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One Scary Boss Can Spook the Whole Office
Coping with an abusive boss can have major impacts on employee well-being, and research has even shown that a bad boss can make people sick, leading to increased rates of heart attack, high blood pressure, anxiety, and chronic stress among employees. But a scary boss doesn’t just impact his or her immediate subordinates – new research from a team of psychological scientists led by Mary Bardes Mawritz of Drexel University shows that an abusive boss’s bad behavior can trickle down throughout the entire office.
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You Can Recover From a Snippy Email, But Prepare to Grovel
The Wall Street Journal: Stephanie Freeman recently wrote an email to a friend to say she missed her and thought of her often. The two women had previously made lunch plans, but they hadn’t followed through. Ms. Freeman added that she’d still love to get together. The reply? “You always say you are thinking of me but never do anything about it,” her friend wrote. “You are all talk and no action.” Ms. Freeman, 45, got angry. “How dare she put all the responsibility of this relationship on me?” she recalls thinking. She fired off a reply telling her friend to be grateful that she thought of her in a positive way and reminding the friend that she was capable of taking action, too.
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Memrise Prize Aimed at Spurring Innovations in Language Learning
David Shanks and Rosalind Potts, scientists in the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences at University College London, United Kingdom, have teamed up with the online learning community Memrise to tackle an age-old problem: how to learn a new language — fast. The $10,000 Memrise Prize challenges contestants to “create the most powerful methodology for memorizing new information.” Contestants will devise a 1-hour learning program to teach English speakers previously unfamiliar Lithuanian vocabulary. Those programs that perform well against a control method will pass to the next round of the contest to be reviewed by independent judges, including experts on memory and neuroscience.
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Holy Safety Net! Religion and Recklessness
Moral instruction is a big part of religion. That’s why most faiths come with strict laws of personal conduct. Indeed, many believe that living a sober life, free of risk and excess and recklessness, is evidence of devotion to a higher power. But most instruction of this sort focuses on recklessness with a moral dimension: Don’t drink too much. Don’t gamble away your family’s security. Don’t let sexual temptations ruin your marriage. Don’t steal someone else’s property. And so forth. These transgressions are considered not only risky, but also wrong. So what about risk taking that has no connection to right or wrong? Sky diving, for example, or cycling without a helmet?
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Toddlers Copy Their Peers to Fit In, but Apes Don’t
From the playground to the board room, people often follow, or conform, to the behavior of those around them as a way of fitting in. New research shows that this behavioral conformity appears early in human children, but isn’t evidenced by apes like chimpanzees and orangutans. “Conformity is a very basic feature of human sociality. It retains in- and out-groups, it helps groups coordinate and it stabilizes cultural diversity, one of the hallmark characteristics of the human species,” says psychological scientist and lead researcher Daniel Haun of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the University of Jena.
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Stand Out as a Leader By Bridging the CEO Pay Gap
Inc.: Are CEOs are properly compensated, compared to unskilled workers? If you think so, you're in the minority. That's one takeaway from recent research by Chulalongkorn University's Sorapop Kiatpongsan and Harvard Business School's Michael Norton. Their other key finding is a fascinating distillation of what people think CEOs should make compared to unskilled workers. Here are the numbers, according to Gretchen Gavett's superb summary on the Harvard Business Review blog: US-based respondents to the survey Kiatpongsan and Norton used believe that, ideally, CEOs should earn 6.7 times what unskilled workers earn.
