-
Distracted Driving: What It Will Take To Lower Fatalities
The Diane Rehm Show: Texting while behind the wheel is illegal in most states. Warnings abound about the risks of distracted driving; Texting alone can make you twenty-three times more likely to crash. And yet drivers are still doing it. A lot. New numbers say 70% of crashes could be due to distracted driving. And it’s not just teens. Meanwhile, traffic fatalities overall are rising sharply. Many experts now say the problem has reached crisis levels, and requires radical new thinking. One proposed solution: a device that lets police officers view cell phone activity after a crash, the way a breathalyzer checks for alcohol levels. What it will take to meaningfully reduce distracted driving.
-
Ne cliquez pas sur cet article, ou vous le regretterez (Do not click on this article, or you will regret it)
Slate: Ne vous a-t-on jamais dit que la curiosité est un vilain défaut? Une étude démontre que si celle-ci a permis de faire avancer l’humanité, elle nous pousse parfois à prendre des décisions que nous savons mauvaises, rapporte Science Daily. Pour mener à bien cette expérience, publiée le 21 mars 2016 dans la revue Psychological Science, deux chercheurs de l’université de Chicago et de Wisconsin-Madison ont testé cinquante-quatre étudiants à leur insu. C’est dans la salle d’attente de l’expérience à laquelle ils avaient accepté de participer que les observations ont eu lieu.
-
Don’t Treat Young Adults as Teenagers
The New York Times: OVER the past dozen years, the Supreme Court has issued several landmark decisions affirming that adolescents and adults are fundamentally different in ways that justify treating minors less harshly when they violate the criminal law. The court, drawing on psychological and brain science indicating that people under age 18 are not yet fully capable of controlling their behavior, abolished the juvenile death penalty and greatly restricted life without parole sentences for crimes by juveniles. As scientists and legal scholars who specialize in these issues, we have welcomed these changes with enthusiasm. Read the whole story: The New York Times
-
How to Get Kids Into a Growth Mindset
Pacific Standard: Like many other things, we develop our beliefs about intelligence—whether it’s fixed or malleable—from our parents. But really, it’s not our parents’ beliefs about intelligence that matter, according to new research—it’s their beliefs about failure that makes the difference. “Researchers, educators, and policymakers agree that parents are key to children’s motivation and success in school and beyond,” Stanford University psychology graduate student Kyla Haimovitz and professor Carol Dweck write in Psychological Science. Read the whole story: Pacific Standard
-
What Science Says—and Doesn’t—about Spanking
Scientific American: To spank or not to spank? This age-old parenting question elicits fierce debate among parents, psychologists and pediatricians. Surveys suggest that nearly half of U.S. parents have spanked their children as a disciplinary tactic, but many experts argue that this form of punishment—hitting a child on the bottom with an open hand—increases the risk that kids will develop emotional and behavioral problems. Other scientists counter that research on the issue is fraught with problems, making it impossible to draw black-and-white conclusions.
-
Better Aging Through Practice, Practice, Practice
The New York Times: SIXTY is not the new 40. Fifty isn’t either. Your lung capacity in late-middle age is in steady decline, as are the fast-twitch muscle fibers that provide power and speed. Your heart capacity has been ebbing for decades. Your sight has been getting worse, your other senses, too, and this, along with a gradually receding ability to integrate information you are absorbing and to then issue motor commands, means your balance is not what it used to be. (Your flattening arches aren’t helping.) Your prefrontal cortex — where the concentrating and deciding gets done — has been shrinking for some time, perhaps since you graduated from college.
