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Grumpy People Get the Details Right
New York Magazine: Think back to the last time you had to navigate a customer-service situation. Perhaps you were trying to make a doctor's appointment when few convenient times were available, or you may have been speaking with a credit-card rep in an effort to get a onetime waiver on a late payment charge. Maybe you were speaking with an airline representative in hopes of finagling priority seating. Did you adopt a warm tone and play nice? Or did you raise your voice and speak aggressively? You are a nice person, so you probably chose the kind route. The tough pill for most of us to swallow is that those overbearing screamers often get their way.
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Younger Leaders Seen as More Innovative, Older Leaders More Reliable
You’re more likely to see gray hair among the CEOs of the top 500 American companies (where the average age is about 53) than you are among Silicon Valley’s tech entrepreneurs, many of whom started billion dollar companies fresh out of college or even high school. New research suggests there may be a reason for the age disparities between leaders in different fields: A team of psychological scientists led by Brian R. Spisak of VU University Amsterdam provides evidence that people have unconscious biases based on age when it comes to choosing a leader.
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Troubled #hearts — in 140 Characters
The Huffington Post: I joined Twitter in 2008, and I've always been impressed by the diversity of this floating conversation. People will just as soon tweet about dinner as the sorry state of American politics, and they are by turns thoughtful and shallow, original and fraudulent, snide and generous of spirit. In 140 characters or fewer, users reflect the range of human emotion, from joy to rage, wonder to boredom, cynicism to hopefulness. Individual Twitter users can obviously reveal a lot about their lives and feelings, even in terse tweets. But what about very large numbers of tweets, by many people in many places?
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Magic May Lurk Inside Us All
The New York Times: How many words does it take to know you’re talking to an adult? In “Peter Pan,” J. M. Barrie needed just five: “Do you believe in fairies?” Such belief requires magical thinking. Children suspend disbelief. They trust that events happen with no physical explanation, and they equate an image of something with its existence. Magical thinking was Peter Pan’s key to eternal youth. The ghouls and goblins that will haunt All Hallows’ Eve on Friday also require people to take a leap of faith. Zombies wreak terror because children believe that the once-dead can reappear. At haunted houses, children dip their hands in buckets of cold noodles and spaghetti sauce.
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Curiosity: It Helps Us Learn, But Why?
NPR: How does a sunset work? We love to look at one, but Jolanda Blackwell wanted her eighth-graders to really think about it, to wonder and question. So Blackwell, who teaches science at Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior High in Davis, Calif., had her students watch a video of a sunset on YouTube as part of a physics lesson on motion. "I asked them: 'So what's moving? And why?' " Blackwell says. The students had a lot of ideas. Some thought the sun was moving; others, of course, knew that a sunset is the result of the Earth spinning around on its axis. Once she got the discussion going, the questions came rapid-fire. "My biggest challenge usually is trying to keep them patient," she says.
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Why It’s Wise to Gamble First, Eat Later
Pacific Standard: According to conventional wisdom, people in an agitated emotional state tend to make bad, impulsive decisions. Fear and anger often lead us to take actions we later regret. But a more recent line of research suggests there is much to be said for the intuitive wisdom of the body. According to mind-body oriented scholars such as Antonio Damasio, uncomfortable sensations that inhibit our normal thought patterns can sometimes provide valuable guidance. A research team led by Utrecht University psychologist Denise de Ridder suggests these thinkers are on to something—at least when the unpleasant feelings are those created by a growling stomach.
