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Why Meeting a First Date for Breakfast Might not Be a Bad Idea
Scientific American: Every day we make decisions that have important implications for our happiness and how we live our lives. Whether we are studying for an exam, preparing for a job interview, or deciding on the best outfit for a first blind date, these very different situations have something in common: They happen at a certain time of day, a time we often can choose or control. When making decisions, we often don’t consider how the time of day might affect our choices. Rather, we decide on a time based on what’s most convenient to us. Yet recent research suggests that time of day has an important effect on our behavior and the actions of others. ...
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Empathy May Be Overrated in an Election, and in a Leader
The New York Times: Is empathy an essential virtue for a presidential candidate? The conventional wisdom is that a good candidate must be able to feel your pain. Bill Clinton was hailed by pundits as a virtuoso of empathy, supposedly riding that quality to triumph over George H.W. Bush, who was so often said to be short of empathy that he felt compelled to tell an audience, “Message: I care.” ... Other researchers, though, argue that empathy isn’t as irrational as it seems. They see it as not just a knee-jerk reflex but as something we can control.
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Rethinking the Rules for Police Interrogations
Undark: ON SEPTEMBER 3, 2006, a 16-year-old boy named Bobby Johnson confessed to murdering a retiree in New Haven, Connecticut. In his statement, Johnson said he borrowed a gun from his cousin. Then he and a younger friend robbed the old man and shot him through the window of an idling car. Johnson pleaded guilty at trial. He was sentenced to 38 years in prison. It was an open-and-shut case — or so it seemed. ... Johnson, for instance, had an IQ of 69, but there are few legal protections for people like him. Police cannot hurt or threaten suspects, but many psychological techniques — including lying about evidence — have been widely upheld as non-coercive.
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John Cacioppo: ‘Loneliness is like an iceberg – it goes deeper than we can see’
The Guardian: Professor John Cacioppo has been studying the effects and causes of loneliness for 21 years. He is the director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience. His book Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection examines the pathology and public health implications of the subject. You have been studying social connection and loneliness for more than two decades. How did you come to it as a subject? It was not biographical, I don’t think. Back in the early 90s I had outlined the new field called social neuroscience, the study of the neural mechanisms within a defined social species.
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Power Suits: How Dressing For Success At Work Can Pay Off
NPR: What does it mean to "dress for success"? Certainly not what it meant when a book by that name first came out in 1975. Now, what to wear to work is a murky area that includes a new clothing trend known as "athleisure" — workout wear that might also work for the office. ... Michael Kraus, a professor at the Yale School of Management, has studied the connection between clothing and financial advantage in negotiations. In a 2014 study, he paired men in suits against peers in sweatpants and flip-flops in a mock real-estate sale negotiation. The men in suits negotiated, on average, about 10 percent more profit than their casually dressed counterparts. Read the whole story: NPR
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Seeing Isn’t Required to Gesture Like a Native Speaker
People the world over gesture when they talk, and they tend to gesture in certain ways depending on the language they speak. Findings from a new study including blind and sighted participants suggest that these gestural variations do not emerge from watching other speakers make the gestures, but from learning the language itself. “Adult speakers who are blind from birth also gesture when they talk, and these gestures resemble the gestures of sighted adults speaking the same language.
