What Drives Success?

A SEEMINGLY un-American fact about America today is that for some groups, much more than others, upward mobility and the American dream are alive and well. It may be taboo to say it, but certain ethnic, religious and national-origin groups are doing strikingly better than Americans overall.

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It turns out that for all their diversity, the strikingly successful groups in America today share three traits that, together, propel success. The first is a superiority complex — a deep-seated belief in their exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite — insecurity, a feeling that you or what you’ve done is not good enough. The third is impulse control.
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US Military Scientists Solve the Fundamental Problem of Viral Marketing

Network theorists working for the US military have worked out how to identify the small “seed” group of people who can spread a message across an entire network
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Malcolm Gladwell on the Advantages of Disadvantages

In his new bestseller, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, Malcolm Gladwell looks at what happens when ordinary people confront powerful opponents. He starts the book by dissecting the classic tale of David and Goliath, challenging our beliefs about what the story tells us regarding underdogs and giants, and ultimately, our fundamental assumptions about power.

Wharton management professor Adam M. Grant recently interviewed Gladwell about his new book when he visited campus as a guest lecturer in the Authors@Wharton series. Gladwell shared why he never roots for the underdog, where he comes up with the ideas for his books and sets the record straight on the biggest misunderstandings about his work.

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

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For Better Social Skills, Scientists Recommend a Little Chekhov

Say you are getting ready for a blind date or a job interview. What should you do? Besides shower and shave, of course, it turns out you should read — but not just anything. Something by Chekhov or Alice Munro will help you navigate new social territory better than a potboiler by Danielle Steel.

That is the conclusion of a studypublished Thursday in the journal Science. It found that after reading literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction, people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence — skills that come in especially handy when you are trying to read someone’s body language or gauge what they might be thinking.

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Après le Déluge, What?

Another great essay by Peggy Noonam of the Wall Street Journal...

Uvealblues

Riots and flash mobs have root causes that government can't reach.

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The riots in Britain left some Americans shaken. In the affluence of the past 40 years, and with the rise of the jumbo jet, we became a nation of travelers. We have been to England, visited a lot of those neighborhoods. They were peaceful; now they're in flames. But something else raised our unease as we followed the story on TV and on the Net. I think there was a ping on the national radar. We saw something over there that in smaller ways we're starting to see over here.

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The denunciations were swift and fierce. Max Hastings, in the conservative-populist Daily Mail: "The depressing truth is that at the bottom of our society is a layer of young people with no skills, education, values or aspirations. . . . Nobody has ever dared suggest to them that they need feel any allegiance to anything, least of all Britain or their community. . . . Not only do they know nothing of Britain's past, they care nothing for its present."

In the left-tilting Guardian, youth worker Shaun Bailey called the rioters opportunists. "Young people have been looting the shops they like: JD Sports and mobile phone shops have been hit, yet Waterstone's [a bookstore] has been left alone. These young people like trainers [sneakers] and iPhones; they are less interested in books. This is criminality in a raw form, not politics."

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Where does that leave us? In a hard place, knowing in our guts that a lot of troubled kids are coming up, and not knowing what to do about it. The problem, at bottom, is love, something we never talk about in public policy discussions because it's too soft and can't be quantified or legislated. But little children without love and guidance are afraid. They're terrified—they have nothing solid in the world, which is a pretty scary place. So they never feel safe. As they grow, their fear becomes rage. Further on, the rage can be expressed in violence. This is especially true of boys, but it's increasingly true of girls.

'Gamifying' The System To Create Better Behavior

Gamification "is the process of using game thinking and game mechanics to engage users and solve problems," says Gabe Zichermann, co-author of the book Game-Based Marketing and chairman of the Gamification Summit.
He tells Weekend Edition Sunday host Liane Hansen that the speed-camera lottery in Sweden turns the whole idea of fines and penalties on its head, in a way that only "game people" think of.
Instead of being structured around punishment and negativity, he says, the speed-camera lottery is "all about positive reinforcement." If you drive the speed limit, or under it, you may win some money.
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"Now, what's interesting about Biggest Loser and other gamified examples of weight loss, is they hue to a model for user rewards that I call SAPS," he says.
SAPS stands for Status, Access, Power and Stuff. Zichermann says those are things people want in their lives as rewards — in that order. "It turns out," he says, "that cash isn't that good of a reward. Status is a fantastic motivator for getting people to do stuff."

He’s Happier, She’s Less So

This intriguing — if unsettling — finding is part of a larger story: there appears to be a growing happiness gap between men and women.

What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage

This was one of the top ten emailed articles of 2006 from the New York Times, in which an author on animal training techniques uses similar techniques to modify the behavior of her husband....

So, like many wives before me, I ignored a library of advice books and set about improving him. By nagging, of course, which only made his behavior worse: he'd drive faster instead of slower; shave less frequently, not more; and leave his reeking bike garb on the bedroom floor longer than ever.

We went to a counselor to smooth the edges off our marriage. She didn't understand what we were doing there and complimented us repeatedly on how well we communicated. I gave up. I guessed she was right — our union was better than most — and resigned myself to stretches of slow-boil resentment and occasional sarcasm.

Then something magical happened. For a book I was writing about a school for exotic animal trainers, I started commuting from Maine to California, where I spent my days watching students do the seemingly impossible: teaching hyenas to pirouette on command, cougars to offer their paws for a nail clipping, and baboons to skateboard.

I listened, rapt, as professional trainers explained how they taught dolphins to flip and elephants to paint. Eventually it hit me that the same techniques might work on that stubborn but lovable species, the American husband.