Narcissists know they're narcissists

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While positive self-views are generally considered healthy, adaptive, and attractive, OVERLY positive self-views often have social costs. For example, when I asked my friend’s boyfriend if his classes this semester were challenging, he responded as follows: “I’ve done better than EVERY OTHER student in EVERY SINGLE grad class that I’ve taken. I certainly don’t except my classes this semester to be a problem.” If you’re like me, this statement made you shudder. The sense of superiority and the overt “bragginess” screams creep. Again, if you’re like me, you aren’t surprised that I was less interested in a friendship with him the second he uttered the statement, and that when this statement was followed by similar statements later on, my friend quickly ended the relationship. Although I’m certainly not qualified to diagnose my friend’s boyfriend with any disorder, or to label him as a particular type of person, this attitude of superiority is consistent with narcissism, colloquially defined as an inflated sense of self-importance, egotism, vanity, and selfishness.

As this example demonstrates, there is often a large disconnect between narcissists’ self-perceptions (e.g. how positively he sees himself) and others’ perceptions of him (how positively his friends, coworkers, classmates, and acquaintances sees him). Interestingly, narcissists often create positive first impressions - they are initially rated as charming, likable, extraverted, and physically attractive (e.g. Back, Egloff, & Schmukle, 2010). However, overtime these impressions sour, with others progressively seeing them as disagreeable, emotionally unstable, and poorly adjusted (like my example above). Despite the deterioration of their reputation, narcissists often continue to see themselves in overly positive ways. This begs the question – are narcissists self aware? More precisely: do narcissists know that others don’t see them in such a positive light? Are they aware of their own negative characteristics? DO THEY KNOW THEY’RE NARCISSISTS?
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5 Resume-Writing Strategies for a Competitive Market

Resume writing ideas that can change everything

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If you're a professional searching for your next opportunity in today's aggressive job market, you've probably found that the task of marketing yourself on your resume is unlike any other.



How do you sum up a long, storied career in just a few paragraphs? What is the best way to differentiate yourself on paper--and to get employers to see your value?



Standing out among the pack requires an intense emphasis on your natural leadership abilities, the impact you have on your employer's business, the feedback you get from colleagues, and the hard skills that you bring to the table.



This information comprises what is known as a "personal brand," and it has become the cornerstone of a successful professional resume in the employment arena.



Here are 5 insider tips that can help bring out your personal brand--and get your resume to open more doors for you:



1 - Hone Your Message.



Many resumes contain too much detail, which is quite understandable given the long tenure that some candidates possess.



However, it's asking a lot of hiring authorities to wade through more than 2 or 3 pages of information.



My recommendation? Sharpen the intensity of your branding message by zeroing in on your top 3-5 main qualifiers, including success stories and keywords that back these up.



In addition, focus on one career goal and skill set at a time. This may mean that you will create one resume targeting a role in Operations, and another that describes your skills for a Sales position.



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Can the important people in your life help you transcend group differences?

Our significant others (even our X's) influence our new relationships (source)

When I first started graduate school I was enthralled by the idea that much of how we relate to other people in our social lives is driven by our past relationships with important/close others. This theory, which my graduate advisor Serena Chen called the relational self suggests that who we are and how we think about the self is fundamentally shaped by our relationships with others. These influential relationships (they must be influential, stable, long-term relationships, though not necessarily positive/well-adjusted ones) create working models-- like scripts in a play that actors follow-- for how to interact with other people. Thus, whenever you are in a context that reminds you of a significant other you should apply these working models.

This can happen pretty much anywhere. Let's say you meet someone who looks like your ex-girlfriend (big X from now on). Your interaction with this person will be based--at least in a small part-- on how you'd expect an interaction with your X to go. So for example, if you expect your X to freak out about you being five minutes late to pick her up at the airport, you'd expect a person who resembles the X to do the same. In addition, if you tend to feel down or blue around your X, again, you should feel a slight dip in your own mood when around this new person.

