Money can’t buy me love. – Paul McCartney As a corollary to psychologist McCartney’s insight, money can’t buy lawyers (much) happiness. That’s one of the key findings of Lawrence Krieger and Kennon Sheldon’s impressive study, What Makes Lawyers Happy?: A Data-Driven Prescription to Redefine Professional Success. This post includes excerpts from this article, sans … Continue reading What Makes Lawyers Happy? – And How Can You Help?
An article in the New York Times, The Rationality of Rage, summarizes the findings of several studies about when expressing anger can be productive. Despite the catchy title of the article, expressing rage generally isn’t helpful. But expressing anger can be useful in some situations. The article distinguishes three types of negotiations – primarily cooperative … Continue reading Good Anger
Life can be darn irritating. In a NYT op-ed piece, Arthur Brooks argues that “When I am working for myself, any disappointing outcome is a stressful, unpleasant reflection on me. When I am serving, on the other hand, the work is always intrinsically valuable because of its intention. Adopting a service mind-set guarantees some measure … Continue reading Satisfaction Through Service
Have you seen “Inside Out” yet? It’s the delightful Pixar movie portraying the conflicting emotions of an 11 year-old girl grappling with the difficulties of a move from Minnesota to San Francisco. Indeed, the emotions are characters themselves: Anger, Disgust, Fear, Sadness, and Joy. The film’s producers consulted psychologists who wrote a piece in the … Continue reading Damn Emotions!
This post mostly is not about dispute resolution. I just went to see an amazing film, Alive Inside, which was a 2014 Sundance Award winner. It is a documentary about a social worker whose personal mission is to arrange for people with dementia to listen to music. The film shows people who were extremely withdrawn … Continue reading Alive
It’s a damn miracle that people on your planet ever understand each other. My good friend, Charlie Irvine, who mediates and teaches in Glasgow, Scotland, wrote an amusing and/or horrifying blog post about students’ statements in law school exam answers. (Charlie blogs on the Kluwer Mediation Blog, which has some very thoughtful contributors. I saw … Continue reading Failure to Communicate
A short piece in the New York Times by Harvard economists and Yale psychologists has a suggestion that may surprise you – or maybe not – about people’s motivation to cooperate. The authors focus on the “tragedy of the commons” which is the situation “where individuals acting independently and rationally according to each’s self-interest behave … Continue reading Why Cooperate?
I love the cookbook that Andrea and 1001 chefs wrote, Cooking Up a Deal: Negotiation Recipes for Success. It’s a wonderfully short and fun piece to assign for the last day of class. For the final class in several courses, I ask students to develop their own personal recipes and then we will develop a … Continue reading Recipes for Success
I am fascinated to learn behind-the-scenes stories of high-profile negotiations, like the negotiation over Iranian nuclear capabilities, which the New York Times just described. Interesting tidbit: the negotiators used an erasable whiteboard so that the Iranians didn’t have a document they could send back to their superiors in Tehran. Another unusual arrangement: “[T]he Iranians did … Continue reading Behind the Scenes at the Iranian Nuclear Negotiation
That’s one of the conclusions in an op-ed in the New York Times today. Researchers Anita Woolley, Thomas W. Malone, and Christopher Chabris did a series of studies finding that the “smartest” teams (measured by performance in logical analysis, brainstorming, coordination, planning and moral reasoning) were distinguished by three characteristics. First, their members contributed more … Continue reading Want a Smarter Group? Add More Women
