What Is Operant Conditioning?
Edward Thorndike is often considered to be the father of modern Educational Psychology. His Law of Effect posits that when our behavior produces a favorable outcome and the same stimulus is presented again, we are more likely to repeat that behavior because we have...
What Are Concepts?
Concepts are general ideas about things. They are mental representations we use to understand the world around us. Concepts represent groups of related ideas that are organized around a main theme. One example is how the concept of gravity includes physics, theory,...
Where Did Our Portable Music Come From?
In 1920, Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company broadcast the live returns of the presidential race between Warren G. Harding and James M. Cox, two-term governor and two-term U.S. Congressman from Ohio. Cox’s running mate was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who...
What Is Critical Listening?
The bandwagon fallacy assumes that something must be true because others think it is. A great example is found in thousands of HR departments that value the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator because so many others use it. Just like a perpetual motion machine, its popularity...
What Is Semiotics?
The Guardian tells of a visiting British minister who presented a pocket watch to a Taiwanese official. When asked to comment on the gift, the official said he might sell it to a scrap dealer for some money. The stunned minister sniffed that in the UK a watch is...
How Does Punishment Affect Kids’ Behavior?
Smile at babies and toddlers and they will almost always do more of what they’re doing, with even more enthusiasm. Frown deeply at them and they will either become hesitant, stop what they’re doing altogether, or even start crying. The smile is rewarding; the frown is...
A Closer Look at Pavlov and His Dogs
When asked who Pavlov is, most people mention something about dogs. Some add that the dogs slobbered at the sound of a bell. A few know that Pavlov won a Nobel Prize, but almost no one knows it had nothing to do with his work with salivating dogs. A scientist friend...
A Closer Look at Breakfast
The sandwich story most of us know involves the time John Montagu, Lord of the Admiralty, was hungry but too busy to stop what he was doing to sit down for a meal. He sent a servant for a piece of meat to gnaw on and asked that it be put between two slices of bread so...
How to Make Online Purchases You Won’t Regret
How to Make Online Purchases You Won't Regret How do product review sites make money? Links. When you click on a link to a product in a review, you will be taken directly to a product page on a retailer’s website. No one is surprised to learn that the retailer with...
What Is Freelancing?
Cavemen sharpened the points of wooden poles and used them to kill game and fight their enemies. When pointed steel tips were added to the business end of these long poles, spears became lances. When lances were adopted by cavalrymen (and yes, they were men) on...
A Closer Look at Product Reviews
An article by Gabriel Daros in Rest of World discusses a recent trend in product reviews in Brazil. For as little as $4 each, freelancers create scripted product review videos. The videos are in Portuguese, one minute long, and appear to be real customers reviewing...
A Closer Look at Reader Favorites
In 2016, I converted the more than 1,000 slides I had built for my classroom lectures at the University of the West Indies into articles that I posted on a new site, LetsTakeACloserLook.com. The subject of most of those early articles was an amalgam of what I call the...
A Closer Look at Personality Tests
Personality tests are designed to reveal what's going on in our subconscious minds, the deep-down place where our emotions and inner conflicts reside. Structured surveys have a list of anywhere from 10 to 600 questions and test takers answer each by choosing from...
A Closer Look at Yawning
New Yorker writer Maria Konnikova tells us how in 1923, neurologist Sir Francis Walshe noticed some interesting things involving yawns and motor reflexes. They led him to conclude that yawning was an act outside our conscious control, deep down where our lizard brains...
A Closer Look at Blue Jeans
In Reno, Nevada, just after the Civil War, a man named Jacob Davis made tents and wagon covers from heavy-duty canvas duck cloth. When the biggest silver deposit anyone had ever seen was discovered, thousands of miners came to work the Comstock Lode. These...
A Closer Look at Bud Light
Bud Light put two marketing executives on leave after someone thought it was a good idea to appeal to a transgender crowd that makes up less than one percent of the population. That promotional campaign backfired with unintended consequences, cutting into sales (-25%)...
A Closer Look at Station Wagons
At the peak of its popularity in the USA, the classic station wagon was a four-door sedan-style automobile with an interior passenger compartment that held nine people. Three rows of bench seats went all the way to the back of the car, as did the roof, so there was no...
A Closer Look at Pennies
“Find a penny, pick it up; all day long you’ll have good luck.” Some say the origin of this superstition comes from long, long ago when metals were believed to protect against harmful spirits. Others say when metal coins were first used as currency, only the very...
A Closer Look at One Tribe’s Bizarre Secret Rituals
After living among them for many years, University of Michigan anthropologist Horace Miner wrote about the exotic habits and magical rituals of a tribe called the Nacirema. His ethnography “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” was first published in 1956 and was such a...
Who Was Margaret Mead?
Beginning in the 15th century and for the next 200 years, European explorers and traders roamed the world in search of peoples to conquer and resources to wrongfully take by force and/or guile. In doing so, the Westerners came into contact with people who looked,...
A Closer Look at Bamboo
Most dictionaries agree that to bamboozle someone is to deceive, defraud and hoodwink them. No one knows for sure where the word comes from. Some say it began with a Scottish word meaning to confound. Others say it’s from the French word for baboon, which means to...
What Are Contrails?
"Look! Up In the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman! Yes, it’s Superman, strange visitor from another planet who came to earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Superman, who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel in his...
A Closer Look at Bananas
The 1876 World’s Fair was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was there that Americans were introduced to an exotic new fruit. Before that, most Americans had never heard of bananas, much less eaten one. In one of the first recorded co-promotions, United Fruit...
What Does Peter Cottontail Have to Do with Easter?
That song was composed in 1949 by the same people who wrote Frosty the Snowman. Gene Autry’s recording of Here Comes Peter Cottontail reached #3 on one Billboard list and #5 on another. Peter Cottontail is Peter Rabbit’s alias in The Adventures of Peter Cottontail,...
Which Are Your Favorite Closer Looks?
I want to put together a list of Readers’ Top 10 Closer Looks Most regular readers know me to be a fact-based non-fiction writer who was a business and consumer researcher for more than 30 years before giving it up to write. All around the world, I learned to look...
Did Noah Prank the Raven?
There are many theories about how April Fools’ started, so pick your favorite from some of the most popular origin stories. One such story says April Fools' Day comes to us from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, where the fox tricks the rooster on March 32nd. Another story...
How Do You Exercise Your Brain?
Puzzles are tests of ingenuity or knowledge. Solving them requires reasoning, study, and persistence. As games, puzzles present difficulties to be solved by clever and patient effort. Daring puzzle-solvers seek ever-more-demanding challenges. A puzzle can also be a...
Which Is More Important – Education or Experience?
As most of us understand history, white settlers from Europe considered the native peoples they met in the Americas to be heathens because they didn’t worship the God of the Bible, which was the one and only true word. Heathens dressed crudely, were uncivilized and...
How Good Is Your Mind’s Eye?
Those who have had their homes burglarized had to submit claims to their insurance companies. Only a few had safely put away somewhere the updated lists they tell us all to have, with photos and serial numbers. Only after the claim we filled out by memory has been...
Why Do Banks Close on Bank Holidays?
What people in the United States call bank holidays are also called federal holidays, public holidays and legal holidays. Bank holidays are normal business days where the doors to financial institutions are closed because Federal Reserve Bank employees take the day...
Which Is Bigger? One-Third Or One-Fourth?
A hundred years ago, Roy Allen opened a string of root beer stands in California in partnership with Frank Wright. A&W was the name they used for their bottled and draft root beers as well as their roadside restaurants. By 1980 A&W had more than 2,000...
National Fart Day
A friend sent a noise yesterday, February 5th, in honor of National Fart Day. I decided to take a closer look and found it is “a comical holiday celebrated for humorous purposes.” I also found there is a National Pass Gas Day, a Fart Out Loud Day and much more....
How Can You Find Your Comfort Zone?
The notion that there is a “just right” amount is known as the Goldilocks Principle. We see it in action with the premium and budget choices that make regularly-priced products and services more appealing. Sellers create bare-bones and bells-and-whistles versions,...
It’s Hip to Be Square
Famers and physical laborers needed three square meals a day: all full, well-balanced and hearty. They'd eat breakfast before sunup, work until lunch, load up on calories again and work until sundown, when they ate a big dinner and went to bed. One origin story says...
Doe, a Deer
Doe, a deer, a female deer; Ray, a drop of golden sun; Me, a name I call myself; Far, a long, long way to run; Sew, a needle pulling thread; La, a note to follow so; Tea, I drink with jam and bread; that will bring us back to do, oh oh oh. Guido d’Arezzo was a...
Turn Right on Red After Stop
Annie Oakley was a television series in the 1950s. The half-hour show was a highly fictionalized account of the legendary sharpshooter (née Phoebe Ann Mosey) who appeared as a star attraction with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. The executive producer was singing...
What Is Chump Change?
Change is loose coins, almost always round and made of metal. In the USA, we use pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. We used to use half dollars and real silver dollars, such as the one George Washington is said to have thrown across the Delaware River. A chump is a...
Goat or GOAT?
Goats are hoofed, horned and bearded ruminants that are closely related to sheep but are hairy instead of woolly. The males are billy goats, the females are nanny goats and the kids are called kids. Goats were domesticated by humans who drank their milk, ate their...
And the Walls Came a-Tumbling Down
"Hello walls (Hello, hello). How'd things go for you today? Don't you miss her since she up and walked away? And I'll bet you dread to spend another lonely night with me, but lonely walls, I'll keep you company." This song about a man's lonely conversation with is...
How Many of These Character Actors Do You Know?
The original definition of a stereotyping was printing by means of a solid block of type, an image that was perpetuated without change. Anything that fit onto a single sheet, such as letters, posters and the like. Only 100 years later did it come to mean preconceived...
Tiger Woods to Head New PGA-LIV Tour
Tiger Woods to Head New PGA-LIV Tour! That’s the headline you’ll be reading soon when the powers that be get the details sorted out. It will not happen until early in 2023 because there are a lot of things that need to be done first. Why Tiger? Tiger Woods is the...
Domino’s Jumps Off One Bandwagon and Onto Another
Five years ago Domino’s announced it was testing driverless delivery of pizzas. Executives had come down with a case of autonomous vehicle fever and decided that was the future of home delivery. I wrote an article about it pointing out the fatal flaws in their testing...
Turkeys, TVs and Two More Minutes
Autumn harvests have been celebrated with feasts since before people started telling time. Historians tell us the harvest feast the Americans observe today began in Virginia 400 years ago when English Protestant settlers decided the day of their arrival in the New...
Do You Know What Kind of Reader You Are?
Studies show that reading on paper goes lots faster than reading on a screen. Those who read on paper generally are more aware of how well they understand what they are reading than screen readers, a skill called metacognition, or thinking about your own thinking. At...
Who Were the Buffalo Soldiers?
Say thanks this November 11th to a black veteran of the U.S. military Black soldiers served in the U.S. Army and Navy during the American Revolution and the War of 1812. In 1820, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, acting in his position as United States Secretary of...
