-
Why You Give Too Much
Prevention: Ahh, a night alone. You could just head home after work, pour yourself a glass of pinot anything, and catch up on this season of Mad Men. But your partner’s suit for tomorrow’s reception is at the dry cleaners and his prescription is still at the pharmacy. If you’re already reaching for your shoes, don’t beat yourself up: a new study in Psychological Science says we’re more likely to make impulsive sacrifices in close relationships. And if you have low self-control, you’re even more likely. Read the whole story: Prevention
-
Nice Results, But What Did You Expect?
National Geographic: In 2008, a team of psychologists from the University of Michigan apparently found a simple memory task that could boost intelligence. They asked volunteers to watch a sequence of symbols while listening to a series of letters. Holding both streams of information in their heads, they had to say if the current symbol or letter matched the one from a few cycles back. This memory-based “dual n-back” task seemed to improve the volunteers’ fluid intelligence—a general ability to solve problems that goes well beyond mere memory. The team said that their study opened up “a wide range of applications”.
-
Aging Photographs and Cognitive Quilts
The Huffington Post: I am a Baby Boomer and a child of the '60s, and for both those reasons I am keenly aware of my memory, and its failings. I'm not alone in this. For a growing number of adults, questions about cognitive aging are increasingly personal and relevant. We want to know what, specifically, will keep us sharp into old age. Will reading Tolstoy do it? Or playing racquetball? ... The scientists took a variety of cognitive measures before and after the classes began.
-
Expansive Postures May Lead Us to Dishonesty
Scientific American: Expansive body postures, like stretching one’s legs, confer a sense of power. And studies show that the feeling of power can lead to dishonest behavior. Now researchers find that just sitting at a big desk or in a large chair can also influence one’s honesty. ... In a real-world setting the researchers also found that those who drove cars with expansive seats parked illegally more often that those with smaller driver’s seats. The studies are in the journal Psychological Science. Read the whole story: Scientific American
-
How to Escape from Bad Decisions
LinkedIn: When we make a choice that doesn’t work out, we find it remarkably difficult to cut our losses and walk away. Think about the last time you waited for 45 minutes at a restaurant, and there was no sign that your table would be ready in the near future. You should have probably headed to another restaurant, but you’d already waited 45 minutes, so how could you leave? Or you hired an employee who struggled to master the key skills for the job, and after several months of training and coaching, things hadn’t improved. You rotated him to two different positions that seem like a better fit, and he underperformed there too.
-
Daniel M. Wegner, 65; Harvard social psychologist unraveled mysteries of thought and memory
The Boston Globe: If you read much of Dan Wegner’s writings on psychology, pretty soon you cannot stop thinking about Dan Wegner, particularly if you try to forget him. He could have told you that would happen. After all, he wrote a book about the difficulty of suppressing thoughts, and his research showed that the more we try to not think about something, the more likely we are to talk about what we are trying not to think about. Those studies are detailed in “White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts,” his 1989 book on suppression and obsession that would have been a capstone of some careers. For Dr. Wegner, it was simply the tip of the ice floe.
