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When Doing Good Means You’re Bad
TIME: Want to know a sure way to be seen as immoral, unethical and unlikable? Raise $1 million for charity. Want to know how to have people think a lot more favorably of you? Raise nothing at all. If you think that’s entirely irrational, you’re right. Welcome to the human condition. The key to being thought of as a louse for helping the sick or the poor is not the act of giving by itself, but the act of benefiting from it. That million dollars looks a little less princely if, for your troubles, you kept 10% of it—even if you made that intention clear from the start and even if $900,000 still went to the folks who need it most. Fork it all over or don’t expect any applause.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Show Me the Numbers: Precision as a Cue to Others' Confidence Alexandra Jerez-Fernandez, Ashley N. Angulo, and Daniel M. Oppenheimer The authors investigated a newly identified indicator of confidence -- precision. In the second of two studies, participants played a "The Price Is Right"-style game in which they had to give price ranges for three objects. Participants were provided with audience suggestions that were more or less precise before choosing members of the audience to help them with subsequent price estimations.
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How College Students Can Benefit From Some Mindfulness Training
The Huffington Post: College is full of distractions, but mindfulness training could help students stay on track and focused, a new study suggests. Researchers from the University of Miami found that students who took a seven-week mindfulness training course had improved attention and less mind-wandering compared with a control group that didn't receive the training. ... Mindfulness training could also boost students' testing abilities. A recent study in the journal Psychological Science suggested mindfulness training could help students as they took the verbal reasoning portion of the Graduate Record Examination, commonly known as the GRE. Read the whole story: The Huffington Post
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The Older Mind May Just Be a Fuller Mind
The New York Times: People of a certain age (and we know who we are) don’t spend much leisure time reviewing the research into cognitive performance and aging. The story is grim, for one thing: Memory’s speed and accuracy begin to slip around age 25 and keep on slipping. The story is familiar, too, for anyone who is over 50 and, having finally learned to live fully in the moment, discovers it’s a senior moment. The finding that the brain slows with age is one of the strongest in all of psychology. ... Now comes a new kind of challenge to the evidence of a cognitive decline, from a decidedly digital quarter: data mining, based on theories of information processing.
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How Warm Is Your Brand?
The world is having a love affair with Costco. Fortune Magazine ranks the warehouse retailer as one of the world’s most admired companies, and only partly because of its commitment to social responsibility. Operating under the philosophy that happy employees deliver effective customer service, the company pays its employees extremely well — a sterling contrast to the way competitors like Wal-Mart and Kmart compensate workers. Costco’s practices even drew a shout out from President Obama during his State of the Union Address on Tuesday. Whether they realize it or not, consumers tend to regard companies the same way they do each other.
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The Great Mom & Dad Experiment
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Couples with babies in tow arrive for dinner one evening at a red brick office building in downtown Oklahoma City. On the menu tonight are pasta and garlic bread, served on Styrofoam plates. The parents file in nervously, not sure what to expect. Seated at one table is a touchingly earnest couple, still in high school, who didn't plan to have a baby but now want to be the best possible parents. Nearby is a 23-year-old in a baseball cap, pulled low over his eyes, who admits he was dragged here by his girlfriend. There are older couples, too, including a forty-something dad who laughs and says he wants to get fatherhood right this time around.