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The Plastic Brain

Today we would like to present you with the second of our series of guest bloggers. Allyson Mackey is a graduate student in the neuroscience program at UC-Berkeley. Enjoy!

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I was recently challenged by a colleague to come up with an example of a neuroscience finding that changed the way I live my life. I immediately thought of the now quite vast literature on neuroplasticity: the ability of our brains to change and adapt to new experiences. In this post, I’d like to propose that what we’ve learned about neuroplasticity so far can help us lead better lives, and that neuroplasticity research in the future will be poised to influence public policy issues ranging from health to education.  

I want to start by summarizing some exciting results from research on the structure and connectivity of brain cells, called neurons. Scientists have shown that experience can drive changes in the connections between neurons in as little as thirty seconds. Substantial changes in brain inputs, like the loss of a sense like vision or touch in a limb, can lead to remarkable compensatory re-organization in cortex. However, even subtle environmental changes can change brain structure. For example, giving rats interesting toys to play with, or allowing them to run more frequently on an exercise wheel, can lead to more connections between neurons in brain regions that are critical for learning, like the hippocampus. What is even more exciting is that cognitive enrichment and exercise can lead to neurogenesis, the creation of new neurons, in the hippocampus. The formation of new neurons was long thought to be impossible since, unlike other cells in your body, most neurons can’t divide to make more neurons after birth.

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Unfortunately, neuroplasticity is often called a double-edged sword. While positive environmental changes can lead to beneficial neural changes, the brain is also susceptible to negative environmental factors. One particularly relevant example is stress.  Chronic stress can prevent the birth of new neurons in the hippocampus, strengthen fear and anxiety circuits, and even effectively turn off brain regions responsible for attention and self-control. In summary, results from animal studies of neural plasticity suggest that our brains have the intrinsic ability to change in response to environmental demands both in adaptive ways, in response to cognitive stimulation and exercise, but also in maladaptive ways, in response to stress.

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What you expect is what you get: The "Pygmalion Effect"

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"Whether you think you can or whether you think you can't, you're right."
-Henry Ford

A couple of Fridays ago I posted a video about teacher who took her third grade class through an activity designed to help them learn about prejudice. When the students were told by their teacher that people with a certain eye color were smarter and better all around, they came to believe it and act in accordance. In the comments to this post, a reader noted that this video reminded him of the famous study by Rosenthal and Jacobson (1966) testing something they'd termed the “Pygmalion effect,” and so I thought I'd share that study with you today.

The Pygmalion effect? If you are not a fan of Eliza Doolittle and My Fair Lady, you might think this effect sounds like a medical condition that occurs after too much sun exposure (or is that just me?), but it’s not. What we’re talking about here is a simple case of self self-fulfilling prophecies (which Juli first wrote about here). Rosenthal and Jacobson were interested in the role of teacher expectancies in learning. What exactly does this mean? Imagine that a third grade teacher starts in the fall with a new class of students, a few of which had older sibling who passed through her class in previous years. She knows that those siblings were star students, and expects the younger siblings will also perform well. She might also talk with some of the second grade teachers who had had some of her students the previous year, and get all kinds of insider information about which students were top performers, and which straggled behind. Now let’s fast forward to the end of the year. Not surprisingly, the students whom the teacher had expected to do well met her expectations, and the stragglers continued to straggle behind. Did those star students perform well because they were smarter than the rest, as indicated by their siblings’ success and the reports of their second grade teachers? Or could it have been a much more sinister story - that they did so well simply because their teachers expected them to do well? This is exactly what Rosenthal and Jacobson wanted to find out.
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What does "good" feel like?

