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Study: inflated praise is damaging for children with low self-esteem
Wired: As counterintuitive as it may seem, a study has revealed that inflated praise given to children who are suffering from low self-esteem could be detrimental to their ability to overcome their feelings of inadequacy. Whilst children with high self-esteem are seen to flourish when given inflated praise, those with low self-esteem are more likely to spurn new challenges when they are too heavily praised. Inflated praise was defined in this research as an adverb, such as "incredibly", or an adjective, such as "perfect", attached to an already positive statement, resulting in an inflated evaluation of a child's performance.
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How Scarcity Trap Affects Our Thinking, Behavior
NPR: Let's hear now about a new book that explores a major source of stress. The book is called "Scarcity" and it's a look at what happens to us when we're pressured with too little time or too little money. The authors say "Scarcity" actually changes how we think. NPR's social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam explains. Each September the state of Massachusetts asks one thing from "Scarcity" author and Harvard economist, Sendhil Mullainathan, to renew his car inspection sticker and each year this recipient of the MacArthur Genius Award does the same thing. He's really busy, so on each day leading up to the expiration of the sticker, he tells himself he'll attend to it the next day ...
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How Thoughts of Money Lead Us Astray
The Wall Street Journal: The New Year makes many of us think about time passing, and research shows that such thoughts often spur us to act more ethically. If we were to brood instead about the cash we're likely to blow on Dec. 31, our actions might be less upright. Two business professors from Harvard University and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania conducted experiments in which some people were primed to think about money and others about time. Then the participants were given the opportunity to cheat anonymously. The results? Thinking about time led to much more honest behavior.
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See half a world and you can’t reason about the past
New Scientist: DRAW a line across a page, then write on it what you had for dinner yesterday and what you plan to eat tomorrow. If you are a native English speaker, or hail from pretty much any European country, you no doubt wrote last night's meal to the left of tomorrow night's. That's because we construct mental timelines to represent and reason about time, and most people in the West think of the past as on the left, and the future as on the right. Arnaud Saj at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and his colleagues wondered whether the ability to conjure up a mental timeline is a necessary part of reasoning about events in time.
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The Brain, in Exquisite Detail
The New York Times: ST. LOUIS — Deanna Barch talks fast, as if she doesn’t want to waste any time getting to the task at hand, which is substantial. She is one of the researchers here at Washington University working on the first interactive wiring diagram of the living, working human brain. ... Dr. Barch is explaining the dimensions of the task, and the reasons for undertaking it, as she stands in a small room, where multiple monitors are set in front of a window that looks onto an adjoining room with an M.R.I. machine, in the psychology building. She asks a research assistant to bring up an image.
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Are We Genetically Inclined To Be Materialistic?
NPR: People tend to hate to lose stuff they already own. This trait, known as the endowment effect, is likely handed down to us by evolution, since it is visible cross-culturally as well as in non-human primates. However, new research suggests certain cultures place a brake on this evolutionary trait, whereas capitalistic societies put it on steroids. A common complaint about the holiday season is that it's become too commercial. Selfishness and materialism are a part of human nature. At least that's what we thought. But in a recent experiment, researchers found a group of people with a very different kind of nature.
