Recently, I chanced upon this website: http://knowledge.smu.edu.sg/ while looking through my emails. Far from the boring and inapplicable research papers I was expecting, the site is host to many articles and topics I find interesting.
For one, I learnt that money can increase happiness but only up to a certain point (S$8000/month) before it tapers off.
Source: http://knowledge.smu.edu.sg/article.cfm?articleid=1326
This is important because most of us pursue happiness. Amongst other factors, happiness is a function of how much we consume and how much leisure we have. However, there's always a tradeoff between the amount of consumption(based on income you earn which depends on working hours put in) and the amount of leisure spent(which is just based on the amount of free time you have). Now the graph makes the relationship clearer and offers a precise amount before diminishing returns for consumption sets in strongly. But I guess for now, further analysis of this data is useless for me because firstly, I am not working. Secondly, I can't even begin to talk about sacrificing leisure to earn $8000/mth as this is simply out of my personal production possibility frontier. For the moment, the strategy is to work like crazy and earn as much as I can.
Moving on to the next article, I looked at how stereotypes affect us. Source: http://knowledge.smu.edu.sg/article.cfm?articleid=1262
While OBHR textbooks stressed that negative stereotypes damage performance of employees who are stereotyped, it did not occur to me that positive stereotypes could actually enhance performance of individuals. Pretty cool stuff I thought. So if you are from a group or culture that is stereotyped to do well, make sure you remind yourself of your superiority before putting yourself to any test.
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