Presentation Tips, pt. 1

From Ben Yoskovitz, the Five Phrases You Never Want To Hear in a Presentation. Please ignore the endless William Safire-like comments regarding the use of the word "Pronunciate" - yes, it's a word (well, actually, it isn't, according to my spellchecker), but no one uses it (that said, I think we still we understood what he means).

Milgram Experiment

Considered one of the most important social psychologists of the 20th century, Stanley Milgram, conducted experiments into the nature of obedience and authority. In his most famous experiment, test subjects believed they were administering electric shocks to subjects who gave wrong answers to a series of questions. At the behest of the scientist controlling the test, each subject increased the voltage to levels that, had electricity really been applied, would have been fatal.

Milgram summarized his findings in "The Perils of Obedience" (1974):

"I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation."

This video, pulled from YouTube, is excerpted from "The Human Behavior Experiments" on Sundance.

Twitter

It's all the rage right now... a sort of highly-addictive "micro-blogging," courtesy of twitter.com. Endless possible applications for this tool: meet-ups, live updating, etc., though some are already saying that it is not a sustainable tool. Warning: can be highly addictive.

Going National

Can West News Services picked up the cover story (Working, Montreal Gazette) on the Principles of Persuasion, so as of yesterday, I have officially gone National... as in the National Post, one of Canada's two national daily newpapers.

"Don't Tell Them You're The Boss" by Donna Nebenzahl

If you want to influence people, don’t tell them who’s boss, says training and development consultant Heath Slawner.

Mr. Slawner is the first human resources trainer in Canada certified in the Principles of Persuasion, a program taught by U.S. socialpsychol ogist Robert Cialdini.

“It’s pretty intellectual stuff, with a lot of nuance to it,” Mr. Slawner said. “People are using these principles all the time; it’s just a matter of understanding them, and the biases we have as human beings.”

Read the full article here