Insightology

Does movie violence increase crime? Does Fox News have an impact on voting? Do people pay not to go the gym? Are companies correct in expecting that investors pay less attention to information released on Friday? These and other interesting questions are asked and answered by Stefano DellaVigna,  an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley. To study movie violence, he and his colleagues looked at actual crime statistics surrounding movie releases, rather than run lab experiments.

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The Reluctant Mr. Darwin - An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution by David Quammen

On the evening of July 1, 1858, six scientific papers were read to the Linnean Society in London. One of them was an idea independently discovered by two authors, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Neither author was there; the young man, Wallace, was in New Guinea collecting insects, while the older man, Darwin, was moaning the death of his young son at home. The idea, natural selection, had nearly zero impact and in the annual address given the following year, the president of the society said the past year hadn't seen "any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize" science. That was the official birth, 150 years ago, of the single biggest idea in the biological sciences.

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First let's discuss leverage and then get to (the Philadelphia Phillies outfielder) Burrell. Leverage can briefly be described as the ability to exert influence. When a person has the ability to influence another or a situation, then that person is said to have leverage. It is a term often used in financial dealings. Have you seen it applied in sports such as baseball? Here's the set-up. In baseball are all runs equal? In other words, do runs scored in the early innings have the same importance as the runs scored in later innings? Sabermetricians will argue that they are not, simply because runs scored later have lower probabilities of being overtaken.  (Click here for an introduction to sabermetrics).

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Do you procrastinate? Have you ever told yourself that you do your best work if you wait till the last minute? You may not be as creative as you think, according to Teresa Amabile the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. A leading authority in the field of organizational creativity, she has conducted intensive multi-year studies to understand the nature of creativity in organizations. One of the findings that surprised even her was that time pressure was actually an impediment to creativity. Even people who felt they were being more creative under time pressure are actually less creative.

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Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond 

Why did history unfold differently on different continents? Rather than point the finger at racial or ethnic differences to answer this question, Diamond focuses on environmental differences and proceeds to lay out a comprehensive case. Four sets of factors, he argues, contributed to the world as we see it today.

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In Mark Twain's classic novel Tom Sawyer is white washing a fence because his aunt told him to do it. In other words, it's work. But Tom soon convinces his friends that whitewashing the fence is a privilege and even gets them to pay him for a chance to try their hand at it. Twain makes the larger point that whether something is work or not is based on whether one gets paid for it. In this case work becomes a privilege when the worker has to pay to take part, as opposed to being paid for it. Based on this principle, two researchers have developed the idea of two markets:  social and monetary. When you help a friend move with no mention of money it is a social market. When you get paid to mow someone's lawn it is a monetary market. Where do you expend more effort and does anything change the level of effort?

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Michael Mauboussin is Chief Investment Strategist at Legg Mason Capital Management, adjunct professor of finance at Columbia Business School and Trustee at the Santa Fe Institute. Unconventional thinking is his calling card. I first came across his name in this column by James Surowiecki, in what apparently was a precursor to Surowiecki's subsequently popular book, The Wisdom of Crowds.

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Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis 

How did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games? Fascinated by this question Lewis begins an investigation that takes him into an area of baseball that was shrouded in mystery about a decade ago. This was an area dominated by people who believed that to truly understand baseball you have to use numbers. Not just any number from a box score (such as an RBI) but those that were shown to be related to winning (such as on-base percentage).

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Rock Paper Scissors (RPS) is serious business. Serious enough to have an RPS World Championship. The next one is in October in Toronto. Why all the interest? Isn't it simply a children's game? As it turns out not only is it easy enough for a small child to play, it is difficult enough for an adult to master because of its unique nature, and complex enough for mathematicians to become interested.

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Emily Oster is an Assistant Professor of Economics in the University of Chicago. Her research reaches outside the traditional boundaries of economics to larger health and policy questions. Her claim to fame is her disputing the Nobel winner Amartya Sen's contention from two decades ago that there were 100 million "missing" women, quite possibly because of misogynistic attitudes in developing countries.

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