Comedy and laughter are remarkably tricky to explain. As evidence of this, I'll point to the fact that there are more than 13 different theories of humor (each described at the bottom of this post). If you examine them, I think you’ll agree that while each captures relevant aspects of humor, none satisfactorily describes humor in all its forms.
Part of what makes comedy so hard to describe is that it has such variety. While the boundaries between different types of humor are fuzzy, I think y...
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Author: Spencer
How Do You Increase The Productivity Of A Team You Are On Or That You Lead? A Simple Framework
We can think about "productivity" in terms of how much value a team creates (according to any particular measure of value) on average each month.
With that definition in mind, there are many reasons a work team may have low productivity. To make a team more productive, I suggest first trying to pinpoint the predominant causes of inefficiency, since different failure points typically have different solutions. The key is to identify and then focus on just the 1-3 of these causes that seem to b...
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Reasons to Forgive
Written: March 27, 2019 | Released: August 30, 2021
In my experience, many obvious-seeming psychological concepts explode in complexity when you attempt to dissect them. For instance, trying to respond to a question about "why we forgive" made me realize there are a vast number of motivations for forgiveness.
After someone wrongs you, you can forgive them based on:UNDERSTANDING
• Empathy - you realize that you would have done the same thing that they did if you had the same choice to m...
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Conversation Etiquette – How Much to Talk
Have you noticed that people often talk more (or less) than their share in one-on-one conversations? What percent of the time should you talk when you are one-on-one with a close friend, acquaintance, or stranger? I ran a study to investigate that question using our Positly.com platform (n=143 participants in the US). See an image summarizing the results here:
You might think that introverts would want the other person to talk more of the time, and extroverts would prefer to talk more, b...
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The FIRE Framework: deciding when to trust your gut
Here’s a link to a recording of me giving a talk about this topic in 2019.
The idea that you should "just trust your gut" - that is, make many life decisions solely based on intuition (as opposed to based on reflection) - is obviously very popular. But I think that there are pretty much only four types of situations where we're best off relying on intuition alone: when a decision is Fast, Irrelevant, Repetitious, or Evolutionary (FIRE for short).
Case 1: Fast decisionsThere is no cho...
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The “seven realms of truth” framework
Here’s a framework I use to think more clearly about complex debates and philosophical questions about whether something is “true,” “exists,” and is “real” (e.g., “is this painting art?”, “is everything subjective?” and “is morality real?”). I find that thinking in terms of this framework can make it easier to figure out what’s being claimed and to clarify what I myself believe.
The framework divides things that are sometimes claimed to be “true,” or that we might say “exist,” into seven dif...
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My Top-10 Weakly-Held Policy Perspectives
Written: February 2, 2019 | Released: June 27, 2021
Change my mind! Below are my very tentative, weakly held perspectives on ten very complex policy topics. If you have strong evidence or solid arguments against (or for) any of these viewpoints, I'd be really interested to know. Please post in the comments, referencing which topic you are referring to (e.g. "#1 - Heath insurance", "#5 - Death penalty", etc.).
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A few notes: I'm assuming the constraint that proposed policies are not a...
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Meaningful Hypothetical Traditions
There is a vast number of hypothetical traditions that could be practiced, compared to the few that actually are. If you were inventing a new tradition that you and millions of others would practice one day each year for many years to come, and you wanted it to produce positive effects on the participants, what would your new tradition be?
Below are a few ideas for hypothetical traditions. I’m sure some would dislike each of these, but I’m hoping some of them would add net value if actually ...
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Computer Keyboard Commands That Actually Save Time
Many of us spend a lot of our time at our computers. Yet how efficiently do we really use them? Memorizing the most useful keyboard commands might save you minutes a day. Here are some of the most useful ones I've found:
Switch windows within a single application (Command-` on Mac)Paste while using the formatting of the document you're pasting into (Command-Option-Shift-V on Mac)Skip to next/previous email in the Gmail email client (k and j once you turn on Gmail key commands)Show desktop (F...
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The Relationship Between Personality and Life Satisfaction
What's the relationship between personality and life satisfaction? We took a stab at figuring it out!
We conducted a study of 999 people in the United States; recruited through our study platform at Positly.com. We looked for a correlation between 18 different personality traits (each trait being assessed with two questions) and life satisfaction. We examined the association each trait had with scores on the Satisfaction With Life Scale (a 5 question scale by Diener, Emmons, Larsen, Griffi...
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