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Fun Op-Ed page from David Brooks @NYT

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Self-control consumes glucose in the brain. For an article in the journal Aggressive Behavior, Nathan DeWall, Timothy Deckman, Matthew Gaillot and Brad Bushman found that research subjects who consumed a glucose beverage behaved less aggressively than subjects who drank a placebo beverage. They found an indirect relationship between diabetes (a disorder marked by poor glucose toleration) and low self-control. States with high diabetes rates also had high crime rates. Countries with a different condition that leads to low glucose levels had higher killing rates, both during wartime and during peacetime.

We tend to admire extroverted leaders. But Adam Grant, Francesca Gino and David Hofmann have added a wrinkle to this bias in an article in The Academy of Management Journal. They found that extraverted leaders perform best when their employees are passive, but this effect is reversed when the employees are proactive. In these cases, the extroverted leaders are less receptive to their employees’ initiatives.

Beautiful women should take up chess. Anna Dreber, Christer Gerdes and Patrik Gransmark wrote a Stockholm University working paper in which they found that male chess players pursue riskier strategies when they’re facing attractive female opponents, even though the risk-taking didn’t improve their performance.

People remember information that is hard to master. In a study for Cognition, Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel Oppenheimer and Erikka Vaughan found that information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than information transmitted in easier fonts.
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