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How Baby Names Can Help Marketers Predict the Next Big Thing
TIME: Few parents would admit to naming their baby after a hurricane. But unconsciously that might be exactly what many of us are doing — or at least appropriating the sounds of a name that, if the storm grows large enough, is uttered over and over on the news and in the course of casual conversation. According to Wharton marketing professors Jonah Berger and Eric Bradlow, that unintended impact of such natural disasters can tell marketers a lot about how the sights and sounds that we’re exposed to every day can impact our choices and, in turn, influence the consumer goods, music, movies and even baby names that become popular.
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When Good People Behave Badly
The Huffington Post: I'm sitting on a plane to Washington, D.C., thinking about unethical behavior. (Insert your own politician joke here.) No, it's not my impending proximity to Congress that has me pondering such matters. Rather, it's that I'm headed to give a keynote address at the annual meeting of Compliance Week, a magazine/website dedicated to corporate governance, risk management, and compliance. That, plus I was just reading about Dan Ariely's new book, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty. What do I plan to talk about in discussing the psychology of fraud and unethical behavior?
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Educators once opposed raising bilingual children. Experts now say it’s beneficial.
The Washington Post: It did not take long for scientists to wonder whether these mental gymnastics might help the brain resist the ravages of aging. To find out, Bialystok and her colleagues collected data from 184 people with diagnoses of dementia, half of whom were bilingual. The results, published in 2007, were startling: Symptoms started to appear in the bilingual people an average of four years later than in their monolingual peers. In 2010, they repeated the study with a further 200 people showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease. In that group, there was a delay of about five years in the onset of symptoms in bilingual patients.
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‘Adults can learn new things’
BBC Radio: Are you ever too old to learn a musical instrument? Gary Marcus, professor of psychology at New York University and author of Guitar Zero - The Science of Learning to be Musical, told the Today programme how he learned the guitar at 38 years old. Speaking to Justin Webb, he explained how he started out with the video game Guitar Hero and worked his way to the real thing. Listen here: BBC Radio
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Training and Development in Organizations: What Matters, What Works
Each year in the United States about $135 billion is spent in training employees -- but those billions do not always improve the workplace because the skills often do not transfer to the actual job. “Learning is a way of life in organizations,” says Eduardo Salas, a psychological scientist from the University of Central Florida. “Everyone gets training. But what matters? What works?
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The Makings of Our Earliest Memories
The New York Times: Like many other pediatricians, I do not wear a white coat. Many of us believe that babies and small children suffer from a special form of “white coat syndrome,” that mix of trepidation and anxiety that some adults experience — to the point of high blood pressure — in a medical setting. The pediatric version is easy to diagnose: Doctor in white coat walks into room, kid starts to cry. I worry that a child like this has recalled shots or an unpleasant ear check and has connected that memory to a particular garment, rather than to my face, or my exam room, or my stethoscope. But how realistic is that? Do babies remember past events? Starting when?