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What Can A Personality Test Tell Us About Who We Are?
In one of the most famous scenes from the Harry Potter series, a group of kids, new to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, line up before an old and crumpled wizard's hat. It is the sorting hat. The hat will tell them which house they'll belong to during their Hogwarts education. There is something deeply appealing about the sorting hat. It is wise. It seems to know people better than they know themselves. We humans love this kind of insight. And our drive to better understand ourselves and the people around us has led to the creation of a multi-billion dollar industry built around personality testing.
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Precrastination: When the Early Bird Gets the Shaft
My baby teeth never fell out. Instead, I yanked them out, roots and all, as soon as they were loose. I could have saved myself considerable pain by letting nature take its course. But I’m a serial “precrastinator”: I flip pancakes before bubbles have formed on the surface; I get to the grocery store before it opens; I turn in work before it’s due. The urge to complete a task is so strong I forge ahead even when I know waiting would lead to a better outcome. Yes, this might sound a little nonsensical. But it’s not uncommon.
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What Would a Dog Do on Mars?
Recently, NASA released colorful, dreamy illustrations depicting an imagined future in which human beings have made it to other worlds. A curly-haired astronaut floats inside a lunar space station, with the crater-pocked moon behind her. A lunar explorer steadies a camera on a tripod to photograph Earth in the distance. And an astronaut stands on the dunes of Mars with her hands in the pockets of her spacesuit, a dog at her side. Wait, a dog? To be clear, NASA’s ambitious plans for missions to the moon and Mars do not include dogs. (At least, none that the public knows about.
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Trying To Do Good
It's always better to help someone than not, right? We begin this episode in a virtual classroom. Several years ago Kellie Gillespie took an online course in social psychology, taught by Scott Plous of Wesleyan University. Hundreds of thousands of other people enrolled in the same online course. Kellie and her classmates were exposed to psychological concepts such as the norm of reciprocity: if you're nice to someone, or you open up to them, they're likely to do the same with you. They also learned about the power of empathy: when you put yourself in someone else's shoes, the relationship you have with them profoundly changes.
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Can We Touch?
Tiffany Field has spent decades trying to get people to touch one another more. Her efforts started with premature babies, when she found that basic human touch led them to quickly gain weight. An initial small study, published in the journal Pediatrics in 1986, showed that just 10 days of “body stroking and passive movements of the limbs” for less than an hour led babies to grow 47 percent faster. They averaged fewer days in the hospital and accrued $3,000 less in medical bills. The effect has been replicated multiple times. Field, a developmental psychologist by training, went on to found the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine.
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Americans Are Obsessed With Tidying Up. But There’s a Downside to Being Organized
In her bestselling book and Netflix series, Marie Kondo makes the case that decluttering can “dramatically transform” your life. “Detoxing” your spaces of unused and unwanted stuff can make you happier, more confident and maybe even slimmer, Kondo writes in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Judging by the popularity of her message and method, Kondo’s philosophy is scratching an itch for a lot of people. And there’s more evidence, much of it predating the “KonMari” phenomenon, that America has caught organization fever. There’s the “Inbox Zero” movement, a popular approach to email management that emphasizes clearing your inbox at the end of every work day.
