Psychology for IT pros

This is the first of a series of post on happiness at work. Happiness is one of the most valuable practical outcomes of applying psychology, and doing so at work can be transformative. We typically spend 40 hours a week working, which is a very long time to be doing something which makes us miserable. Few people I've met had really made a point of pursuing happiness at work. It's not a widely held expectation that we should enjoy our jobs, and perhaps even the opposite is true, that there is some moral value in spending time doing something you find unpleasant. This internalisation of the Protestant Work Ethic has been, perhaps surprisingly, escaped the Danes. They have word for happiness at work,  Arbejdsglæde,  and both expect the workplace to allow them to be happy, and make decisions in support of that. This has considerable benefits, including a higher per-capita GDP than the UK. Before I get stuck in, it's important to define what I mean by happiness here. What I&

Turns out, not much. The statistics for people who died falling out of their bed  correlate almost perfectly (0.96) with the number of laywers in Peurto Rico. This stat comes from the rather wonderful tylervigen.com  which collects many (many, many) such examples. Some time spent browsing that site gets the point across that correlation does not imply causation. This means that even if two things vary together, you can't assume they are linked. You definitely can't assume that one is causing the other. It's a logical fallacy known as  cum hoc ergo propter hoc , or "With this, therefore because of this". This fallacy is immensely important to psychology research. The traditional scientific method involves testing causality by changing a single, "independent" variable, then measuring what happens to another variable. If the second, "dependent" variable changes too, then there is a causal relationship between them. Changes in the independent

This is one of the first few posts on the blog, and despite being really keen to get going I've really struggled to put words on the page. This has been a bit of a surprise to me. I don't usually have a problem with writing. It's one of the aspects of the day job that I most enjoy. However, writing for the blog and for an unknown, potentially unlimited audience, turns out to be pretty intimidating. The scope for making a fool of myself seems pretty big when put in those terms.  As a species, we're extremely averse to making a fool of ourselves. Evolutionary psychology suggests that much of the fundamental wiring in our brains, and hence our underlying functioning, is designed to deal with the kind of small social groups you get in hunter-gather societies, not in the kind of large, complex groups that we encounter as modern humans. The effect of this is that we systematically over-estimate the negative effect of other peoples' opinion of us will have on our lives.

The first few posts I'm making are to set the scene for the future of the blog and explain what I'm trying to do. In my previous post  I mentioned that I will be using evidence to make suggestions,  examining IT and business practice. This post discusses why that's important to me, and why I think it should be important to you too. We are bombarded with advice about how things should be done, from colleagues, bosses and friends. We can go out and find even more information online, from training, or in books. All of these can extremely useful, but having a reliable way of sorting out the real from the rubbish is vital. Evidence, well deployed, can cut through uncertainty, making your actions more effective and your decisions more reliable. Poorly deployed or misinterpreted, though, it can give you false confidence and lead you astray. Being intelligent is not a protection against this risk, either, and some research suggests it even increases the capacity for  self-decep