Seeing the glass as half full: Taking a new look at cognition and aging 11-12

Image credit : Shyam's Imagination Library

From a cognitive perspective, aging is typically associated with decline. As we age, it may get harder to remember names and dates, and it may take us longer to come up with the right answer to a question.

But the news isn’t all bad when it comes to cognitive aging, according to a set of three articles in the July 2014 issue of Perspectives in Psychological Science.

Plumbing the depths of the available scientific literature, the authors of the three articles show how several factors — including motivation and crystallized knowledge — can play important roles in supporting and maintaining cognitive function in the decades past middle age.

Motivation Matters

Lab data offer evidence of age-related declines in cognitive function, but many older adults appear to function quite well in their everyday lives. Psychological scientist Thomas Hess of North Carolina State University sets forth a motivational framework of “selective engagement” to explain this apparent contradiction.

If the cognitive cost of engaging in difficult tasks increases as we age, older adults may be less motivated to expend limited cognitive resources on difficult tasks or on tasks that are not personally relevant to them. This selectivity, Hess argues, may allow older adults to improve performance on the tasks they do choose to engage in, thereby helping to account for inconsistencies between lab-based and real-world data.

Prior Knowledge Brings Both Costs and Benefits

Episodic memory – memory for the events of our day-to-day lives – seems to decline with age, while memory for general knowledge does not. Researchers Sharda Umanath and Elizabeth Marsh of Duke University review evidence suggesting that older adults use prior knowledge to fill in gaps caused by failures of episodic memory, in ways that can both hurt and help overall cognitive performance. While reliance on prior knowledge can make it difficult to inhibit past information when learning new information, it can also make older adults more resistant to learning new erroneous information.

According to Umanath and Marsh, future research should focus on better understanding this compensatory mechanism and whether it can be harnessed in developing cognitive interventions and tools.

Older Adults Aren’t Necessarily Besieged By Fraud

Popular writers and academics alike often argue that older adults, due to certain cognitive differences, are especially susceptible to consumer fraud. Psychological scientists Michael Ross, Igor Grossmann, and Emily Schryer of the University of Waterloo in Canada review the available data to examine whether incidences of consumer fraud are actually higher among older adults. While there isn’t much research that directly answers this question, the research that does exist suggests that older adults may be less frequent victims than other age groups.

Ross, Grossmann, and Schryer find no evidence that older adults are actually more vulnerable to fraud, and they argue that anti-fraud policies should be aimed at protecting consumers of all ages.

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This is the relationship between money and happiness 04-25

Can money buy you happiness? 

It’s a longstanding question that has many different answers, depending on who you ask.

Today’s chart approaches this fundamental question from a data-driven perspective, and it provides one potential solution: money does buy some happiness, but only to a limited extent.

Money and happiness

First, a thinking exercise.

Let’s say you have two hypothetical people: one of them is named Beff Jezos and he’s a billionaire, and the other is named Jill Smith and she has a more average net worth. Who do you think would be happiest if their wealth was instantly doubled?

Beff might be happy that he’s got more in the bank, but materially his life is unlikely to change much – after all, he’s a billionaire. On the flipside, Jill also has more in the bank and is likely able to use those additional resources to provide better opportunities for her family, get out of debt, or improve her work-life balance.

These resources translate to real changes for Jill, potentially increasing her level of satisfaction with life.

Just like these hypotheticals, the data tells a similar story when we look at countries.

The data-driven approach

World Bank

In general, this means that as a country’s wealth increases from $10k to $20k per person, it will likely slide up the happiness scale as well. For a double from $30k to $60k, the relationship still holds – but it tends to have far more variance. This variance is where things get interesting.

Outlier regions

Some of the most obvious outliers can be found in Latin America and the Middle East:

In Latin America, people self-report that they are more satisfied than the trend between money and happiness would predict.

Costa Rica stands out in particular here, with a GDP per capita of $15,400 and a 7.14 rating on the Cantril Ladder (which is a measure of happiness). Whether it’s the country’s rugged coastlines or the local culture that does the trick, Costa Rica has higher happiness ratings than the U.S., Belgium, or Germany – all countries with far higher levels of wealth.

In the Middle East, the situation is mostly reversed. Countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Turkey, and the U.A.E. are all on the other side of the trend line.

