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Benjamin Voyer on the psychology of teamwork
The Economist: How would you describe the psychology of teamwork? The study of teamwork began with the emergence of social psychology and an interest in how groups behave, particularly as against another group. This is the idea of having an “in group” that you’re a member of and that becomes part of your social identity, and then the “out group” against which you discriminate and define yourself. It has developed into its own field of organisational psychology. We’ve looked at how groups form against each other and what happens to an individual voice in the team. We wonder how we make a team more efficient and also what the risks are of having teams.
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Same-Sex Couples May Have More Egalitarian Relationships
NPR: A little more than 10 years ago gay marriage was not an option for same-sex couples anywhere in the U.S. Now it's legal in the majority of the country, and so we wondered what research can tell us about these couples and their marriages. Robert-Jay Green is the founder of the Rockway Institute for Research in LGBT Psychology, and he's been studying same-sex couples since 1975. Welcome to the program. ROBERT-JAY GREEN: Thank you. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So first of all, tell us who did you track in your study, and what you find out? GREEN: Well, this was a study of 976 couples who, in 2008, were registered domestic partners in California.
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Q&A: The Teaching Brain
NPR: Vanessa Rodriguez is co-author, with Michelle Fitzpatrick, of the new book, The Teaching Brain: An Evolutionary Trait at the Heart of Education. In it, they contrast behaviorist models of instruction, which cast the learner's brain as an "empty vessel" to be filled with knowledge, with cognitive psychology models, which view learning as a more dynamic and vibrant process, starting at birth. Rodriguez taught in New York City public schools for 10 years before pursuing a doctorate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in human development and education. Read the whole story: NPR
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People Don’t Hate Millennials
Slate: I know, I know. Millennials have been written to death. But I’m going to make like the millennial I am and say it’s my duty, as the voice of my generation (avoice of a generation?), to proclaim: You don’t hate millennials; you hate the 21st century. Millennials, those born roughly between 1980 and 2000, are infamously narcissistic,entitled, lazy, arrogant, wild, politically disengaged suckers who will fall for any weird fad. But except for that last one, which is totally true, these clichés are silly and easily debunked. Yet people keep spitting out condescending explainers and bitter grumbles about “millennial” propensities like slacktivism, iPhone addiction, and irony culture. ...
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Restoring a Master’s Voice
The New York Times: Training a dog to salivate at the sound of a bell would have seemed pretty stupid to Ivan Pavlov. He was after much bigger things. Using instruments like metronomes and harmoniums, he demonstrated that a dog could make astonishingly fine discriminations — distinguishing between a rhythm of 96 and 104 beats a minute or an ascending and a descending musical scale. But what he really wanted to know was what his animals were thinking. His dream was a grand theory of the mind.
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The Scientific Case for Low Expectations on New Year’s Eve
New York Magazine: You may have seen by now that web-only clip of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, in which Oliver emerges from hiatus to yell for a bit about how New Year’s Eve celebrations are the worst and we should all probably just stay home with our cats, or something to that effect. As is so often the case with Oliver’s rants, he is probably correct. Your high expectations of having a fun New Year’s Eve will most likely mean the actual events of the night will turn out to be a big fat disappointment, according to a funny and clever bit of research from behavioral scientist and best-selling author Dan Ariely. Read the whole story: New York Magazine
