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Why Your Kid Should Be a Rebel
Most parents dread the day their child is labeled “rebellious.” But Francesca Gino, a professor at Harvard Business School, hopes to change this negative connotation. Rather than regard rebels as troublemakers or outcasts, Gino argues, “effective rebels are people who challenge the status quo and break rules constructively, creating positive change in the process.” That’s why she believes that parents should, in fact, groom their kids to be rebels. In the latest episode of Home School, The Atlantic’s animated video series about parenting, Gino reveals why parents should teach kids to question the rules rather than take them for granted.
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More social science studies just failed to replicate. Here’s why this is good.
One of the cornerstone principles of science is replication. This is the idea that experiments need to be repeated to find out if the results will be consistent. The fact that an experiment can be replicated is how we know its results contain a nugget of truth. Without replication, we can’t be sure. For the past several years, social scientists have been deeply worried about the replicability of their findings. Incredibly influential, textbook findings in psychology — like the “ego depletion” theory of willpower, or the “marshmallow test” — have been bending or breaking under rigorous retests.
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You 2.0: Originals
Consider this: Frank Lloyd Wright was a procrastinator. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are afraid of taking risks. Most of Beethoven's compositions are pretty awful. Conventional wisdom suggests these originals were successful despite their hemming and hawing, their hedging, and their many flops. But Wharton professor Adam Grant says these defects are actually fundamental to originality. In his new book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, Adam investigates who comes up with great ideas, how, and what we can do to have more of them. This week, we bring you our conversation with him as part of our summer series, You 2.0.
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How viral outrage can backfire
In a series of experiments, psychologists at Stanford showed people social media posts that could easily be seen as offensive — for instance, as racist, sexist, unpatriotic, or xenophobic. If the offensive post was shown getting 10 outraged replies, people felt more sympathy toward the author than when it generated only two outraged replies. This was true even when the offender was described as a white supremacist! Yet while third-party observers of these social media pile-ons were relatively sympathetic to the author of the original offensive post, that effect did not hold when people were asked to write their own outraged reply.
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Myth: We Only Use 10% of Our Brains
This will prepare students to understand how all parts of the brain contribute to behavior.
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Employees in Open Offices Are More Active, Less Stressed
Digital tools afforded by smartphones and activity trackers allow researchers to study real-world behavior as it happens in the moment.
