What motivates you to be nice and give more? Well here are two recent studies that might offer you some motivation to do both more often.

Nature Online
19 March 2008

Based on the classic interpersonal cooperation game Prisoner's Dilemma, a recent study by Martin Nowak has determined that being nice really does payoff in the long run. Martin is the director of the Evolutionary Dynamics Lab at Harvard University. The study added a "costly punishment" component to the game. A player could choose to punish someone who didn't cooperate. This then penalized the non-cooperative person, while at the same time the other player had to pay to punish. They found that "those people who gain the highest total payoff tend not to use costly punishment: winners don't punish."

Listen to an interview with researcher David Rand (segment actually appears 17:38 in the March 19th 2008 Nature Podcast) that contains a great quote: "Punishment isn't stupid, just the people who choose to punish."

ScienceNOW Daily News
20 March 2008

"Social psychologist Elizabeth Dunn of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, wanted to find out what kind of spending really does make people happy. So she and colleagues surveyed 109 UBC students. Not surprisingly, most said they would be happier with $20 in their pocket than they would with $5. They also said they'd rather spend the money on themselves than on someone else. Wrong move. When Dunn's team gave 46 other students envelopes containing a either $5 bill or a $20 bill and told them how to spend it, those who shelled out on others (donating to charity or giving a gift) were happier at the end of the day than those who blew it on themselves (to pay a bill or indulge in a treat).

Dunn says the results "confirmed our hypothesis more strongly than we dared to dream." The effects of altruistic spending are probably akin to those of exercise, she notes, which can have immediate and long-term effects. Giving once might make a person happy for a day, but "if it becomes a way of living, then it could make a lasting difference," she says. She hopes the finding might someday spur policymakers to promote widespread philanthropy that could make for a more altruistic--and happier--population."

Massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPG) are online computer role-playing games in which a potentially huge number of players interact with one another all within a virtual world. What do these "games" have to do with teaching leadership you ask?

Well IBM is actually teaching leadership (mostly to GenXers now, soon to be more and more Millennials) via these online games. You can see why by reading one of their recent reports "Leadership in a Distributed World: Lessons from Online Gaming." Obviously "Big Blue" and many others have done the "demographic math" to realize we're really not doing a very good job developing future leaders. A recent IBM Global Human Capital Study titled: Looming Leadership Crisis, Organizations Placing Their Companies' Growth Strategies at Risk shares the reality that's driving more virtual reality learning.

Ian Bogost and his thought-provoking, issue-understanding, Persuasive Games and Water Cooler Games designs, builds, and distributes electronic games for persuasion, instruction, and activism. His work has been featured in The New York Times Online edition and might lend itself to teaching leadership via simulation gaming. One you will want to check out is Fatworld, which is a game about the politics of nutrition -- exploring the relationships between obesity, nutrition, and socioeconomics in the U.S.

The number of students in the labor force (ages 16- to 24-years-old) grows sharply starting in April each year. Now might be the prefect time to encourage kids to start KICKin' IT IN on the summer job search. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, last summer the youth labor workforce grew by 2.9 million to a total of 24.3 million in July 2007.

While some predict the 2008 summer job outlook for teens won't be impossible, they do caution that kids will have to work to find work. Want to get a jump on the large numbers of high school and college students searching for summer jobs? Check out these suggestions, resources and articles from SnagAJob, Teens4Hire and Young Jobs.

BTW, if you'll be hiring students this summer, you might want to beat the rush too. That is if you want the best-of-the-best kind of kids KICKin' IT IN for you this summer. FYI, here are the top-ten industries employing kids in the summer:

Social bookmarking is a great way to save content, references, ideas, or anything else you can link to from all across the internet in one place for you and your colleagues. For anyone who may be less familiar with social bookmarking here's a low-tech/high-tech explanation.

As an example, here's a short starter list about kids today and the best places to find information about this Millennial Generation of students growing up in the U.S.

You can bookmark our blog using the AddThis button below and make What's KICKin' a part of your social bookmark collection.

Okay, perhaps it's because I'm a father whose daughter sometimes seems like 11 going on 21, but this interview certainly makes you stop and think about what we're doing motivating girls to grow up so fast. Originally this interview aired on WBUR with NPR's On Point Monday, March 10, 2008. You'll hear Camille Sweeney, contributor to The New York Times, who wrote an article "Never Too Young for That First Pedicure" which appeared February 28th 2008; Samantha Skey, senior vice president of strategic marketing at Alloy Media and Marketing in New York; Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, professor of child development and education at Columbia University, and director of the National Center for Children and Families; Joan Jacobs Brumberg, professor emerita at Cornell University and author of "The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls" interviewed by guest host Jane Clayson.