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Facebook And Mortality: Why Your Incessant Joy Gives Me The Blues
NPR: Clearly, researchers love Facebook, even if some of the rest of us are ambivalent. A 2012 survey of social science papers related to the social network turned up 412 separate studies, and there have been even more since. Among the most popular questions: What effect does Facebook have on emotional states? It does seem a reasonable question. After all, about 22 percent of the world's population uses Facebook regularly, according to the company, logging on for about 50 minutes a day. But is all this interconnectedness creating psychological benefits or global gloom? The answer, it turns out, is complicated. Read the whole story: NPR
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If you’re going to Instagram your food, you may as well do it right. Here’s how.
The Washington Post: I have taken a few photos of taupe sandwiches. Blobby, beige plates of pasta. Drinks so dimly lit you couldn’t tell what they were. Scroll deep, all the way to the bottom of my Instagram, and you will see my shame. Photographing your food — something more and more of us are doing these days — is frivolous and fun. But it can also be tricky. Just because something looks delicious in person doesn’t mean it will appear as enticing through your phone’s five-inch screen. It’s a problem that stymies even high-profile food celebrities: Martha Stewart, famously, was bad at photographing food for social media. ...
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Loneliness can be depressing, but it may have helped humans survive
The Washington Post: Loneliness not only feels nasty, it can also make you depressed, shatter your sleep, even kill you. Yet scientists think loneliness evolved because it was good for us. It still is — sometimes. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that being lonely ruins health. In one recent study, the risk of dying over a two-decade period was 50 percent higher for lonely men and 49 percent higher for lonely women than it was for those who did not experience feelings of isolation. According to some research, loneliness may be worse for longevity than obesity or air pollution.
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How to Motivate Your Employees: Give Them Compliments and Pizza
New York Magazine: It is Monday morning. You have just arrived at work, and you get one of the following three emails, each promising a different reward if you get everything done that day: One says you’ll get a cash bonus. Another says your boss will give you a rare compliment. A third says you’ll get a voucher for free pizza. Which of these would motivate you to get the most done? If you are like the subjects in a study led by Dan Ariely, the answer (obviously, I’d argue) will be pizza, with compliments coming in at a very close second. ... More to the point, what matters most to you when you are actually doing a task turns out to be pretty different from what you assume will matter.
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Why Facts Don’t Unify Us
The New York Times: According to the Pew Research Center, the nation is more polarized than at any time in recent history. While some of the issues dividing us boil down to ideology and preference, there is at least one on which hard science should have a strong say — climate change. But do numbers and figures change people’s opinions? Apparently, they do — they result in a deeper divide.
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Why Do We Judge Parents For Putting Kids At Perceived — But Unreal — Risk?
NPR: Many parents who grew up playing outdoors with friends, walking alone to the park or to school, and enjoying other moments of independent play are now raising children in a world with very different norms. In the United States today, leaving children unsupervised is grounds for moral outrage and can lead to criminal charges. What's changed? ... This may seem to get things the wrong way around, but it's supported by new research available Tuesday in the open access journal Collabra.
