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Amazing, once-in-a-lifetime experiences make us social misfits
The Boston Globe: As anyone who has signed on to Facebook recently can see, social media takes the propensity for sharing extraordinary experiences to the maximum. A Facebook feed can read like a list of epic moments from friends near and far: a gnarly mountain bike ride; an exquisite meal in Italy; a celebrity sighting. But a new study led by a Harvard researcher suggests that the human desire to share out-of-the-ordinary experiences with others may amount to a fundamental miscalculation of what brings people together — and could even be a social liability.
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Geteilter Schmerz verbindet sogar Wildfremde (Shared pain even connects strangers)
Die Welt: Geteilter Schmerz, so unangenehm er auch sein mag, kann positive soziale Folgen haben. Das berichten Brock Bastian und seine Kollegen von der University of New South Wales in dem Fachmagazin in "Psychological Science". Geteilter Schmerz stärke den Zusammenhalt und die Solidarität unter den Gruppenmitgliedern, so die Forscher – und zwar selbst dann, wenn diese sich zuvor gänzlich fremd gewesen waren. Für diese Erkenntnis musste eine ganze Reihe von Versuchspersonen mehr oder weniger stark leiden.
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Grumpy People Get the Details Right
New York Magazine: Think back to the last time you had to navigate a customer-service situation. Perhaps you were trying to make a doctor's appointment when few convenient times were available, or you may have been speaking with a credit-card rep in an effort to get a onetime waiver on a late payment charge. Maybe you were speaking with an airline representative in hopes of finagling priority seating. Did you adopt a warm tone and play nice? Or did you raise your voice and speak aggressively? You are a nice person, so you probably chose the kind route. The tough pill for most of us to swallow is that those overbearing screamers often get their way.
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Younger Leaders Seen as More Innovative, Older Leaders More Reliable
You’re more likely to see gray hair among the CEOs of the top 500 American companies (where the average age is about 53) than you are among Silicon Valley’s tech entrepreneurs, many of whom started billion dollar companies fresh out of college or even high school. New research suggests there may be a reason for the age disparities between leaders in different fields: A team of psychological scientists led by Brian R. Spisak of VU University Amsterdam provides evidence that people have unconscious biases based on age when it comes to choosing a leader.
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Troubled #hearts — in 140 Characters
The Huffington Post: I joined Twitter in 2008, and I've always been impressed by the diversity of this floating conversation. People will just as soon tweet about dinner as the sorry state of American politics, and they are by turns thoughtful and shallow, original and fraudulent, snide and generous of spirit. In 140 characters or fewer, users reflect the range of human emotion, from joy to rage, wonder to boredom, cynicism to hopefulness. Individual Twitter users can obviously reveal a lot about their lives and feelings, even in terse tweets. But what about very large numbers of tweets, by many people in many places?
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Magic May Lurk Inside Us All
The New York Times: How many words does it take to know you’re talking to an adult? In “Peter Pan,” J. M. Barrie needed just five: “Do you believe in fairies?” Such belief requires magical thinking. Children suspend disbelief. They trust that events happen with no physical explanation, and they equate an image of something with its existence. Magical thinking was Peter Pan’s key to eternal youth. The ghouls and goblins that will haunt All Hallows’ Eve on Friday also require people to take a leap of faith. Zombies wreak terror because children believe that the once-dead can reappear. At haunted houses, children dip their hands in buckets of cold noodles and spaghetti sauce.
