India: PM's bravery awards "nothing to do with our products"

Much to Do about Nothing

I n the popular literature there is a certain fascination with the concept of zero [1]–[3]. While today the inconspicuous 0 is taken for granted, the situation was different in the distant past. For example, the Romans had no symbol for 0, a fact memorialized by the jump from 1 B.C. to 1 A.D., a convention instituted in 531 A.D. [4, p. 91]. In contrast, the Mayans had a symbol for zero, and the...

Getting More Work for Nothing? Symbolic Awards and Worker Performance

Getting More Work for Nothing? Symbolic Awards and Worker Performance We study the impact of status and social recognition on worker performance in a field experiment. In collaboration with an international non-governmental organization we hired students to work on a database project. Students in the award treatment were offered a congratulatory card from the organization honoring the best perf...

Is our self nothing but reward?

Neuroscience has increasingly explored the neural mechanisms underlying our sense of self. Recent studies have demonstrated the recruitment of regions like the ventral tegmental area, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and the ventral striatum to self-specific stimuli-regions typically associated with reward-related processing. This raises the question of whether there is a relationship between se...

The Stroop effect: why proportion congruent has nothing to do with congruency and everything to do with contingency.

The item-specific proportion congruent (ISPC) effect refers to the observation that the Stroop effect is larger for words that are presented mostly in congruent colors (e.g., BLUE presented 75% of the time in blue) and smaller for words that are presented mostly in a given incongruent color (e.g., YELLOW presented 75% of the time in orange). One account of the ISPC effect, the modulation hypoth...

The Stroop Effect: Why Proportion Congruent has Nothing to do with Congruency and Everything to do with Contingency by