Outlier countries

Within regions, there is even plenty of variance.

We just mentioned the Middle East as a place where the wealth-happiness continuum doesn’t seem to hold up as well as it does in other places in the world.

Interestingly, in Qatar, which is actually the wealthiest country in the world on a per capita basis ($127k), things are even more out of whack. Qatar only scores a 6.37 on the Cantril Ladder, making it a big exception even within the context of the already-outlying Middle East. 

Nearby Saudi Arabia, U.A.E., and Oman are all poorer than Qatar per capita, yet they are happier places. Oman rates a 6.85 on the satisfaction scale, with less than one-third the wealth per capita of Qatar.

There are other outlier jurisdictions on the list as well: Thailand, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan are all significantly happier than the trend line (or their regional location) would project. Meanwhile, places like Hong Kong, Ireland, Singapore, and Luxembourg are less happy than wealth would predict.

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Wearable IoT Neuroflow for treating the PTSD patients. 01-29

A Veteran Entrepreneur

If you can lead soldiers into battle, you can cold call 140 investors.

Neuroflow founder Chris Molaro, WG’17, is a veteran, and he’s seen the effects of PTSD. As he reminds us, “20 veterans a day commit suicide, on average.”

Neuroflow is his way of fighting back. Neuroflow uses wearables to measure the physical effects of stress, and quantify them in a way that is useful to therapists who are treating people for severe anxiety and stress. For the first time, therapists can use quantifiable measurements to see if their therapies are working—and adjust for maximum effectiveness.
The Importance of Persistence

Neuroflow is also a story of persistence. Chris started working with his cofounder, Adam Pardes, who is an engineering PhD candidate at Penn, on a project for the Y-Prize, which asks students to commercialize Penn technologies. In Chris’s words, they “lost miserably.” But the idea was what set them on the path to Neuroflow.

They won the Innovation Prize in the Penn Wharton Startup Challenge, and got a lot of other support from across the University. Chris says that, “before raising the investment capital we won a total of $140,000 in business plan competitions, thanks in large part to Wharton.”
But when they set out to raise serious money, it took time, and a lot of persistence. They ultimately raised $1.25 million. Doing so took them months of conversations, and talks with 140 investors. This, as Karl points out, isn’t especially uncommon—so for you entrepreneurs out there who are looking to raise funds, get ready to start calling.
Our Own Battle

For Chris, he sees Neuroflow as “our own war zone, our own battle, and we have to figure out a way. And we’ve got great men and women to our left and right in the office, and we’ll figure it out.”

What is Neuroflow, 

Originally appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, written by Anna Orso.

When Clark Griswold tried to blanket his home in Christmas lights, an electrical glitch rendered the facade completely dark. But it was his gruff in-laws who added insult to injury. “Beautiful, Clark,” said one. The other called it a “silly waste of resources.”

This is a scene from the 1989 classic National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. But you don’t need to summon Chevy Chase to feel some sort of way at the mere mention of your in-laws.

Finances, gift-giving and, yes, difficult family members all contribute to higher levels of stress during the holiday season. Now, thanks to a Philadelphia startup, there’s an app for that.

A Wharton grad and a Penn Ph.D. student last year founded NeuroFlow, a startup that’s developed software to interpret brain waves and heart rate to measure relaxation and help patients and clinicians visualize how external stressors trigger physical reactions.

The software shows that even the mention of one’s in-laws can set off in some people a physiological response – that gut-level feeling of uneasiness – and can then illustrate exactly how meditation and mindfulness techniques impact the body and brain. But the tool, now in beta and used by a handful of mental health professionals, has applications far beyond the holiday season. Its founders are planning a full launch in February, and believe their platform will ultimately help de-stigmatize mental illness by helping people see it, rather than just feel it.

A lofty goal for a company with eight full-time employees run by a couple of twentysomethings.

“We know it’s a stressful time of year, yet what we found is that the conversation around mental health, around anxiety, around stress is such that there’s this negative stigma,” said CEO and co-founder Christopher Molaro, 29, an Iraq war veteran and Wharton MBA who founded the company in large part to address post-traumatic stress disorder. “I think it’s because if you can’t understand something, measure something, see something, you just push it aside as something that doesn’t exist.”

