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The Power And Problem Of Grit
NPR: Before she was a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, Angela Duckworth was a middle school math teacher. As a rookie teacher, she was surprised when she calculated grades. Some of her sharpest students weren't doing so well, while others who struggled through each lesson were getting A's. "The thing that was revelatory to me was not that effort matters—everybody knows that effort matters," Angela told Shankar. "What was revelatory to me was how much it matters." ... And psychologists find people at the tippy-top of their fields engage with their work differently.
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The Harsh Truth About Speed-Reading
The Kernel: For a long time, people have claimed to be able to read very quickly without any loss of comprehension—and many have claimed to teach this amazing skill. President Kennedy was one famous speed-reader, who could supposedly finish reading the New York Times in minutes; according to Time, he could read about 1,200 words a minute, or about three times the rate of a top college-level reader (he arrived at that number himself). More recently, “six-times World Speed Reading Champion” Anne Jones allegedly devoured J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in 47 minutes, Dan Brown’s Inferno in just under 42 minutes, and Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman in 25 minutes, 31 seconds.
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Take a chance on me
The Boston Globe: IF YOU DON’T think there are many people to date in your area, be careful not to put all your eggs in one basket. In a new study, both men and women who were led to think that there were fewer members of the opposite sex in the population were subsequently more willing to choose a risky lottery ticket bet, less willing to diversify stock market or retirement investments, and more willing to have the government concentrate its vaccine research funding in one company. This seems to reflect a natural instinct to take bigger risks for bigger rewards in hope of securing a mate. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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How Not to Explain Success
The New York Times: DO you remember the controversy two years ago, when the Yale law professors Amy Chua (author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”) and Jed Rubenfeld published “The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America”? We sure do. As psychologists, we found the book intriguing, because its topic — why some people succeed and others don’t — has long been a basic research question in social science, and its authors were advancing a novel argument.
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What Happened to Jordan Spieth?
Inc.: Here's how it happens, and how you can deal with it. Our brains are structured so that when we have practiced something really well, we no longer need to think about it. Our subconscious processing systems are at work. But when we slow down to focus on our automatic actions, we screw up the processes, and tie ourselves in knots. Jordan Spieth choked on the 12th hole at Augusta, not when he hit his first ball into the creek, but when he hit his second. Psychologist Sian L.
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4 Ways to Be a Better Arguer
Scientific American Mind: My family is what you might call politically diverse, with members ranging from real pinko-commie hippies to paranoid right-wing conspiracy theorists—and we're all connected on Facebook. This election year, things among us had gotten pretty acrimonious until my brother, Colin, did something ingenious: he made a pledge to stop talking politics on Facebook. In the middle of a heated argument, it's tough to picture everything working out well in the end with your opponent. Yet remaining hopeful may actually help that happen, says Susan Krauss Whitbourne, a personality researcher and professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
