“Psychology is key element” plus 2 more

Psychology is key element
The Psychology of Mubarak's Resignation
It’s Not the Online Coupons. It’s the Psychology.

Posted: 12 Feb 2011 11:07 AM PST

Golfing history is littered with examples of high quality competitors crumbling under the spotlight despite having excellent technique.

This demonstrates that even if a golf swing is both mechanically efficient and consistently reproducible in practice, it is largely useless to any serious golf competitor unless it is robust against the effects of pressure and the psychology associated with competitive golf. Therefore in recent years, coaches have had to add an element of psychology to their repertoire.

Golf psychology has become a core part of any experienced golf teachers' method as we have all begun to understand the significance of those six inches between the ears in regard to returning a good golf score.

Examples of golfers who have and who have NOT thought about a situation correctly and clearly are spotted easily by those of us who are glued to any live golf telecast.

The tangible skills that are required to bring home a good result is clear and obvious to anybody who has played golf _ yet only a select few of us can do this consistently, and therein lies the mystery and never ending challenge of this game that we all love.

Out of Bounds: Golf is not a funeral, although both can be very sad affairs.

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The Psychology of Mubarak's Resignation

Posted: 12 Feb 2011 07:53 AM PST

Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak

Sean Gallup / Getty Images

Despots are good at a lot of things — suppressing dissent, muzzling the press, crushing hope, the whole tool kit of talents necessary to cling to power for 30 or 40 years. What they tend to be a little rusty on are their people skills — the ability to understand the motivations of others and act in a way that effectively communicates their own. That interpersonal obtuseness was on breathtaking display on Thursday, when Hosni Mubarak made his last globally televised stand, informing the Egyptian people that, no, he still wasn't going anywhere — before finally giving up and packing it in the next day.

That Mubarak at last did heed the will of his people is a good and sensible thing for him to have done. That it took him so long says a lot about what goes on in the mind of a dictator and how hard it can be to make him see the world the way everyone else does. (See how the U.S. plans to aid democracy in Egypt.)

Disputes between the leader and the led usually flow from the bottom up. There is no happier autocrat than one whose rules are being unquestioningly obeyed and whose authority is being docilely accepted. The problem comes not so much when there are small stirrings of dissent — those can be quickly snuffed — as when there's a large-scale popular uprising.

Biological anthropologist Chris Boehm at the University of Southern California studies the human revolutionary impulse and has been struck in particular by how it plays to a unique tension in the psychology of our species. On the one hand, humans are extremely hierarchical primates, readily picking leaders and assenting to their authority for the larger good of the community. On the other hand, our hunter-gatherer ancestors were a very egalitarian bunch, doing best when the group operated collectively, with dominance asserted only subtly. When one individual — usually a male — began to overreach, he was dealt with swiftly. That impulse — to challenge the bully and take him down — is one that stays with us today, and that we practice with great relish. (See TIME's complete coverage: "The Middle East in Revolt.")

"The revolutionary urge is the universal reaction to power being exerted over us in an illegitimate way," says Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia, whose own work parallels Boehm's. "It's absolutely thrilling and intoxicating to people." How thrilling and intoxicating? "Put it this way," says Haidt, "the flag of my state is an image of a woman warrior with a bared breast and her foot on a dead man, who represents tyranny. The state emblem is a murder."

But it's not typically a single, half-clad Joan of Arc who brings down a dictator like Mubarak. It's a mobilized force representing a deeply fed up nation, and that happens in a very predictable way. Political wildfires, like all fires, start small, with scattered acts of defiance or rebellion. When the conditions are right, many of those little fires come together, and then the blaze accelerates fast. (Comment on this story.)

"It has to do with a lot of things," says political science professor Ian Lustick of the University of Pennsylvania, "the density of the social networks, how fast the second movers follow the first ones, and the third then follow the second. The pattern is the same in most such rebellions, with a cascade of events leading to a tipping point."

Of course, even a revolution that looks fast in hindsight can seem awfully slow while it's unfolding, and eighteen full days elapsed between the time Egyptians began rising up and Mubarak finally quit the field. For most of that period, it was clear to any rational observer that his position was untenable, so why did it take him so long to reach that conclusion too?

First of all, never underestimate the impenetrability of the presidential bubble. "Dictators dislike dissent and they surround themselves with sycophants," says Haidt. "It is quite common for them to have no idea about how they're actually viewed by their people."

