Friday, July 11, 2014

This Week in EID - Episode 11



The week at EID started with a guest post from Peter Hancock.  Peter is one of the most well-respected human factors professionals and a past president of the Society.  He is also notoriously philosophic in his writings.  So I was really excited to have him as our first guest post.  Read it (after you finish this review of course).  It is really thought provoking.

Of course, no week would be complete without a piece on priming.  This one is a pet peeve of mine, and apparently a lot of other people according to the study I linked to.  Do you start sentences with “So, . . .”You should really stop.

Self-identity resonance is a phenomenon that most of us underappreciate.  Our behavior is probably more driven by actions that make us feel better about ourselves than by optimizing things like health or success.  We see this over and over again (and why it comes up so much in my blogging).  In this piece, I reviewed an intervention that was used to improve vaccination rates, but failed because of a lack of self-identity resonance.

On Thursday we turned to a sad anniversary, the Bangladesh Rana Plaza disaster.  We compared the two accords that have sprung up since and how they differ in terms of how serious about safety the signatory companies are.  It seems the Europeans are much more serious that the Americans are when it comes to safety.  What else is new?

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