by david allan van nostrand | Aug 7, 2017 | Conformity, Fads, Items in the News
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 for Millennials As soon as brand became a...
by david allan van nostrand | Jul 24, 2017 | Conformity, Marketing, Organizational Behavior
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...
by david allan van nostrand | Feb 23, 2017 | Conformity, Human Behavior
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...
by david allan van nostrand | Feb 16, 2017 | Conformity, Human Behavior, Social Desirability
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...
by david allan van nostrand | Dec 22, 2016 | Conformity, Status, Unintended Consequences
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...
by david allan van nostrand | Nov 24, 2016 | Conformity, Human Behavior, Organizational Behavior
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...
