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Those Phone-Obsessed Teenagers Aren’t As Lonely As You Think
NPR: A recent dinner with my friends went something like this: "Wait, who is going to take a Snapchat of all of us when our drinks arrive?" "Oh no, I can't! My phone is dying." "Guys, this is such a stereotypical millennial conversation. I am totally tweeting about this." So I guess I understand why older folk fret that youngsters these days are losing out on authentic social connections because of social media. But it looks like the kids are going to be all right, researchers say. High school students in 2012 reported lower levels of loneliness than their counterparts in 1991, according to a studypublished Monday in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Do Men Overperceive Women's Sexual Interest? Carin Perilloux and Robert Kurzban Research has shown that men interpret women's levels of sexual interest as being higher than what women themselves report. In a series of surveys, women reported their sexual intentions, and men estimated the sexual intentions of women, on the basis of engagement in 15 different behaviors (e.g., cooked dinner, stared deeply into eyes, etc.). Men's estimations of women's sexual intentions were stronger than women's own ratings.
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Studying Office Social Networks to Improve Teamwork
The perception that an organization’s rules and policies are fair may be particularly important for people who work closely together in teams. When people perceive that they are being treated fairly by their organization, having a sense of what’s called “procedural justice,” they perform better as a team and show more positive behavior as individuals. But when the boss plays favorites, trust between teammates can plummet. In a recent study, psychological scientists Dong Liu (Georgia Institute of Technology), Morela Hernandez (University of Washington), and Lei Wang (Xi’an Jiaotong University) utilized a novel social network approach to studying teams.
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Study on Cultural Memory Confirms: Chester A. Arthur, We Hardly Knew Ye
The New York Times: Quick: Which American president served before slavery ended, John Tyler or Rutherford B. Hayes? If you need Google to get the answer, you are not alone. (It is Tyler.) Collective cultural memory — for presidents, for example — works according to the same laws as the individual kind, at least when it comes to recalling historical names and remembering them in a given order, researchers reported on Thursday. The findings suggest that leaders who are well known today, like the elder President George Bush and President Bill Clinton, will be all but lost to public memory in just a few decades.
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Why Everything You Think About Aging May Be Wrong
The Wall Street Journal: Everyone knows that as we age, our minds and bodies decline—and life inevitably becomes less satisfying and enjoyable. Everyone knows that cognitive decline is inevitable. Everyone knows that as we get older, we become less productive at work. Everyone, it seems, is wrong.
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Shop Yourself Happy
The Atlantic: This year, a few pure souls might celebrate a freegan Christmas. Some will opt for a "Buy-Nothing" holiday. Others still will pull off a DIY Hanukkah. The vast majority of people who have some disposable income, however, will do what all the glossy store catalogs implore this time of year and "SHOP NOW." Even among those who think that Black Friday insanity, and holiday consumerism in general, are terrible, the default setting during December is to buy things. Behavioral economists have been puzzling for years over how much and what kinds of spending provides the biggest happiness boost for the buyer.