Marathons Are for Wimps
Pheidippides was a courier employed by the Athenian army in the days when important messages were sent by runner, sometimes over very long distances that took days to deliver, sort of like Pony Express riders without the horses. The Athenian army planned on fighting...
Famous Last Words
Eric Arthur Blair was born the son of an opium agent in Bengal, India in 1903 and brought up in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery, what he called lower-upper-middle class. As a child he was known for his intellectual brilliance and for being withdrawn, morose and...
Fire!
On October 19, 1856, someone at the Royal Surrey Gardens Music Hall in London falsely shouted “Fire!” and in the panicked rush to escape, seven were killed. On December 5, 1876, a fire broke out in The Brooklyn Theater. Employees didn’t want to panic people by...
Which Came First, the Chicken or the Pecking Order?
A pecking order is a social hierarchy. With domestic fowl, it is the social hierarchy of a flock of chickens in which the dominant birds peck the subordinate birds who submit to it as a signal of acceptance of the difference between their social standings. All up and...
Circle Gets the Square
Hollywood Squares was a popular game show on television in the 1960s, patterned on the pencil and paper game of tic-tac-toe. The studio set had nine small cubicles, stacked three high and three wide. Within each open-faced square sat a celebrity. The two contestants,...
A Closer Look at Bulls
In the 1800s, cowboys of the wild west rode horses all day every day, day and night, rain and shine. Much of their time was spent herding cattle back in the days when everything west of the Mississippi was open range where the deer and the antelope play and...
What Are Brain Clouds?
Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, America’s sweethearts, starred in Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, two well-regarded romantic comedies by Nora Ephron, director and screenwriter. Ephron was not involved in the film Joe Versus the Volcano. Hanks plays Joe, a...
Not That Blackjack
In the 1800s, street gangs didn’t have guns. They used cloth bags or socks filled with sand as homemade weapons to conk people over the head with so they could steal their money and their goods. The next technological evolution was the blackjack. Also referred to as a...
How Did You Get Under That Bus?
To throw someone under the bus is to shift the blame to them, usually to deflect it from yourself. It involves betrayal and sacrifice, particularly for the sake of personal gain. It is exploiting someone in a vulnerable position, especially when they are sacrificed in...
Frank Marugg’s Boot
Over coffee one day in the 1950s, a shop teacher heard a policeman say he wished there was a way to immobilize parking violators’ cars instead of just issuing citations that are often ignored. It could have been called the Frank Marugg boot, but was given the name of...
Does Your Dog Bite?
A man wearing a silly little hat and a trench coat belted tightly around his waist enters a quaint old European mountain hotel where a clerk with bushy grey hair, eyebrows and mustache sits behind the desk puffing on a long-stemmed pipe. Near the clerk, a small furry...
9 Things Cows Don’t Know
Milk was touted for hundreds of years as good for kids' teeth and bones, especially since Louie figured out how pasteurize milk. Back then there were no milk bottles. Vendors sold it by the dipperful. As the story goes, Dr. Henry Thatcher had an epiphany one day in...
11 Problems with Animals
What’s quick as a bunny, slow as a turtle, wise as an owl, sly as a fox, hungry as a wolf, free as a bird, slippery as an eel, clumsy as an ox, graceful as a swan, gentle as a lamb, silly as a goose, crazy as a loon, pig-headed, eagle-eyed, blind as a bat, stubborn as...
What’s That Goop On Your Head?
As P.G. Wodehouse once wrote, “What's wrong with flies being in ointment, what harm do they do and who wants ointment anyway?” Perhaps he was unfamiliar with the following verse from the Book of Ecclesiastes: “Dead flies cause the apothecary’s ointment to send forth a...
What Are Snow Globes?
Snow globes are transparent spheres of glass or plastic filled with a clear liquid and enclosing a miniaturized scene. Paperweights, ornaments, souvenirs and collector’s items, snow globes are little worlds that sit in the palm of your hand. Shaking the sphere...
Do the Name Ruby Begonia Strike a Familiar Note?
Amos ’n’ Andy was one of the most controversial and polarizing shows in the history of United States television. History professor, author, and social commentator Joshua K. Wright asks an excellent question: Did this television series become a scapegoat for black...
Trinidad or Tobago?
Not many people know that Trinidad is closer to Venezuela (6 miles) than it is to Tobago (20 miles). Just 1,800 square miles, Trinidad is smaller than Rhode Island, but nearly twenty times the size of Tobago, a little squirt of an island. More than a million people...
What Are Consumers Absolute Suckers For?
This is the third of a three-part series about advertising characters in the United States. The first told the stories of the four greatest fictional characters to personify a brand and the second related the histories of the four greatest real-life television...
Whatever Happened to the Maytag Repairman?
In the 1950s, 60s and 70s, advertisers hired lots of second- and third-tier actors to play fictitious characters in their TV commercials. Jesse White was the lonely Maytag Repairman, Jan Miner played Madge the Manicurist for Palmolive dishwashing liquid, Nancy Walker...
Who Were Aunt Jemima and Betty Crocker?
The Chicago World’s Fair was opened to the first of 27 million visitors when U.S. president Grover Cleveland pushed a button and the newfangled electric lighting dazzled goggle-eyed fairgoers who only knew lanterns and candles. PBS tells us “Visitors gawked at...
Car 54, Where Are You?
“There's a holdup in the Bronx, Brooklyn's broken out in fights. There's a traffic jam in Harlem that's backed up to Jackson Heights. There's a Scout troop short a child, Khrushchev's due at Idlewild; Car 54, Where Are You?” The Car 54, Where Are You? television...
What Are Flotsam and Jetsam?
The ship was on its way from Crete to Rome when a ferocious storm struck. At the mercy of gale winds and violent waves, the ship was perilously close to sinking. The crew were forced to do the only thing they could to try and save it: lighten the ship enough to give...
Why Is George Washington’s Face on the Purple Heart?
The history of Memorial Day, like most histories, depends on who’s telling the story. Histories of all kinds are told many different ways. Accuracy varies, too. When it comes to wartime, history is written by the victors. In most cases, the winners are the good guys...
Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall
A mirror image is the reversed copy of any reflected likeness, where left is right and right is left. Narcissus fell in love with his mirror image when he saw it reflected in a pool of water. Unable to tear himself away from admiring his great beauty, he died there....
Thank God and Greyhound You’re Gone
“Oh, thank God and Greyhound you're gone. That load on my mind got lighter when you got on. That shiny old bus is a beautiful sight, with the black smoke a-rolling up around the tail lights. It may sound kinda cruel but I've been silent too long. Thank God and...
How Will You Celebrate National Frog Jumping Day?
The Devil and Daniel Webster is a short story about a farmer from Cross Corners, New Hampshire. Plagued for years by bad luck, one day he says "It's enough to make a man want to sell his soul to the devil - and I would, too, for two cents." Sure enough, the next day a...
Warning!
Red flags have long been used as warnings of immediate, imminent and potential danger. The warning is signaled by the combination of color and movement. These days, to red-flag something is to draw attention to a dangerous situation. In auto racing, a red flag means...
What’s the Connection between a High Speed Train and a Lanyard?
Summer camps have long used handicrafts to keep kids busy when they're stuck indoors on rainy days. For many years a popular camp craft activity has been to make braided neckerchief slides, bracelets, and lanyards for whistles and pocket knives from colorful strips of...
What Is Cloud Nine?
To be on cloud nine is to be in a state of intense well-being. The most common explanation for the origin of the term tells us that the United States Weather Bureau classifies nine levels of clouds. The clouds on Level Nine are the ones we know as the fluffy white...
What Is Rumpology?
Devotees of rump reading purport to find deeper meaning in the lines, crevices, dimples, warts, and moles of people’s buttocks. Rump reading was big in ancient Babylon, where seekers of rectal wisdom (one wonders who they were) covered their hindquarters with liquid...
Do You Have Expert Eyes?
Right now, even as you read this, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you. You are missing the events unfolding in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you. You are ignoring an unthinkably large amount of information that...
Why Do Women Wear Makeup and Perfume?
Shouyang, a Chinese princess, fell asleep under a plum tree. A flower petal landed on her forehead and left a purple imprint that was thought to enhance her pale-skinned beauty. Ladies of the court were so impressed that they started decorating their own foreheads to...
Why Are These People Laughing?
In ancient Greece, early influencers were professionals hired to manipulate audiences' emotions by applauding performers and performances. In French theaters and opera houses, the pros were called claquers. By the 1830s, theater impresarios would order groups of...
Are Owls Really Wise?
"Every little swallow, every chickadee, every little bird in the tall oak tree. The wise old owl, the big black crow, flapping their wings singing go, bird, go. All the little birds on Jaybird Street love to hear the robin go tweet tweet tweet." Rockin’ Robin was...
Where Did the Tooth Fairy Come From?
Most people in the USA know when small children lose baby teeth, they are told to put them under the pillow and when they wake up next morning, the Tooth Fairy will have left something for them. The tooth “disappears” the same way Santa “appears” - while the children...
Why Do They Call It Pickleball?
While browsing during a commercial, I came across a professional pickleball tournament. As you may know, pickleball is a game that combines elements of tennis, ping-pong and badminton. The game is played by two or four players on a small court batting a ball back and...
MBA Final Exam True or False ?
Two weeks ago I published the course outline distributed to MBA students at the University of the West Indies Graduate School of Business. You can take the 10 question true or false part of the final exam now, click here to go back for a refresher, or click here to...
MBA Final Exam: 10 Multiple Choice Questions
If you read last week’s article, you might be ready to take the multiple choice section of final exam. If you missed it or if you want to better your chances of passing the exam, please click here to go back and read or reread the course summary. Otherwise, start here...
Are You Smarter Than a Guinea Pig?
Some time in this century, a few of the world’s leading MBA programs realized students were being taught plenty about business but nothing about human behavior. They knew a growing body of evidence was showing clear linkages between management practices based in the...
Where’s My Get Out of Jail Free Card?
Imagine yourself in charge of a halfway house for felons just released from state and federal prisons. Your agency’s mission is to provide counseling and support services that will help these criminals find - and keep - jobs, adjust to life outside the walls, develop...
How Do You Manage Your Supply and Demand?
Florida is one the busiest vacation destination states in the USA. Most come for the ocean, beaches and warm, sunny days. Many of the more than 130 million tourists who come to Florida are golfers. Combine these numbers with the many year-round residents who golf and...
The Okay Corral?
John Montgomery had a barn, stables and blacksmith shop in Tombstone, Arizona in 1881. He named his outdoor horse pen the O.K. Corral*, never knowing it would become the historical site where Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers shot it out with Ike and Billy Clanton...
National Bobblehead Day
January 7 is National Bobblehead Day. Early versions were called wobblers, bobblers, nodders, and head-shakers and had a head connected to a body by a spring so it would bounce around. The most popular were cats. In 1842 Russian author Nikolai Gogol described a main...
