Psychologist Jerry Yang and poker

Vaugh­an writes a great post titled Psy­chol­o­gist wins world pok­er cham­pi­onships on Jer­ry Yang, a 29 year-old psy­chol­o­gist and social work­er who just won the World Series of Pok­er. He says:

  • In terms of deal­ing with the inter­ac­tion between social influ­ence and risky finan­cial deci­sions, a study by Dr. Andreas Roi­der found that psy­chol­o­gists made, on aver­age, three times as much mon­ey as econ­o­mists and physi­cists in an online trad­ing game because they were less swayed by the ‘herd instinct’
  • In oth­er words, psy­chol­o­gists were bet­ter at under­stand­ing how peo­ple actu­al­ly behave, as opposed to how they should behave if they were choos­ing the most math­e­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect strategy.”

Very inter­est­ing…

He also posits that psy­chol­o­gists may be bet­ter at detect­ing oth­er’s emo­tions, maybe through the tools we described in this post Improv­ing Your Brain Tools: Read­ing Emo­tion­al Mes­sages in the Face

  • Con­cealed emo­tions, microex­pres­sions, are the fleet­ing expres­sions that peo­ple make when they are con­scious­ly or uncon­scious­ly try­ing to hide their true emo­tion­al response. In con­scious microex­pres­sions they may be try­ing to lie, while with uncon­scious expres­sions, they may not even be aware of what they are tru­ly feeling.“ 
  • Accord­ing to Paul Ekman, “These expres­sions tend to be very extreme and very fast. Eighty to 90 per­cent of peo­ple we test­ed don’t see them.”

Brain Fit­ness is more than we usu­al­ly think…
 

3 Comments

  1. Terri on July 20, 2007 at 12:49

    True. Busi­ness­men should have tak­en psy­chol­o­gy class­es dur­ing their course of study to deal with peo­ple. Being able to under­stand peo­ple’s emo­tion can real­ly make a big dif­fer­ence, espe­cial­ly in business..



  2. Alvaro on July 21, 2007 at 12:19

    True, Ter­ry. In fact, Daniel Gold­man and his Emo­tion­al Intel­li­gence books have been very use­ful to make busi­ness exec­u­tives aware of this need. Cheers



  3. Wally on July 23, 2007 at 6:11

    I agree. I think psy­chol­o­gy class­es should be a part of their stud­ies. It will only take a small part of their time. Besides, it’s very use­ful as long as human emo­tions is concerned.



About SharpBrains

SHARPBRAINS is an independent think-tank and consulting firm providing services at the frontier of applied neuroscience, health, leadership and innovation.
SHARPBRAINS es un think-tank y consultoría independiente proporcionando servicios para la neurociencia aplicada, salud, liderazgo e innovación.

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