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Science Proves Your Boss Is an Idiot
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Save the Assistants
Lilit Marcus used to have a really, really terrible assistant job. So she quit. Now she is the Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of www.savetheassistants.com, “a blog for the beleaguered,” where assistants from all industries can submit horror stories, get advice, and more. A New Yorker via North Carolina, Lilit is also a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Newsweek, The New York Post, and Mediabistro.com. When she’s not trying to save assistants, Lilit lives, works, writes, learns to cook, and shops for vintage clothes in Brooklyn, NY.
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October 23, 2009
Two professors at the University of Southern California, have done a study showing that the dumber and less competent someone is, the more likely they are to yell and try to intimidate other people.
“Power holders feel they need to be superior and competent. When they don’t feel they can show that legitimately, they’ll show it by taking people down a notch or two,” says Nathanael Fast, a social psychologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who led a series of experiments to explore this effect. Fast and Chen asked their volunteers to select a punishment to be given to university students for wrong answers in a hypothetical test of learning. Volunteers chose between horn sounds that ranged from 10 decibels to a deafening 130 decibels. The volunteers who felt the most incompetent and empowered picked the loudest punishments – 71 decibels on average. Workers who felt up to their jobs, selected far quieter punishments, between 55 and 62 decibels, as did those primed to feel incompetent yet powerless.I still can’t believe people get paid for “discovering” things that any assistant could have told you about. Then again, I suppose it’s the nature of being an assistant to watch other people get paid for shit that you deal with every day.
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