The Best Way to Learn Something Is to Teach It
The best way to learn something is to teach it. You have to take what you know (and what you think you know) and put it down in writing. You have to organize it in a way that it makes sense to others. Psychologists and psychiatrists have their own version of having...
What Management Principles Do You Believe In?
100 years ago was the age of industrialization in the USA. Manufacturing jobs employed many millions of people to make cars, furniture, radios, airplanes, tires, telephones and appliances. These things had long been made by hand, but were now made in mechanized...
The Camel’s Nose
One cold night in the desert an Arab was warm inside his one man tent, asleep. His camel gently poked his nose in and said it was so cold outside, perhaps his owner would let him get just his nose warm. Groggy and not seeing the harm in that, the Arab said okay...
Walk or Don’t Walk?
Research should be providing the fact base that points companies in the direction of likely success. Instead, it stands at the corner of walk and don’t walk, selling maps to the stars’ homes. Business research today churns out mountains of misinformation that send...
3 On a Match
You’ve seen it in dozens of films, mostly in black and white. Somewhere outside in the dark of night, three guys take out cigarettes. One of them strikes a wooden match. The match flares up from the phosphorous in the tip and then settles down to a steady yellow...
How Can You Always Win?
The desperate young husband was at the roulette table gambling what little money he and his wife had left. It was his only chance to earn enough money to get them out of Vichy-controlled Morocco to Lisbon and from there to the United States. But the trip from...
How to Be a Squeaky Wheel
In the days of stagecoaches, buckboards and covered wagons, crude wooden wheels turned around crude wooden axles, producing lots of friction and heat. To keep the wooden wheels and axles from burning away, they were lubricated by slathering them with lots of axle...
What’s Really Big and Really Small?
When we landed on Wake Island, I got a taste of the vastness of the Pacific Ocean very different than the one I got flying high above empty water for hours. Wake Island is a two square mile dot in the ocean 2,300 miles west of Honolulu and 2,000 miles east of Tokyo....
Why Do You Think Your Dog Does This?
That quizzical look on dogs’ faces when they cock their heads at an angle always makes for a great photo. A story on the science.org website says that when dogs cock their heads like this, they are doing more than just being cute. A first-ever study that looked into...
What Does Get Your Goat Mean?
In the film Seabiscuit, the trainer tried to cure the horse’s nervousness by putting a goat in the stall with him to keep him relaxed. Seabiscuit grabbed the goat by the neck and threw it out of the stall. The trainer tried again with a horse named Pumpkin and a...
Why Are People Sick of Managers?
People are sick of managers. The news is full of people not going back to their jobs and managers are a big reason. Commutes are seen as what they are - huge chunks of unproductive time to get to and from work so a hall monitor can loom over you and take attendance....
How Did You Choose Your Dog?
In 1859 English naturalist Charles Darwin returned from a five-year voyage with his soon to be famous conclusion that humans and apes had common ancestors. His ship was named The Beagle. Genes had not been discovered yet, so Darwin knew nothing about them. But he...
The Frito Bandito
Frank Woolworth opened a store in Utica, New York in February of 1879. It failed three months later. He tried again in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He used the same sign he brought with him from Utica: Woolworth’s Great Five Cent Store. That store was also a failure....
Sam Ryder’s Cup
In May of 1921 a small group of American professional golfers travelled to Great Britain by steamship. Upon arrival a friendly competition was proposed and a 10 man team match was held at the Kings’ Course at Gleneagles, located in Auchterarder, Perthshire, Scotland,...
I Took the Garbage Out Last Time
Social scientists often get inspiration from day to day occurrences. They notice something, realize they’ve it seen before, and want to know more about it. So they do research, sometimes observational, sometimes surveys, and now and then both. Back in the 1970s, two...
A Closer Look at Tomatoes
Susie Scott of Sussex University is trying to develop a Sociology of Nothing. She says that instead of looking at who we are and what we do in our lives, she wants to look into the shadows of things that are absent, lost, missing, empty, silent, and invisible. She...
What Does a Hand-Rolled Cigar Have to Do with Labor Day?
Rolling cigars is a repetitive manual task that requires only the use of the hands and eyes. Back in the cigar factories of Havana in the late 1800s, Saturnino Martinez thought reading to cigar rollers would help alleviate their boredom as they silently made one cigar...
Who Said O-Tay, Panky?
Lying and the ability to detect lies are related skills. Knowing when someone is lying comes in very handy in poker games when an opponent is trying to steal the pot by bluffing. Did you know good bluffers are better than lousy bluffers at detecting when someone is...
Sneeze Guards
People in a hurry to solve a problem rarely take the time to look around the corner and down the road to consider what other things may be affected by their solutions. Take for example the installation of all those plexiglass shields we see in stores today. They were...
Don’t Read This Warning!
People who like to avoid shocking discoveries, who prefer to believe that society is just what they were taught in Sunday School, who like the safety of the catchphrases of what Alfred Schütz has called the “world taken-for-granted,” should stay away from sociology....
Sex Education
What are three things that AT&T, Boeing, Citibank, Del Monte, Estee Lauder, Ford, General Mills, Hilton, IBM, Jaguar, KFC, Lowes, Macys, Nokia, Office Depot, Pepsi, Quiznos, Ryder, Subway, Time-Warner, UnitedHealthcare, Verizon, Walgreens, Xerox, Yum Brands, and...
A Closer Look at The Bobo Doll Experiment
Monkey see, monkey do is an American English idiom that says children learn by imitating what they see others do. Some etymologists trace the origin to an old African folk tale about a traveling hat salesman who took a nap under a tree. While he was sleeping, his...
Try This Unbeatable $5 Customer Retention Strategy
For $5, I bought a watermelon at a small upscale Italian bakery/deli near me where I buy just-baked bread every week. When I cut into my watermelon, it was more white than red and was filled with the whitish ropy strings we are used to seeing when we carve pumpkins. I...
There’s a Hole in the Bucket
A woman named Liza asks a man named Henry to fetch a pail of water. Henry says he cannot because there’s a hole in the bucket. Liza, a practical woman, tells Henry to fix the hole. Henry asks what he is supposed to fix the hole with. Please click on the link here to...
Colonel Mustard in the Library
Agatha Christie was a British novelist who wrote the Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot whodunits in the 1930s and 1940s. This was the golden era of British murder mysteries, with Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson the most memorable of all. Fascinated...
Do You Know What This Is?
Five men who had been born blind listened to the stories told by travelers who came their way. After hearing about strange creatures called elephants, they argued amongst themselves. Looking to resolve their differences, the men went to the palace to learn the truth...
A Closer Look at Ketchup
Salespeople looking to land new accounts call on new restaurants while they are still under construction. Vendors selling such things as office supplies, cleaning supplies, paper products, and condiments flock to these soon-to-be-opening restaurants. When a local...
It’s Like Comparing Apples and Oranges
Everyone knows that apples and oranges are more alike than different. After all, they’re both fruits that grow on trees and tend to be round and of a size that fits nicely in the hand. So why do we use the term “that’s like comparing apples and oranges” to illustrate...
I Solemnly Swear
“Almost overnight the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was in full flower, and Captain Black was enraptured to discover himself spearheading it. He had really hit on something. All the enlisted men and officers on combat duty had to sign a loyalty oath to get their map...
Flattery Will Get You Everywhere
In 800 BC, near a town named Delphi, a Greek shepherd saw his herd of goats behaving strangely near a deep crack in the ground where steamy vapors were rising from the hole. When he came to take a closer look, he inhaled the fumes and began to have strange visions of...
Which is the real Posh Spice?
Elegant and fashionable people from high social classes are called posh, which was Victoria Beckham’s choice (Posh Spice). It is also the name of a pedigreed cow recently sold at auction for a record-setting £262,000. The owner said the name was no reference to a...
What kind of office are you going back to?
The first cliques most of us encountered were in school, where the cool kids hung around in one bunch, the jocks in another, and so on. I pronounced it “clicks” for years and then someone told me it’s “cleeks.” Whichever way you say it, cliques are small groups that...
Who Can You Turn To?
Vowing I wouldn't quit until I was done, I locked myself in the house and didn't come out for two weeks. If I wasn't sleeping, I was writing nonstop until I had finished what I was willing to call my best draft of a graduate thesis on job satisfaction for Indiana...
Who’s Been Naming Our Cars?
Hundreds of car companies have gone out of business, most in the earliest days of automobiles. Did you know the beer company Anheuser-Busch once built a car? Or that a company named Apple Automobile built a car in 1917? Alcoa, the aluminum company built a car, as did...
A Little Learning Is a Dangerous Thing
Lake Wobegone is the fictitious central Minnesota town “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” It was the setting of a long-running radio variety show, several novels, and a feature film. The radio show A...
What Can You Learn From an Admiral?
The grey-haired, steely-eyed Admiral on the bridge of the flagship, leading a fleet of heavily-armed warships into battle, pointed toward the rising sun and said “Set course at 107.25 degrees.” NO, HE DIDN'T! He said “Take us out, Skipper,” because Admirals don’t...
Rule of Thumb
Back in the days of not so Merrie Olde England, the law allowed men to beat their wives, children, horses, and anyone unable to defend themselves. As the folk tale goes, the Rule of Thumb law stipulated men could use only sticks that were no larger around than their...
Why Conversations Drag On
A team of Harvard researchers led by Adam Mastroianni and Daniel Gilbert conducted two experiments to investigate the dynamics of two-way conversations. In the first, they surveyed 805 online study subjects about their most recent face-to-face conversation with a...
How Much Do You Know About Goldilocks?
Goldilocks went for a walk in the forest. She came upon a house and knocked on the door. When no one answered, she walked right in and saw three bowls of porridge. Hungry, she tasted the porridge from the first bowl. "This porridge is too hot!" she said, and tried the...
Why Are Owners of Luxury Cars Such Jerks?
Narcissus, the son of a river god, was known for his beauty. One day he saw his own reflection when he went to drink from a smooth-as-glass pool of water deep in the forest. Smitten by his own pretty face, he fell in love with himself. When Narcissus leaned down to...
Fat Homeless Jaywalkers Programmed to Die
Robots are machines that respond automatically and unthinkingly to the commands of others. They perform routine mechanical tasks that have been pre-programmed by humans. They are not sentient beings and are not capable of conscious thought. Robots are best at...
Very few know this about Steve Jobs
Apple has been doing lots of consumer research for a long time. Wait a minute, you say, that’s not true! You read the Fortune magazine interview where he was supposed to have said Apple never used consumer research. You might even remember his quip, “It isn’t the...
A Lousy Strategy
In 2015, McDonald’s was congratulating themselves on the success of their brand-new All-Day Breakfast because same-store sales had risen 5.7%. They deliberately avoided mentioning how the confluence of more than a dozen things contributed to that small increase. Only...
Why Do People Use So Much Jargon?
One of the most strategic military sites in the world, the Rock of Gibraltar guards the only entrance to the Mediterranean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean. For centuries it was much fought over by Carthaginians, Moors, Romans, Phoenicians, and Barbary Pirates. When...
