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Just a Numbers Game? Making Sense of Health Statistics
Presidential candidates use them to persuade voters, drug companies use them to sell their products, and the media spin them in all kinds of ways, but nobody – candidates, reporters, let alone health consumers – understands them. Health statistics fill today’s information environment, but even most doctors, who must make daily decisions and recommendations based on numerical data – for instance, to calculate the risks of a certain drug or surgical intervention, or to inform a patient of the possible benefits versus harms of cancer screening – lack the basic statistical literacy they require to make such decisions effectively.
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Teenage Wasteland: Kids who Drink Before 15 at Increased Risk for Poor Health as Adults
As if raising teenagers wasn’t already difficult enough, parents are constantly barraged with information about the best way to deal with their teens. In addition to there being a copious amount of information available, it does not help that much of it is contradictory. For example, when it comes to using drugs and alcohol, parents are warned that those substances are dangerous and young adolescents should definitely not be exposed to them. On the other hand, parents are also informed that it is normal for teenagers to experiment with illicit substances and that the majority of them will not end up as drug addicts. So what’s a parent to do?
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Deal or No Deal? The Role of Emotions in Negotiating Offers
A series of experiments reveal whether people who trust their feelings (and those who do not) handle themselves in the art of negotiation.
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Male Warriors and Female Peacekeepers: Gender Biases in Leadership Selection During Competitions Within and Between Groups
What makes a great leader? As election season starts to heat up, we are bombarded with pollsters asking us what traits we want in our leaders. Traits that we look for typically include a sense of power, great negotiating skills and lots of charisma. However, a recent study suggests that it is not just an outgoing personality and great communication skills that determine who is chosen as leader of a group. Previous research has implicated that there is a gender bias when selecting leaders; preference for a male versus female leader may depend on the specific situation that a group finds itself in. Psychologists Mark Van Vugt and Brian R.
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Those Were the Days: Counteracting Loneliness with Nostalgia
Nostalgia amplifies perceptions of social support and may be helpful in overcoming feelings of loneliness, researchers find.
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Why it’s good to have smart friends: The role of feedback in decision making
Every day we are faced with a multitude of options, but the majority of choices we make fall into two categories: descriptive choice (based on what we are told or on statistics) and experiential choice (based on our own personal experience). An example of these choices would be deciding whether or not to wear a helmet while cycling. We are told that it is for our safety, so choosing to wear the helmet would be a descriptive choice. However, we see that our friends never wear helmets and they have never been hurt, so in this case choosing not to wear a helmet would be an experiential choice.
