Sense of humor is a potent weapon in dealing with setbacks

Psychology Today wrote about research into how people cope with stress and failure. One key asset (as people who read this blog regularly probably already know) is a sense of humor:

A sample of 149 students completed daily diary reports for 3 -- 14 days, reporting the most bothersome failure they experienced during the day, what strategies they used to cope with the failure, and how satisfied they felt at the end of the day. Their coping strategies included: using emotional or instrumental support; self-distraction; denial; religion; venting; substance use; self-blame; and behavioral disengagement.

Of these, using social support (both emotional and instrumental), denial, venting, behavioral disengagement, and self-blame coping had negative effects on satisfaction at the end of the day: the more students used these coping strategies in dealing with the day's most bothersome failure, the less satisfied they felt at the end of the day. What's interesting to note is that social support by others was not an effective strategy.

In contrast, positive reframing (i.e. trying to see things in a more positive light, looking for something good in what happened), acceptance and humor coping had positive effects on satisfaction: the more students used these coping strategies in dealing with failures, the more satisfied they felt at the end of the day.

The research (link - PDF) was originally published in the journal with the distinctly unhumorous name "Anxiety, Stress & Coping."

TV ad shows our human frailties

This commercial from Liberty Mutual Insurance, featured in the 2012 Olympic coverage, seemed appropriate to repost here :)



"Humans. We mean well, but we're imperfect creatures living in a beautifully imperfect world.... It's amazing we've made it this far."

Etsy CEO on the Three-Armed Sweater Award for Spectacular Mistakes

From Nick Bilton's interview of Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson on the New York Times Bits blog:

Q. Do you see your employees as hackers?
A. Absolutely. The internals of the company really embody the hacker spirit. The empowerment of the company is really on the edges. For example, we have 100 engineers, and any single engineer can deploy code to the live site at any time. It happens about 30 times a day.

Q. Wait, anyone can upload code? At anytime? Has this ever gone awry?
A. Of course! We do blameless postmortems about it all the time — which is incredibly important. We believe that if you have a blameless process, you actually get to the root of the problem quicker and people don’t feel like they have to hide information. We don’t enjoy making mistakes, but we give an award to the person who makes the most spectacular mistake.

Q. What kind of awards?
A. We had a three-armed sweater made for one of our engineers who committed the most spectacular mistake of the year. He essentially disabled any Etsy employee from accessing the site.