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Can a Difficult Childhood Enhance Cognition?
The Atlantic: Hard childhoods seem to not only rob children of material joys, but also of brain power. Children who grow up poor tend to score worse on tests of memory, processing speed, language, and attention. And they are 40 percent more likely to have a learning disability than their better-off peers. Busier and less-educated parents utter millions fewer words to their babies, creating a gap in verbal ability by the time the children are 3. Factors like hunger, unsafe housing, and parental instability all contribute to “toxic stress” that impairs brain development.
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How Your Phone Can Keep You From Spending
The Wall Street Journal: An app can help you order a pizza, find a parking spot—or plan your retirement. In more than a dozen recent experiments, Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely used mobile apps and simple tenets of psychology to help people save more money, pay down more debt and devise and stick to budgets. Overall, Dr. Ariely’s research at the university’s Common Cents Lab shows that people enrolled in the behavioral interventions spent less and saved more than those who weren’t. Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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How Companies Can Benefit More From Their Corporate Giving
The Wall Street Journal: The past decade has seen an enormous increase in the number of companies engaged in charitable-giving initiatives, both with their customers and their employees. Many major brands now offer some form of charitable tie-in (“10% of profits go to charity”; “buy one and one goes to charity”), and many companies offer matching programs for employee donations. On their face, both types of initiatives feel good: Companies are showing they care. But the underlying psychology is more complex.
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The Factors That Foster Wise Reasoning
Empirical research on wisdom suggests that it’s not so much that some people simply possess wisdom and others lack it, but that our ability to reason wisely depends on a variety of external factors.
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At last, scientific proof that daydreaming doesn’t mean you’re a flake
Quartz: Western culture tends to look down on daydreamers—as if it’s a childish habit that we’re supposed to outgrow, along with make-believe games and imaginary friends. But none other than Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology, thought that most adults daydream too little. Daydreaming, he theorized, is important for creative thinking. When we indulge in fantasies about our hopes for the future, we prepare ourselves to deal with reality. Now a new study, led by cognitive psychologist Michael Kane at the University of North Carolina Greensboro and published in Psychological Science, confirms that daydreaming can be positive—depending on the context and content of our fantasies.
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Social Science Research Explores Psychological Effects Of Rituals
NPR: Research suggests when volunteers are taught and required to practice rituals, they demonstrate greater trust toward others who practice the same ritual, and diminished trust toward those who don't. Well, I was talking to Nicholas Hobson. He's a Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto. Along with researchers Michael Norton, Francesca Gino and Michael Inzlicht, Hobson recently ran some experiments to measure the effect that rituals have on people. Now, since existing rituals like wearing the cheese head for Packers fans have complicated cultural meanings, that could... Read the whole story: NPR
