How to Flunk Uber

Delia Ephron, a best-selling American author, screenwriter, and playwright, published an essay in the New York Times on August 31st, 2014 entitled “Ouch, My Personality, Reviewed” that is a superb example of what Freud called “the psychopathology of everyday life.” She starts the essay by noting that she recently used Uber, the car service for metrosexuals, and the driver told her that if she received one more bad review, “…no driver will pick you up.” She reports that this feedback triggered some “obsessive” soul searching: she wondered how she could have created such a bad score as an Uber passenger when she had only used the service 6 times. She then reviewed her trips, noting that, although she had often behaved badly (“I do get short tempered when I am anxious”), in each case extenuating circumstances caused her behavior. She even got a bad review after a trip during which she said very little: “Perhaps I simply am not a nice person and an Uber driver sensed it.”

The essay is interesting because it is prototypical of people who can’t learn from experience. For example, when Ms. Ephron reviewed the situations in which she mistreated Uber drivers, she spun each incident to show that her behavior should be understood in terms of the circumstances—the driver’s poor performance—and not in terms of her personality. Perhaps situational explanations are the last refuge of both neurotics and social psychologists?

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Hogan Has An App

Are you looking for any easy way to sharpen your interpretation of the Hogan Personality Inventory? There’s an app for that.

Now available for iOS and Android tablet devices, Hogan Pick 2 HPI allows you to easily interpret the high or low score implications of any two HPI scores by tapping LOW or HIGH for any two HPI scales. The INTERPRETATION panel will display behaviors you can expect from someone with similar HPI score combinations.

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5 Ways Teams Fail

An unbalanced team can be an operational nightmare – projects stall, ideas dry up, and morale plummets. Fortunately, unbalanced teams manifest themselves in five predictable ways, each of which can be fixed by bringing in people to fill gaps, or reassigning people where too many individuals are trying to fill a role.

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