Why Your Company Is Stuck In a Rut
Governor-general and city builder Grigory Potemkin built fake villages along the banks of the Dneiper River to impress Russian Empress Catherine the Great during her journey to Crimea in 1787. The structures would be secretly disassembled after she passed and...
What’s HR Up To Now?
Long before automated resumé screening, a friend complained long and loud about how every time he needed to hire someone to work in the office, the phone would ring all day. Most of the applicants who called about the job were not the kind of people who had resumés or...
How to Cheat on Exams
Chegging has become a synonym for cheating. It is the biggest of the homework help sites. Forbes called Chegg a superspreader of cheating when they found more than half of college students admitted they used Chegg to cheat. The problem exploded when Covid-19 moved...
Who is the Ugly American?
William Lederer and Eugene Burdick wrote a fictional novel called The Ugly American*. The title refers to the world's belief that typical Americans are insensitive to the languages, customs, traditions, religions, and backgrounds of peoples of other lands and...
If You Build it, Who Will Come?
It was the thirteenth day in a row the temperature was over one hundred degrees. The air was so heavy and wet it was like we were wearing it. I was riding with Joe Hudson in his rusted Chevrolet. On its last legs, it had no A/C or shock absorbers. It lurched and...
Are you afraid of Brazil nuts?
Radium, a solid, is one of forty radioactive elements (uranium, plutonium are the best-known). Discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898, it glows in the dark and has a half-life of 1,600 years. Its less-toxic cousin radon (originally called radium emanation) is...
Whaddya Say We Shoot the Messenger?
More than 2,000 years ago in Greece, a playwright named Sophocles wrote about strong-willed, highly principled characters who encountered seemingly insurmountable ethical problems. Sophocles' interest was in individuals who would not compromise their principles, even...
What Choice Would You Have Made?
Eleven years after Charles Lindbergh was the first to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, Douglas Corrigan took off from New York in his plane and headed for California. He landed in Ireland, claiming he lost his direction in the clouds and his compass had...
Old Lang Sign
The words to the song millions sing at midnight each December 31st are said to have been written by Robert Burns, Scotland’s national poet. Encyclopaedia Britannica says no one knows who wrote the music. Burns refused to take credit for the song, saying it was merely...
Inquiring Minds Want to Know
The Merry Mailman television program debuted on Secaucus, New Jersey’s WOR-TV in 1950. The host was Ray Heatherton, a former bandleader and singer. Ray and his sidekicks Chick and Milt entertained studio audiences with games, songs, stories, magic tricks, skits,...
Take this 1-minute test of your ability to focus your attention.
Test your ability to focus As you watch this one-minute video of people passing a ball back and forth, count the number of times the people in white pass the ball. CLICK HERE TO WATCH IT NOW The video was created by psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris...
Ask For It By Name
McDonald’s aimed its advertising at parents for many years before someone got the idea to advertise directly to their kids instead. Their notion was that the children would relentlessly pester their parents to take them to McDonald's for Happy Meals, visits with...
Awesome!
When the clerk at my grocery store asked if I found everything I was looking for, I said yes and she said “Awesome!” In the time it took her to scan my dozen items and take my payment, she said awesome seven more times. I don’t know about you, but I believe awesome...
Avoid this like the plague!
Ask any American to name the first soft drink that comes to mind, and most say Coca-Cola. Ask Americans what company they think of first when they think about auto insurance, and you'll get many different answers (Allstate, Farmer's, Geico, Liberty Mutual, Nationwide,...
How Agile Are You?
When people ask me if I've ever done agile research, they say "AGILE" as if it should be capitalized, underlined, and in italics. Their emphasis implies it is something quite new and mysterious. My response is to say I’ve been recommending agile research since long...
Veterans Day
If you enjoy this article, please do me a solid and send it along to the veterans you know, and if you don't know any, to a couple of friends. When I joined the Air Force, I was sent to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio for basic training. What was boot camp...
Beam me up, Scotty
Wikipedia says the well-known phrase “Beam me up, Scotty,” was never said on television or in the movies. It did, however, become the title of James Doohan’s autobiography. Humphrey Bogart never said “Play it again, Sam,” Mark Twain never said “The coldest winter I...
A Closer Look at Payday Loans
Two categories of regular readers are marketers who use research and people who conduct the research marketers use. Both groups often ask how to tell the difference between good information and bad. Because most research is privately funded for competitive purposes...
The 80/20 Rule
When interviewing study subjects, researchers hear many of the same themes and comments repeated, as you can easily imagine. No one liked how cassette tapes snarled, for example, and everyone hates long wait times. The temptation for impatient researchers and study...
The Shell Game
In a shell game, three walnut shells are moved about swiftly and onlookers bet on which one the pea is under when they come to rest. It’s not actually a game at all - it’s a swindle con artists control through sleight of hand and illusion to fleece the mark (the...
Out of Whack
Asymmetry is when two sides of a thing are out of whack, like the male Fiddler Crab's pincers. They eat with the tiny one and use the big one to wave at females. There are two types of imbalance we hear about among humans. The most obvious one is that most of us are...
Do the Right Thing
Spike Lee’s film Do The Right Thing was a cautionary tale (one that warns of the consequences of actions and inactions). It did not provide “answers” to the issues it exposed. Instead, the film reflected back to its audience their own perspectives on prejudice and...
Alley Oop
When I created a special course for MBAs, I began by giving my students a whirlwind tour of humans since Alley Oop*, following the arc of human history in Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel. Then I introduced them to many strange people they...
Jingles
Andy Devine was a college football player who moonlighted as a professional footballer, using an alias (Jeremiah Schwartz) in order to maintain his amateur status. His father operated a hotel and his mother was the granddaughter of the first Navy officer killed in the...
Hoarders
Former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s aunt Edith Bouvier lived in a 28-room house with 300 cats. The home was so cluttered that 26 of the rooms were uninhabitable, leaving Big Edie and her daughter Little Edie to live in only one bedroom. When sanitation workers...
Dirty Little Secrets
Ron Sellers at Grey Matter Research wrote me recently, saying “The attached report is probably the most important thing I’ve done in the insights industry.” Teaming up with Harmon Research, Grey conducted an online survey and wrote a report called Still More Dirty...
The Calm Before the Storm
Most of us know brainstorming is the technique of stimulating creative thinking by unrestrained and spontaneous participation in group discussion. That’s what advertising executive Alex Osborn of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn had in mind when he coined the...
What would you do with these?
The average American generates between four and five pounds of waste each day, which adds up to more than 33 tons in a lifetime. Only one-third of it is recycled. Concerned about these numbers, a municipal government commissioned us to study household recycling. The...
Translucent vs. Transparent
When people do the same sort of thing while away from work as they do while at work, they are said to have taken a busman’s holiday. In London in the 1800s, horse-drawn “carriages for everyone” were called omni-buses. The driver and the conductor were called busmen....
Oh no! Not another useless employee survey!
Peter Cappelli, professor of Management and director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, wrote an article in today’s Wall Street Journal that is essential reading for everyone whose organization administers annual...
9 sweepings from the online dustbin.
Every week I read thousands of stories, articles, and news releases. From the practical to the curious, from the ironic to the absurd, here are 9 items that caught my eye. The headlines are mine. As if the real ones aren’t bad enough. Taiwan’s Songshan Airport...
Apprentices, Journeymen, and Master Craftsmen
A guild was an association of craftsmen or merchants formed for the furtherance of their professional interests. Guilds began in ancient Rome and came to prominence in the Middle Ages. Operating at the city level, they were organized by profession, such as carpenter...
Would You Rather Eat a Bowl of Sand or a Bowl of Gravel?
I’ve asked hundreds of people if they'd rather eat a bowl of sand or a bowl of gravel. Every single one said they wouldn’t eat either one, just like you did. “Okay, okay,” I say, and ask them (and you) to imagine a situation where you are forced to eat one or the...
How to Choose a Mentor
Headed off to the Trojan war, Odysseus asked a trusted friend to stay behind in Ithaca and watch over the upbringing of his son, Telemachus. Odysseus chose the best person he knew to prepare his heir to handle family responsibilities while he was away. It was a good...
5 Ways to Get Ahead of the Customer Curve
“Lead, follow, or get out of the way.” Media mogul Ted Turner said it, and so did General George S. Patton, but they weren't the first. That was Thomas Paine, the revolutionary whose 1776 pamphlet, Common Sense, called for American independence from Britain....
What Do You Do When You See a Wet Paint Sign?
There is a skeptic inside each of us. Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure. Skeptics want to see the world for what it actually...
Would You Eat This Deep-Sea Predator?
Neither would millions of people until Lee Lantz came along. A seafood merchant, he found a mild and flaky fish that tasted great. Its name, Patgonian Toothfish, was as unappetizing as its looks. He couldn’t change its appearance, so he made up a new name. He called...
R.I.P. Focus Groups
The father of the focus group despised how his methodology had been hijacked and bastardized. Robert Merton said “Focus groups are supposed to be merely the source of ideas that need to be researched.” They were meant to be no more than a jumping off point and a...
I Yam What I Yam
Are you tired of hackneyed phrases? Threadbare, moth-eaten sayings that have been used so tediously for so long that they've lost whatever meaning they ever had? Me, too. Recently I heard someone say “It is what it is" for the third time in a single day. If you look...
Which Line Is Longer?
Our eyes tell us the top horizontal line is quite obviously longer than the bottom horizontal line. This famous example of an optical illusion purposely deceives us by tricking our eyes into seeing what isn't there. Illusion is of course the principle behind what...
Employers Say New College Grads Can’t Think
One of our very human tendencies is that we are not very good at seeing ourselves through others' eyes. Studies show most college students claim to have the skills and qualities employers are looking for today. Responding to the same surveys, employers say students...
Service with a Smile
When I was a rookie bartender working my way through college, I found a grizzled veteran who agreed to teach me how a master craftsman does it. One day I asked him the name of the guy seated down at the end of the bar. “Amigo," he said. “No, no, what’s his name?” I...
Canary In the Coal Mine
Friends who know my statistical background have been asking what pandemic numbers I watch, so I thought you might want to see how we make our own reports for the places that interest us by using a simple spreadsheet with only a few numbers and only one formula...
Turtles All the Way Down
Long before the Europeans came, the Iroquois tribe lived across most of New York, Pennsylvania, and Eastern Canada. Like most societies, they had a creation story. “They swam to the Great Turtle, master of all the animals, who at once called a council. When all the...
What would you have done?
I was once asked to oversee data collection for a survey sponsored by one of the world’s largest and most well-respected Non-Governmental Organizations. The data collected would be used by the C-suite to develop goals and objectives and allocate time, people, and...
A.I. and T.P.
You've seen and heard many stories about toilet paper shortages. The stories seem real because shelves are empty. The reason shelves are empty is not due to any real scarcity (factories make more than enough for everyone), but instead to several very different things....
What do you think happened next?
