The cost of a phone agent’s smile

Humans who answer the phones in call centers are, in many organizations, requested or even required to smile, smile, smile. A team of researchers at Goethe-University Frankfurt in Germany and the University of Denver ran an experiment to see what this forced smiling does to the forced smilers…. —so begins today’s Improbable Innovation nugget, which appears in its entirety on […]

Improbable on Science Friday today: Things That Annoy Him

I’m going to be on NPR’s Science Friday program today. We’ll talk about one professor’s fascination with things that annoy him. That professor has published nearly 100 reports about things that annoy him. The reports themselves are not annoying — each report is short (typically just one or two pages) and clear. This segment will be at […]