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Abusive Supervision – Who’s to Blame?
It seems self-evident that abusive supervision encourages deviant behavior among subordinates. Boss yells at employee, and employee can’t shout back without the risk of getting fired or suspended. So employee vents anger and frustration on the organization — stealing company property or abusing an expense account. But could it be that such deviant behaviors are what cause bosses to treat employees abusively, rather than the other way around? A newly published behavioral study suggests that possibility. An international team of researchers theorized that abusive supervision will lead to organizational deviance, and vice versa.
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Practice may not make perfect
The Economist: TO MASTER the violin takes 10,000 hours of practice. Put in that time and expertise will follow. This, at least, is what many music teachers—following Malcolm Gladwell’s prescription for achieving expertise in almost any field by applying the requisite amount of effort—tell their pupils. Psychologists are more sceptical. Some agree practice truly is the thing that separates experts from novices, but others suspect genes play a role, too, and that without the right genetic make-up even 20,000 hours of practice would be pointless. A study just published in Psychological Science, by Miriam Mosing of the Karolinska Institute, in Sweden, suggests that the sceptics are right.
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Hey, Impulse Spenders: Here’s a Solution to Your Bad Habit
TIME: A study recently published in Psychological Science shows that an attitude of gratitude tempers impulsive urges. In the study, participants had the option of receiving $54 now or $80 in a month. The researchers then induced moods of happiness, neutrality, or gratitude. Participants in the happy or neutral groups preferred the smaller sum immediately—the typical response in delayed gratification experiments. The surprise came from those who felt grateful. They preferred to wait for the larger sum, which is the smarter, if less immediately gratifying, option. Read the whole story: TIME
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What we really taste when we drink wine
The New Yorker: Two glasses sit side by side on the table, each filled midway up with red wine. On the bottom of each stem is a white piece of paper. One reads “Wine A”; the other, “Wine B.” I, along with approximately one hundred and thirty others, have a simple assignment: taste both wines and rate their tastes from one (worst) to ten (best), then write down which we think is more expensive. We aren’t allowed to comment out loud or talk with our neighbors. What—and how—will we choose? And will those rankings match the rankings and prices of the actual wines inside each glass? This live-action experiment was conducted in early June by the Columbia University neuroscientist Daniel Salzman.
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This Is Your Stressed-Out Brain On Scarcity
NPR: Being poor is stressful. That's no big surprise. In a poll by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, 1 in 3 people making less than $20,000 a year said they'd experienced "a great deal of stress" in the previous month. And of those very stressed-out people, 70 percent said that money problems were to blame. ... Money seems to rule Boria's brain. Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir says that's normal for someone who's not making ends meet. Shafir studies the brain on scarcity. He told me that it doesn't matter what kind of scarcity you're dealing with. When humans don't have enough of something, that fact dominates our consciousness.
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Investigating the Siren Song of Mobile Devices in the Car
The vast majority of U.S. states ban motorists from texting while driving, and at least a dozen bar even voice conversations over a handheld device. Similar prohibitions are being enacted around the world. But so far they haven’t made a substantial dent in distracted driving. At any given moment during the day in the United States, approximately 660,000 drivers are using a handheld communications device instead of concentrating on the road, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. So why do so many of us ignore the dangers of texting or chatting on the phone when we’re behind the wheel?