Which activity sounds better to you?
a) canoeing on a peaceful lake       b) white-water rafting

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What is your new favorite song?

a) Calgary, by Bon Iver           b) Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.), by Katy Perry

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If you were to use an illegal drug, which would you choose?
a) heroine (a calming narcotic)      b) cocaine (an energizing stimulant)

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What do your responses to these questions say about you?
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The Effects of Employee Satisfaction on Customer Satisfaction

Empowering your employees to act in your customers’ best interest!



There is a clear connection between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. While it is difficult to quantify the impact of employee attitude on the satisfaction level of your clients, one fact remains the same: satisfied customers will keep coming back and referring your company to their friends and business acquaintances. It is obvious that there are significant benefits to be gained from trying to improve an organization's service quality, and that's why managers devote so much time and money to training programs that provide employees with guidelines on the specifics of dealing with customers. What managers don't fully understand is that such attempts are, to a certain extent, shallow! Real improvements in customer service start with providing superior service and support to the employees themselves.



Akhtaboot is here to provide you with tips on how to make sure your employees are happy and satisfied and in return are giving their maximum in providing the best services to your customers.



Hire Better!



Because not everybody is capable of working on a computer while handling a phone conversation, HR managers must first define the company’s future employee needs to deliver the right customer experience. Company culture, details of the job and specific competencies also need to be evaluated and understood in order to develop an effective hiring model. While finding exceptional client servicing employees who can do efficient post-call work is important, it is actually not as important as finding employees who can listen and respond with empathy to clients, and who have the ability to identify issues and deliver specific answers effectively and efficiently with emphasis on first call issue resolution. By systemizing the hiring process, using a more strategic approach and taking time to analyze the job and your employee competency needs, you will be able to identify and hire candidates that better meet the needs of your organization and who are more likely to stay in their positions for a longer period of time.



Trust and Respect



Trust and respect are the basis of pretty much all successful relationships, and it’s certainly no different in employee relationships. One of the best ways to determine the level of trust in a company is to examine assumptions regarding intentions. Do policies and procedures seem to assume that employees act on their best intentions or their worst intentions? In other words, are the policies in place mostly to ensure employees don’t do things they are not allowed to do, or to ensure employees have the right environment to do the things they should be doing? An excellent way to test respect is in how input is heard from the different members of a team. Are people’s ideas that presented with detail and backed with supporting evidence taken seriously? This doesn’t mean that all ideas must always be accepted and implemented. However, if the idea is ultimately rejected, it should be rejected with the same level of thought and supporting evidence.



Show Appreciation



Employee attitudes typically reflect the moral of the company as a whole. In areas of customer service and sales, happy employees are extremely important because they represent the company to the public. Satisfaction, however, is not linked solely to compensation. Sure, a raise or extra benefits will probably improve employee contentment, at least temporarily, but small, inexpensive changes can have a long-term impact such as showing ‘Appreciation.’ Appreciation means making your employees feel important and that they are a vital part of a common goal. The result of doing so will sure be manifested in better customer satisfaction.



Instill Confidence



With a solid framework for hierarchy, clear accountabilities and matching authority, employees can begin to make decisions about their daily work with confidence. As those decisions become more and more effective, employees become more self-confident. Self-confidence is definitely a vital element to success in all aspects of life. Confident employees find it much easier to do what’s right for customers and for the company.



Create an Atmosphere of Growth



A Job is more than a source of income, it is actually a venue for employees to grow and learn. Companies that invest in their employees’ growth will not only have happier employees; they will have more productive employees who generate better and better ideas for improving the company service level. This means mentoring employees, training them in areas even beyond their current scope of responsibilities, being more transparent about aspects of the business that are interesting to particular employees and more. Creating more skilled and more knowledgeable employees has an extremely high ROI.



Measurement is Key



Companies with a highly evolved sense of the impact employee satisfaction makes on customer profitability constantly measure everything: customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, process efficiencies and bottlenecks. This enables them to determine what’s working and what’s not so as to make adjustments accordingly. Periodic re-evaluation also enables your company to benefit from the fresh ideas of your current and new hires.



