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Facebook And Mortality: Why Your Incessant Joy Gives Me The Blues
NPR: Clearly, researchers love Facebook, even if some of the rest of us are ambivalent. A 2012 survey of social science papers related to the social network turned up 412 separate studies, and there have been even more since. Among the most popular questions: What effect does Facebook have on emotional states? It does seem a reasonable question. After all, about 22 percent of the world's population uses Facebook regularly, according to the company, logging on for about 50 minutes a day. But is all this interconnectedness creating psychological benefits or global gloom? The answer, it turns out, is complicated. Read the whole story: NPR
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If you’re going to Instagram your food, you may as well do it right. Here’s how.
The Washington Post: I have taken a few photos of taupe sandwiches. Blobby, beige plates of pasta. Drinks so dimly lit you couldn’t tell what they were. Scroll deep, all the way to the bottom of my Instagram, and you will see my shame. Photographing your food — something more and more of us are doing these days — is frivolous and fun. But it can also be tricky. Just because something looks delicious in person doesn’t mean it will appear as enticing through your phone’s five-inch screen. It’s a problem that stymies even high-profile food celebrities: Martha Stewart, famously, was bad at photographing food for social media. ...
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Stereotypes Skew Our Predictions of Others’ Pains and Pleasures
Every day, millions of people – including senators, doctors, and teachers -- make consequential decisions that depend on predicting how other people will feel when they experience gains or setbacks. New research looking at events ranging from college football games to US elections shows that our predictions about others are less accurate when we have information about the groups they belong to, such as which political party or sports team they’re rooting for. This research suggests that our reliance on stereotypes about social groups interferes with accurately predicting how others will feel.
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Experience Buying and Selling Reduces Financially Costly Biases
When it comes to decisions about buying and selling, businesses are supposed to use evidence and observations about the market for goods to make profitable decisions. In classical economics, it’s assumed that people make financial decisions based on rational rules of thumb—buy low, sell high, diversify portfolios, that kind of thing. But the reality about how we make financial decisions appears to be much more complicated than simply assessing the rational value of goods.
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Paying Do-Gooders Makes Them Less Persuasive
People who receive a financial incentive to raise money for a charity they care about are actually less effective in soliciting donations, even when potential donors have no idea that incentives were involved.
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Loneliness can be depressing, but it may have helped humans survive
The Washington Post: Loneliness not only feels nasty, it can also make you depressed, shatter your sleep, even kill you. Yet scientists think loneliness evolved because it was good for us. It still is — sometimes. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that being lonely ruins health. In one recent study, the risk of dying over a two-decade period was 50 percent higher for lonely men and 49 percent higher for lonely women than it was for those who did not experience feelings of isolation. According to some research, loneliness may be worse for longevity than obesity or air pollution.
