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A Disagreeable Personality Can Help Get Original Ideas Noticed
Infamously disagreeable innovators ranging from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs have helped to propagate the idea that being headstrong and aggressive may be linked with creative genius. After all, creative success isn’t just about coming up with an innovative idea -- you also have to convince others to get behind your idea, and this is where researchers find that being a jerk may come in handy. But new research shows that you don’t have to be a jerk to come up with the next game-changing creative idea.
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Speaking a second language may change how you see the world
Science: Where did the thief go? You might get a more accurate answer if you ask the question in German. How did she get away? Now you might want to switch to English. Speakers of the two languages put different emphasis on actions and their consequences, influencing the way they think about the world, according to a new study. The work also finds that bilinguals may get the best of both worldviews, as their thinking can be more flexible. ... The results suggest that a second language can play an important unconscious role in framing perception, the authors conclude online this month in Psychological Science.
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It’s Not a Junk Drawer. It’s An Archive Of An Interesting Life
NPR: Spring is finally here, and in the coming weeks many of us may find ourselves infected with a fever to clean. It's time to weed out your wardrobe, vacuum behind the couch, and maybe even dig into the depths of your pantry and chuck those decade-old granola bars. But there's one place that might get a pass: the junk drawer. You know you've got one. "Everyone has a junk drawer," says Kit Yarrow, consumer psychologist at Golden Gate University. Yarrow should know. As part of her job, she pokes around in other people's junk drawers. "It sounds odd, but I do," she says.
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How to Manage Media in Families
The New York Times: Parents have a love-hate relationship with firsts. Some they like: the first smile, the first steps, the first sleeping through the night. Others they dread: the first flu, the first tantrum, the first broken bone. As children get older, the firsts become more nuanced, generating both joy in our children’s independence and fear of their slipping away: the first summer away, the first date, the first driver’s license. But few firsts generate more ambivalence than the first cellphone. On one hand, many parents welcome this milestone. Now they can keep track of their children when they’re out and notify the children if they’re running late. Also, parents gain leverage.
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With Age Comes Not Only Wisdom, but Trust
Pacific Standard: On the whole, do you trust people? Considerable research suggests fewer and fewer Americans do, and given the well-established link between trust and well-being, that’s concerning. Fortunately, a newly published paper suggests your faith in your fellow man will very likely go up as the years go by. “An aging world may become a more trusting world,” write Michael Poulin of the University of Buffalo and Claudia Haase of Northwestern University. Their research, based on data from 83 countries, finds individuals typically turn more trusting over the course of their lives—and confirms that this shift in attitude is, on balance, a positive thing.
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Teenagers Shape Each Other’s Views on How Risky a Situation Is
Young adolescents’ judgments on how risky a situation might be are most influenced by what other teenagers think, while most other age groups are more influenced by adults’ views, according to new research in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Psychology researchers at University College London (UCL) asked 563 visitors to the London Science Museum to rate the riskiness of everyday situations such as crossing a road on a red light or taking a shortcut through a dark alley. Ratings were given on a continuous scale from low to high risk, and children (aged 8-11) generally rated situations as more risky than all other age groups.
