Success Depends on Others Failing

[BigFatBlonde]

Posted: 11/28/07 at 2:11pm

Time Magazine
Monday, Nov. 26, 2007
Success Depends on Others Failing
By Laura Blue/London

Reward mechanisms in the brain depend on how well you think other people are doing, a new neurological study suggests. The findings, published in the Nov. 23 issue of the journal Science are the first to lend physiological proof to a longstanding theory among contemporary economists: that people are affected not only by their own achievements and income, but also by how they stack up against their neighbors.

The study, by cognition experts and economists at the University of Bonn in Germany, looks at the brain regions that process reward. Nineteen pairs of subjects performed a series of tasks, estimating the number of dots on a screen, while their brains were scanned. Each time a subject answered correctly, he or she won a cash prize but the prizes were not always the same. Players could see whether their opponents had answered correctly, and how the prize money was distributed.

The researchers were especially interested in the set of outcomes where both players answered correctly. For any given prize value, the brain's reward response was bigger if the other player earned less. Players on average were more pleased with a 60 euro prize when the other player got just 30 euros, for example, than they were if both players earned 60 euros, or if the other player got more.

Full article:

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1687725,00.html?imw=Y?xid=feed-netzero-featured

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 11/28/07 at 2:40pm

But all the CEO self-help books say that all you have to do to be a winner is Refuse to Lose.

Simple.

[son_of_a_gunn_25]

Posted: 11/28/07 at 5:03pm

Updated On: 12/23/09 at 05:03 PM