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Bosses Can Spot Self-Serving Workers
Supervisors are surprisingly accurate at distinguishing between employees who put in extra effort out of altruistic concern for the company, and those who suck up just to get ahead, according to a new study from a team of Canadian psychological scientists.
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Call for Nominations: Psychonomic Society Early Career Award
The Psychonomic Society Early Career Award was established as an annual award to honor the distinguished research accomplishments of our early career members and fellows. Each year, up to four awardees will be named. One nominee, whose research is closest to the areas of perception and attention, will receive the Steven Yantis Early Career Award. They will be recognized at the annual meeting and will receive both a glass and a cash award ($2,500). In addition, the awardees’ airfare to the meeting will be paid. The 2015 Annual Meeting will be held in Chicago, Illinois on November 19-22. Nominations are now being solicited for 2015. Please click here to submit your nomination.
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Remembering a Crime That You Didn’t Commit
The New Yorker: In 1906, Hugo Münsterberg, the chair of the psychology laboratory at Harvard University and the president of the American Psychological Association, wrote in the Times Magazine about a case of false confession. A woman had been found dead in Chicago, garroted with a copper wire and left in a barnyard, and the simpleminded farmer’s son who had discovered her body stood accused. The young man had an alibi, but after questioning by police he admitted to the murder. He did not simply confess, Münsterberg wrote; “he was quite willing to repeat his confession again and again.
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How to enjoy your food more
The Boston Globe: Social psychologists often seem like killjoys when it comes to studying how people eat. A primary concern is overeating, so their main objective is frequently to try to identify the psychological levers that can be pulled to help people to eat less. This research has produced a number of pieces of now-familiar advice: Don’t eat while watching television (you lose track of how much you’ve consumed); serve food on small plates with small utensils to create the illusion of plenty. These days, however, food is a fetish, and some social psychologists have joined the fun.
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Two Heads Are Better Than One
The Wall Street Journal: In the early 1960s, Michael S. Gazzaniga, then a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, was one of a team of researchers who opened the minds of fellow scientists to a new view of how the brain functions. In “Tales From Both Sides of the Brain,” he tells the story of the seminal discoveries in which he was involved and chronicles the lifetime of exploration that has flowed from them. Mr. Gazzaniga’s signature area of research is called “split brain” studies. They were pioneered by his Caltech mentor, Roger W. Sperry, who won a Nobel Prize in 1981.
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Bad Weather: Better for Work, Terrible for Everything Else
The Atlantic: Talking about the weather used to be drudgery saved for only the most boring acquaintances. But in the age of temperature selfies and record snow, winter'spopularity on the Internet seems to thrive in spite of the season's toll on our minds (and bodies). Winter and the snowstorms that come with it have traditionally been associated with a drop in economic output, with some estimates in the billions annually for the U.S. alone. But productivity studies hum a different tune for office workers: When the weather's bad outside, workers are more productive at their jobs inside.
