At YC’s Startup School NYC, Shana Fisher brought up an amazing resource called SCARF.

SCARF stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness.

With these five areas, stands positive (approach) and negative (avoid) modes of interacting with people. As the title says, SCARF is based on neuroscience research to correlate human interaction & collaboration with physical brain activity.

When you are being threatened with a SCARF metric, you will perform worse (due to “less oxygen and glucose available for the brain functions involved in working memory“). On the contrary, when you have an opportunity to increase a SCARF metric, you perform better since you don’t have decreased cognitive resources.

There are lots of findings and useful applications, so I encourage you to read about SCARF.