Daniel P. Egan

Photo credit Time and again the researchers discovered that the addition of the potted plant enhanced people’s creativity... An eight-month study of creativity in the workplace conducted by Robert Ulrich at Texas A&M University showed that adding ...

Photo credit The only way to discover your strengths is through feedback analysis. Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations...

I've been rereading Daniel Gilbert's bestselling book Stumbling on Happiness and my main takeaway is this: Much of our unhappiness springs from the fact that we're terrible at accurately remembering how things made us feel in the past, so w...

Under what conditions can cooperation be sustained in a network of strangers? Here we study the role of institutions and uncover a new behavioral foundation for the use of monetary systems. In an experiment, anonymous subjects could cooperate or defect in...

We present a field study of social learning. The setting is a pair of adjacent fast food restaurants serving very similar cuisine whose main clientele are the students at a nearby major university. We observed whether an uninformed customer's choice of re...

Being an identical twin might seem like a great way to fool a DNA test and get away with the perfect crime. But furry forensic experts can make sure justice is served. In a new study, researchers instructed a group of children, including two se...

Photo credit The subjective well-being of very wealthy persons was compared with that of a control group who lived in the same geographical area. One hundred persons from Forbes list of wealthiest Americans were queried, as well as 100 control persons ...

Wealth heterogeneity infuences people's behavior in several socioeconomic environments, especially when groups consisting of "unequal" members have to take a collective action which affects all members equally or proportionally. After eliciting real out-o...

No good deed goes unpunished A while back, we have been working with Dahn Tamir on identifying spam tasks and requesters on the Mechanical Turk platform. Dahn took the lead and build a task on MTurk in which Turkers could see the (other) newly posted task...

To my surprise, the book that inspired this column, The Undercover Economist, has shown enough staying power to merit a second edition, which was published on Friday. Naturally I spent much of the editing process wincing at the prose and the cheerful over...