Fibbing easier through e-mail — “A U.S. study shows e-mail is much more conducive to telling falsehoods than using old-fashioned pen and paper. Moreover, people feel more justified in doing it.” Past research has also found that e-mails are more likely to engender lower levels of trust, negative attitudes and sending rude messages. One more reason to slow down and take your time before replying to those pesky electronic messages.

Writing about values improves relationships — “According to a study published in this month’s issue of Psychological Science, writing about values you hold dear can conjure feelings of love and connection that may help strengthen your social bonds and decrease defensiveness.”

Court rules lesbians are not just from Lesbos — “A Greek court has dismissed a request by residents of the Aegean island of Lesbos to ban the use of the word lesbian to describe gay women, according to a court ruling made public on Tuesday.” Continued

Things are as they are, not as you want them to be

You may already have come across an article by Charles J. Sykes called: “Some rules kids won’t learn in school”. The whole article is worth reading, but here are some extracts that seem appropriate for a Monday morning.

The original was printed in The San Diego Union Tribune in 1996. In the intervening 12 years, nothing has altered the truth of what Mr. Sykes wrote. That’s a little depressing, but I guess social revolutions take a good deal longer than that and the next one to affect us hasn’t even started. Continued

What happens when a word loses most of its meaning?

Here’s an intriguing thought from Andre, who writes the blog ‘Tools For Thought’ (“Questioning My Assumptions: Productivity as an Amoeba Word”).

He writes:

I’m over productivity. It’s outlived its usefulness as a focal point and framework for meaningful discussion.
 
Through overuse and misuse, productivity has become an amoeba word, a term whose meaning can morph to any usage the speaker or writer chooses by changing its frame of expectation. Productivity joins the ranks of words like “success,” “spirituality,” and “growth” to mean whatever the person using them decides they mean in the moment.

Continued

This week’s miscellany of the odd, intriguing and amusing items I came across on the Web.

First from The Guardian (“Gentlewomen prefer Bonds”). It seems it has now been “scientifically proven that being a bit of a bastard is simply a natural evolutionary strategy.”

It is a truth universally acknowledged that while gentleman prefer blondes, women prefer bastards. But just in case anyone was fretting that the old adage was just a hoofed-together cliché, the brains at New Mexico State University have surveyed 200 college students and clinically proven that men with serious personality flaws always get the girl.

Continued

Do you need to be more skeptical to survive in the world of business?

Barry Maher, author of Filling the Glass: The Skeptic’s Guide to Positive Thinking in Business, offers a quick quiz to help you decide if you need to be a little less trusting of those around you in the world of business.

My favorites include these:

10. You believe the numbers in the business plan. I can’t believe anyone is that dumb, but maybe I’ve written to many myself in the past.

7. When they tell you this is a “people company,” you think one of those people is you. Only one group of ‘people’ truly count and they’ve all got corner offices and vast numbers of stock options.

5. When the CEO says that customers come first, you think that means BEFORE short-term profits and driving up his stock options. I’m almost sure nobody can be that dumb, but . . .

2. You accept a lateral move and relocate to East Cowflop, North Dakota, because you think that puts you in line for the next promotion rather than at the top of the list for the next hellhole where nobody else is willing to go. Yes, well, if that’s how you think, East Cowflop is probably where you need to be.

Check out the entire list here.

Technorati Tags: gullibility, trust, humor

Ruth Ostrow, writing for one of The Australian’s blogs, shares a story that illustrates that it’s never safe to assume you know whether something is going to turn out well or badly (“Despair’s serendipity”).

We all know that some people see a glass as half full, while others see it as half empty. What’s worse is when you see some unpleasant event as directed at you personally, instead of the chance event that it is. There’s something about the human mind that seems to want to find a specific meaning in whatever happens — usually one that has some personal reference. Continued

TIME magazine’s Curious Capitalist, Justin Fox, reckons “the ugliness and the real if small risks of offshore drilling platforms strike me as pretty minor environmental threats compared with other things we tolerate with relatively little complaint.”

His off-the-top-of-the-head list of worse threats to the environment includes the Hummer division of the General Motors Corporation, suburban Phoenix (spot-on!) and subsidies for corn-based ethanol (”Six environmental threats worse than offshore oil drilling“).

Care to add your own?

Amongst Canadians, are men are more likely to ask for directions than women?

The stereotypical male, according to urban myth, would rather have a few fingers cut off than ask for directions to avoid getting lost.

Women, on the other hand, being infinitely more sensible and less prone to macho posturing, take the easy way out and ask a local how to find the place they’re looking for. Continued

Here are some interesting and oddball stories from this week’s news around the world

Financial Infidelity, it seems, is the new extra-marital activity. “There’s no such thing as an innocent financial fib,” says Bonnie Eaker Weil, PhD, a New York–based psychotherapist, whose book Financial Infidelity: Seven Steps to Conquering the #1 Relationship Wrecker is [now out]. Whether you hide shopping bags, abominate price tags, or lie about how much you paid (or owe), you’re being financially unfaithful, she says. (“Financial Infidelity: A type of cheating so subtle; you may be straying without knowing it.”) Continued

Instincts can be fatal for people as well as hedgehogs

Photo credit: Jörg Hempel

I recently came across this quirky article (“3 Things I Learned From Hedgehogs”) that draws parallels between the behavior of hedgehogs and people. It’s a somewhat forced comparison, but there are some sound points too.

When I lived in Great Britain, I saw plenty of hedgehogs, alive and dead. The live ones lived in my garden. You could find one most nights by listening for the snuffling and grunting sounds they seem to make all the time. The dead ones lay squashed all along the roads. The motor car is the biggest killer of the poor little creatures (for North American and other readers who have never seen a hedgehog, they’re rotund creatures roughly similar in size to a small possum). I suspect some drivers at least aim for them, since I drove thousand of miles a night in rural areas and never once, to my knowledge, hit a hedgehog in the road. Continued