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Don’t just photograph life’s highlights, study suggests
The Boston Globe: We assiduously document life’s obvious highlights: Our cellphones are filled with photos of the first day of school, graduations, weddings, and birthdays. A new study by a team of Harvard Business School researchers suggests, however, that we underestimate the pleasure we will gain from rediscovering our most mundane moments. In fact, the most boring, everyday stuff may give us more pleasure in retrospect than our extraordinary experiences.
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Can’t Place That Smell? You Must Be American
The New York Times: FLORENCE, Italy — WE think of our senses as hard-wired gateways to the world. Many years ago the social psychologist Daryl J. Bem described the knowledge we gain from our senses as “zero-order beliefs,” so taken for granted that we do not even notice them as beliefs. The sky is blue. The fan hums. Ice is cold. That’s the nature of reality, and it seems peculiar that different people with their senses intact would experience it subjectively. Yet they do. In recent years anthropologists have begun to point out that sensory perception is culturally specific.
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Why Food Pilgrims Will Wait Four Hours For A Taste Of The Sublime
NPR: During a trip to Austin, Texas, last year, Sarah Grieco and her friends stood in line for two hours to taste the famously delicious smoked meat at La Barbecue. Before that, Grieco, 25, says she queued up for pork belly pancakes in Seattle, and ramen burgers in New York. And she and a friend waited three hours for the flashy cronut at Dominic Ansel Bakery. The food hasn't always lived up to the hype — she wasn't a fan of the ramen burgers. But, she says, she usually doesn't mind waiting to taste something truly unique. "I don't see it as time wasted," she says. "I see it as part of the experience." Dedicated — and exceedingly patient — food pilgrims like Grieco are everywhere.
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A Parrot Passes the Marshmallow Test
Slate: Can your kid pass the “marshmallow test”? And what does it mean if he can’t, but a parrot can? The marshmallow test is pretty simple: Give a child a treat, such as a marshmallow, and promise that if he doesn’t eat it right away, he’ll soon be rewarded with a second one. The experiment was devised by Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel in the late 1960s as a measure of self-control. When he later checked back in with kids he had tested as preschoolers, those who had been able to wait for the second treat appeared to be doing better in life. They tended to have fewer behavioral or drug-abuse problems, for example, than those who had given in to temptation.
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More than words: saying ‘thank you’ does make a difference
The Conversation: Most of us were taught that saying “thank you” is simply the polite thing to do. But recent research in social psychology suggests that saying “thank you” goes beyond good manners – it also serves to build and maintain social relationships. This premise has its base in the find-remind-and-bind theory of gratitude, proposed by US psychologist Sara Algoe, from the University of North Carolina.
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Why Jurors and Policemen Need Stress Relief
National Geographic: I’ll be sitting on a jury tomorrow for the first time. The logistics are annoying. I have to take an indefinite time off work, wait in long security lines at the courthouse, and deal with a constant stream of bureaucratic nonsense. But all that is dwarfed by excitement. And, OK, yes, some pride. My judgments will affect several lives in an immediate and concrete way. There’s a heaviness to that, a responsibility, that can’t be brushed aside. My focus on jury duty may be why a new study on social judgments caught my eye. Whether part of a jury or not, we judge other people’s behaviors every day.
