BEHAVIORAL GROOVES BLOG ARCHIVE

August 18, 2022

Improve Performance Using 12 Action-Oriented Words

While we don’t believe that everyone will achieve the same performance lift that they saw here, the benefit certainly is worth the cost.  As Annie Duke says, it’s a “free roll.”  

August 4, 2022

Groove Track: Why You Can’t Find a Cab on a Rainy Day!

The findings suggest that the cab drivers are using the simple heuristic of average daily wage to manage their business, and because of that, they end up passing up high-revenue opportunities

July 21, 2022

Mind Over Milkshakes: how our expectations change reality

For years, we’ve known that our mindsets impact our thoughts and our perceptions, but in this paper, the authors demonstrate how mindsets impact our physical self as well.  Their research revealed how people’s beliefs about a milkshake actually changed the amount of ghrelin that their bodies produced.  

April 12, 2022

How One Man’s Social Identity is Inspiring the World

The World Is Watching The world is transfixed by watching Ukraine mount a powerful resistance to the Russian invasion of their homeland. The face…

February 11, 2022

Sweet Regret

How can we reframe suffering and regret to improve our lives? Authors Paul Bloom and Daniel Pink wrote two separate books, one on suffering and one on regret – that we take insights out of to show this convergence.

January 12, 2022

How to craft powerful goals – for you and your team!

More than three-quarters of all New Year’s resolutions are dropped before January even ends.  The number one complaint from sales reps about sales incentive…

January 29, 2021

Being a Catalyst For Change with Jonah Berger (Bonus Track)

If we just give more facts, more reasons, more information, people come around, and often they don’t – this is the heart of many of our issues with influencing change. We just try to push change through when we should look at removing barriers.

November 13, 2020

The rule of 4 and other hints to improve your life with Roy Baumeister (Bonus Track)

It turns out that the best role that emotions play in our behaviors is in forecasting what our emotions will be after we do a particular behavior. These Anticipated Emotions help us decide what we should do NOW based on how we anticipate feeling LATER ON.

November 13, 2020

Using priming to improve your life – our interview with Dr. John Bargh (Bonus Track)

Remember, the unconscious mind is constantly being influenced by the world around us and all the things in it. We were glad to be reminded how important it is to be intentional with things that are around us all the time, how we organize our work and living spaces, and maybe the most important one of all: hug your kids.

October 23, 2020

Using moral arguments to change opinions with Andy Luttrell (Bonus Track)

Andy Luttrell’s research focuses on moral psychology and the way human beings can be persuaded to change our positions on moral issues. The concept…

September 29, 2020

Habits vs Routines

What Differentiates a habit from a routine… and why does it matter? Kurt breaks it down in a quick and easy read.

September 29, 2020

Good Prime – Bad Prime

Priming can cause us to unconsciously engage in behaviors both good and bad. This article explores two quick real-world observations on how the priming effect can impact us – one good, one bad.

April 8, 2020

Why toilet paper?

Is there something that we don’t know about the toilet paper supply chain?  Is it a major play by toilet paper manufacturers to up their sales?  Okay, that sounds like a conspiracy theory. But we have to wonder.

August 2020

Hey, Groovers… Another month living in a pandemic.  It feels like the months are all running together and that we have grown accustomed to…

July 2020

This has been the most surreal half-a-year that either of us has ever experienced.  A worldwide pandemic, economic downturn, unemployment at record rates, George Floyd’s death, protests and riots, self-isolation, polarization over masks, and murder hornets!  We are hoping that the 2nd half of the year doesn’t bring locusts and zombies…

June 2020

Like everyone else around the world, we watched the video of George Floyd being killed by an officer of the law on May 25th. However for us, the event took place – literally – just down the street from where we live. Like many of you who receive this newsletter, Minneapolis is our beloved home, and these recent days have been surreal for us. As humans, we are reason-seeking machines. And right now, we’re trying to make sense of the horrible and the absurd.

April 2020

Behavioral Grooves was named a Global Top 20 Social Science Podcast in March by Chartable, the de facto standard in podcast reporting. We were tickled for the recognition as our mission is to expand the community and being recognized as a Global Top 20 podcast indicated we’re on the right path.

March 2020

Did you know that Kurt and Tim launched a new podcast channel called Weekly Grooves? (That’s podcast speak for “a whole new podcast!”) Weekly Grooves takes a crack at the week’s headlines through a behavioral science lens. You can check it out at https://weeklygrooves.podbean.com/. (It will be live in Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, ACast, etc. shortly!) The Weekly Grooves is a fresh way to interpret the weekly headlines for those who might want to dig a little deeper.

April 2019

It is always fun talking to people who are interested in Behavioral Science. We learn and grow from those interactions. Recently we’ve had the opportunity to talk to a variety of people from across different areas – with a big focus on research.

December 2018

Kurt’s Reading Recommendation Tim put me on to George Loewenstein’s “Exotic Preferences: Behavioral Economics and Human Motivation.” It is amazing and I’m not even…

November 2018

Behavioral Grooves continues to celebrate our one-year anniversary! Thank you everyone who has made this possible! November Meetup: Kurt & Tim Kurt and Tim…

October 2018

Behavioral Grooves celebrates one-year anniversary! Kurt’s Reading Recommendation I have a number of books that I’ve read or am reading right now. I will…

August 2018

Hello, Groovers! Thank you for being a part of the Behavioral Grooves community. We are glad you’re interested in behavioral science topics and this…

July 2018

George Loewenstein is a pillar of the behavioral economics research community. He was at the table with Kahneman and Thaler as they decided to give a name to their work and call it “Behavioral Economics.” His research has been citied thousands and thousands of times among scholars.

June 2018

Tim’s Reading Recommendation I’ve been traveling a bunch lately – much of it with Kurt – and I found an article in The New…

May 2018

Tim’s Reading Recommendation Ethics comes up frequently in our podcast discussions and occasionally during our meetups, so Kurt and I decided to jump into…