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What’s the Big Idea? How Gender Influences Perceptions of Genius
New research suggests that the metaphors we use to frame innovations can bias our perceptions of who is capable of coming up with the next big idea.
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LET YOUR WORKERS REBEL
Harvard Business Review: Throughout our careers, we are taught to conform — to the status quo, to the opinions and behaviors of others, and to information that supports our views. The pressure only grows as we climb the organizational ladder. By the time we reach high-level positions, conformity has been so hammered into us that we perpetuate it in our enterprises. In a recent survey I conducted of more than 2,000 employees across a wide range of industries, nearly half the respondents reported working in organizations where they regularly feel the need to conform, and more than half said that people in their organizations do not question the status quo.
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The psychology of superstitions, explained
Vox: In 2013, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman published a book called Thinking Fast and Slowthat popularized a growing theory in the psychological literature. The theory outlines two main channels, or “systems,” in which we think, and how the two of them interact can explain how superstitious thoughts originate and stick around. The first way, called System 1, represents our immediate gut reactions to the world. It’s the part of our brain that thinks in stereotypes and makes snap judgments. In the case of superstitions, System 1: Read the whole story: Vox
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Does Smiling Make Cartoons Funnier?
Scientific American: A large, multi-lab replication study has found no evidence to validate one of psychology’s textbook findings: the idea that people find cartoons funnier if they are surreptitiously induced to smile. But an author of the original report—published nearly three decades ago—says that the new analysis has shortcomings, and may not represent a direct replication of his work. In 1988, Fritz Strack, a psychologist now at the University of Würzburg, Germany, and colleagues found that people who held a pen between their teeth, which induces a smile, rated cartoons as funnier than did those who held a pen between their lips, which induced a pout, or frown.
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SRCD Call for Letters of Intent for Two New Programs Focusing on State Early Childhood Policy
The Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) is seeking letters of intent for two new State Policy Programs that it will be piloting in 2017–2018: the Pre-doctoral State Policy Scholars Program in Early Learning, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Post-doctoral State Policy Fellowship in Early Childhood, funded by the Heising-Simons Foundation. The deadline to submit letters of intent is December 19, 2016. More information about the pilot State Policy Programs is available online. For questions, please email [email protected].
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Powerful People Think Differently About Their Thoughts
New York Magazine: Being in power does, in a very real sense, go to people’s heads. Psychologists have found that when people are made to feel powerful, they believe more in the things they’re thinking. This leads to a bunch of wacky, seemingly contradictory behaviors, as Ohio State Ph.D. candidate Geoff Durso explained to Science of Us in an email: Feeling more powerful may make you kinder and more assertive, yet also more dishonest. ... For a study published this month in Psychological Science, Durso and his colleagues recruited 129 and 197 college students for two separate experiments.
