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When Job Hunting, Make Sure Your Voice Is Heard
New York Magazine: Some people are really good at getting their foot in the doors of prospective employers, even when there aren't any jobs available: They'll aggressively seek out informational interviews, lunch, or coffee with the people who make hiring decisions, and so on. As someone who has always lacked this level of initiative when job hunting, I've often wondered whether there are some limits to this approach. Doesn't it sometimes come off as overbearing?
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The Psychology of the Firefighter
The Huffington Post: Firefighters experience a steady onslaught of trauma and intense human emotion. Perilous flames, collapsing buildings, the anguish of burn victims, explosions, automobile accidents, suicide attempts, and even terrorist attacks, dismemberment and death. Such harrowing events come with the territory of first responders. It would seem that such repeated exposure to adversity must, over time, take a psychological toll, challenging even the most seasoned firefighters. Yet that doesn't seem to be the case.
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Shutterbug Parents and Overexposed Lives
The New York Times: In “The Entire History of You,” the third episode of the dystopian British series “Black Mirror,” humans have developed implanted memory “grains” that record everything they see and hear. When users “redo” a memory by playing it back, the recreation even surpasses the original; they can zoom in on details or activate a lip-reading function to decipher unheard speech. I thought of the episode when a friend showed me some pictures and videos of his two young children. There is more visual documentation of his kids from the last couple of months than of my entire childhood in the ’80s and ’90s. They’re growing up in a world far closer to one of grains and redos. ...
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The Slippery-Slope Effect: Minor Misdeeds Lead to Major Ones
“Well, you know what happens is, it starts out with you taking a little bit, maybe a few hundred, a few thousand,” notorious fraudster Bernie Madoff told Vanity Fair after stealing $18 billion from investors. “You get comfortable with that, and before you know it, it snowballs into something big.” A new study finds that getting away with minor infractions ends up making it easier for people to justify bigger, more serious ethical violations. Over time, small ethical transgressions--like stealing pens from work--can put employees on the “slippery slope” of increasingly bad behavior.
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To Make Better Decisions, Pretend You’re Deciding for Someone Else
New York Magazine: Perhaps the very last person you should turn to for advice is yourself, according to a new post from the Association for Psychological Science, which references research published last year in Psychological Science. We tend to make wiser decisions when thinking about someone else's problems than when thinking about our own issues, researchers from the University of Waterloo and the University of Michigan found, but there's a way around this. Think through your own decisions from a third-person perspective, suggest the researchers, led by Igor Grossmann at the University of Waterloo. Read the whole story: New York Magazine
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Can Money Buy Us Happiness?
U.S. News & World Report: Money can't buy you happiness, goes the generally accepted wisdom that was probably made up by someone poor, who wanted to bring his rich friends down a few notches. Some scientific studies have agreed with that sentiment, while others have concluded that, yes, being rich helps with being happy. In any case, if you want to crack open your wallet and try to buy some happiness, there are some purchases that may lift your spirits (at least for a while). Buy experiences, not things.