“People are our most valuable asset”, “Our employees come first” and “We’re only as strong as our people”. These statements have been around in the workplace for decades, yet countless companies seem to be in denial of just how accurate those statements are. Many business owners think that they only need to pay attention to paying customers, providing them with exceptional service. Yet, it has been proven that keeping your employees satisfied with their work experience, providing them with challenges and allowing them to have a sense of ownership in the business can have a tremendous effect on customer satisfaction and loyalty. The correlations are clear: Satisfied employees generate satisfied customers, who in turn build long-term relationships and spend more money!

Psychological blind spots

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Just as we have visual blind spots when looking at the road through our car mirrors, we also have psychological blind spots - aspects of our personalities that are hidden from our view. These might be annoying habits like interrupting or bragging, or they might be deeper fears or desires that are too threatening to acknowledge. Although it's generally not pleasant to confront these aspects of ourselves, doing so can be very useful when it comes to personal growth, and when it comes to improving our relationships with others - there is undoubtedly something we do that, unbeknownst to us, drives our significant others, roommates, or coworkers a little crazy. So how do you know what your blind spots are?

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Akhtaboot Cares Initiative at the Launch Event of the “Leader in Progress” Program of the German-Jordanian University

As part of Akhtaboot’s continuous efforts to help the less fortunate in pursuing their education and finding the right career path, Akhtaboot Cares Initiative (ACI) has recently participated in the Leader in Progress Scholarship Fund Initiative, a charity program organized by the students of the School of Management and Logistics Sciences of the German Jordanian University.



Akhtaboot Cares Initiative - Akhtaboot’s CSR Arm - provided a donation for the purpose of supporting outstanding orphan students in pursuing their university education. In addition, Akhtaboot will also take an active role in helping the orphan students in planning their career paths and in landing the right job upon graduation.



In celebration of all donating companies, the German Jordanian University organized a charity Suhoor to support the Leader in Progress Scholarship Fund Initiative. The Suhoor was held under the patronage of Her Highness Princess Alia Tabbaa, President of the German Jordanian University, at the Sheraton Hotel - The Sanctuary terrace on Tuesday the 16th of August.



About Akhtaboot Cares Initiative



The Akhtaboot Cares Initiative (ACI) is a comprehensive CSR program that was developed through partnerships with a number of second parties and educational institutions in the Middle East and GCC region. Through the ACI Akhtaboot maintains an ongoing presence in the region’s educational institutions and career-related events by developing and executing specific training programs that are tailor-made to educate graduates-to-be and job seekers on how to approach the job market and to smoothen their transition into the professional world.



About The Leader in Progress Scholarship Fund



The Leader in Progress scholarship fund was created by the German Jordanian University students who wanted to contribute to the society of our beloved country, Jordan. This initiative is intended to close the gap social classes and even the wider gap between large businesses and social institutions. Driven by the vision of his majesty King Adbulla II, the initiative is geared mainly toward youth education.

Are the Rich Really Rude? What Science Actually Says

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In a previous post I wrote about how cool it can be for one's research to be picked up by the national media. Last week I was lucky enough to have this happen here, here, and here. The article described in the news is based on a program of research that Professor Dacher Keltner and I started about 7-8 years ago. The goal of our research was to study social class-- that is, the collection of social and material conditions of life that rank us in American society relative to others. More specifically, we wanted to understand how a person's position in society-- based on their income, their educational attainment, or their occupation status-- could shape their behavior in social interactions, their perceptions of others, and their emotions. According to the media, our research concludes that the rich are rude/selfish/and lack empathy. But is this really the case? Let's summarize the evidence!

