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Bad People Are Disgusting, Bad Actions Are Angering
A person’s character, more so than their actions, determines whether we find immoral acts to be ‘disgusting,’ studies show.
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Awesomeness Is Everything
The Atlantic: october, Jeff Bezos’s space-flight company, Blue Origin, passed a crucial safety test when it successfully detached a crew capsule from a rocket. In the process, would-be space tourists came one giant leap closer to suborbital selfies. A joyride to 330,000 feet would be, quite literally, awesome. Research on awe (an emotion related to Edmund Burke’s notion of the sublime, Sigmund Freud’s oceanic feelings, and Abraham Maslow’s peak experiences) reveals both its triggers and its far-out effects. and may even adjust our worldview to accommodate it.
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Want to Feel Less Time-Stressed?
The Wall Street Journal: Here’s a novel suggestion for those who feel they are in a constant race against the clock to get things done: Make some time for others. While it might seem counterintuitive to sacrifice some of the very thing you think you don’t have enough of, our research shows that giving a bit of time away may, in fact, make people feel less pressed for time and better able to tick things off their to-do lists. With Americans feeling starved for time to such an extent that scholars have declared a “time famine,” we began searching for a cure by asking: When people feel pressed for time, what activities are they most likely to forgo?
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How Do Creative Ideas Get Heard?
Imagine you are an employee at a widget-making factory. Sitting at your desk one day, you have an epiphany: You’ve thought of a new way to create widgets that should increase production by threefold. But will your supervisor be supportive of your new idea, or will it be cast aside without due consideration? In a 2015 article published in the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, Roy B. L. Sijbom (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands), Onne Janssen (University of Groningen, The Netherlands), and Nico W. Van Yperen (University of Groningen, The Netherlands) examined when and why leaders support radical creative ideas voiced by their subordinates.
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The Roots of Implicit Bias
The New York Times: During the first presidential debate, Hillary Clinton argued that “implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police.” Her comment moved to the forefront of public conversation an issue that scientists have been studying for decades: namely, that even well-meaning people frequently harbor hidden prejudices against members of other racial groups. Studies have shown that these subtle biases are widespread and associated with discrimination in legal, economic and organizational settings. Critics of this notion, however, protest what they see as a character smear — a suggestion that everybody, deep down, is racist.
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Switching to Daylight Saving Time May Lead to Harsher Legal Sentences
Sentencing data shows that judges in the US tend to give defendants longer sentences the day after switching to daylight saving time compared with other days of the year.