See photos of the celebration in Tahrir Square.

It’s Not the Online Coupons. It’s the Psychology.

Posted: 09 Feb 2011 04:01 AM PST

You might think that this column is about Groupon.com, the white-hot Web site whose coupons save you 50 to 90 percent at local businesses. But it's not. It's about psychology.

Each day, Groupon offers for sale a deep-discount coupon from a business in your town. It might be a $25 coupon that buys you a $50 bike tune-up, or a $40 coupon for a $90 massage, or $25 for $100 worth of fitness classes. The coupons aren't actually distributed until a critical mass of people (50, for example) have clicked "Buy." After all, shopkeepers can't afford discounts that steep unless there's something in it for them.

If not enough people express interest, the deal dies. No coupons are issued, and nobody's out a cent.

Groupon is, therefore, a huge win-win-win. You save eyebrow-raising amounts of money. Local businesses pick up a landslide of new customers overnight without doing a lick of marketing on their own (a Phoenix aquarium, for example, sold 10,000 tickets in 24 hours). And Groupon collects half the money from those coupons. No wonder it became profitable after only seven months.

Now, this concept — Internet-organized group buying — has been tried many times before. Remember MobShop? Mercata? LetsBuyIt? They all worked, in principle, the same way.

But Groupon is suddenly everywhere you look — in the headlines, on Facebook, in dinnertime conversations. The company says that it operates in 175 North American cities and 500 overseas, has 54 million members and has saved them $1.6 billion so far. In fact, Groupon is the fastest-growing Web company in history, having attained a $1.5 billion value in only 18 months.

(On the other hand, not all of the dinnertime conversation about Groupon is positive. The company's SuperBowl TV ads last weekend backfired. One seemed to belittle the oppression of Tibetans under Chinese rule — "The people of Tibet are in trouble. Their very culture is in jeopardy. But they still whip up an amazing fish curry!"— and struck many viewers as juvenile and insensitive.)

Frankly, I couldn't understand the big deal about Groupon. Why is it such a superstar when so many competitors labor in obscurity?

The answer: clever psychology.

First of all, Groupon's sales staff tries to cultivate deals that suit the audience in each city. If you're in San Francisco, you get offers for Segway tours of vineyards, flying lessons and skateboarding gear. In New York City, you're more likely to see huge discounts on music lessons, theater tickets and interesting restaurants. In most cities, you're likely to spot lots of deals for spas and cosmetic surgery, which hints at the upscale female customers who constitute Groupon's biggest buyers.

In suburban Connecticut, where I live, I saw offers like "$10 for $20 worth" of Italian food at a restaurant nearby, "$15 for $30 worth of dry cleaning," and "$10 for $20 worth" of goods at Barnes & Noble. Since that's all stuff I'd buy anyway, I took the plunge. I bought the Barnes & Noble coupon and the restaurant coupon.

A few hours later, I received my coupons by e-mail. They pointed out that I could avoid printing the coupons if I used the free Groupon app for iPhone or Android phones.

At the bookstore, I picked out a couple of books totaling $23. I showed my phone to the cashier, who had been trained to enter the Groupon codes. I was the ninth person that day to cash in.

I paid the $3 overage, and that was it. I loved it. I'd just gotten $10 worth of books free. It almost felt as if I'd shoplifted.

More psychology, of course. It's absurd that I should have felt so giddy. I mean, is saving $10 such a landmark event? The last time you bought a house, a car or even a night at a hotel, did you haggle for another $10 off? You probably could have gotten it. But you didn't.

Somehow, though, in the Groupon context, it feels like a steal. There's something about the simple phrase, "$10 for $20 worth of stuff" that gets you.

Furthermore, your coupon is good for anything in the store. It's not the same as a Half-Off Sale, where the store chooses what goods to discount.

That "tipping point" business — the minimum number of takers an offer has to have before it becomes valid — is part of the psychology, too. Sure, this element was created to protect the merchant's interests. But let's face it, the tipping-point requirement adds a certain thrill to the proceedings. You're invested in the outcome.

Even the scarcity of deals — one each day — plays on your feelings. It adds to that sense of exclusivity and of serendipity.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 12, 2011

The State of the Art column on Thursday, about Internet-organized group buying, misspelled the name of a defunct predecessor to the popular current site Groupon. It was called Mercata, not Mercato.

Psychology

Saturday, February 12, 2011