Technology in Modern Psychological Research

Number of words: 483 Our second argument for why depth generates meaning comes from the work of one of the world’s best-known (and most misspelled) psychologists, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In the early 1980s, Csikszentmihalyi, working with Reed Larson, a young colleague at the University of Chicago, invented a new technique for understanding the psychological impact of … Read more

Revisiting Neil Postman’s Insights on Technology

Number of words: 162 A foundation for our answer can be found in a warning provided by the late communication theorist and New York University professor Neil Postman. Writing in the early 1990s, as the personal computer revolution first accelerated, Postman argued that our society was sliding into a troubling relationship with technology. We were, … Read more

The Complexity of Measuring Work Habits and Their Costs

Number of words: 445 Tom Cochran’s experiment yielded an interesting result about the literal cost of a seemingly harmless behavior. But the real importance of this story is the experiment itself, and in particular, its complexity. It turns out to be really difficult to answer a simple question such as: What’s the impact of our … Read more

Understanding the Science Behind Attention Residue

Number of words: 338 In a 2009 paper, titled, intriguingly, “Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work?,” Leroy introduced an effect she called attention residue. In the introduction to this paper, she noted that other researchers have studied the effect of multitasking—trying to accomplish multiple tasks simultaneously—on performance, but that in the modern … Read more

Unlocking the Secrets to Digital Mastery

Number of words: 116 What’s the secret to landing in these lucrative sectors of the widening digital divide? I argue that the following two core abilities are crucial. Let’s begin with the first ability. To start, we must remember that we’ve been spoiled by the intuitive and drop-dead-simple user experience of many consumer-facing technologies, like … Read more

The Rise of High-Skilled Workers in the Digital Age

Number of words: 224 Brynjolfsson and McAfee call the group personified by Nate Silver the “high-skilled”. Advances such as robotics and voice recognition are automating many low-skilled positions, but as these economists emphasize, “other technologies like data visualization, analytics, high speed communications, and rapid prototyping have augmented the contributions of more abstract and data-driven reasoning, … Read more