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Super Rare Items Are Most Likely to Be Missed
Various jobs in security, medicine, and other fields require employees to pick out a target item in the midst of lots of distracting information. To complicate matters, the targets that are are most important to find – say, a weapon or a malignant tumor – are also incredibly rare. So, how are we at picking out these kinds of ultra-rare targets? Not very good at all, according to new research from Stephen Mitroff and Adam Biggs of Duke University. The researchers took advantage of anonymous data provided by an app called “Airport Scanner,” developed by Kedlin Co.
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Why Your Name Matters
The New Yorker: In 1948, two professors at Harvard University published a study of thirty-three hundred men who had recently graduated, looking at whether their names had any bearing on their academic performance. The men with unusual names, the study found, were more likely to have flunked out or to have exhibited symptoms of psychological neurosis than those with more common names. The Mikes were doing just fine, but the Berriens were having trouble. A rare name, the professors surmised, had a negative psychological effect on its bearer. ... That view, however, may not withstand closer scrutiny.
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Meditation May Help Us Cut Our Losses
There are certain things that are notoriously hard for us to do: Leaving the theater halfway through a terrible movie, deciding to quit a craft project that doesn't look like it ought to, pushing away a less-than-exciting home-cooked meal. We have a hard time doing these things thanks to what researchers call the “sunk cost” bias: We feel compelled to continue with something just because we've already invested money, time, and/or effort into it. In these cases, we aren't rewarded for our perseverance -- the movie will still be bad, the craft project will still be sad-looking, and the food will still taste bland.
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‘Affluenza’: Is it real?
CNN: Attorneys for Texas teen Ethan Couch claimed that his "affluenza" meant he was blameless for driving drunk and causing a crash that left four people dead in June. Judge Jean Boyd sentenced him Tuesday to 10 years of probation but no jail time, saying she would work to find him a long-term treatment facility. ... But the term highlights the issue of parents, particularly upper-middle-class ones, who not only refuse to discipline their children but may protest the efforts of others -- school officials, law enforcement and the courts -- who attempt to do so, said Suniya Luthar, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University.
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Women Will Tolerate Sexually Explicit Ads — at the Right Price
Harvard Business Review: Kathleen D. Vohs, the Land O’Lakes Professor of Excellence in Marketing at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, and her colleagues set up a study in which men and women viewed advertisements for wristwatches. One of the watches was priced low, at $10; the other ran for $1250. The subjects viewed each watch against both a simple mountain backdrop and a sexually explicit scene. So do women ever think sex sells? Professor Vohs, defend your research. When men and women view sex-based ads featuring a cheap watch versus an expensive one, their reactions differ. Men’s reactions don’t vary much, regardless of how much the watch costs.
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The ritual of eating chocolate is almost as important as the chocolate itself
The Telegraph: Fascinating recent research suggests that rituals associated with food and drink enhance the enjoyment of what is consumed. Writing in the journal Psychological Science, Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota suggests that such rituals – clinking glasses of wine, shaking a little pack of sugar before adding it to coffee – ensure that people are paying proper attention to the food or drink when they get to it, which makes it taste better. Naturally Professor Vohs turned to chocolate to test her hypothesis, and had her subjects unwrap a bar in a systematic manner before consuming it.