NeuroFlow is a phone app and cloud-based program that, through bluetooth technology, interprets data to offer digestible information about how relaxed a person is. That data comes from a heart-rate monitor and an EEG (electroencephalogram), in this case a headset, which measures electrical activity in the brain.

The idea is that clinicians would be able to visualize exactly when a patient becomes more stressed, and can then watch in real-time as relaxation techniques like breath monitoring start to actually work. That visualization helps people see mental illness in the same way they can see a broken arm on an X-ray.
Sound complicated? I tried it out this week in a conference room at Benjamin’s Desk, the Center City coworking space where NeuroFlow is based.

Adam Pardes, the company’s 26-year-old co-founder and chief operating officer, helped me put on a headset (similar to the one in the photo above) that retails for about $250. The NeuroFlow program recognized I was wearing the headset, and the line that charted my score on the “relaxation index” was sky high.

Safe to say this reporter is not very relaxed. NeuroFlow confirmed it.

But with the help of a breathing guide that acts a bit like a metronome, I watched the line go down. After just about a minute, I’d gotten into the “relaxation zone,” and I was able to see it.

Other variances in anxiety and stress can be seen with NeuroFlow’s YouTube integration, a tool that allows therapists to show a patient a video – say it’s of a car driving over a bridge for a person who fears that – to see the exact point when a patient’s body goes into anxiety mode.

Using the technology, a patient would also be able to gauge progress with a therapist over time. The tool isn’t meant to replace a mental health professional, though. Think of NeuroFlow more as a thermometer for mental health.

“Your body physiologically changes when you’re more stressed and more relaxed,” Molaro said. “The fact that we can measure and better understand means that you don’t have to be ashamed of it and can go seek help, whether using our platform or not.”

Molaro said NeuroFlow closed its first major funding round in October, raising $1.25 million in venture capital. It’s also supported in part by Penn, where the company is conducting some research through the school’s Neuroscience Initiative.

Sixteen clinicians across the country are currently using NeuroFlow in beta, and the full software will be available for purchase online for about $100 per month.

Molaro and Pardes, who has a background in bioengineering, see a host of applications for clinicians and patients down the line, from testing stress levels in soldiers to tracking mental health in professional athletes to managing that Griswold-level holiday stress.

“Twenty veterans a day killing themselves is unacceptable. Fourteen students at Penn killing themselves is unacceptable,” Molaro said. “My mom crying on Christmas because she’s anxious and stressed out is unacceptable. People deserve better.”

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People Have an Irrational Need to Complete 'Sets' of Things. 01-05

People are irrationally motivated to complete arbitrary sets of tasks, donations, or purchases—and organizations can take advantage of that, according to new research by Kate Barasz, Leslie John, Elizabeth Keenan, and Michael Norton. 

Here’s a tip for persuading people to finish more tasks, buy more products, or donate more money: Simply present assignments, requests, or items as arbitrary sets, rather than as individual units.

New research reveals that people are irrationally but effectively motivated by the idea of completing a set, even if it means working harder or spending more money—with no additional reward other than the satisfaction of completion and the relief of avoiding an incomplete set. Imagine arriving at your boss’s summer BBQ and presenting her with five beers in a box designed to hold six. No matter that your favorite craft beer store permits you buy bottles one at a time. Chances are you’d still buy six, just to fill all six spaces in the box.

“People really don’t like to leave things incomplete,” says Kate Barasz, an assistant professor of marketing at IESE Business School and lead author of the paper “Pseudo-Set Framing,” written while she was a doctoral student at Harvard Business School. The term “pseudo-set” refers to the idea that the set is kind of arbitrary—manufactured for the sole purpose of creating the idea of wholeness.

“People really don’t like to leave things incomplete”

Do you want customers to refer more of their friends to your company’s website? Ask them to refer friends in arbitrary “batches” of five at a time. Looking to increase charitable giving to your nonprofit organization? Ask potential donors to contribute a set of six gifts. Are you and your fiancé struggling to write thank-you cards for all those wedding shower gifts? Try batching the unwritten cards into sets of eight. Rather than feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of writing one note at a time, you’ll feel oddly motivated to finish a whole set at a time.

