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Physical Environment May Affect Likelihood of Dishonest Behavior
New research shows that expansive physical settings -- such as having a big desk to stretch out while doing work or a large driver's seat in an automobile -- can cause individuals to feel more powerful, which may, in turn, elicit more dishonest behavior, such as stealing, cheating, and even traffic violations. The new research is forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Your Brain Sees Even When You Don’t
Forbes: The unconscious processing abilities of the human brain are estimated at roughly 11 million pieces of information per second. Compare that to the estimate for conscious processing: about 40 pieces per second.* Our conscious processing capacity isn’t insignificant, but clearly it’s just a retention pond compared to the ocean of the unconscious. And more and more research is uncovering abilities of the unconscious that defy reason. Two recently published studies on how the brain “sees” illustrate the point–the first one is cool, the second borders on incredible.
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How the Hum of a Coffee Shop Can Boost Creativity
The New York Times: Pulling up a seat at your favorite coffee shop may be the most efficient way to write a paper or finish a work project. But now a new Web site lets you bring the coffee shop to your cubicle. The site, called Coffitivity, was inspired by recent research showing that the whoosh of espresso machines and caffeinated chatter typical of most coffee shops creates just the right level of background noise to stimulate creativity. The Web site, which is free, plays an ambient coffee shop soundtrack that, according to researchers, helps people concentrate. ...
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We Still Need Information Stored in Our Heads Not ‘in the Cloud’
TIME: Is technology making us stupid — or smarter than we’ve ever been? Author Nicholas Carr memorably made the case for the former in his 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. This fall we’ll have a rejoinder of sorts from writer Clive Thompson, with his book Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better. My own take: technology can make us smarter or more stupid, and we need to develop a set of principles to guide our everyday behavior and make sure that tech is improving and not impeding our mental processes.
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What Makes Rituals Special? Join Us For A Google+ Conversation
NPR: Click play on the video player above to watch my Google+ conversation with Harvard behavioral scientist and Slate's Human Nature correspondent about the role of ritual in human life. All over the world, people employ rituals. For millions, it's as simple as making a cup of coffee the same way, every day. Books and movies are filled with characters who employ lucky charms and superstitions. And some works explore the , when ritual spills into obsession and . Surprisingly, though, there has been little effort to examine rituals quantitatively.
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Do Children Make Us Happy?
Pacific Standard: Several months ago, the novelist Zadie Smith wrote an essay for the New York Review of Books on joy, a complicated emotion that lies at the heart of parenting she argued. In the essay, Smith captured the paradox of parenting: Children, so-called “bundles of joy,” can make parents profoundly unhappy. “Occasionally, the child, too, is a pleasure,” she wrote, “though mostly she is a joy, which means in fact she gives us not much pleasure at all, but rather that strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight that I have come to recognize a joy, and now must find some way to live with daily.” Smith went on to write, “Sometimes joy multiplies itself dangerously.
