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When Things Don’t Go According to Plan
Methodologists have embraced preregistration as a way to prevent questionable research practices and add transparency to scientific studies. But many researchers end up deviating from those preregistered plans, and those deviations aren’t reported systematically, if at all.
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Finding It Tough to Motivate Yourself? These Strategies Can Help.
Many people think that motivation is the key to changing habits — and that you either have it or you don’t. But motivation is not a psychological trait or personality characteristic. It’s something you can cultivate. “It’s about setting yourself up for success,” said behavioral scientist Katy Milkman, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book “How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.” “Create an environment that’s conducive to making the choices you want to make.
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Being a Team Player: Opportunities and Challenges in the Era of Collaborative Science
The growing number of collaborative science teams changes the landscape of science and technology; whereas small teams disrupt science and technology by creating novel systems and ideas, large teams build on existing knowledge systems. Both will be crucial for moving science forward.
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Love Languages Are Fake, Scientists Say
The concept of "love languages," first theorized by a Baptist preacher in the early 90s, has had a vice grip on pop psychology for decades — but now, some scientists are calling bull. In a new paper published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, researchers from the University of Toronto Mississauga took on the public's "obsession with love languages." They found, per their close reading of ten relationship science studies, that there just isn't a lot of "strong empirical support" for the theory. ...
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Why February Is the Best Month for Resolutions
It might be the dreariest month of the year, but there are at least two things going for February: It’s short, and it’s not January. February brings a reprieve from the pressures that come with the start of the year. The steady stream of gym advertisements eases up. Dry January ends, and bars get more of their customers back. For those of us already thinking about abandoning our New Year’s resolutions, the arrival of February may seem like tacit permission to give up. If you haven’t made as much progress on your resolutions as you might like, psychologists stress that you shouldn’t be hard on yourself.
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Robert Rosenthal, Who Linked Subtle Cues to Behavior, Dies at 90
Robert Rosenthal, a psychologist renowned as an expert in nonverbal communication, and in particular what he called the “self-fulfilling prophecies” in which subtle, often unconscious, gestures can influence behavior, died on Jan. 5 in Riverside, Calif. He was 90. His daughter Ginny Rosenthal Mahasin said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was an aneurysm. Widely considered one of the leading social psychologists of the 20th century, Dr. Rosenthal, who spent much of his career at Harvard, was best known for his work in the 1960s on what he called the Pygmalion effect — or, more technically, “interpersonal expectancy.” ...
