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You 2.0: Rebel With A Cause
A few years ago, social scientist Francesca Gino was browsing the shelves at a bookstore when she came across an unusual-looking book in the cooking section: Never Trust a Skinny Italian Chef by Massimo Bottura. The recipes in it were playful, quirky — and improbable. Snails were paired with coffee sauce, veal tongue with charcoal powder. Francesca, who is Italian, says remixing classic recipes like this is a kind of heresy in Italian cooking. "We really cherish the old way," she says. But this chef — one of the most influential in the world — couldn't resist circling back to one, big question: Why do we have to follow these rules? It's the kind of question Gino loves.
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Myth: Traumatic Memories Are Often Repressed and Later Recovered
This provides students with an opportunity to see that, often, analyses may lead to conclusions that are not final.
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Myth: It’s Better to Stick to Your First Impulse Than Go Back and Change Multiple Choice Test Answers
A misconception that is ideally addressed early in the introductory course.
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Myth: Brain Training Will Make You Smarter
Researching this persuasive myth allows students to use scientific reasoning tools to evaluate popular claims regarding intelligence.
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Nobody likes a freeloader—including four-year-old kids
It may come as a shock to parents of young children, but preschoolers are more cooperative than we realize. In a novel study to find out how early our instinct for cooperation begins, Yale researchers performed an experiment with kids between the ages of four and 10. The goal was to find out how kids felt about “free riders”—people who fail to contribute to a common project, but reap the benefits from it. The result? Starting as young as four, kids turn out to dislike free riders intensely, “punishing” those who freeloaded even if they had good reason not to contribute.
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‘Find your passion’? That’s bad advice, scientists say.
"Find your passion" is a mantra dictated to everyone from college students to retirees to pretty much anyone seeking happiness. But according to a forthcoming study from Stanford and Yale-NUS College in Singapore, it's actually bad advice - and may actually make it harder for people to figure out what they love to do. Why? The idea of "finding" one's passion implies that people have built-in interests just waiting to be discovered, and if you can simply figure out what they are you will magically be able to embrace them, says the study, which will be published in the journal Psychological Science.