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The Power of Prejudice: A Class Divided

Do you remember your first brush with prejudice as a child? These students certainly do. A classic in intro social psychology classes, the video I've linked to below details the experiences of a group of students in Riceville, Iowa in 1970 after MLK Jr was shot. The video tells the tale of their teacher pushing them to understand the experience of prejudice, possibly for the first time. I won't give too many details because the video tells the whole story. This video will certainly stick with you, and not just because of their awesome '70s attire.
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My favorite unromantic theories of love

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Why are we drawn to certain people and not others? What makes us fall in love - and stay in love? Poets delve into the mystery of love with beautiful sonnets, musicians seek to capture its subtle essence in song, and many others feel that their love is divinely inspired. Social and personality psychologists, on the other hand, break love down into simple shapes, colors, and equations, the most popular of which are described below. These theories may seem to reduce love to something more mundane and unexciting, but they also have a certain elegance of their own. 

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Google Adwords Case Study on Akhtaboot as a Success Story: Akhtaboot is Taking on the Online Recruitment Market with all 8 Tentacles!

Google AdWords has recently chosen Akhtaboot as a success story in a recent case study conducted on a selection of online portals utilizing Google AdWords services in the Middle East.



Akhtaboot is a Jordanian-based career network that is committed to providing a user-friendly, effective and efficient way of linking the right person to the right job opportunity. Founded in 2007 in Amman, Akhtaboot currently serves as a career network for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region with branches set up in Dubai and Riyadh. It has seen exponential growth since its inception, and it is seeing a phenomenal increase in traffic and users with every passing day. In May 2011, Akhtaboot made it to Jordan's Fastest Growing Companies List.



Since the launch of Akhtaboot, it has used Google AdWords as a key tool in growing the business. Yousef Shamoun, Founder and CEO of Akhtaboot, says: "We use most advertising/marketing platforms. We have noticed that we get our best results from our online advertising campaigns, specifically Google AdWords. Our target audience is primarily online, and Google provides us with the necessary tools to effectively and accurately track our ROI." As a result of using a combination of very targeted AdWords campaigns and continuous SEO efforts, Akhtaboot experienced a significant annual growth of 168% in registrations and sign-ups.



Being a purely online business, Akhtaboot today relies on AdWords for 20% of all its traffic. It uses AdWords to grow its database of qualified CVs, to get company clients to use its services, as well as for branding and exposure. It has used both search as well as display ads in its campaigns, experimenting with different messages, and tracking corresponding clickthrough-rate and cost-per-conversion. Performance of the campaigns is also optimized through regular phone calls with the Google AdWords team, which, as Yousef describes it, "have been instrumental in improving our results and were very responsive to our needs". What separated AdWords from its competitors was the return on investment. Having used other online advertising programmes, Yousef commented that "We are very pleased with the ROI achieved from our Google ad campaign even when compared to other online mediums."



Akhtaboot started to use Conversion Tracking to measure its success in February 2011. "Conversion tracking", says Yousef, "is great. It helped us identify the exact number of conversions from both our English and Arabic campaigns. Conversion Tracking helped us identify the bottlenecks in our registration process, and ultimately we were able to tweak our registration process and reduce our cost-per-conversion."



Akhtaboot has recently started experimenting with Conversion Optimizer, an AdWords feature that uses Conversion Tracking data to get more conversions at a lower cost. Preliminary results show that there has been an increase of 14% in conversions and a decrease of 18% in the cost-per-conversion.



Through AdWords, Akhtaboot managed to strengthen its brand equity as well as to extend its services to new geographical countries. Yousef is highly confident that Google AdWords is essential for the success of their business. Akhtaboot plans to expand and open local offices in most of the countries in the MENA region to stay in close contact with job seekers and companies alike and to be able to serve them in the most effective and efficient manner.



Check out more success stories of Google AdWords users.

