Cognitive Psychology | Alessandro Perilli

The Three Dimensions of the Good Life

peris — Sun, 22 Sep 2024 17:56:09 +0000

We present empirical evidence that happiness, meaning, and psychological richness are related but distinct and desirable aspects of a good life.

The post The Three Dimensions of the Good Life first appeared on Alessandro Perilli.

Digitally-native teenagers’ expectations about social interactions in real life

peris — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 10:28:15 +0000

You can’t overcome the 90–9–1 rule

peris — Fri, 11 Mar 2022 08:36:07 +0000

User participation often more or less follows a 90–9–1 rule:

90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions

…
The problem is that the overall system is not representative of average web users. On any given user-participation site, you almost always hear from the same 1% of users, who almost certainly differ from the 90% you never hear from. This can cause trouble for several reasons:

Customer feedback. If your company looks to Web postings for customer feedback on its products and services, you’re getting an unrepresentative sample.
Reviews. Similarly, if you’re a consumer trying to find out which restaurant to patronize or what books to buy, online reviews represent only a tiny minority of the people who have experiences with those products and services.
Politics. If a party nominates a candidate supported by the “netroots,” it will almost certainly lose because such candidates’ positions will be too extreme to appeal to mainstream voters. Postings on political blogs come from less than 0.1% of voters, most of whom are hardcore leftists (for Democrats) or rightists (for Republicans).
Search. Search engine results pages (SERP) are mainly sorted based on how many other sites link to each destination. When 0.1% of users do most of the linking, we risk having search relevance get ever more out of whack with what’s useful for the remaining 99.9% of users. Search engines need to rely more on behavioral data gathered across samples that better represent users, which is why they are building internet access services.
Signal-to-noise ratio. Discussion groups drown in flames and low-quality postings, making it hard to identify the gems. Many users stop reading comments because they don’t have time to wade through the swamp of postings from people with little to say.

…
How to Overcome Participation Inequality

You can’t.

The post You can’t overcome the 90–9–1 rule first appeared on Alessandro Perilli.

To be an aristocrat is largely to insist that, in the past, others have treated you as an aristocrat

peris — Sat, 01 Jan 2022 20:46:41 +0000

We can describe a simple formula here: a certain action, repeated, becomes customary; as a result, it comes to define the actor’s essential nature.
Alternately, a person’s nature may be defined by how others have acted toward him in the past.

To be an aristocrat is largely to insist that, in the past, others have treated you as an aristocrat (since aristocrats don’t really do anything in particular: most spend their time simply existing in some sort of putatively superior state) and therefore should continue to do so.

Much of the art of being such a person is that of treating oneself in such a manner that it conveys how you expect others to treat you: in the case of actual kings, covering oneself with gold so as to suggest that others do likewise.

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The specialness spiral

peris — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 09:48:09 +0000

This is what we call a specialness spiral. You take an ordinary item and forgo using it once. Because of that, you start to see it as a little more special. But because you see it as a little more special, at the next opportunity to use it, you say, “Well, maybe this is not a good enough opportunity,” so you pass up using it. It becomes a little more special. The next opportunity has to be even better, which means that it’s less likely to be used, so it becomes even more special. It’s this ratcheting upward of a specialness spiral where an item that started out very ordinary, through repeated lack of use eventually becomes quite special and seen more as a treasure.

The post The specialness spiral first appeared on Alessandro Perilli.

The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing

peris — Sun, 07 Nov 2021 22:26:10 +0000

The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing.

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Emotional stakes in decisions

peris — Sun, 10 Oct 2021 12:51:07 +0000

People who have no emotional stake in a decision can see what needs to be done sooner. — Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel

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A lot of data and the scientific method can do little against a good story

peris — Sun, 10 Oct 2021 09:17:10 +0000

“What evidence would you need to see to change your mind?” The honest answer to this question is usually: “I need a new story that’s more immediate, more vivid and most of all, more culturally aligned than the one I have now.” It took humans 100,000 years to invent the scientific method. Before that, we ... Read more

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