What New Year Resolution Can REDUCE Your Persuasiveness?

It’s that time of year again—the very beginning of it. In all likelihood, this means that you recently considered a variety of potential New Year’s Resolutions, ranging from getting that promotion to losing weight to spending more time with your family. But there’s one potential resolution that, should you fulfill it, might actually make you less persuasive. What is it?

According to social psychologists Cory Scherer and Brad Sagarin, giving up swearing in the New Year could actually make you less persuasive. The researchers hypothesized that when people pepper their speech with an occasional obscenity, the audience perceives an increase in the speaker’s intensity. Moreover, this boost in the perceived passion and enthusiasm of the speaker ultimately makes the speech more persuasive.

To test this idea, Scherer and Sagarin had participants watch a video of a five-minute long persuasive speech. For half of the participants, the speaker used the relatively tame swear phrase “Damn it!” once during the speech. For the other half of participants, the speech was exactly the same, except the swear phrase was omitted. Once the speech was over, participants were asked about their attitudes toward the topic addressed in the speech. Consistent with predictions, the data revealed not only that the speaker was viewed as more passionate about the topic when profanity was used than when it was not, but also that the former was more persuasive than the latter.

Does this mean that you should call up your clients and start filling your sales pitch with four-letter words? Of course not. First, the swear words used in this research were clearly very timid by modern standards. Second, the research also suggests that profanity is most likely to be effective when the audience is already generally in agreement with you, but you want to push them even more toward your point of view.

Still, these results should give pause to anyone considering completely abolishing profanity from their vocabulary in 2009: If you go through with it and eliminate even the tame swear words, you may find yourself breaking that very resolution—and cursing yourself out—the next time you fail to be persuasive.

Source:
Scherer, C. R., & Sagarin, B. J. (2006). Indecent influence: The positive effects of obscenity on persuasion. Social Influence, 1, 138-146.

How could a tiny seed create a huge tree?

Its common to say that trees come from seeds. But how could a tiny seed create a huge tree? Seeds do not contain the resources needed to grow a tree. These must come from the medium or environment within which the tree grows. But the seed does provide something that is crucial: a place where the whole of the tree starts to form. As resources such as water & nutrients are drawn in, the seed organizes the process that generates growth.


In a sense, the seed is a gateway through which the future possibility of the living tree emerges.

Source: Presence- Human Purpose and the field of the future: Peter Senge & others

Initiative: An important factor for transformational leadership

There was an interesting article in TOI, 04 Jan 2008.
It spoke of this interesting factor called 'initiative'. Its one of the most important factors for a transformational leader. It can result in innovations which can bring about a radical change in whatever we do.

Students design car that runs on water
B’lore Collegians Develop Vehicle With Mileage Of 500 Km A Litre
Bangalore: Imagine a car that vrooms 500 km on a litre of fuel, which has water as an important component. Students of RV College of Engineering here have built a prototype of an energy-efficient, eco-friendly vehicle that can dodge the twin crises of global warming and exhaustion of renewable energy resources. Various corporate giants have expressed interest in the project, with GE stepping in to financially support initial research costs and provide them with light and state-of-the-art polymers for the car’s aerodynamic shell. “Our first prototype released in August last year delivered a mileage of 180 kmpl. The new vehicle is being touted as the most fuel-efficient vehicle in India,’’ said Aashay Sahay, a team member of Project Garuda RVCE Supermileage that has masterminded the project. This car uses the principle of extracting hydrogen and converting it into gaseous form that can be injected into the engine, significantly revving up its fuel efficiency. The entire procedure is performed through a speciallydesigned hydrolyser kit and when perfected, this innovation could be applied to all cars and bikes to nearly double their mileage. Work on this front is guided by Vineet Engineering from Pune. The young team is confident that such a system can later help a vehicle run completely on water.

WATER WHEELS: Bangalore college students with their fuel-efficient car

Another system that has enhanced efficiency is the use of a fuel injector guided by an Electronic Control Unit (ECU). These ensure that the vehicle draws optimum fuel as it is calibrated along various power curves. The project has been nominated for the Rotary Young Achievers Award 2008. “Our dream is to enter it in two international competitions—the SAE Supermileage in Michigan next June and the Shell Eco-Marathon in the United Kingdom next July,’’ said a spokesperson. How water drives this machine Explaining the mechanism that drives the car, a scientist said: “When you hydrolyse water, hydrogen is separated from oxygen. The separated hydrogen is then injected into the engine in gaseous form which will be the fuel to run the vehicle. The use of hydrogen as gas could lead to the possible enhancement of mileage. If hydrogen is extracted from water, it becomes a fuel form.”