Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

5 items tagged “psychology”

2020

The impact of crab mentality on performance was quantified by a New Zealand study in 2015 which demonstrated up to an 18% average exam result improvement for students when their grades were reported in a way that prevented others from knowing their position in published rankings.

Crab mentality on Wikipedia # 1st August 2020, 4:25 pm

2013

What do you do when you passionately believe in what you’re doing and have been seeing strong customer validation, but people around you constantly diss it? How do you persevere without a support system?

This is one of the reasons it’s a good idea to build a circle if trust with other entrepreneurs—or potentially even move to a “startup hub” region where more people are doing startups.

[... 110 words]

2010

Fear and Loathing in Farmville. “At multiple times during the conference, [Daniel] James expressed his serious ethical qualms over the path social gaming was laying for the industry. So many of the methods for making money are thinly-veiled scams that simply exploit psychological flaws in the human brain.” # 21st March 2010, 10:13 am

2007

Infowar: strike early, strike often. “The study found that the American participants’ belief in the truth of an initial news report was not affected by knowledge of its subsequent retraction. In contrast, knowing about a retraction was likely to significantly reduce belief in the initial report for Germans and Australians.” # 18th October 2007, 12 pm

The Psychology of Security. I haven’t even started on this yet, but I bet it’s worth reading. # 9th February 2007, 1:27 am