The 3 Sources of Happiness, and what they can teach about successful projects

The 3 Sources of Happiness, and what they can teach about successful projects:

When I realized I wanted to expand my online presence I was concerned that the duplicate posting on several networks would serve no more than to allow people to read what I post in the manner in which pleases them. As it turns out, however, I am learning a lot from every community I join, and enjoy the small if important differences between each blogging/microblogging/social service.

What I enjoyed this time specifically was finding some nice blogs on psychology through the networking process (like the one linked here) which is an interest of mine, but also, in my opinion, an important aspect of anything we do – understanding psychology, even in it’s basics, allows you to at least recognize research that can support your work, and maybe even apply some of the research methodologies to it. I looked at the linked article from the perspective of developing crowdsourcing solutions for instance, as it is my current technology of interest.

Any crowdsourcing project requires, from the little I’ve read and researched, four components:

1. A needed service –  one that can’t be completed by one human or by a computer – that can be split into component tasks that are each achievable by a single human being.
2. A method to assign the component tasks to crowdsourcers efficiently.
3. A method to combine the component tasks (which could be planned as a new task in the project) that also ensures no errors were made.
4. An incentive for the crowdsourcers to do the task.

I find that each of these requirements can benefit from applying knowledge from the ranks of psychological research:

1. To define a service well enough to be able to split it into tasks is hard. Applying some of the critical thinking needed for psychology research questions can only help. If the task is a cognitive one, understanding the building blocks of cognition is a main task of cognitive psychology.
2. Workflows for organisations are often devised not by managers, but by professional advisors, who studied organisational psychology. This field of study could support the workflow of assigning component tasks to croudsourcers efficiently and provide tools to measure this efficiency.
3. Once again, defining the combination process professionally can make it into a human task – another link in the chain. But even if you chose an algorithm to combine your workers’ tasks – understanding the human mind, cognition and though processes have been essential in algorithm development (a research paper written about Foldit, the protein modeling game, showed that users discovered during one year of collaboration a modeling algorithm than matched the efficiency of a professional grade algorithm developed for years).
4. Inciting people is also something psychologists study – publicity, payment models, ranking – any method you chose to reward croudsources can only benefit from being backed by psychological research than can help you gather a crowd for the project. The article linked, for instance, could serve as a great guide for a crowdsourcing project – by developing microtasks in a way that is enjoyable, challenging, and supporting an important project (you’d have to convince them of that, off course!) would make people more inclined to contribute, even if they’re not payed for it, as it would bring them joy.

And isn’t that, after all, the greatest service to give?

via tumblr http://vehpus.tumblr.com/post/15589819273 at January 10, 2012 at 01:56AM. Originally posted on http://vehpus.tumblr.com

The ability to work together is what makes us unique

The ability to work together is what makes us unique:

The linked article discusses several studies made in order to find the difference between humans and other animals, specifically apes. The goal was to understand what development in humans was key to making us different than other species. What the article suggests is incredible – the author claims our social skills, not our intelligence. is what made us the dominant species on the planet.

It only makes sense then that the development of the web – an incredible social tool – is having such a major effect on the world these days, as did other social advances (the printed press, the radio, telephone etc’) over the course of history. If the theory holds, the web could be our newest tool used to develop our society by socializing, learning from each other, working together to further our society.

Thanks to http://into-mind.com/ for her post discussing this article.

via tumblr http://vehpus.tumblr.com/post/15480712527 at January 08, 2012 at 03:04AM. Originally posted on http://vehpus.tumblr.com

Using the Internet for Psychology Studies

Using the Internet for Psychology Studies:

This article is great for two reasons: first, it links nicely to my previous post on the value of writing; secondly, the method used to study the research question in the psychology study was interesting – it used kids’ interactions on the internet, to learn something about their psychological well-being.

The only thing that seems strange to me is this – once the researchers figured out they wanted to study the interactions of students over the internet, why did they suffice with picking a few students from nearby schools, rather than try to pick them up from the internet itself.

Obviously there are many challenges to overcome in order to conduct a valid psychology study (having taken an introductory course in psychology in Israel’s Open University out of general interest in the field, I only began to grasp the complexity of these studies). Psychologists need to monitor so many variables in their studies, it’s probably understandable their natural instinct would be to keep the study up close and personal.

But what I still don’t see in the field of psychology, unlike many other fields, is serious considerations of the merits a web platform for psychology research. The article itself provides several reasons to at least consider it – the use of blogs and commenting, which could be easier to monitor if conducted in a controlled web environment, and the ability to reach a wider testing audience (which, as the researchers profess, was gender biassed in their study).

It’s true that using the web comes with many risks, including spamming, flaming, and trolling in comments to name just a few, but I think a good and controlled environment, with the proper incentive to participate (while still complying with requirements to avoid harming the test participants) could be amazing. Imagine a computer game designed with sensory tests that could gather data from around the world? Or how about testing cooperation under very controlled circumstances? I’ve actually read an article about Spanish researchers testing the prisoners dilema in a computer hall with 1000 students – but why not set up the same experiment with 100,000? The technology is there – all that’s missing are willing designers to plan the research!

via tumblr http://vehpus.tumblr.com/post/15312980516 at January 05, 2012 at 12:52AM. Originally posted on http://vehpus.tumblr.com