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Act Your Age
There is no denying that in Western society, youth is valued. It is estimated that in 2008, more than £16 billion was spent on anti-aging products the United Kingdom. In 2006, Americans spent over $45 billion on cosmetics, plastic surgery, and hormone therapy. Despite this massive effort to combat aging, there is little research on the social consequences of attempting to look younger. Psychological scientists Alexander Schoemann and Nylar Branscombe (University of Kansas, Kansas, USA) investigated how young adults evaluate older adults who attempt to make themselves look younger. Most research has been done on in-group-out-group interactions.
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Powerful people think they’re taller than they are (we’re looking at you, Sarkozy)
Toronto Star: Women don’t need high heels to feel taller – all they need is a little bit of power. People overestimate their height when they are in more powerful positions, according to new research from Washington University and Cornell. “Although a great deal of research has shown that physically imposing individuals are more likely to acquire power, this work is the first to show that the powerful may actually feel taller than they are,” Michelle Duguid and Jack Goncalo wrote in the study. Perhaps 5-foot-5 French President Nicholas Sarkozy, notorious for standing on boxes while being photographed, really feels like he’s 6-foot-1.
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Kids Want Fame More Than Anything
Huffington Post: "This is America, where everyone has the right to life, love and the pursuit of fame." -- Ryan Seacrest, American Idol, 2010 In the new millennium, people face messages highlighting the significance of fame everywhere they look. Not only in reality television shows such as "Keeping up with the Kardashians" and "American Idol", but also in popular fictional TV shows, even those targeted to children. After watching some of these shows with my then 9-year-old daughter, I grumbled about the drastic change in "values." Worried that I was becoming one of those predictable adults who lament that things were much better in the past, I decided to test my hypothesis.
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When Kids Know Better
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Alia Martin from Yale University and Kelcey Wilson from Quinnipiac University present their poster session research on “When Kids Know Better: Paternalistic Helping in 3-Year-Old Children.” One challenge we face in helping others is that sometimes the best way to help is by not doing what is requested. Martin, Wilson, and collaborators showed that 3-year-old children can override a communicated request and, as a result, provide the most useful means of helping another person to achieve her goal.
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To “Think Outside the Box”, Think Outside the Box
Want to think outside the box? Try actually thinking outside of a box. In a study to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers had students think up solutions to problems while acting out various metaphors about creative thinking and found that the instructions actually worked.
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Science’s “most beautiful theories”
Reuters: From Darwinian evolution to the idea that personality is largely shaped by chance, the favorite theories of the world's most eminent thinkers are as eclectic as science itself. Every January, John Brockman, the impresario and literary agent who presides over the online salon Edge.org, asks his circle of scientists, digerati and humanities scholars to tackle one question. In previous years, they have included "how is the Internet changing the way you think?" and "what is the most important invention in the last 2,000 years?" This year, he posed the open-ended question "what is your favorite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation?" Read the full story: Reuters