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The Culture Inside
Invisibilia: Is there a part of ourselves that we don't acknowledge, that we don't even have access to and that might make us ashamed if we encountered it? We begin with a woman whose left hand takes instructions from a different part of her brain. It hits her, and knocks cigarettes out of her hand and makes her wonder: who is issuing the orders? Is there some other "me"in there I don't know about? We then ask this question about one of the central problems of our time: racism. Scientific research has shown that even well meaning people operate with implicit bias - stereotypes and attitudes we are not fully aware of that nonetheless shape our behavior towards people of color.
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How to Complain and Get Results
The New York Times: The blender does not blend. Your vacation was spoiled by a late flight. Or the cabinet you bought is as sturdy as wet cardboard. When products or services fail, it’s easy to feel as if your complaints to the company responsible disappear into a black hole. While there are no magic words, there are a few tricks to help your complaint get a friendlier reading. All it takes is a little finesse, and some good documentation. ... Be focused and think about what you want, Kit Yarrow, a consumer psychologist and a professor emerita of psychology and marketing at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, wrote in an email.
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How one researcher is studying that tingly, universal, unmistakable and unsettling phenomenon known as déjà vu
TED: Most of us know the feeling. You’re introduced to someone, you watch a new movie, or you walk down a street in an unfamiliar city, and then suddenly, you’re struck by the uncanny sensation that you’ve been through this all before. You know it’s impossible — there’s no way you could have encountered this person, film or street — yet it all seems so familiar. We call this “déjà vu,” a French phrase meaning “already seen,” first used in the early 20th century. Some researchers estimate that two-thirds of the population has experienced this phenomenon, which also may be accompanied by the conviction that you know what will happen next. Read the whole story: TED
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The Dangers Of Hidden Jargon In Communicating Science
NPR: One of the challenges that can arise in communicating science and other forms of scholarship to non-experts is the jargon involved. How many people can confidently explain the meaning of broadband asymmetric acoustic transmission, mural lymphatic endothelial cells, or graded incoherence (to borrow some phrases from recent journal publications)? But the most dangerous kind of jargon isn't the kind we notice. It's the kind that slips by. When technical definitions hide behind words we use in everyday speech, the opportunities for miscommunication abound. The expert thinks she has been clear; the recipient thinks he has understood. And yet, both could be wrong.
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Why Adolescence Lasts Forever
The Atlantic: In August of 2001, Mitch Prinstein, a psychology professor who had just been hired at Yale University, offered his first class at the school: a course he had developed about popularity among children and adolescents. When Prinstein arrived at the small classroom the school had assigned him in the center of campus, he was greeted with a crowd outside the lecture hall—one so large that he figured there’d been a fire-drill-mandated building evacuation. It took him a moment to realize that there was no fire; the students were all there for his class.
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Eureka? Yes, Eureka!
The New York Times: In the commencement address he delivered at Harvard last month, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, warned the graduating students not to trust the story of innovation that Hollywood promotes — namely, “the idea of a single eureka moment” in which a lone thinker has a groundbreaking epiphany. He characterized this idea as “a dangerous lie” that discourages real creativity. “You know what else movies get wrong about innovation?” Mr. Zuckerberg added. “No one writes math formulas on glass. That’s not a thing.” Actually, that is a thing, although sometimes people carve their formulas in stone if there isn’t any glass to write on.
