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Our Sense of Fairness Is Beyond Politics
APS Member/Author: Alison Gopnik What do the haves owe to the have-nots? Should a society redistribute resources from some people to others? These questions are central to the economic policy differences between left and right. The opposing views might seem completely irreconcilable. But a new paper in the journal Cognition suggests that people of all political stripes have surprisingly similar views about redistribution, at least in the abstract. Daniel Nettle at Newcastle University and Rebecca Saxe at MIT presented 2,400 people in the U.K. with stories about how an imaginary village could divvy up the food people grew in their gardens.
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Falling short on your 2021 resolutions? Remember: Pandemic.
The new calendar year historically signals a fresh start, as illustrated by the custom of setting resolutions to become better versions of ourselves. But as 2020 has given way to 2021, bringing with it the uncertainty, anxiety and fear many Americans had been desperate to leave behind, experts say it’s fine if you jettisoned traditional resolutions this year.
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A Quarter of Canadians Don’t Want The COVID-19 Vaccine. We Asked The Experts Why
After the COVID-19 pandemic tossed the world into chaos, the light at the end of the tunnel was the announcement that major pharmaceutical companies had vaccines in development. Two vaccines, made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, have now been approved for use. As Canada rolls out its vaccination campaign, beginning with frontline workers and later the general population, life may soon return to normality. ...
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Personalities Change. Why Shouldn’t Career Expectations?
Patterns of personality growth from adolescence to young adulthood have a greater bearing on career outcomes than adolescent personality traits and crystallized ability.
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Stop Keeping Score
I am an inveterate scorekeeper. I can go back decades and find lists of goals I set for myself to gauge “success” by certain milestone birthdays. For example, in my 20s, I had a to-do list for the decade, the items on which more or less told the story of a penniless musician who had made some dubious choices. It included quitting smoking, going to the dentist, mastering my pentatonic scales, and finishing college. (I hit them all, although the last one mere days before my 30th birthday.) There is nothing unusual about this tendency to keep score. Google “30 things to do before you turn 30” and you will get more than 15,000 results.
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2020 Led to Soul-Searching, Sparking Meaningful New Resolutions
The challenges of 2020, one of the most surreal years in recent memory, prompted some individuals to make ambitious resolutions. “It is leading some people to think it’s time to say, ‘I see that life can be fragile, I need to re-prioritize what’s important to me.’ ” said John C. Norcross, a professor and chair of the psychology department at Pennsylvania’s University of Scranton. While some people found themselves too overburdened by the demands of 2020 to bother making resolutions, “others are recalibrating in their own way, whether it’s less screen time and family-game night or saying, ‘I appreciate the need to slow down,’ ” Dr.
