Is your life as awesome as you pretend it is on Facebook?

Before I start, a plea: don’t shoot the messenger. A study* reported in the journal Personality and Individual Differences last month has suggested that there’s a direct link between the number of friends you have on Facebook and the degree to which you qualify as a “socially disruptive” narcissist. Just for the record, in a previous 2010 study on college students, narcissism was explained as “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration and an exaggerated sense of self-importance.”

Study participants who scored highly on something called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory questionnaire apparently had more friends on Facebook, tagged themselves more often, and updated their status and profile pictures more frequently. The research comes amid “increasing evidence that self-absorbed young people are becoming increasingly obsessed with self-image and shallow friendships.”  I’m just saying . . .   Continue reading

The Hummer House

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Zak Stone is the Assistant Editor of GOOD, the unique media platform that produces “a quarterly magazine, online videos, and events for people who give a damn”, as their website claims.  When Stone heard that General Motors was planning to phase out its Hummer vehicle a few years ago, he noted that few tears were shed.  It felt, he wrote, like poetic justice for the gas-guzzling, military-turned-luxury vehicle favoured by a certain former governor of California.

So he cheered the news that a pair of Los Angeles architects may have found a way to redeem this environmentally disastrous vehicle:   Continue reading

Warning, doctors: it’s the age of the ‘Super Loss’ malpractice suit

As I wrote here in 2009, if you want to predict what you should be worrying about tomorrow, find out what insiders are worried about today. For example, it’s ever-so-enlightening to eavesdrop on the internal reports that health care industry stakeholders are reading, where simple, dull-witted heart patients like me can find intriguing musings from the pundits paid to stay one step ahead of the prescription pad.

I found such an insider recently in the form of LifeHealthPro. This company’s website explains:

“LifeHealthPro.com is the only complete online destination for life and health insurance advisors. The site is designed to provide advisors, insurance wholesalers, CPAs, and estate planning attorneys the essential elements they need to run their practice and increase their bottom line.”   Continue reading

Why men buy, but women shop

Men want to go to Sears, buy a specific tool and get out. That’s the message of a study called “Men Buy, Women Shop” in which researchers found that women react more strongly than men to personal interaction with retail sales staff. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to respond to more utilitarian aspects of the experience – such as ease in parking the car, whether the item they came for is in stock, and the length of the checkout line.

The study was undertaken by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business (Jay H. Baker Retail Initiative) and the Verde Group, a Toronto consulting firm. According to Wharton marketing professor Dr. Stephen J. Hoch, shopping behaviour mirrors gender differences throughout many aspects of life:

“Women think of shopping in an interpersonal, human fashion while men treat it as more instrumental. It’s a job to get done.”

Continue reading