Every management strategy is a best guess, never perfectly clear or fully confident. Every best guess benefits from insights that challenge, confirm, or contradict existing beliefs. I share the conviction of those who believe one of the key functions of research is to...
I can see clearly now.
One of the joys that came my way from serving many years in the research trenches around the world was having a front row seat to history. In hundreds of investigations of all sizes and shapes, I got to see up close how decisions got made and how things evolved over...
Nothing to Sneeze About
Konrad Putzier wrote in the Wall Street Journal how after years of crowding office workers into ever-smaller spaces, we are finally coming to realize that our high-density offices are ideal places to spread disease. Because so many of us are spending so much time in...
Chain of Custody
Evidence is defined as the available body of information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or untrue. Chain of custody is a legal term for the rigorous procedure that is to be followed and documented when evidence is collected, held, transferred,...
Methodology Is Not the Study of How Methodists Do Things
People are methodologists without realizing it until I ask them if they’ve ever done a jigsaw puzzle. Most of us have, usually as children, and we solved them by following a prescribed system of rules while adhering to a strict set of principles, automatically and...
Money for Nothing
We passed the entrance to this market research facility several times because we had automatically assumed we would come upon their roadside sign. No sign and not even a street number, just the rusted oil drums and concrete rubble you see in the photo. This got me to...
What Color is Your Parachute?
As each stove came down the assembly line, I plugged a two-pronged electric heating coil into a socket and secured it with two screws: bzzt bzzt with an airgun, like a Nascar tire changer but slower. Four calrods*, eight screws: bzzt bzzt...bzzt bzzt...bzzt...
How Much Does Research Cost?
When someone asks "How long is a piece of string?" or "How big is a house?" you know the only right answer is "It depends." "How much does research cost? We cannot say how much research costs any more than we can say how much a car costs until we’ve asked and answered...
Where Does the Average Person Go More Often – the Library or the Movie Theater?
A new survey by Pew Research Center found how over the course of the last 12 months, people went to libraries twice as often as they went to see movies in theaters (10.5 times vs 5.3 times). Does this strike you as odd? Me, too. The study also says things are the...
Brothers and Sisters, I’m allergic to bad information
A few weeks ago I asked readers if it would surprise them to hear that when it comes to research, the top brass almost never ask to see the ingredients label. This earned me a bunch of amen, brothers from people who have seen firsthand how too few executives ask the...
What We Can Learn About A.I. from Mickey Mouse
As a kid, when the arm was down at railroad crossings I would pay close attention to the freight cars as they went by. I made up a game where I held as many of the six-digit railcar I.D. numbers as I could in memory with the goal of finding consecutive numbers amongst...
Can You Name the 5 Things We Do In Elevators?
Undergraduate grade point averages are the first thing doctoral programs look at and my application would have been automatically binned if they had Artificial Intelligence scanners in those days, but it was 1977 and they didn’t. The Indiana University Sociology...
We Don’t Need No Stinking Badges
Instead of paying for meaningless certificates, badges, how about sponsoring some actual learning with real value?
What’s Wrong With This Picture?
A new study shows that people who go to museums, art galleries, the theater, and concerts live longer than those who don’t. The researchers, professors of psychology and epidemiology, described in detail their study's methods, sample, and most importantly,...
What are “Dear Abby” Statistics?
“Dear Abby” Statistics -- Awash in Ignorance and Presented Ass-Backwards Last week the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece that has Harry Anslinger grinning in his grave. They included the oft-cited statistic so old it has whiskers:...
Dreck the Halls
Young Moderns have had it with the dreary old decorations of the past and think it’s time to move on. One great way to make your Christmas yard display stand out is by featuring an inflatable Hidden Valley Ranch bottle, a Taco Bell sauce packet, and a giant bag of...
A Boomer Apologizes: It’s All Our Fault
We were the first to have a gen-name. Now everyone has one and some have two. Regardless of what they call themselves, our term for the latest group at front and center of deciding everything for everybody else is Young Moderns. Nitpickers will say hey, what about the...
I’d Rather Be Tased Than Read a Book
One by one, hundreds of college students were asked to be alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes - no phones, no books, no pens for doodling - nothing. They were asked only to stay awake, be quiet, and sit idly in their seats. Before beginning, students were shown a...
Do you rely on others for your information?
The department chairman said to be fair to all students, he would start our postgraduate statistics course from the very beginning, as if none of us had any prior knowledge at all. With my heavy quant background, I figured this course would be a breeze. Forty-five...
Gulliver’s Troubles
Three international executives recently listened with great interest as a man complained long and loud about how cellphone numbers should never be reissued. He had just bought a new mobile and was angry because he kept getting annoying calls for someone else. He was...
Whistleblower’s Secret Guide for Executives
Gatekeepers tamper with your research every time they touch it.
Veteran’s Day
United States Air Force 1966-1970. Texas, Illinois, Michigan, Alaska, Hawaii, Okinawa, Taiwan, Philippines, Vietnam. Welcome home.
Why Is It Called a Dunce Cap?
For many generations, beating and humiliation were two of the tools schoolteachers used to keep order. Children who misbehaved would get whipped with sticks and switches. Those who gave the wrong answers would be made to put on dunce caps and stand in the corner, face...
Third Anniversary
This is the third anniversary of LetsTakeACloserLook.com. Here is where I've written and published more than 150 articles, usually on the topic of misinformation and often involving items in the news. To those of you who have been loyal readers all along - thanks for...
Garbology
A recent study published by the Centers for Disease Control says the United States is experiencing "an epidemic of lung injury” and “use of flavored e-cigarettes by youths has become a serious concern.” Anyone who has seen or heard current events knows both these...
How Information Is Like Gold
The great California gold rush began when sawmill builders found gold in a streambed in 1848. Headlines in newspapers around the world told tall tales of gold lying on the ground just waiting to be picked up. Hundreds of thousands of gullible fortune seekers came by...
People have lots of friends. People are lonely. How can this be?
You know how you hear one story that makes a lot of sense and then you hear another that also makes a lot of sense but you’re bothered because taken together they don’t make any sense at all? Me, too. I examine research studies than most, and because they have...
?#@*&%!
In The Guardian, Issy Sampson described rap music as society’s lurch toward infantilism. His? Her? (but certainly not Their) many examples included language that disgusts most people. The British daily published every bit of it unbowdlerized, as is their policy....
Scientists Say Sugar, Fat, and Salt Are Good for You
At least that's what bought-and-paid-for scientists say. The Not-(Directly)-for-Profit International Life Sciences Institute was created forty years ago by Coke, Pepsi, General Mills, and others, all companies with less interest in Life Sciences than in influencing...
“Dick pic” study shows who sends them and why.
NOTE: "dick pics" is the colloquial term used in scientific papers, online publications, and Europe, where news outlets take casual coarseness in stride. The first academic study on dick pics has been published. Its objective was “to explore men’s motivations for...
Hurricane Dorian Screams Down Upon Boca Raton!
Several friends from elsewhere called to see how I was faring with the monster hurricane making the news across the county. After twice explaining the disconnect between what they were being told and what was actually happening, I decided to write an article about it....
Take this one-question A.I. I.Q. test
Question 1. How many jobs will Artificial Intelligence destroy? A. Futurist Thomas Frey says one billion. B. McKinsey says 800 million. C. McKinsey says 400 million. D. The International Federation of Robotics says zero. Why such different answers? Frey’s prediction...
I’m creating a very different self-learning course.
Until now, there has been no one place people can go to learn how to avoid misinformation traps. I intend to provide just that. What makes me think I'm qualified to take this on? Two things, thanks for asking. As a hands-on behavioral scientist for hire, I rode herd...
Guess how many people want this app.
Use it and the food you order costs more, takes longer to arrive, isn’t what you asked for, shows up cold and messy, and you have to go outside and get it no matter the distance or the weather? Probably none, when I put it that way, but the real answer is millions. No...
How to predict the future with two lines.
We assembled a team of bright people with different backgrounds. We included insiders and outsiders. On the table were a stack of index cards, a dozen Sharpies. Our subject was residential yards, which we defined as the open spaces within the boundaries of the lot...
Change Your Life in 4 Minutes
When it comes to planning and decision-making, too many people rely on complicated procedures and detailed statistics when there is an excellent tool that is easy to use and requires no math at all. The 2x2 matrix is a great tool for early-stage planning. It is an...
The seemingly most-qualified people to set the compass for your company’s long-term strategic direction are actually the least-qualified for the job.
The strategy team had zero experience in their client's particular industry. The actions they proposed were so outrageous that the insider experts unanimously predicted the sacred brand would be irreparably damaged. After weighing the opinions of his doomsaying...
Is your company making the same huge mistake as Apple?
I am an unabashed fan of Apple’s tech support. In my experience, theirs is the finest in all the land by a wide margin. When I submit a request, they call me within two or three minutes. It’s nice that their tech reps are invariably pleasant and courteous. What’s even...
A Grubby Little Con Game
The most common ad testing research waits until the very last moment to do the fastest and cheapest research possible. Paid study subjects are shown an ad that has been slickly produced and is ready to go. The only purpose of this research is to make sure the...
Airlines Doomed, Study Says
Readers have asked me to demonstrate how I go about reading a study. We don’t use privately-funded studies as examples, so I’ve been waiting for something interesting to show up in the public domain where we all have free access to the information. A little background...
What can your business learn from NASA’s Challenger disaster?
Volume of ramp is 1920cu in vs 3 cu in for test. If you saw those exact words, would you have cancelled the Challenger launch because conditions were dangerous and the likelihood of failure was high? Me neither, and here's why. Westerners read from top to bottom and...
Why is so much market research like 100-year-old sausage?
In the late 1800s, the United States were transforming themselves into an industrial society. Millions moved to the cities to work in the new factories, where conditions were unimaginably wretched. Sociologists, reformers, and people concerned with social injustice...
How to scrape most customer satisfaction research off your shoe.
The senior officer wanted to talk about his Customer Satisfaction data. He had been reading reports and got to wondering how much he could count on the purported accuracy of the information he was getting. He wanted to be able to dig deeply into the data, but before...
How Did Businesses Waste $3 Billion on Surveys?
It was early evening at the garden party celebrating the couple’s magnificent new backyard deck. Built into the gentle slope of the land were walkways, conversation areas, and bridges spanning koi ponds, all made from materials of the highest quality. Gentle breezes...
How Did Businesses Waste $2 Billion on Focus Groups?
Two slick-talking tailors promised to make a suit of clothes that was so special it would be completely invisible to stupid and incompetent people. The emperor ordered a special suit and later dispatched his most trusted ministers to see how it was coming along. The...
Most Market Research is Bullshit
A few weeks ago, I posted an article about how people use lies and trickery to con us into believing untruths. It referenced two University of Washington professors who are teaching students how to defend themselves in a course named Calling Bullshit: Data Reasoning...
Let’s Have Dinner at the Gas Station
Amazon’s recent announcement of a category-changing Whole Foods shop-eat-entertain design strategy was big news because they took the usual way of thinking about grocery stores and radically redefined it. Paradigm shifts occur when we dramatically change our beliefs...
