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Not Guilty by Reason of Neuroscience
Slate Magazine: On Feb. 19, 1997, a house painter called 911 in Tampa, Fla. He had returned unannounced to a client’s house and through a window saw what appeared to be a naked man throttling a naked woman. When the police arrived, they learned the man hadn’t just strangled Roxanne Hayes; he had stabbed the mother-of-three multiple times, killing her. The murderer’s name was Lawrence Singleton; he was 69 years old, and he was notorious in California, where 19 years before, he had raped a 15-year-old hitchhiker, Mary Vincent; hacked off her forearms; and left her in a canyon to die.
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Watch the Influence of ‘Prospect Theory’ Grow
The Wall Street Journal: You’ve been hearing a bit about Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist and Nobel laureate, recently, thanks to the publication of his new book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” This graphic illustrates how the influence of the most famous paper by Kahneman and his frequent collaborator, Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk,” spread after its publication, in Econometrica, in 1979. According to data from Thomson Reuters, the paper was cited 778 times in 2009 alone, in 504 papers and books. From the humanities to computer science, there are few fields that have not embraced the paper. Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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Focusing on negatives helps catalyse change
The Times of India: If you want people to change, you have to get them to notice what is wrong with existing norms. That's the idea on which a new study, 'Why people pay attention to negative information about the system when they believe it can be changed for the better', is based. "Take America's educational system. You could find some flaws in that," says India Johnson, graduate student at Ohio State University, who co-authored the study with Kentaro Fujita, a professor at the university, the Psychological Science journal reports. "But we have to live with it every day, so people tend to focus on the positive and reinforce the system," says Johnson, a university statement said.
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What’s the best way to phrase requests for maximum compliance?
Business Insider: Men's Health covers a study in Psychological Science: If a direction seems final, people just accept it, explains researcher Kristin Laurin, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Waterloo. But if there is a possibility that the rule won’t happen, they long for the freedom that they would be restricted from and look for ways to get around the regulation. So whether you’re breaking it off with your girlfriend or asking an employee to take on a new project, the advice is the same: Be clear, firm, and direct. If you tell a rule in a definite and relevant manner, people are going to more likely embrace it and they won’t look for ways to cheat the rule, Laurin explains.
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Threats to the fetus during pregnancy
Chicago Tribune: Poor nutrition in the womb and infancy can reprogram the body's organs, setting the stage for disease decades down the road, according to the fetal origins theory. Much less is known about the impact of environmental and psychological exposures, but some potential threats include: Depression: In a study published in Psychological Science, pregnant women were checked for depression before and after birth. Researchers found that babies tended to thrive if their mothers were healthy both before and after birth and also if they were consistently depressed.
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Better Angels at Work
Huffington Post: In his new book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argues that the world is becoming less violent because of an increase in intelligence and education. He demonstrates multiple data points to prove his case that statistically significant adjustments have occurred in human behavior to create more tolerant and humane societies. Other similar studies concur with his conclusions that the world is embracing its better angels. We can look at the contemporary experience of the workplace to see similar trend lines. You don't need to watch Mad Men to know that office behavior has changed radically in the last fifty years.
