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Why income inequality is so much worse than we realize
Scientific American: In a candid conversation with Frank Rich last fall, Chris Rock said, “Oh, people don’t even know. If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.” The findings of three studies, published over the last several years in Perspectives on Psychological Science, suggest that Rock is right. We have no idea how unequal our society has become. In their 2011 paper, Michael Norton and Dan Ariely analyzed beliefs about wealth inequality. They asked more than 5,000 Americans to guess the percentage of wealth (i.e., savings, property, stocks, etc., minus debts) owned by each fifth of the population.
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Procrastination Is Not Great for Your Heart
New York Magazine: People who are self-admitted procrastinators are also more likely to have heart disease, according to a study published online this week in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine.Fuschia M. Sirois of Bishop's University in Quebec, who led the research, gave a group of people with hypertension and cardiovascular disease and a group of healthy people a variety of questionnaires, including one designed to measure their proclivity toward putting things off.
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This Fast-Food-Loving, Organics-Hating Ivy League Prof Will Trick You Into Eating Better
Mother Jones: THE CHICKEN QUESADILLA GRANDE is calling to me. I am jet-lagged, starving, and fairly certain that a giant pile of melted cheese will dramatically improve my outlook on life. But right now, in front of a renowned authority on healthy eating? That doesn't seem like such a great idea. I'm here at an Applebee's in Ithaca, New York, where Brian Wansink, a Cornell food psychologist, is evaluating my dining habits. So far, he says, I've got a few things going for me: We are seated by the window, which his research has shown makes us 80 percent more likely to order salad. And had we chosen a booth near the bar, our risk of ordering dessert would have been 73 percent greater.
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This Is The Real Consequence Of Feeling Lonely
Refinery 29: Bad news for the lone wolves out there: New research suggests that, even if you love being alone, being lonely isn't all that great for your health. The study, published this month in Perspectives on Psychological Science, was a meta-analysis of previously-published studies looking at the relationship between social isolation and health. The researchers found 70 studies that qualified — with 3,407,134 participants overall. On average, the studies followed participants for about seven years while monitoring their levels of social isolation and loneliness as well as whether or not they had died. Read the whole story: Refinery 29
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Extraversion May Be Less Common Than We Think
Social scientists have long known that, statistically speaking, our friends are more popular than we are. It’s a simple matter of math: Because popular people have more friends, they are disproportionately represented in social networks—which guarantees that on average, our friends have more friends than we do. New research by researchers Daniel C. Feiler and Adam M. Kleinbaum of Tuck Business School at Dartmouth College extends this so-called "friendship paradox" with a study of personality, documenting a “network extraversion bias” within the emerging social networks of a new class of MBA students.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: An Event-Based Account of Conformity Diana Kim and Bernhard Hommel Why do people conform to the behaviors and judgments of others? In two sessions, female participants rated the attractiveness of faces on a scale of 1 to 8. In the first session only, after each picture, participants were shown a number or a short video clip of someone pushing a number button. Participants' attractiveness ratings in the second session were influenced by the number and video presentations shown in the first rating session. The authors posit that actions people take and the events they perceive are coded in a common format.