The Food Hall Experience
Mental Floss’ Leigh Raper has very strong feelings about the Sherman Oaks Galleria (mall) food court, featured in the film Fast Times at Ridgemont High. She says it represented ”the teen ideal of community, freedom, and independence.” It is good to remember this was...
Calling Bullshit
University of Washington professors Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom say the world is awash in bullshit and they’re tired of it. This is why they designed a class called Bullshit: Data Reasoning in a Digital World. Their aim is to teach people how to think critically...
Shocking New Study Turns the Parachuting World Upside Down!
Movie buffs know that army paratroopers shout Geronimo! as they jump out of airplanes. As the story goes, they do it because it’s what the famous Apache chief yelled when he bravely leaped his horse from a high cliff into the river below to evade the hot pursuit of...
When To Schedule Your Parole Hearing
In one famous study, judges approved parole in about one third of the cases they heard. But as with most averages, the proportion did not hold steady hour after hour throughout the day. As a matter of fact, prisoners who appeared before judges early in the day were...
March 32nd
No one knows how April Fools’ started. One story says it began during the First Century, when court jesters and fools told Roman emperor Constantine they could do a better job of running the empire. Amused, the emperor allowed a jester to be king for one day. Another...
Is Your Job the Next to Go?
Desk Set is a 1957 movie starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Tracy is an expert hired to modernize a television network's research department. When the employees find out powerful new computers are coming, they are afraid they will lose their jobs to...
Just the Nose
The statistics vary from study to study, but most agree that more than two out of three of us have stolen something from work. For most of us, it is small things. Pens, pencils, and paper clips are pilfered all year long. There are seasonal patterns, too. In August,...
Who Invented the Drive-Thru Window?
Drive-thru windows account for two-thirds of fast-food sales.
Tree-to-Toilet Pipeline
Thanks to decades of marketing, including 21 years of Mr Whipple squeezing the Charmin, the United States leads the world in toilet paper usage. Americans, who make up 4% of the world’s population, use 20% of the world’s toilet paper. Fortune says the $31 billion...
Word Association
Say the words cracker barrel and most Americans think of the chain restaurant and gift shop. Cracker Barrel Restaurants and Country Stores were designed to evoke the friendly, homespun character of general stores from the 1800s, when the U.S. was a rural agrarian...
Where Nobody Knows Your Name
Travelers are leaving their hotel rooms and heading for the lobby for a couple of good reasons. One is that the ever-smaller rooms have no space for tables, chairs, or desks and so are less comfortable than ever before. Another is that the lobby is now a happening...
The Wisdom of Amarillo Slim
Although it is unlikely professional gambler Amarillo Slim ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, he was more than familiar with the concept. A Hall of Fame poker player, Slim liked to point out that “If you don’t know who the fool at the table is, it’s you."...
What Are Your Chances?
We have to make an effort to get the full picture, especially when marketers don’t want us to have it. Most of us have seen the NordicTrack ads on TV where Jane lost 20 pounds and we can, too. Few of us have read the fine print in the footnotes. The information there...
Not Meant to Be Taken Literally
TrueCar operates a consumer-facing website that promises to help car buyers find the best price. Their TV ads feature a glasses-wearing, bearded, regular-guy pitchman oozing authenticity. He tells us that by seeing TrueCar data on what other buyers paid, we can see...
Brainstorming
Novelist William Styron wrote in Darkness Visible that “depression is a true wimp of a word.” True depression, he said, swallows its victims entirely and is so overwhelming that a better word for it is brainstorm, not as it is currently used to mean some burst of...
The 3-D Experience
In 1999, Star Wars was in theaters, Space Invaders was in arcades, and our team was crisscrossing Europe and Asia, testing mock-ups of what would one day become tablet computers. The main attraction of our prototypes?They were a new category on the power-mobility...
Unvarnished
In 2013, the US Army’s Chief of Staff ordered a team of officers to draft an honest, undiluted history of the Iraq War. He said the army wasted the first few years in Iraq relearning lessons because no one had produced a proper study of the mistakes made in the...
2 Million
Newspapers everywhere have picked up the Associated Press story on predictions of 2 million people in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Who is behind that forecast? In The Curious Science of Counting a Crowd, Rob Goodier says “when turnout implies clout, politicians and...
A Sense of Purpose
Purpose-driven brands take stands on issues linked to human or planetary betterment. Instead of merely touting their products, they talk about social and environmental impact. Forbes says when brand owners add purpose to the equation, they are seeking a deeper...
Sorry, Charlie
Fox News Network’s Alexandra Deabler says the canned tuna industry is in decline because younger generations want their foods trendier and less-processed. Andy Mecs, VP of Marketing for Star-Kist, takes that explanation a step further, saying “A lot of millennials...
Artificial Intelligence and Online Dating
Millions of Americans have used online dating services. These days one in five romantic relationships begin online. What was once considered the act of a desperate loser is now seen by three out of four InterWeb users to be a practical and efficient way to meet...
Brain Drain
Nearly half of American smartphone owners say they can’t live without it. I guess not, when on average, Americans check theirs 85 times a day. Everyone* knows that using smartphones is a distraction. But few know that even when we turn them off, they continue to...
Before You Buy Your Christmas Tree
What percent of the 90 million US households that display a Christmas tree will use an artificial one? As is common with statistics, it depends upon the source. The American Christmas Tree Association says 81%, while the National Christmas Tree Association says 44%....
How a Fly Changes Human Behavior
Q. Why did researchers etch flies into airport urinals around the world? A. Because men like to aim. Spillage around urinals has always been a problem for restroom maintenance people. Aad Kieboom, Manager of Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport, says installation of flies has...
Insert Tab A into Slot A
Americans are famous for ignoring instruction manuals and plowing right in. Men are worse about it than women, and the younger we are, the less we bother with instructions or advice. There are many reasons for this, but the biggest ones are that instruction manuals...
Nipper Favored His Master’s Voice
In 1899, when offered this painting at sale, the Edison Bell Company rejected it, saying "dogs don't listen to phonographs." Dogs incarcerated at the pound are not having the same soothing experience as dogs spending the day being pampered at the doggie spa. Kennelled...
Which of the Seven Dwarfs is the Tallest?
It's impossible to say, as they're always wearing hats. And what's the point, anyway? None are tall in the absolute sense, so who cares which of seven tiny creatures is the "tallest" of a bunch by a millimeter? Any differences in height among the seven is...
Second Anniversary
Last week was the second anniversary of my weekly articles. I've written more than 100 of them in succession, usually on the topic of information and misinformation and often involving items in the news. To those of you who have been loyal readers all along -...
Second Prize Is a Set of Steak Knives
A study of 1,500 salespeople who were promoted to managerial roles found outstanding sales performance predicted managerial failure more often than not. Why? Because the skills that made them successful salespeople were not the skills they needed to become successful...
How the TED Talks Became the Ted Baxter Talks
The first TED talks brought together outstanding thinkers from T(echnology), E(ntertainment), and D(esign) tackling difficult problems and solving them with insight and creativity. Once intellectually stimulating presentations, TED talks have devolved into shallow...
The Glamour of International Business Travel
After a long day of flying and hours of the weary traveler's shuffle-stop-shuffle-stop through immigration, baggage, and customs, I arrived at the airport rental car line as hot and tired as the dozen or so people waiting in line ahead of me. There were sixteen...
McCadillac
Let me see if I have this straight: Cadillac struggled to sell cars, so their solution was to leave Detroit for New York, where they struggled to sell cars, so their solution was to leave New York for Detroit. Really? Four years ago, Cadillac hired aging...
Cool
Thomas Dorgan was an American cartoonist who died in 1929. According to his obituary in the NY Times, he introduced many slang terms into the popular culture. Among them were some that are gone and some that lasted. When you said something was the cat’s pajamas or the...
How Your Company’s Research is Like Drug Trials
Those who provide the money for research want to hear good news, so it is not surprising that many researchers are willing to see they get it. How? One way is by interpreting findings in a positive light. We see this in particular when the goal of a study is...
Cookies & Milk
"Our new and improved labels and boxes of "Cookies & Milk" will remind you of your favorite childhood cookie, dunked in sweet, creamy v'nilla milk!" Two quick questions: Q1. Which age group is the target? Q2. What type of products are these? A1. Most of us would...
Put On Your Thinking Caps
Six Thinking Hats is a system for conducting work sessions that claims to overcome the problems of factionalism, arguing, and groupthink. Different ways of thinking are represented by different colored hats. Participants are directed to "put on" these figurative hats...
I Think We Can All Agree, Don’t You?
Most of us know groupthink is the situation where people in meetings are pressured to agree with the stance championed by the most senior executive. We know it occurs when consensus is considered more valuable than asking questions, challenging the status quo,...
The Other Wheel of Fortune
The NYTimes’ Daniel Slotnik wrote a great obituary about a bewildered-looking man in a rumpled suit who won millions of dollars playing roulette. The man claimed to have used a computer program to create a winning system. He lied. What he did was observe very, very...
McBummer
A story in Fortune said McDonald’s partnership with UberEats is bringing in younger customers. A Global Data report said McDonald’s has seen an increase in customers 50 and older. A CNBC article said McDonald’s is losing customers. Wait a minute - more younger...
Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and Beer
Smart businesspeople know formal research studies aren’t always needed. Sometimes it’s about reading signs, like the trackers in old cowboy movies. According to Butch and Sundance, Lord Baltimore was the very best at following a trail and anticipating the next move...
An Automotive Brand Loyalty Surprise
Priceonomics writes stories about data provided by their customers. They say they are obsessed with creating and spreading quality, data-driven information. Their latest release is titled Which Car Brands Have the Most Loyal Owners? When we took a closer look,...
My Smart TV Is Doing What?
Since the earliest days of television, Nielsen has ruled the TV audience-measuring roost. Using a combination of set meters, code readers, and personal diaries, they have collected Americans’ viewing habits and sold the data to networks and advertisers. But they’re in...
How To Be As Successful As Buffett, Gates, and Cuban in 15 Seconds
Warren Buffett spends 80% of his day reading, Mark Cuban reads three hours a day, and Bill Gates reads a book a week. Most successful people agree that reading books is important because it is a difficult mental task that requires focus and guides deeper...
Ford’s Aha! Moment
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s John Stoll, Ford’s president of global markets, says he is going to turn the advertising world on its head. Ford will laser-target us with very specific ads online, using algorithms that mine social media and online...
Online Reviews: Fact or Fiction?
Most of us have read about the Virginia restaurant that refused to serve a White House staffer and within 24 hours found ten thousand negative reviews had been posted on Yelp. Yelp’s reaction was to say the restaurant’s rating had been affected by reactions to news...
Can I Buy You a Drink?
The National Institutes of Health have shut down a controversial study of how moderate drinking promotes good health after a task force found severe ethical and scientific lapses in the study’s planning and execution. Credibility for sale. The NYTimes reported that...
