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How to Help Others the Right Way
TIME: I’ve posted a number of times about how helping others makes you happier. But I know this leaves some people scratching their heads: How much should I help others? How often? Will I be exploited? Will I end up resenting people I love if they don’t reciprocate? We all know selfless givers who are taken advantage of and taken for granted. Nobody wants to feel like a sucker. So this simple thing doesn’t seem so simple — and it feels safer to just be selfish no matter what fancy research and your conscience might tell you.
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The Negative In Positive Stereotypes
NPR: In an interview earlier this year, Sen. Harry Reid argued that it's time for a woman to run for president. "Women have qualities that we've been lacking in America for a long time," he told New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney. For instance, he said, "Women are much more patient." Reid's remarks reflect a positive stereotype — a belief that attributes a favorable characteristic to a group. In this case, it's that women have patience. Women are also stereotypically thought to be nurturing, Asian-Americans to be good at math, African-Americans to be good athletes, and so on.
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The Whites of Our Eyes
The New York Times: SEVERAL years ago, while browsing the campus bookstore, one of us, Professor Segal, encountered a display table filled with Squirtles. A Squirtle is a plush-toy turtle manufactured by the company Russ Berrie. They were adorable and she couldn’t wait to take one home. Afterward, Professor Segal began wondering why this toy was so attractive and suspected that its large, round eyes played a major role. It’s well known that a preference for large eyes emerges in humans by 5 months of age. But the Squirtle was even more appealing than many of its big-eyed competitors. Was there something else about its eyes?
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Looks could kill
The Economist: PEOPLE decide quickly how trustworthy a stranger is, based on what his face looks like. And experiments show that, regarding any particular individual, they generally come to the same conclusion. There really are, it seems, trustworthy and untrustworthy faces—though, surprisingly, there is little consensus among researchers as to whether someone whose face is deemed devious really is more likely to betray a trust. The perceivedly untrustworthy do, however, suffer for their phizogs. And a study published in this month’s Psychological Science suggests that in extreme cases—in America at least—this suffering may be fatal.
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Do Know-It-Alls Really Know It All?
NPR's Science Friday: Pre-rated stocks,” “fixed rate deduction,” and “annualized credit” sound like fairly weighty financial terms. So much so, that a number of self-described finance experts said they were familiar with them. However, these concepts were invented by researchers at Cornell University seeking to understand why people say they know things when they don’t—what the team refers to as “overclaiming.” The resulting study, published in the journal Psychological Science, indicates that the more people see themselves as experts, the more likely they are to feign knowledge of phony information.
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Age Is Just a Number
People tend to proceed through life trying to act their age. But the pioneering research of Ellen Langer suggests that adopting the attitude of a younger person may actually have health benefits. In a classic 1981 study, she had old men live in a retreat that was retrofitted to look like 1959, while they pretended that they were living in that year. She and her colleagues found that the men experienced improvements in vision, strength, and other abilities, and that they actually looked younger as well. Langer’s mind-body research indicates that just as social cues can make us feel old, other social cues can make us feel and act young.
