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A More Progressive Tax System Makes People Happier
The way some people talk, you’d think that a flat tax system—in which everyone pays at the same rate regardless of income—would make citizens feel better than more progressive taxation, where wealthier people are taxed at higher rates. Indeed, the U.S. has been diminishing progressivity of its tax structure for decades. But a new study comparing 54 nations found that flattening the tax risks flattening social wellbeing as well.
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People Think The “Typical” Member Of A Group Looks Like Them
What does a typical European face look like according to Europeans? It all depends on which European you ask. Germans think the typical European looks more German; Portuguese people think the typical European looks more Portuguese. That’s the conclusion of a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The results shed light on how people think about groups they belong to. Other studies have found that, when people choose typical characteristics for a group they’re in, they’ll pick characteristics more like themselves. But that research was done using words.
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Like Mama Bears, Nursing Mothers Defend Babies With A Vengeance
Women who breast-feed are far more likely to demonstrate a "mama bear" effect — aggressively protecting their infants and themselves — than women who bottle-feed their babies or non-mothers, according to a new study in the September issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. And when breast-feeding women behave aggressively, they register a lower blood pressure than other women, the study found. The results, the researchers say, suggest that breast-feeding can help dampen the body's typical stress response to fear, giving women the extra courage they need to defend themselves.
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Patients’ Health Motivates Workers To Wash Their Hands
Can changing a single word on a sign motivate doctors and nurses to wash their hands? Campaigns about hand-washing in hospitals usually try to scare doctors and nurses about personal illness, says Adam Grant, a psychological scientist at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. “Most safety messages are about personal consequences,” Grant says. “They tell you to wash your hands so you don’t get sick.” But his new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that this is the wrong kind of warning. Hand-washing is an eternal problem for hospitals.
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What Determines A Company’s Performance? The Shape Of The CEO’s Face!
Believe it or not, one thing that predicts how well a CEO’s company performs is - the width of his face! CEOs with wider faces, like Herb Kelleher, the former CEO of Southwest Airlines, have better-performing companies than CEOs like Dick Fuld, the long-faced final CEO of Lehman Brothers. That’s the conclusion of a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Elaine M. Wong at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her colleagues study how top management teams work. But they have to do it in indirect ways.
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In Remembrance of William K. Estes
National Medal of Science recipient William K. Estes passed away on August 17th at the age of 92. His long and productive career encompassed the science of learning and memory from behaviorism to cognitive science, with seminal contributions to both. He was also an active member of APS and was the founding editor of the journal Psychological Science. Estes (born June 17, 1919) began his graduate studies under the tutelage of B. F. Skinner during the early 1940s. Together, Estes and Skinner developed a conditioning paradigm, called conditioned suppression, which represented a new technique for studying learned fear (Estes & Skinner, 1941).