Recent quotes:

Here's why conservatives and liberals differ on COVID-19: New Lehigh University College of Business study looks at getting everyone to agree on the pandemic threat -- ScienceDaily

According to the paper, "Getting Conservatives and Liberals to Agree on the COVID-19 Threat," published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research in September, conservatives tend to see free will as the primary driver of outcomes in life, whereas liberals are more accepting of the idea that randomness plays a role. Compared to liberals, conservatives tend to attribute outcomes to purposeful actions. So in the context of the pandemic, they're more likely to blame any negative outcomes in their lives on these more agentic policymakers or fellow Americans rather than the virus itself.

autonomy, competence and connection

Kennon Sheldon, a psychology professor at the University of Missouri and author of Optimal Human Being, says we’ll be happiest if they meet our primary psychological needs: autonomy, or, as Sheldon says, “doing what you want to be doing and believe in doing”; competence, or “doing something well and/or seeing improvement”; and relatedness, like “connecting to others, immersing in a community, or contributing something to the world.”

You gotta do to be

Researchers from the University of Ottawa and the University of Rochester asked college students to focus over a ten-day period on increasing either meaning (for example, pursuing excellence and personal growth, practicing gratitude, showing kindness toward others, engaging in introspection) or amusement and pleasure (sleeping more, watching television, shopping, eating sweets). They found that the students who focused on pleasurable activities felt an immediate boost in happiness over the first ten days, but only those who focused on meaningful activities experienced a sustained increase over the subsequent three weeks. Pursuing meaningful activities, the researchers concluded, “was generally related to elevating experience.”

How Exercise Shapes You, Far Beyond the Gym – Personal Growth – Medium

A study published in the British Journal of Health Psychology found that college students who went from not exercising at all to even a modest program (just two to three gym visits per week) reported a decrease in stress, smoking, alcohol and caffeine consumption, an increase in healthy eating and maintenance of household chores, and better spending and study habits. In addition to these real-life improvements, after two months of regular exercise, the students also performed better on laboratory tests of self-control. This led the researchers to speculate that exercise had a powerful impact on the students’ “capacity for self-regulation.” In laypeople’s terms, pushing through the discomfort associated with exercise — saying “yes” when their bodies and minds were telling them to say “no” — taught the students to stay cool, calm, and collected in the face of difficulty, whether that meant better managing stress, drinking less, or studying more.

Look at the ends -- what's being controlled -- not the means

HomeFeatured Study Reveals How Little We Know About Each Other’s Intentions Neuroscience NewsJanuary 19, 2017 FeaturedNeuroscience VideosOpen Neuroscience ArticlesPsychology5 min read Summary: Researchers report people need to understand what a person is trying to control by using a certain behavior, rather than trying to change the behavior itself. Source: University of Manchester. Psychologists from The University of Manchester have shown how difficult it is for us to guess the true intention of each other’s behaviour. The study, published today in Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, has important implications on public policies designed to impact on areas such as smoking, obesity, eating disorders, self-harm, alcohol use and gambling. Clinical psychologist Dr Warren Mansell, who led the study, says policy makers need to accurately understand what a person is trying to control using their behaviour, rather than trying to change the behaviour itself. He said: “We think we know what someone is doing just by observing them. For example if we see someone move a steering wheel of their car, we assume they are aiming to keep their car in the centre of the lane. “But our study shows that it is incredibly easy to be mistaken – and that has important implications on anyone whose task is to change human behaviour. “In psychological research, for example, this study suggests that some behaviour studied may be no more than a side effect of participants’true intentions. “We should therefore avoid focusing on people’s behaviour itself . That would lead to multiple and inevitably futile interventions for each and every problem.” He added: “In terms of public policy, we frequently we see money spent on another new initiative for ‘behaviour change’. “Yet if these behaviours are just side effects of people trying to exert control, then this multi-pronged approach to health is highly inefficient and fails to address the common root cause of people’s difficulties. “You need to ask people what they want in their life and how they solve their problems. Smoking, for example, is just one of many different ways in which a person might try to control something important to them – such as their social confidence, or emotional state.”
Here's how Mediabrands CEO Matt Seiler expressed it in a recent AdExchanger interview: "If you push for automation you've got to find a different way to be compensated. Because if it means you stripping out a bunch of bodies, we're not all just going to make less money. We need to make money based on something that is more important than spend or body count."
The unnamed senior marketer quoted above said, "The more I look into programmatic, the more I look into partners, the more I see pressure on the agency model. That's going to be a storyline over time." He continued: "The old school mentality is, I've got an agency I can fire if things don't work. The new school is, I need control of the data. I don't want any risk that I'll be part of a 10-client deal. I want to be part of a one-client deal."
(Quick reminder: under agency, the publisher is considered the “seller”, not the retailer. The publisher sets the price which the retailer can’t change and pays the retailer, or sales “agent”, a fixed 30% of the set price paid by the consumer.) Publishers simply imitated their convention from the wholesale terms transactions they’d always done before. They book as revenue the 70% they keep of the sale, not the full price the consumer pays (and which, if they did, would make the 30% paid to the retailer a “cost of sale” like printing or shipping is in the physical world or like DRM costs might be in the digital world).