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Changing the Climate on Climate Change
A team of scientists highlight evidence-based “best practice” insights that stand to improve public policy and decision making on climate change.
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Self-Proclaimed Experts Often Claim To Know More Than They Really Do
Gizmodo: ifteen years ago, psychologists showed that the most incompetent people are the worst at recognizing their own incompetence, confirming what most of us already suspected. Now it turns out that even highly competent people may lay claim to more knowledge than they actually possess. In a set of studies published recently in Psychological Science, Stav Atir, Emily Rosenzweig and David Dunning showed that people who view themselves as experts in any given domain may actually be more susceptible to overclaiming how much they know about it — more so than non-experts, who are more willing to acknowledge that they know less. Read the whole story: Gizmodo
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What Your Baby’s Smile Can Tell You About Her Development
The Wall Street Journal: Once upon a time, babies’ first smiles would often be dismissed as “probably just gas.” Now, scientists know better. Starting nearly from birth, infants’ ethereal grins provide a window into their social and emotional development, researchers say. And the responses those enchanting and goofy expressions elicit can help program babies’ brains for a lifetime of social interactions. ... Developmental psychologists at Johnson State College, in Vermont, observed that 5-month-olds find an unusual sight, such as a book on a person’s head, extremely funny and will laugh even if no one else around them does.
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What Athletes See
The Atlantic: Consider two very different basketball players. The Los Angeles Clippers star DeAndre Jordan, one of the strongest, quickest players in the NBA, nevertheless made only 39 percent of his free throws last year. Then there’s his teammate, Jamal Crawford—not as fast or as strong as Jordan, but he makes 90 percent of the shots he takes from the foul line, a rate that’s among the best in the league. ... Some evidence indicates that the quiet-eye technique stimulates the dorsal area of the brain, which regulates focused, goal-directed attention.
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Satiated, Stuffed, and Spatially Impaired?
A few days of high-fat, high-sugar eating — say, Thanksgiving followed by a weeks’ worth of leftovers — may impair a specific cognitive function: spatial recognition.
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The lessons I learned trying to teach my child generosity
The Washington Post: My second-born son Oliver has a serious affinity for stuffed animals. He takes such tender care of them, wrapping them in blankets when it is chilly, hauling them around on errands, baby-talking them when he thinks no one else is listening, lining them up just so next to his bed, and tucking them lovingly in every single night. That is why, when my oldest son Milo walked past a gift shop when we were out one day just the two of us, I was touched when he noted how much his brother would love the little stuffed gray fox in the window. I took him by the hand and turned him around, giddy with the thought of the lesson in store.
