If someone had told Sisyphus that he was no longer required to push a large boulder up a mountainside for all eternity . . . would he have carried on anyway? According to a 2010 paper in the journal Psychological Science, he might well have. “Our research suggests that Sisyphus was better off with his punishment […]
Tag: work
The scourge of ‘Alphabetism’ (new paper from professor Zax)
Professor Zax, who is (amongst other things) an anthroponomastician at the Department of Economics, University of Colorado at Boulder, US, presents (along with co-author Alexander Cauley) a new 48 page working paper which suggests that (males) who have a surname initial which occurs towards the end of the alphabet are more likely to end up […]
Retaliation on a voodoo doll (symbolizing an abusive supervisor) restores justice [new study]
Mistreated by a supervisor at work? Would it make you feel a little bit better if you could, say, torment a voodoo doll? Professor Lindie Hanyu Liang (at the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada) and colleagues have investigated such things. In return for a $1 payment, 195 full-time employees […]
On the nature of creepiness (study)
“Surprisingly, until now there has never been an empirical study of ‘creepiness’ “ This situation was rectified by Professor Francis T. McAndrew and Sara S. Koehnke of the Department of Psychology, Knox College, Galesburg, US, in a 2016 paper for the journal New Ideas in Psychology. The team stopped short of giving an exact definition […]
Do Interruptions Affect Quality of Work? (study)
Dr. Cyrus K. Foroughi (U.S. Naval Research Lab) is, amongst other things, an expert on interruptions. In 2014, working with Nicole E. Werner, Erik T. Nelson and Deborah A. Boehm-Davis he was able to experimentally demonstrate that interruptions can affect the quality of work – in a negative way. Thus it’s suggested that the answer […]
‘Functional Stupidity’ – updated (new study)
Back in 2013, Improbable reported on the emergence of a new organisational concept – ‘Functional Stupidity’, see ‘A Stupidity-Based Theory of Organizations’. Now, the idea of ‘Functional Stupidity’ has been refined by Roland Paulsen, who is a researcher at the Department of Business Administration, Lund University, Sweden. “I distinguish 10 ‘stupidity rationales’ emanating from reflective types […]
Smelling bodies at the office (corporeal porosity)
As Dr. David Abram wrote in his 1996 book ‘The Spell of the Sensuous’ : “[…] the boundaries of a living body are open and indeterminate: more like membranes than barriers … so that it is very difficult to discern, at any moment, precisely where this living body begins and where it ends.” Such indeterminacies […]
Virtual hand shadow theatrics
If you, like Raymond Crowe shown above, are a professional hand-shadow artist (viz. a shadowgrapher according to Wikpedia) then you might think that your job is one of the relatively few that is unlikely to be replicated by a computer any time soon. Think again. Work underway at the IMAGINE (Intuitive Modeling and Animation for […]
What the dog ate. What the scientist reported.
A dog at a scientist’s lab work. The scientist then wrote a report about the dog eating the scientist’s lab work. The report is: “Thallium toxicosis in a dog consequent to ingestion of Mycoplasma agar plates,” Birgit Puschner [pictured here], Marguerite M. Basso and Thomas W. Graham, Journal of Veterinary Diagnostic Investigation, vol. 24 no. 1, […]
Play, Usurpation and Boredom (at work)
If you, reader, work for a living, would you say that “… work and play are largely indistinguishable in the postindustrial organization”? Some may say yes, some may say no, and yet others may remain undecided. Thus the ‘Should work be play?’ / ’Should play be work?’ questions remain very much open for study – […]