The Brand App Experience
There are more than five million mobile apps, yet consumers only download a tiny fraction of them, and regularly use no more than 20 or 30 a month. Mobile users favor them over websites and expect them to be fast, comprehensive, and easy to use. How big is the mobile...
7 Things You Don’t Know About Wireless-only People
The Centers for Disease Control released a study that showed some things many of us would already have supposed to be true. For the first time ever, a majority of U.S. homes are cellphone-only. Ten years ago, nine of ten U.S. households had a landline, and now...
A.I. vs H.I.
An article in Gizmodo says scientists have developed a way to identify people by their walk. They did this in the highly controlled environment of a lab where study subjects walked on a special pressure-sensitive floor while being filmed. An A.I. system analyzed...
Let’s Use the Internet to Vote on Our New Flag
Estonia is in northern Europe, just south of Finland and just west of Russia. It was part of the USSR until 1991, when it declared its independence. Sten Hankewitz, writing in Estonian World, tells us that when several small districts in the Kanepi region recently...
The Nina, the Pinta, and the Mayochup
Columbus did not discover America. You might say he was the first European to arrive in the western hemisphere, but evidence suggests the Vikings got there 500 years before him. And never mind the Asians who 15,000 years ago came across the land bridge that connected...
TIDAL Wave
You already know music streaming is worth billions of dollars. Spotify, Apple and Pandora are big names, but did you know about TIDAL? Owned by Jay Z, TIDAL claims that Kanye West’s The Life Of Pablo was streamed by its customers 250 million times in just ten days and...
Where Are Your Ancestors From?
It depends. Phil Rogers, a Chicago news reporter, recently sent samples from home test kits to several online DNA sequencing services. One told him his ancestors were from Ireland and Scotland. Another said Portugal. Others said Scandinavia, Peru, and Afghanistan. How...
How to Lead a Group to Make Bad Decisions
Begin by ignoring the principles of good decision-making and problem-solving. This is easiest if you don’t bother to learn what they are. Announce at the beginning of every meeting the course of action you’ve already decided upon. This way, your group needn’t bother...
Big Data, Artificial Intelligence – and Cockroaches
Stephen Chen writes in The South China Post that the world’s largest cockroach farm is using Big Data and Artificial Intelligence to breed 6 billion adult cockroaches a year. They are the raw materials of the production process for a cockroach-based “healing potion”...
The Sky Is Falling!
In her excellent article in the New York Times: Lies, Damned Lies, and One Very Misleading Statistic, Amanda Taub takes a closer look at a sexual misconduct scandal reported in The Sun, a British tabloid. Their headline shrieked that “a bombshell report” had found “UN...
The Swiss Army and Their Knife
During the late 1880s, the Swiss Army decided to purchase a new folding pocket knife for their soldiers. It was to be suitable for use by the army for two things other knives couldn't do: opening canned field rations and disassembling the Swiss Army rifle, an...
You Say Potato
In my early days as a researcher, I had proudly produced what I believed to be an excellent piece of research only to be told - after the fact, of course - that it wasn’t what sponsors were looking for. It was easy to blame them; their real dissatisfaction was a...
A Little Bird Told Me
An excellent article by Steve Lohr in The New York Times tells us False News Spreads Faster and Wider, and Humans Are to Blame. He cites a study by Sinan Aral from MIT’s Sloan School of Management that analyzed ten years of Twitter stories spread by three million...
Who Let The Dogs In?
More than half of dog owners share their beds with their dogs, about the same number who regard the dog as a member of their family. Size matters. According the America Pet Products Association, 32% of large dogs sleep with their owners, compared to 41% of...
Show Me the Money
United Airlines announced last week it would stop giving bonuses to its employees. Individual bonuses would be replaced by a lottery that would give a few big prizes to a few lucky winners. The stated purpose was to increase motivation, build excitement, and...
How To Gain 11 Pounds
USA Today says 90% of Americans don’t like to cook. A Harris poll says 80% do. Harvard Business Review says 10% love to cook and 45% hate it. Why the disparity? Some is due to samples and methods, and some is due to using terms that are closely related but not the...
Musical Chairs
Faced with large numbers of battlefield casualties arriving en masse, Army doctors needed to quickly determine which cases required immediate attention, which were urgent, and which could wait. This assigning of priorities and resources to one of three broad...
Which Is It?
Most businesses define customer problems as unwanted headaches, obstacles, messes, and predicaments. The exceptional ones don’t. Exceptional leaders understand problems are usually of our own making and they take the responsibility for them. They see problems as...
Order, Please
Most Western societies read from left to right and from top to bottom. As a result, we quite naturally assume that when it comes to lists of things, the most important ones come first. This has a profound but often ignored effect on how we go about building lists....
Deities, Ghosts, and Aliens From Other Planets
There are true believers in each category. Those who believe in dieties are fragmented into hundreds of religions and sects. Each "knows" theirs is the one true way. How many religions are there in the world today? Most of us know the top five: Christianity, Islam,...
The Other Levi-Strauss
Beginning in the 15th century and for the next 200 years, European explorers and traders roamed the world in search of peoples to conquer and resources to plunder. In doing so, they came into contact with people who looked, dressed, and acted in ways they had...
Marriage Causes Divorce
Newspapers provide their advertisers with lots of reader data. My first apprentice-level research job out of grad school was with a Scripps-Howard newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee. One of my assignments was to seek correlations without regard to causality. The goal of...
Your Shower Is Leaking
The co-op board told my friend her shower was leaking into the apartments below. She was instructed to under no circumstances use the shower until it was repaired. Faced with an undiagnosed amount of serious plumbing work, she began by going to the home improvement...
Shop ‘Til Somebody Drops
Thousands of years ago, we were all hunters of wild animals and gatherers of wild foods. Responsibilities were allocated by gender. Hunting was a male task, as men were bigger and stronger. Women's responsibilities included child-rearing, cooking, and gathering...
Tornadoes
In the United States 1,200 tornadoes a year kill 50 people. Texas has 149 tornadoes a year, Kansas has 93, and Oklahoma has 64. So Texas is the most dangerous place, right? That's the deduction most people make, but a few of us know the importance of taking more...
Nothing Says Christmas Like…
Nothing says Christmas like a set of KFC Christmas tree ornaments, an idea perhaps inspired by the Japanese tradition of eating Christmas dinner at KFC. It is so popular that Japanese customers must place their Christmas orders two months in advance. Highlights of...
Before You Make That New Year’s Resolution…
In the New York Times this morning, Tim Herrera wrote about how we make New Year’s resolutions: “We set an under-defined and overly ambitious goal for the new year, give up two weeks in, and by the end of January, forget the whole thing ever happened.” Half of us make...
Nuts
William Black opened a store in New York City in 1926 where he sold roasted nuts. As the story goes, he called it Chock Full o’ Nuts because the tiny (6 by 20 foot) store was crammed full of dozens of types of nuts. Within six years, he had more than 100 nut shops in...
Mixed Emotions
U.S. President Ronald Reagan liked to define “mixed emotions” as the feelings a man has as he watches his mother-in-law drive over the cliff in his new Cadillac. Another example involves how driverless vehicles will be programmed to react in emergencies. One is to act...
Beachfront Property For Sale
A flyer pinned on a bulletin board advertised Beachfront Property For Sale and featured this photo: The next day, while on our way to Jemma’s Tree House for lunch, we stopped on the road between Crown Point and Speyside and I took some photos of my own. The situation...
Gatekeepers
Thousands of years ago, a gatekeeper was a roadway toll-taker or the person whose job was to prevent people from entering a restricted area without permission. In the modern workplace, gatekeepers control access to information. Information Gatekeepers are common in...
Dear Diary
Sixty-seven years ago, Nielsen issued their first television audience ratings. They claimed their sample represented an accurate cross-section of U.S. geographies, markets, homes, families, people, incomes, educations, ages, ethnicities, and more. Two ways of...
Pay Only For What You Keep
In 1926, the Book-of-the-Month Club started with only a few thousand subscribers. By 1951, it had sold 100 million books. The business model worked then, and it works now. Clothing retailers have wholeheartedly embraced the subscription model, and why not? It allows...
Coconut Grove
Yet another scientific study has been repudiated. Research that demonstrated how to get school kids to choose apples instead of cookies by branding the fruit has been renounced by the Journal of the American Medical Association. This comes long after the Cornell...
Mind The Gap
I showed my MBA students a newspaper article that said Trinidad & Tobago’s Facebook account rate of 97% ranked #1 in the world. When asked to explain why T&T was at the top, every student readily produced good-sounding reasons. Most concluded they would...
It’s Time To Eat
Grossly overweight people are the subject of many studies. In one interesting experiment, scientists manipulated the clocks so when they said 12 noon, it was really 11am. All the subjects went to the dining room, because it was time to eat. The scientists fiddled in...
We Know Exactly What We’re Doing
Executives make a lot of assumptions, and many of them are wrong. Take disposable diapers, for example. Diaperanswers.org says P&G invented the disposable diaper. MotherJones.com says it was Johnson and Johnson. P&G or J&J, take your pick. Marketers and...
Measuring Ad Effectiveness
What makes ads work is the power of repetition - ads work because they pound names and ideas into our heads over and over again. How else do you explain 21 straight years of Mr Whipple being embarrassed when caught squeezing the Charmin? Some ads work better than...
Who’s Guarding the Henhouse?
Digital advertising is a $200 billion a year bandwagon - and a murky one, too. The term “jumping on the bandwagon” refers to following a crowd or trend, particularly one that seems assured of success. The digital ad stampede is lately being challenged by a few...
Jumping On The Bandwagon
Long before television and radio, circuses traveled from town to town by way of horse-drawn wagons that paraded right down Main Street, USA. Elephants would be first - bizarre creatures never seen before by simple country folk. Next would be a fancy wagon with a...
What Would You Do To Save a Dollar?
Recent news is that Domino’s is testing public reaction to driverless delivery of pizzas. Except they're not actually testing driverless delivery. For the tests, there are three people in the car - a driver to take over when necessary, an engineer to monitor the...
How It Took Us 100 Years to Face the Facts
Today, 35,000 people are killed each year in auto accidents in the US, the same number as in 1951. So seat belts, air bags, and safer vehicle design are clearly of no help, right? Wrong. The totals are the same, but the percentages are vastly different. Today, twice...
Powdered Eggs
Powdered eggs really came into their own during WWII, when the Armed Forces needed to feed millions of men in the European and Pacific theaters of operation. Powdered eggs were an excellent solution to the problem of shipping foodstuffs to far flung locales. But the...
What They’re Really Saying
Here are some of the things we all hear around the workplace, and what they really mean: I’m an expert multitasker. I am unable to concentrate on anything. I am continually diverted from what I should be doing by anything that catches my eye. Nothing ever gets my...
70 Million Leading Edge Rejectors
A recent WSJ article advised men over 40 that to be fashionable, they should buy $845 sneakers to wear with a $2,000 sweater. The definition of a fashionable person is one who dresses according to the current trend. So if we want to be fashionable, we should do what...
