Psychology | Oleg Korneitchouk

What Makes A Leader?

By Oleg on 05/29/09

It's a very nice!

Leadership – We all want it but what exactly makes a good leader? Luckily, you are not the only person who has asked this question. Social psychologists have studied what makes great leaders and have found interesting results.

Is there a leadership personality?

Through many studies, psychologists such as Linda Albright and Michael Chemers, have found there to be a weak relationship between personality and leadership abilities. Compared to non-leaders, leaders are slightly more extroverted, charismatic, intelligent, socially skilled, open minded, ambitious, less neurotic and confident in their leadership abilities.

However, there are few personality traits that correlate strongly with leadership effectiveness. University of California’s Dean Simonton collected information about 100 personal attributes of all of the United States presidents, such as educational experiences, occupations, personalities, and family backgrounds. Only three variables correlated with how effective of a president he was while in office: height, number of books published and family size. The taller, smaller sized family and greater number of published books, the more effective of a leader they will likely be. All other traits were uncorrelated.

What is the best leadership style?

A theory developed by University of Washington’s Fred Fiedler called contingency theory of leadership states that there are two types of leadership styles – task-oriented and relationship-oriented.

Task-oriented leadership is more concerned with getting the job done than with the groups’ relationships and feelings. Relationship-oriented leadership is the opposite, more concerned with relationships. But which is more effective? The answer lies in the amount of power given to the leader.

Task-oriented leaders perform well under high-control or low-control situations.
Relationship-oriented leaders perform well under moderate-control situations.

When the leader has either high or low control of the situation, the subordinates need a well structured and well defined goal plan which is provided by the task-oriented leader. In a moderate control situation, the group needs to maintain the good relations in order to keep the group working smoothly and therefor relationship-oriented style works better. So adjust your leadership technique accordingly.

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Predictably Irrational Revised and Extended Edition Released!

By Oleg on 05/20/09

Yeah we are

Finally. I’ve been holding back on buying the first edition for the revised one to come out since a friend recommended it to me.

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

The subject of the book is behavioral economics, the irrational decisions we as humans make in life. More specifically, when it come to money decisions. This is a (I would hope) growing career especially since the economic collapse and everyone who is interested in either business or psychology should read up on some concepts developed by this field. The best way to show you how great this field is, is with an example.

MIT Economist Subscription Pricing Study

So back in the day, Dan Ariely noticed something weird about economist.com subscription options.

Web only – $59
Print only – $125
Web + Print – $125

Well well. A regular pricing model would have continuous price increases as value offered increases but here we have web+print for the same price as print only. He decided to run a survey at MIT (where he teaches).

He sampled 100 students and presented them with those three options. 16 chose web only, 84 web + print, and unsurprisingly, none chose print only. Since nobody chooses the print only option, it really has to place in their pricing chart right? So he took out the print only option and gave the survey with only those two options. Results:

Mind Blown

I’ll give you a minute to let that seep in. The number of print + web subscriptions dropped from 84% to 32% (which would be a loss of $3000). How could removing an option, that no one chose when available, have such a dramatic effect on a buyer’s decision? The answer, human’s are irrational. Having the print only option sets a reference value point which establishes the worth of the print only option. Without the reference, customer’s do not have that value established and find that the web only option is a better decision.

I’m sure he explains it more clearly and with more detail in his book, which is chock full of such research studies. Adding this book to my slowly growing library. Read it.

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Starting out with social psychology

By Oleg on 05/17/09

pretend there is one more person

The field of psychology I’m most interested in, and is also most closely related to marketing, is social psychology. Now I have already taken the course in college (and breezed through it) so my head is filled with all of the mind blowing experiments.

So that I don’t drown you in information, I’ll set you up with a list of the most famous social psychology experiments done to date. After this, I’ll be drawing upon my knowledge and textbook for the tons of equally amazing studies and how e can apply them to our lives.

Why we do dumb or irrational things: 10 brilliant social psychology studies

To those interested in psychology, this should be a blog you frequent. It’s filled with great experiments and is updated often.

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