-
Rituals Make Food (and Drinks) Taste Better
TIME: One night as she was enjoying an evening with friends, professor Kathleen Vohs, who teaches marketing at the University of Minnesota, was disappointed to find that the bottle of wine she had bought earlier came with a screw top, not a cork. “I missed the whole ritual of unwrapping the foil and inserting the corkscrew, and feeling that tension,” she says. “It has so many dimensions because I can feel the foil, but everyone else can hear the pop — you know that very satisfying pop.” Because the wine bottle was missing that pop, Vohs and her company agreed that the wine probably wouldn’t be as flavorful.
-
Babies Aren’t Afraid of Heights Until They Start Crawling
Smithsonian Magazine: Babies are fearless when it comes to heights. That woozy, faint feeling only starts kicking in around month nine, when babies begin to recoil from the edge of a steep staircase or the drop-off of a changing table. Researchers writing in the journal Psychological Science wondered what changed, and they suspected it was the experience of moving around. The researchers randomly assigned some babies to receive training in using a powered baby go-cart, providing them with locomotor experience, while other babies received no such training. Critically, none of the babies had begun to crawl.
-
Heat Wave Psychology: Long Past, Green Future?
The Huffington Post: I live in Maryland, where we have been suffering through an unrelenting heat wave all summer, and I confess I have cranked up the AC on the worst days. But I always feel guilty about it when I do, and I turn it off whenever the air dips back into the tolerable range. So I'm no saint, but I am mindful. I am motivated by thoughts of the future generations, my kids and their kids and all of the people who will have to inhabit this overheating planet. We all make more or less responsible choices like this every day. We drive hybrids or guzzlers, recycle or don't, protest or endorse the Keystone XL pipeline.
-
Intent to Harm: Willful Acts Seem More Damaging
How harmful we perceive an act to be depends on whether we see the act as intentional, reveals new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The new research shows that people significantly overestimate the monetary cost of intentional harm, even when they are given a financial incentive to be accurate. “The law already recognizes intentional harm as more wrong than unintentional harm,” explain researchers Daniel Ames and Susan Fiske of Princeton University.
-
Why Summer Makes Us Lazy
The New Yorker: In his meticulous diaries, written from 1846 to 1882, the Harvard librarian John Langdon Sibley complains often about the withering summer heat: “The heat wilts & enervates me & makes me sick,” he wrote in 1852. Sibley lived before the age of air-conditioning, but recent research suggests that his observation is still accurate: summer really does tend to be a time of reduced productivity. Our brains do, figuratively, wilt. One of the key issues is motivation: when the weather is unpleasant, no one wants to go outside, but when the sun is shining, the air is warm, and the sky is blue, leisure calls.
-
Superstar Sports Players More Likely to Cheat
TIME: The first player to be affected by Major League Baseball’s crack-down on those caught using banned performance-enhancing drugs was Milwaukee Brewers’ outfielder Ryan Braun, who was suspended for the rest of the season. One would think that it would be the struggling or fringe players who’d be more likely to cheat, but Braun was a 2011 National League MVP. He has been a star his entire career, beginning in 2007 when he was named the National League Rookie of the Year. So why, of all people, would Braun feel the need to cheat? ... Research conducted by Zoe Chance, a professor of marketing at Yale School of Management, provides additional insight.