99 Cents Worth of Branding
I bought the e-version of Bob Hoffman's The Ad Contrarian for 99 cents last week and enjoyed his very different way of looking at the advertising business. Here are his opinions on branding and millennials: Branding. As soon as brand became a verb, branding became an...
Try This Experiment at Home
The next time a prescription drug ad comes on, turn the sound off and watch the scenes of happy people enjoying active lives with families, friends, and pets. The next time that ad runs, leave the sound on, close your eyes and listen. You may discover how the list of...
A Closer Look at Personality Tests
Personality tests claim to provide accurate descriptions of who we are. Before they came along, it was fashionable to study the shape and size of the skull as an indication of character and mental ability. People thought how you interpreted ambiguous images of...
Prescription Drug Commercials
Prior to 1997, pharmaceutical companies could only market directly to doctors. When the Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration allowed television ads for prescription drugs, budgets swung towards Direct To Consumer (DTC) ads. The annual...
A Closed Mind Is a Small Mind: 12 Very Different People Weigh In
“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” - Albert Einstein “A mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work if it does not open.” - Frank Zappa “It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of views.” - George Eliot“ “Ignorance...
System 1 And System 2 Thinking
David Harris, President of Insight & Measurement, LLC, says the hot topic among researchers and marketers is System 1 thinking, as written about in Kahneman and Tversky’s 2011 bestseller, Thinking Fast and Slow. Harris and I agree that many who claim to understand...
Amazon Swallows Whole Foods
We’ve seen the stories about Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods and the many speculations for the reasons behind this decision. The big ones are customer data, distribution, logistics, and more consumer touchpoints, but there are others. Physical Contact. There are...
Who Would You Target?
In her excellent WSJ article, A Test of Loyalty at Macy’s, Miriam Gottfried says that 9% of Macy’s customers account for nearly half of all sales. This led to Macy’s decision to develop ways to reward these high-end customers with more brands available exclusively at...
Crazy Goats
In the 8th century BC, a Greek shepherd found his goats behaving strangely. Nearby was a chasm, with vapors coming out of the ground. When the shepherd got close, he inhaled the fumes and began to have strange visions of the future. Word got around, as you would...
Three Ways To Test Ads
For those companies that bother with advertising testing research (fewer than you think), there are three basic ways they go about it. The most common is the Disaster Check. Here companies do one or two quick focus groups after creating an ad. They only want to see if...
The Golden Slide
Once upon a time, there was a joint meeting of the Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Better Business Bureau. There were 800 stakeholders in the audience and I was a featured presenter. My assignment was to present a full report on the results of a huge...
Why Did Our Plan Fail?
The senior executives decided the company needed a state-of-the-art customer service program. They appointed a Project Team and directed them to implement the vision. The team's first task was to write an action plan. They spent weeks putting together a detailed...
Ten Essential Reads For Everyone Who Uses Information
Graduate students in the MBA classes I taught asked for book recommendations enough times that I finally put a list together. The first four involve personal development On Writing Well, by William Zinsser. Fundamental principles and insights for anyone who wants to...
Baby, You Can Drive My Car
Unless you’ve been on a desert island for some years, you know that driverless vehicles are right around the corner. The idea is AutoAutos will be safer and more efficient. Commercial applications see real benefits in no longer having to pay drivers who need to sleep....
Advertising Genius or Something Else?
We Are Unlimited is a 200-person agency formed by Omnicom to work only on McDonald’s ads. On their website, they say “We read culture. And then we create the ideas that change it.” One of their ideas is an ad that capitalizes on “how teens and twenty-somethings are...
Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?
Two criteria for establishing research quality are validity and reliability. Most of us know what these terms mean in daily life, but few of us know what they really mean when it comes to evaluating the credibility of study findings we read about in reports or in the...
Breaking Up With QWERTY
Folk wisdom says the QWERTY keyboard was invented in 1875 to slow typists who were overwhelming the machinery of primitive typewriters. The truth is that it was designed for the convenience of telegraph operators who needed to convert Morse Code's dots and dashes into...
Everything Old Is New Again
Amazon’s cashierless grocery store is designed to allow shoppers to skip checkout lines and cash registers. The idea is that we scan our smartphones when we enter, pick up whatever we like, and walk out, with charges automatically posted to our accounts. Things worked...
Hurry, Hurry, Step Right Up!
Circuses. Most of us have been to circuses where tamed animals are trained to perform for the amusement of spectators. In general, the less the performing animals act as they normally would, the more we are entertained. Dancing bears in tutus. Seals balancing balls on...
Doing The Laundry
We were asked to survey users of stacked washer-dryer units to learn about their likes and dislikes. We agreed, but only if we began with some site visits so we could observe how people used them in their homes. Stacked washer/dryer combos are designed to save space....
What Do You See at the Airport?
Every day, nearly four million people fly on airplanes. Think of the complexity of what’s involved. Websites are searched, travel agencies are contacted, calendars checked, phone calls made, messages sent, relatives consulted, and so on. A massive worldwide system of...
Starting A New Business? Read This First
Many people are tired of working in companies where they feel they are not valued. Some have come to professional crossroads. All want to express themselves. This is the theme for all those banking and investment commercials. Spread your wings and fly. Realize your...
Things We Know But We Don’t Know We Know Them
A fellow named Harold Garfinkel held that we engage daily in the building up of rules for behavior like an oyster builds a pearl, slowly and irrevocably. He also pointed out that we follow these gradually accumulated rules, without knowing we’re doing so, or...
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain
There is an excellent article in the February 15, 2017 Wall Street Journal called A Generation Living For Likes. Here is a link to it. In it, Laura Vanderkam talks about Donna Freitas’ book, The Happiness Effect. “The real downside of Facebook, Instagram and their...
Who Wants Dessert?
In an earlier century, the would-be entrepreneurs had an idea for a new business: home delivery of desserts. No one in their area was doing it, and they would have the market all to themselves. A shoestring operation, they had budgeted for only two focus groups. We...
Who Says We’re Satisfied?
Most people aren’t surprised when we tell them 80% of companies say they provide superior customer service. But most are surprised when we tell them only 8% of those companies’ customers agree. This means 72% of companies who say they provide superior customer service...
Wishful Thinking
As humans, we accept as truth the things we believe and reject the things we don’t. Most of us call this wishful thinking. Psychology Today calls it the direct influence of desire on beliefs. As a result, we are basing many of our decisions on interpretations instead...
You Can’t Teach An Old Dog New Tricks
Whether we call them adages, aphorisms, or proverbs, they are old and well-known sayings commonly held to be true and often given as advice. QUICK QUIZ: Ask yourself if you agree with each of these sayings (Yes/No). Birds of a feather flock together. Opposites...
Reader Beware
If I told you results from my survey said 63.5% of new car buyers want more cupholders and 36.8% want black seats, you might believe me, especially if I showed you a serious-looking report, or better yet, a dynamic slide presentation. If I admitted my study didn’t...
Big Data
Only recently popularized, Big Data has been around for a long time. It has been nearly 50 years since some exceptional Stanford students developed a sophisticated statistical package to analyze huge data sets on mainframes. Their idea was to use this very powerful...
Let’s Tie One For The Gipper
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal claims an increase in overtime games in college football is explained by greater parity and cites a number of sources to bolster the contention. When the football (not statistics) experts suggest reasons why parity is...
Why Are We So Proud of Being Multitaskers?
Multitasking is for many a status symbol, a demonstration of their importance. Or is it? We took a closer look at multitasking, and here is what we found: Almost everyone is wrong about almost everything involving multitasking. Most people think they're good at...
Q. What’s The Difference Between a Good Haircut and a Bad One?
Did you know that to become a barber requires you successfully complete1,500 hours of training and a two-year apprenticeship? That it takes even longer to get a cosmetology license? Yet MBA programs say you can learn to be a researcher by taking a single course that...
Who Gets Hired for Research Manager and Director Jobs?
We took a closer look at hundreds of online job postings for Market Research Managers and Directors and here are four things we found. Educational Levels. Four in ten required no university degree at all. Half required an undergraduate degree and only one in ten...
You Get What You Pay For
FREE! is the headline, but there are two other claims shared by every one of the dozens of Free DIY Online Survey companies. Read this and see how you feel about their claims. Our product is easy to use! Most say their tools require absolutely no previous experience...
Meat Loaf Was Wrong: Two Out of Three IS Bad
Cubicles were a cost-effective office solution with so many negatives that Scott Adams earned fame and fortune poking fun at them in his Dilbert cartoons. Even more cost-effective are open-plan layouts, which now make up more than two out of three business office...
Did You Wash Your Hands? Of Course Not
We all know that people will tell you one thing and do another. Social desirability is the term behavioral scientists use to describe how people will deliberately give false responses so as to present themselves in the best light. They'll tell us they do things they...
Dewey Defeats Truman – Again
Early Tuesday night, the NY Times said Hillary Clinton was the overwhelming favorite to win the presidential election. Wednesday morning this false conclusion sounded like the most famous election headline of all time. The problems with political polling are the same...
McDonalds Is At It Again
Earlier this year the big news for McDonald's was how their newly-introduced All-Day Breakfast was drawing new customers and increasing profits. If you read any of these articles, the chances were slim that you would have learned that there were other factors that...
One Size Fits No One Well
Enough With the Wacky Safety Videos, a recent WSJ article, tells us how it has become the norm among airlines to produce big-budget safety videos, and how customers are reacting to this phenomenon. Airlines, emphasizing entertainment over information, think these new...
Leading Edge Rejectors
They were the first to get on the technology bus, and now they're the first to get off. Seventy million Baby Boomers were born in the years immediately after World War II. They were well into managerial and professional careers when desktop computers and cellphones...
H2CUS. CU@4.
One effect of too-small and hard-to-use keyboards is the shortening of words and messages. This spins itself off into a linguistic subculture where understanding and using code words are evidence of being well-informed and up-to-date — technological sophisticates with...
A 534-Word History of Tech
Thirty years ago, the first Motorola Brick cellphones weighed two pounds, were as big as your shoe, and cost $4,000. The first ones were owned by four different groups of Leading Edge Adopters: status seekers, business people who spent a lot of time out of the office,...
Status Seekers
A hundred years ago, a new comic strip was published in the New York Globe. Called Keep Up With The Joneses, it featured the adventures of a family vainly trying to keep up with their well-to-do neighbors. Mr and Mrs McGinis and their daughter were social climbers,...
FOMO and Treadmills
In an earlier century, Fear Of Missing Out was not being able to talk about last night’s episode of All In The Family, or Cheers, or 60 Minutes, or Seinfeld. Now it’s the fear of not knowing what’s hottest and most current, what’s breaking and what’s trending, and...
Herd Behavior
As much as we humans like to think of ourselves as sophisticated, there are many things we do at animal level. One of these is herd behavior, our tendency to blindly follow the lead of others and go with the group. And while this is often a choice, as when we follow...