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How Vanity Could Save the Planet
The Atlantic: Whether you follow a vegan diet or are a devoted carnivore, carry canvas or plastic, you are one of 7.5 billion people. The ecological effect of your choices is minuscule. And yet they have a big effect on how others see you, and how you see yourself. Psychologists found that prodding people to worry about social status increased their interest in buying green versus nongreen items—but only if they were shopping in public. People in Washington State and Colorado were willing to pay a premium of $430 to $4,200 (results varied by zip code) for the green-signaling Prius over an equally efficient car that didn’t broadcast its virtue Read the whole story: The Atlantic
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One Way to Make Better Decisions: Rely on Your Imagination More Than Your Willpower
New York Magazine: Maybe you can relate to this particular struggle: When the alarm goes off in the morning, some people use the snooze button for five more sweet, sweet minutes of sleep. I use it for 30 of them, give or take. I gorge on the snooze button. It’s gotten so bad that I now set my first alarm for much earlier than I actually need to be awake, just so I can keep on snoozing a little while longer. Yes, I know I really should be getting up and starting the day and all that, but it’s so hard when you’re just so cozy. Which might actually be the root of the problem: I’m thinking about the trade-offs all wrong.
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Scientific American, Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science Announce Online Writing Workshop
Scientific American and the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University are teaming on an online workshop aimed at helping scientists and engineers write blogs and op-eds for magazines, newspapers, and other news outlets. Presented in partnership with The Kavli Foundation, two dozen scientists will receive mentoring on writing over this fall and next spring, with successful assignments to be considered for publication as a Scientific American guest blog.
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Some People Are Great At Recognizing Faces. Others…Not So Much
NPR: Every day, Marty Doerschlag moves through the world armed with what amounts to a low-level superpower: He can remember a face forever. "If I spend about 30 seconds looking at somebody, I will remember their face for years and years and years," he says. ... "I think nobody really knew until the last few years just how bad we all are with unfamiliar faces," says Mike Burton, a professor of psychology at the University of York UK. Burton has run a number of facial recognition studies and has concluded that most people are remarkably bad at recognizing the faces of those they know only slightly. And to make matters worse, most people think they are good at this skill when they are not.
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How High-School Popularity Follows You Into Adulthood
New York Magazine: Although we don’t talk much about antiquated psychological concepts like the id, ego, superego, and unconscious anymore, we do know that there are plenty of actions we take without thinking—feelings that seem to bubble up from nowhere and ways that we react to life that just seem to be part of our “personality.” Today, we understand that all of these automatic behaviors, feelings, and thoughts are related to specific activity in our brains. Recent research suggests that, in a very literal sense, our brains were built on a foundation of popularity. Read the whole story: New York Magazine
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Minority Students and the Culture of Research
The social context of faculty-led research labs could impact on students’ further participation in science, particularly for underrepresented minority students.
