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How in Touch Are You With America on Gun Control?
TIME: The Senate rejected a handful of gun control measures Monday in the wake of the horrific mass shooting in Orlando that left 49 victims dead and another 53 wounded–joining a reinvigorated debate over access to guns in America. But even as such shootings are happening with increasing regularity, public opinion has remained fairly unchanged on issues such as whether gun ownership increases the owners’ risk of death.
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Psychology’s First Superhero: Celebrating Wonder Woman At 75
Fast Company: William Moulton Marston—an attorney and psychologist who invented a systolic blood pressure deception test, the precursor to the modern polygraph—created Wonder Woman as a new type of superhero who, beyond her strength, used wisdom and compassion as weapons against evil—not to mention a magic golden lasso to compel people to tell the truth. Read the whole story: Fast Company
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Even Small Children Are Less Helpful after Touching Money
Scientific American: Merely touching money has the power to alter our behavior. Money makes us more selfish, less helpful, and less generous towards others. One experiment, for example, had a pedestrian drop a bus pass in front of people who had just gotten money out of a cash machine or merely walked past the machine. People who had gotten money out of the cash machine were less likely to alert the woman that she had dropped her pass. While money can hamper helpfulness, it also confers psychological advances in the form of making people more persistent and more successful at solving challenging problems. Read the whole story: Scientific American
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Think Less, Think Better
The New York Times: A FRIEND of mine has a bad habit of narrating his experiences as they are taking place. I tease him for being a bystander in his own life. To be fair, we all fail to experience life to the fullest. Typically, our minds are too occupied with thoughts to allow complete immersion even in what is right in front of us. Sometimes, this is O.K. I am happy not to remember passing a long stretch of my daily commute because my mind has wandered and my morning drive can be done on autopilot. But I do not want to disappear from too much of life. Too often we eat meals without tasting them, look at something beautiful without seeing it.
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After seeing the results of a clever psychological study, I’m considering making a major change to my daily commute
Business Insider: As a born-and-raised New Yorker, I'm an expert at ignoring people. Nowhere does that skill come in handier than on a crowded subway, where my limbs are often entangled with those of other riders, our faces close enough for me to smell the latte on their breath. The key, I've learned, is to pretend they don't exist. Seriously — don't acknowledge the physical intimacy, don't try to crack a joke about it, and definitely don't use it as an opportunity to ask where they're headed. ...
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Getting smarter
aeon: Is it just me, or is everybody out there looking for a quick fix? There is something highly compelling about the idea that there is a secret switch we can flip to become suddenly smarter, to reveal cognitive abilities hidden inside each of us. It is a notion that certainly has commercial appeal. Over just seven years, the games-maker Lumosity rocketed from zero to 50 million users, promising rapid improvements in general intelligence by playing brain-training video games for just a few weeks.
