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The Secret to Dealing With Cynics at Work
In a management training that my company sent me to a few years back, I was introduced to a new concept: “cynical terrorists.” This category was meant to describe the kind of person who assumes the worst of everyone, shoots down every new idea, and generally drenches their environment in negativity with the volatile energy of a broken sprinkler system. Cynical terrorists, our coach explained, are highly engaged at their workplace, but in a destructive way. This makes them very powerful and very scary. I picture the Joker in a J. Crew button-down shirt, sowing chaos for the hell of it. ...
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New Research Finds Text Messages Can Help Predict Suicide Attempts
New research at UVA suggests that language used in text messages may one day help clinicians predict an increased risk of a suicide attempt in real time.
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The Outsize Influence of Your Middle-School Friends
No wonder, then, that researchers studying a phenomenon known as social buffering found some puzzling results when they studied teenagers. Social buffering is a way of describing the protective, positive effect of one individual on another. It describes the power of one person to reduce another’s stress. ... But how does that response change as kids grow older? That’s what the neuroscientist Dylan Gee, now at Yale University, wanted to know. She studies how brain circuits mature, and has found that puberty is a turning point for dealing with stress.
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Linguistic Similarities Build Friendships and Echo Chambers
Friends influence one another’s linguistic styles over time, contributing to the relational “echo chambers” common on social media and in society as a whole.
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Call for Abstracts: Behavior, Energy, and Climate Change 2020 Conference
The Behavior, Energy, and Climate Change (BECC) 2020 Conference is accepting abstracts for posters, individual presentations, and panels through April 1, 2020. BECC, to be held December 6-9 in Washington, DC, presents behavioral research on how to encourage behavior change for energy and carbon savings, how to evaluate these programs, how to understand why individuals and groups change, and how to make these transitions in fair and equitable ways. Student fellowships are available for the conference through the Stanford University. The conference is co-convened by Berkeley Energy and Climate Institute and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
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NSF Grants to Study Ethical and Responsible Research
The National Science Foundation (NSF) funds research looking at ethical and responsible approaches to conducting research. Topics to consider include professional ethics, codes of conduct, licensing requirements, membership in organizations, honor codes, and more.