Appearing in a forthcoming edition of Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, “Pseudo-Set Framing” was co-written by Barasz; Leslie John, the Marvin Bower Associate Professor at HBS; Elizabeth Keenan, an assistant professor at HBS; and Michael Norton, the Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration at HBS.

The Canadian Red Cross puts pseudo-sets to the test

The researchers proved the efficacy of pseudo-set framing through a series of laboratory and real-world field studies.

In one study, they teamed up with the Canadian Red Cross, a humanitarian charitable organization, to find out whether pseudo-set framing could influence gift-giving behavior during its 2016 holiday online fundraising campaign.

More than 7,000 potential donors were randomly (but evenly) directed to one of three landing pages.

The first page emphasized cash donations.

The second page emphasized specific gifts over cash donations. This page also included an image of a globe. For each new item added to the donor’s online cart, a location marker would appear in a particular geographic region, signaling that the item would be donated to that part of the globe.

The third page invited donors to give one of each of six items in order to complete a so-called “Global Survival Kit”—in other words, a pseudo-set. This page had a globe on it, too, but instead of location markers, it featured a line that grew closer to circumnavigating the globe each time an item was donated.

The rationale: “Who wants to donate six blankets, when you can donate one blanket and feel just as good?” Barasz says. “But, if you frame it as a set, then there is a reason to want to complete the set and to donate all six of the items.”

The results of the field study were stark. Among those who chose to give gifts, 21 percent of those in the “Global Survival Kit” condition chose to donate all six items, compared with just 5 percent in the “gift” condition and 3 percent in the cash condition.

“The strength of the increase was a really nice surprise,” says Doug Wayne, director of national digital marketing and web strategy at the Canadian Red Cross, who decided to collaborate with the research team after meeting Norton through a colleague. “Ultimately, it speaks to how powerful that framing is.”

People incur the cost of a bad gamble just so they can complete a pseudo-set

In fact, the human drive for completion is strong enough that people will strive to complete arbitrary sets even when there’s a risk associated.

In another study, 201 participants had the opportunity to accept up to four online gambling opportunities, with the chance of winning up to 25 cents. (The stakes were notably low—the online equivalent of nickel slots.)

The chances of winning decreased with each successive gamble, and participants could stop and cash out at any time. Gamble 1 offered a 90 percent chance of winning a nickel and a 10 percent chance of winning nothing, Gamble 2 offered a 75 percent chance of winning, and Gamble 3 a 50 percent chance. In the first three gambles, there was no chance of incurring a loss. But Gamble 4 offered a 50 percent chance of winning a nickel and a 50 percent chance of losing a dime.

The odds were stupid. It made no rational sense to take that last gamble. And yet….

The researchers rigged the system so that all participants won the first three gambles, such that they’d all be facing the final risk having accrued 20 of the possible 25 cents. Everyone saw their successive winnings displayed both numerically and graphically on screen.

However: Half of the participants saw a visual display consisting of five nickels—with separate blank circles depicting money not yet earned. The other half saw a single quarter, divided into fifths such that unearned money was depicted as a missing piece.

Overall, 29 percent of participants in the single-quarter condition chose to accept all four gambles, compared with 16 percent in the five-separate-nickels condition. For them, the need to complete that picture of a quarter seemed to supersede their rational knowledge of the bad odds.

“People persist with completing pseudo-sets even when it’s costly for them to do so,” John says. “That, to me, is especially compelling as a researcher—that completing this totally arbitrary set is so motivating to people that they are willing to participate in an obviously bad bet.”

Future research and advice for managers

The researchers acknowledge that it’s possible for a pseudo-set to backfire. For instance, a person who might have given seven items to the Red Cross might decide to give a single set of six items instead. And a badly designed pseudo-set could prove annoying or demotivating—say, if the arbitrary set comprises 200 parts. “If the number of tasks required to fill a ‘pie piece’ is prohibitively high, people may decide not to engage at all to avoid anticipated dissatisfaction with partial completion,” the authors write in “Pseudo-Set Framing.”

Future research may investigate the ideal size of a pseudo-set in any given situation. In the meantime, Barasz offers this rule of thumb, especially with regard to encouraging people to complete repetitive tasks: “My advice to a practitioner would be to find out, on average, how many people usually complete, and then make your set slightly larger than that,” she says.  

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