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Young Minds, Smart Strategies: How Children Decide When to Use External Memory Aids
Podcast: Do young children prefer to rely on their memory, or do they take the easier route and use external aids like lists and reminders? Under the Cortex explores.
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The Evermaskers
... The truth, or its best approximation, may be, to some extent, irrelevant. How any given person will perceive a threat is “a deeply psychological phenomenon,” Steven Taylor, a clinical psychologist at the University of British Columbia and the author of The New Psychology of Pandemics, told me, and one that is “influenced by values, your past history, your medical history, and your mental-health history.” (In the U.S., at least, people’s sense of risk from COVID, in particular, also has a strong connection to their politics.) Unless someone’s COVID-cautious habits have been causing major problems in their life, there’s no point in trying to discourage them, Taylor said.
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Four-Year-Olds Respond to Misinformation by Exercising Instinctive Skepticism Muscles
... A different and perhaps more inventive tack entails accepting the inevitability of children spending time online and prodding them to become their own fact-checkers. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, tested such an approach by asking whether children could learn to recognize misinformation—and to use that ability to develop their own fact-checking skills. Evan Orticio, a graduate student in the research group of Berkeley psychologist Celeste Kidd, and colleagues designed a study to investigate the natural fact-checking abilities of young children.
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Why Old Friends Bring Out Our Worst Teenage Selves
... As viewers get to know the group, they learn that Jaclyn was the ring leader in school. On this vacation, she assumes that role again, paying for the trip and deciding when the group goes out to party and who should hook up with whom. The other two fall in step. Long-term friend groups often contain these kinds of inflexible roles, said Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University and the director of the university’s Social Connection and Health Lab. Maybe “someone’s more of the leader or the comedian,” she said. This isn’t always a bad thing, but it’s hard to evolve in the eyes of those who know you in one specific role.
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The Paradox of Hard Work
... To say that long-distance runners embrace difficulty is to say the obvious. When you watch many thousands of people happily push themselves through a race that they might not even be allowed to finish, though, you start to get the hint that something deeply human is going on. People like things that are really hard. In fact, the enormity of a task often is why people pursue it in the first place. This is a puzzling phenomenon, when you stop and think about it. It violates all sorts of assumptions about rational action and evolutionary selection and economic theory. Psychologists call it the Effort Paradox.
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Typecasting Others and Self As Villain or Victim Can Hurt Relationships
This question from a patient may strike a chord with those who have felt wounded in relationship (which, of course, is all of us). When we feel hurt by others, our brains don’t simply process the pain — they become casting directors, auditioning people for the two starring roles: the blameless victim and the heartless villain. Social scientists call this “moral typecasting.” Most people will be familiar with the idea of typecasting in the entertainment industry.
