Daniel H. Pink is the author of four provocative bestselling books about the changing world of work. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife and their three children.
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To write my previous books, I relied on tons of interviews, lots of traditional library and online research, and one kick-ass genie. For the next book, I’m adding a new technique: Quantitative survey research. In an effort to add some statistical meat to the book’s analytic bones, I’ve enlisted the wonderful folks at Qualtrics and [...]
Cornell professor Karl Pillemer admits he’s an advice junkie. Yet even amid the groaning self-help shelves at his local bookstore, he felt something was missing. As he asks in 30 Lessons for Living: Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans (Amazon, BN.com, IndieBound), “Why, if we have so many professional advice givers, are so many people [...]
Dedicated readers know that I’ve written a fair bit on how contingent rewards, including money, can go awry in all sorts of ways — resulting in poorer performance, diminished creativity, reduced interest in tasks that were once intrinsically interesting, and so on. But can the very idea of money also affect our behavior? In an [...]
On the business pages, columnists are writing about income inequality. On the sports pages, they’re discussing the labor economics of the National Basketball Association. Here at the Pink Blog, we can do both. Take a look at this chart of the 50 highest paid NBA players. These guys make a lot of money – practically CEO [...]
A: This popular game show presents an elegant environment for studying the effects of gender on competition. Q: What is Jeopardy? Scores of studies have examined the differences between men and women when it comes to competition, but a recent paper called “Girls will be Girls – Especially among Boys” (pdf) takes a clever approach [...]
Sometimes when I’m stuck on a course of action, I use two techniques to help me decide. One is what I call the “90-year-old me Test.” I imagine I’m 90 and looking back at the decision before. What will I want to have done in this situation? In most cases, the 90-year-old me wants today’s [...]
Let’s say you and I are talking in person — and I make a strange request: “Take your right forefinger and draw a capital E on your forehead.” There are two ways to do that, of course. You can draw like the guy on the left or like the guy on the right. But which [...]
Ever come up with a great idea for someone else, but find yourself stymied by your own problem? Recent research by Evan Polman of NYU and Kyle J. Emich of Cornell may shed some light on why. In three sets of experiments, they found that when people solved problems on behalf of others, they produced faster [...]
Paul Sullivan – author of the terrific book, Clutch – has a fascinating piece in Saturday’s New York Times about the growing ranks of social scientists who are studying American elites. As wealth in this country concentrates at the top – and, increasingly, at the top of the top – how that happened and who inhabits this upper echelon [...]
NPR has a terrific story — complete with this official Barack Obama scribble-pic — about why the human brain often prompts the human hand into doodling during boring meetings and phone calls.Turns out that this aimless artistry isn’t so aimless after all. It’s keeps us from doing a full Walter Mitty when we’re not sufficiently [...]