The Spotlight Effect or You're the Only One Who Knows You're Having a Bad Hair Day

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Part of the human experience seems to be finding ourselves in highly embarrassing situations. At some time most of us have tripped on the stairs in a crowded area, spilled our drink on a stranger, put our foot in our mouth during an important conversation, or simply had to face the world on a really bad hair day. When I find myself in one of these situations, such as when I tripped over my own feet in the middle of campus last week, I instantly blush and put my head down, hoping to avoid the pity and humor that I’m sure is on the faces of all those who witnessed my moment of embarrassment. But, according to social psychology research, I shouldn’t be so quick to blush and look away. It turns out that the number of people who noticed my mishap are likely to be much fewer than I’d imagined, as we tend to overestimate how much our actions and appearance are noticed by others, something social psychologists call the “spotlight effect." 

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Friday Fun: At the Movies (with a Psychologist)

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Because Juli's psychology songs post was so much fun, I thought I'd try something new this Friday. In what follows, I will provide a very brief summary of the plot, or a specific scene, from a movie. After this description, I will then discuss a key psychological construct that the movie's theme relates to.



It's a simple game, so let's get started. There are spoilers, so read on with caution.



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Adversity: A path to vulnerability or resiliency? Depends on how much.

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Throughout my life I’ve been lucky to be friends with a diverse array of people, who have had quite varied past experiences. There are those few friends with "charmed" lives. Healthy family, happy home, found "the one" with little difficulty. There are others who have experienced major past adversity. The loss of a parent, a debilitating rejection, chronic poverty. This variability has often made me wonder about the relationship between past experiences and whether one responds to current life adversity with with vulnerability or resiliency. If faced with a new crisis, who will display the resilient response – 1) my friend who has never experienced any adversity or 2) my friend who has experienced too much adversity. There are convincing arguments to be made for either case. My friend who never experienced adversity might have a strong social support network and a positive outlook on life, but might lack necessary skills and toughness needed to get through a traumatic event. My friend who experienced too much adversity might be stressed and depleted from their past experiences, but might have developed that toughness and those skills that my “charmed” friend lacks. So what’s the answer?

In 2010 Mark Seery, a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, along with colleagues Alison Holman and Roxane Cohen Silver tackled this question. Specifically they assessed whether past adversity is associated with 1) worse mental health and well-being outcomes overtime, and 2) how one responds to a recent adverse event.
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Akhtaboot Launches “Career Connect”

Akhtaboot - the career network is proud to announce the launch of its revolutionary new service: Career Connect for your company, powered by the Akhtaboot jobs platform. Career Connect will provide companies with their own fully integrated and branded jobs section, with the ability to post unlimited job postings and receive job applications directly onto their careers section on their own website.

The launch of the Career Connect service follows the recent release of the revamped employer side of Akhtaboot, which includes several new improvements, ranging from new time-saving functionality to easier navigability. Career Connect is now going a step further by giving companies their own branded careers section, with benefits including:

• Customized Design: companies will enjoy a fully integrated job board, branded with the company name, logo and job content, powered by “Akhtaboot”.
• Social Media Integration: companies can link their Twitter and LinkedIn pages to their “Career Connect” platform for maximum exposure of their posted jobs.
• Branded Facebook Application: companies can now link their Career Connect platform to their Facebook Fan Page, allowing fans to search for and apply to the posted jobs from within Facebook.
• CV Email Drop Functionality: allowing companies to gather all CVs received by email into one database, along with the ability to filter all CVs through a revolutionary text search box. CVs can either be soft-copy attachment or hard-copy scans, and the Akhtaboot system is powered by OCR technology to handle any kind of CV.
• Additional Customized Sign-up Fields: for more specific and targeted job applications that meet the requirements of any company.

Mohamad Haj Hasan, COO and Cofounder of Akhtaboot said:

“Our core business expertise lie in the development of cutting edge recruitment solutions to help our clients pursue their business objectives. With Career Connect, we offer our clients a single point of contact for all of their recruitment needs”.

With the launch of Career Connect, Akhtaboot goes beyond helping companies simply fill their vacancies; it actually provides companies with a recruitment hub that is specifically designed to make the hiring process simple, efficient, and as cost-effective as ever.