Strategic Decievers

A group labeled "strategic deceivers" have a competitive advantage over other people. Researchers at Baylor University created a game giving players the opportunity to bid on an object for which they knew its true value, but the seller did not. Bidders fell into three groups. An honest group offered bids based on the true value, a conservative group made bids only casually related to the true value, while the 10 percent of the participants could be called strategists. They offered low bids when the real price was high and high bids when the price was low. By focusing on credibility, their bids seemed consistent and realistic to the sellers. Even more interesting, MRI's showed the strategists had different brain activity than the others in the regions related to complex decision-making. They made a greater effort to get into the mind of the other player and often bluffed. The people in this group also had above-average IQs.

Stephen Goforth

Keep Asking Questions

A few years ago, I got a call (on my communication device) from a Pittsburgh author named Chip Walter. He was co-writing a book with William Shatner (a.k.a Kirk) about how scientific breakthroughs first imagined on Star Trek foreshadowed today’s technological advances. Captain Kirk wanted to visit my virtual reality lab at Carnegie Mellon.

Shatner stayed for three hours and asked tons of questions. A colleague later said to me: “He just kept asking and asking. He doesn’t seem to get it.”

But I was hugely impressed. Kirk, I mean, Shatner was the ultimate example of a man who knew what he didn’t know, was perfectly willing to admit it, and didn’t want to leave until he understood. That’s heroic to me. I wish every grad student had that attitude.

Randy Pausch
The Last Lecture

Honest Signals

An MIT professor says he can read how much nervous energy you have by hooking you up to what he calls a “sociometer”. It’s a gadget that tracks nonverbal interactions. In one experiment, Sandy Pentland used it to predicte how well business plan pitches would be received just by looking at the tone of voice used to pitch the plan. Bottom line: It’s easy to mistake charisma for content. Pentland writes about the findings in his new book Honest Signals.