is among the most puzzling and hard to change. After all, everyone assumes that people hanker after happiness and pleasure. Have you ever heard of a self-help book on being miserable?

So what explains those men and women who repeatedly pursue a path that leads to pain and disappointment? Perhaps there is a hidden psychological reward. Link to read this article

Source: New York Times

New research shows that how people view their abilities in the workplace impacts how they respond to success.

Dr. Jason Plaks, a social psychologist at the University of Toronto, and Kristin Stecher, a research scientist at the University of Washington, found that those who thought of their capabilities as fixed were more likely to become anxious and disoriented when faced with dramatic success, causing their subsequent performance to plummet, compared to those who thought of their abilities as changeable. [continue reading…]

Do you like your name and initials? Most people do and, as past research has shown, sometimes we like them enough to influence other important behaviors. For example, Jack is more likely to move to Jacksonville and marry Jackie than is Philip who is more likely to move to Philadelphia and marry Phyllis. Scientists call this phenomenon the “name-letter effect” and argue that it is influential enough to encourage the pursuit of name-resembling life outcomes and partners. [continue reading…]