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Oh, the humanity. Putting faces on social causes.
Back in the 1940s, the U.S. Forest Service began a public service campaign aimed at preventing forest fires. It featured Smokey Bear, a humanized caricature of a bear wearing blue jeans and a ranger’s hat. In a kind, gravelly voice, Smokey enlisted public support with slogans, his most famous being: “Remember—only you can prevent forest fires.” Smokey’s effort is considered one of the most enduring and effective advertising campaigns of all time. I know the ads worked for me as a boy. I grew up in a heavily wooded area, and became extremely cautious about matches and campfires as a result of Smokey’s message, as did all my friends.
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Why Wanting Expensive Things Makes Us So Much Happier Than Buying Them
The Atlantic: The idea that you can't buy happiness has been exposed as a myth, over and over. Richer countries are happier than poor countries. Richer people within richer countries are happier, too. The evidence is unequivocal: Money makes you happy. You just have to know what to do with it. So what should you do with it? Stop buying so much stuff, renowned psychologist Daniel Gilbert told me in an interview a few years ago, and try to spend more money on experiences. "We think that experiences can be fun but leave us with nothing to show for them," he said.
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So Damn Superior: Parsing Partisan Politics
The Huffington Post: A new Gallup poll shows that Americans' confidence in the Congress is at an all-time low. A measly 10 percent of citizens express confidence in lawmakers, and most say they have little or no confidence. That is the worst rating of any American institution -- including the military, HMOs and labor unions -- since this polling began in 1973. A lot of this disaffection has to do with the extreme partisanship that has seemingly paralyzed Capitol Hill. Today's is not the first political stalemate in American history, but it is certainly one of the most maddening.
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Failure to Replicate the Mehta and Zhu (2009) Color Effect
Mehta and Zhu (2009) reported several studies in Science on the effects of the colors red and blue over a series of cognitive tasks. Red was hypothesized to induce a state of avoidance motivation which would cause people to become more vigilant and risk-averse in a task. Blue was hypothesized to induce a state of approach motivation which would cause people to use more innovative or risky strategies. Studies appear in high-impact journals, like Science, often because they report novel or far-reaching effects. Such studies need to be replicated in order to determine whether the finding is reliable.
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How to Be a Better Boss
Scientific American: I took on my first “boss” role a couple of years ago while overseeing a tiny cadre of junior-level editors at a national women's magazine. The media industry isn't exactly known for having easy managers—ever read The Devil Wears Prada?—and I hadn't had any formal management training in my 10 years in the business. ... Psychologists who study management talk about job stress a lot because of all the ways it can affect a company: medical costs, sick days, morale and turnover. Time after time, researchers find that one of the most consistent ways to reduce stress among workers is to offer them a little more autonomy—a sense of control over their own job.
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The Problem with the Neuroscience Backlash
The New Yorker: Aristotle thought that the function of the brain was to cool the blood. That seems ludicrous now; through neuroscience, we know more about the brain and how it works than ever before. But, over the past several years, enthusiasm has often outstripped the limits of what current science can really tell us, and the field has given rise to pop neuroscience, which attempts to explain practically everything about human behavior and culture through the brain and its functions. A backlash against pop neuroscience is now in full swing. The latest, and most cutting, critique yet is “Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience,” by Sally Satel and Scott Lilienfeld.
