Welcome to The Spark, bringing you the world's best behavioral science. 

We are in the midst of an exciting month here at Applied Scholar! The Vault is fully live, we’ve had a number of great conversations with subscribers and practitioners, and we’ve made big upgrades to the behind-the-scenes systems that help us bring you the best and most applicable research. Let’s dig into some of the research and commentary we’ve recently come across.

We suspect this Spark has something for everyone, as we touch on a wide range of topics - Mindfulness at Work, Microlearning, Meeting Science, and taking a different look at the recent “oh my, everyone is using Artificial Intelligence to cheat!” story.

 A brief note before the research: July is the launch month for the Vault, with an active discount for all Spark subscribers this month. Use SPARK50 at checkout to secure 50% off your first 3 months or 50% off your first year subscription.

SPOTLIGHT

Mindfulness at Work? How Strong is the Actual Evidence.  

We’re in a shit sandwich. On one hand, the volume of behavioral science research papers is going up. On the other hand, the average quality of that research is going down. In summary: there’s now more and more research to wade through that is becoming worse and worse.

For all of us, that means it’s becoming harder and more time-consuming to figure out if the research you’re coming across is reliable and trustworthy. Discernment is becoming more and more valuable. If you can go to one place, easily find what you need on topics you care about, and know that what you’re coming across has been fully vetted. That’s the value that we provide.

As a major part of our effort to do this, we’re constantly on the hunt for high-quality research reviews. We want to avoid being influenced by some one-off study of low-quality design, and focus much more of our attention on the big, high-quality reviews or meta-analyses. 

Mindfulness - with a ton of interest and attention in professional organizations, HR, and coaching - has a ton of those low-quality one-offs. So we were legitimately excited (nerd alert!) to come across a research summary focused specifically on Mindfulness at Work (the best way to access it without a paywall is to go through this LinkedIn post).

If your work touches on mindfulness (e.g., you’re a coach recommending it, a facilitator who uses it in sessions, or a buyer of a mindfulness product for an organization), this review provides a helpful reality check on the “buzz” around mindfulness at work.

Side note: It’s even cooler that there’s an adversarial response to this article as well, written by another group of researchers. Unfortunately though (typical of this type of stuff), it’s hidden behind a substantial paywall. But if you’re really into this topic, it could be worth exploring to get the full range of views.

FEATURED RESEARCH

Let's dig into the research.

A Healthy Dose of Skepticism for Microlearning: Throughout Michael’s L&D career, he has heard this a lot: “You know, attention spans are getting shorter. I don’t think they’ll watch this long video. Can you cut it up into shorter segments?” Sigh. Well, it turns out, there could be some real downsides to short videos that change a lot, as this research highlights. Our one sentence summary: you remember less when the videos are short and switching. This is just one study (always careful!), but it is something to watch and take seriously, as it aligns with a much broader research foundation. Side note on this one: we found it uniquely ironic that the article summarizing the research included a short video at the top. Really?!?

Meeting Science: We read a lot of research and we’ve never come across a paper quite like this one before on the topics of meetings. We’ll give the preface that it’s a bit more on the academic side, but if meetings (and making them not suck so much) is something you’re interested in, this summary is likely for you. The key takeaways are consistent to what you might see in shorter peices, but this one takes a much more interesting road before getting there. We loved this point: “from early tribal councils to the social interactions of medieval guilds, the need to come together has been woven into the fabric of human existence .” Also, you know that there are likely 1 billion meetings per day around the world? Crazy!

PERSPECTIVES TO SHARE

High-quality commentary from the world of applied behavioral science.  

AI, cheating, and a big point on workplace performance - There’s a story making the rounds about a Brown professor who thinks most of his students used AI to cheat on a midterm take-home exam. So he decides to make the final exam in-person, and grades (shockingly!) plummet. Midterm average is in the 90s. Final exam average is below 50 percent. Here’s a link to the full story if you have somehow managed to avoid this one or you want to see the visual of the grades (it’s a cool chart actually!). As you might expect, the average commentary is something like “oh my, AI is the worst, students are the worst, what are we going to do?” Yep, got it. Viewing this through a workplace lens, we have a TOTALLY different take here at Applied Scholar! How fricken amazing would it be if all of your employees - using just one new tool - doubled their performance on something. Of course, academic exams aren’t exactly like workplace performance. Fully agreed. But some work probably is more like this, and what an amazing outcome for those types of tasks. So next time you see yet another clickbait headline about AI-cheating students crushing exams, you might consider asking: “do my employees or I have any tasks that even remotely resemble that type of work?”

LAST BUT NOT LEAST

We hope you take the time this month to preview and explore the Vault. And be on the lookout for a new Collection in the Vault, the Foundations of Inclusion and Belonging. Coming in early August!

Click here to visit the Vault Preview. 

 We hope that you enjoyed this edition of the Spark. See you again soon!