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The Psychology of Forgiving and Forgetting
Nicholas Kristoff’s latest New York Times column was sad and moving. It was a tribute to Marina Keegan, an honors student and recent graduate of Yale University who turned her back on a lucrative Wall Street career—and eloquently urged other college graduates to do the same. In an essay that was viewed a million times online, she bemoaned the squandering of young talent for the mindless accumulation of wealth. Days after her graduation, she died in a car crash. Her boyfriend, the driver, fell asleep at the wheel. Such losses are always tragic, and far too common, but that’s not what got my attention.
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Consequences When African-American Boys Are Seen As Older
NPR: But first, we're going to take a closer look at some new research about the way some boys are viewed by adults. This work was recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. And it found that African-American boys as young as 10 years old were significantly less likely to be viewed as children than their white peers. The report suggests that this could have serious implications for the way African-American boys are viewed by the criminal justice system and by society as a whole. The title of that report is "The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children." Phillip Atiba Goff is that one of the lead authors of that research.
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Thinking About a Majority-Minority Shift Leads to More Conservative Views
Facing the prospect of racial minority groups becoming the overall majority in the United States leads White Americans to lean more toward the conservative end of the political spectrum.
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The Nature/Nurture Mixture
The nature/nurture interaction is a vibrant and important field of study in behavioral science. Terrie Moffitt has focused her research on how genes and environment can, in certain combinations, spur antisocial and criminal behaviors. Her groundbreaking research, in collaboration with psychological scientist Avshalom Caspi, showed that individuals with a specific genotype are more vulnerable to developing antisocial and violent behavior if they are mistreated during childhood. She’s also linked another genotype to a risk for depression in the wake of stressful life events. Watch Terrie Moffitt's keynote address at the inaugural International Convention of Psychological Science.
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Hey GM, Denial is Not the Answer
TIME: When it comes to delivering bad news, the learning curve for most corporations is like the terrain of Kansas—which is to say no curve at all. Take General Motors. It was in 2001 that GM got its first inkling that problems with its ignition switches could cause a car to shut off while in operation—never a good thing. More evidence surfaced in 2005 and beyond, but it was only this year that the company came clean and recalled 2.6 million vehicles—getting deservedly blowtorched not just for their design failures but for their slipperiness. So not exactly nimble. GM is not alone.
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Gratitude is good for your wealth
CBS News: Market pundits have long lamented the devastating impact that impatience has on your wealth. Whether it's chasing the performance of last year's hot funds, overspending on credit cards, or simply going for the immediate gratification that comes from spending today what you should have saved for tomorrow, literally hundreds of academic research papers say the same thing. The impatient individual costs himself a fortune. On the other hand, investors who have the personal discipline to start saving young and leave their investments alone, end up rich. But what makes one investor patient and another impatient? The old school answer was willpower.
