Progressfocused

I read Michael Cohen's book Disloyal. Here are some quotes from the book and some thoughts about the book and Trump.

The Social Progress Index (SPI) of 2020 has been published today.The SPI uses non-economic indicators to chart how well countries are doing.Read below how it works in the 163 countries described in the SPI. Overall, is the world continuing to make progress?How is your own doing?Are there certain things that clearly need improvement?Which countries are progressing the fastest?Which countries are actually declining?How is the United States doing in the era of Donald Trump?

We all have had to have difficult conversations at some point, like conversations where we say no to a request, give negative feedback, or communicate a negative decision or assessment. In these kinds of bad news conversations, people often experience a tension between two moral motivations, namely to be honest and to be benevolent. Emma Levine, Annabelle Roberts, and Taya Cohen explain, in a new paper, that people often make ineffective choices in how to deal with that tension, and they provide practical tips on how to better approach situations like this.

In most professions the quality of work performance depends mainly on human actions. In this human action, not only technical knowledge and skills are important, but also cooperation and communication skills. Collaboration is often important because people are usually responsible for achieving results together. They have to inform each other, support each other, teach each other things and clarify expectations. The situational communication model below can help you determine how to communicate effectively in different situations.

Feedback can be very valuable. Feedback, information about the effects of our behavior, can help us get better at what we do. By definition, we ourselves only have a limited insight into the effects of our actions. Other people look at what we do from a different perspective and can therefore see different things. Moreover, they may have more or different knowledge and skills, so that their feedback can be extra educational for us. Whether these positive effects of feedback are realized depends on what the feedback is about and how effectively the feedback is delivered. Here are some questions to make your feedback as effective as possible.

A paper by Bryan, Yeager & O'Brien (2019) sheds a new light on the replication crisis in psychology. An image that has emerged here and there of original authors as tinkering cheats and replicators as holy defenders of scientific morality must be revised. Replicators often take too many liberties, both in the design of their research and in the way in which they analyze data.

As parents, we play an important role in how children develop. We have a lot of influence on what they consider important and how they behave. But how we can best fulfill our role as a parent is not always easy to imagine.

If you had to point out one starting point in the development of self-determination theory, it should probably be Edward Deci's classic research into intrinsic motivation. He published that study in 1971, and it was the first major publication in a large series of publications that would follow from Ed Deci and Richard Ryan and an ever-expanding network of researchers. Here you can read a brief description of that study.

A recent publication by Walton & Brady (2019) describes 5 principles for reframing negative events. These principles can be applied by the person who has experienced a negative event. But also by others such as, parents, teachers, doctors, managers, and so on.