This article explores how much memes like urban legends succeed on the basis of informational selection (i.e., truth or a moral lesson) and emotional selection (i.e., the ability to evoke emotions like anger, fear, or disgust). The article focuses on disgust because its elicitors have been precisely described. In Study 1, with controls for informational factors like truth, people were more willing to pass along stories that elicited stronger disgust. Study 2 randomly sampled legends and created versions that varied in disgust; people preferred to pass along versions that produced the highest level of disgust. Study 3 coded legends for specific story motifs that produce disgust (e.g., ingestion of a contaminated substance) and found that legends that contained more disgust motifs were distributed more widely on urban legend Web sites. The conclusion discusses implications of emotional selection for the social marketplace of ideas.

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Employee personality traits have long been studied in the context of workplace outcomes, and drawbacks of certain workstation types have become regularly debated in the last decade. However, very little is known at the intersection of these two areas of interest. This study of 231 federal office workers explored how personality levels interacted with workstation type (open bench seating, cubicle, private office) on-task focus and happiness. Momentary assessment and global, one-time survey methods were used to capture a more ecologically valid understanding of such interactions. While global ratings of task focus were higher for those in private offices than those in cubicles and open bench seating, there were no differences between workstation types in momentary assessments of focus. Several personality trait-workstation type interactions were found, including support for the idea that certain affordances of open bench seating are more beneficial to momentary focus and happiness for employees high in extraversion, while detrimental to momentary focus for those high on neuroticism. Taken together, these findings suggest that a consideration of individual differences is critical to advance the workstation design conversation in order to best support the most valuable asset of an organization: the employee. Concern for the employee is especially important in the current context of the global pandemic that is driving a rapid evolution in approaches to both short and long-term strategies for workplace design and policy.

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