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Fans Fooled by the “Hot-Hand Fallacy”
Which countries and athletes will rise to the top? To make predictions, many people will look for athletes who are on a “hot streak,” such as US Women’s National Team forward Alex Morgan who scored 2 goals yesterday, resulting in a 2-to-4 win over France. Sports provide numerous opportunities to collect statistics, but biases such as the “hot-hand fallacy” can skew a spectator's decision making when it comes to predicting sports outcomes. Peter Ayton, a researcher from City University London, UK, investigates how people make judgments and decisions under conditions of risk, uncertainty, and ambiguity. One way he studies decision making is through sports.
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Journal Alert: Current Directions 21:4 Now Available Online
Current Directions in Psychological Science Volume 21, Number 4 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Prospective Memory in Workplace and Everyday Situations R. Key Dismukes Forgetting to perform intended actions -- also known as failure of prospective memory(PM) -- can have serious consequences, especially at work. Dismukes says that workplace PM failures are likely to occur when a critical set of steps is interrupted, when highly practiced habitual tasks are disrupted, when one step in a procedure is replaced with a different step, or when people are asked to multi-task. Dismukes provides tips for avoiding PM failures, such as creating reminder cues for upcoming tasks.
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How to Find More Time: Give Some Away
LiveScience: Seems there’s never enough time in the day, right? But if you want more time, try giving some away. A new study finds that those who volunteer their time feel they have more of it. “Although it seems counterintuitive to give away any of your time when you feel your time to be scarce, our findings suggest that even spending small pockets of time to help others can make people feel more effective, and like they can do a lot with the limited time they have,” said study leader Cassie Mogilner of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “Giving time makes people feel like they have more time,” Mogilner told LiveScience. Read the whole story: LiveScience
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Olympics: Mind games of the victorious
Otago Daily Times: For decades after the first sports psychology lab was established in 1920 in Germany, mental coaches have been the water boys of sports science, viewed by their colleagues as not quite good enough to make the first-string team. That has changed. Virtually every top professional team and elite athlete has a psychologist on speed dial for help conquering the yips - when stress makes crucial muscles jerk and ruins, say, an archery shot - marshal the power of visualization, or just muster the confidence that can mean the difference between medaling or just muddling through.
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Boost Your Memory By Resting Your Eyes After Learning
Business Insider: A new study suggests that a brief — even just a few minutes — bit of rest after learning something new can greatly improve your ability to remember it. The new study was published in the journal Psychological Science. “Our findings support the view that the formation of new memories is not completed within seconds,” researcher Michaela Dewar said in a statement from the journal. “Indeed our work demonstrates that activities that we are engaged in for the first few minutes after learning new information really affect how well we remember this information after a week.” Read the whole story:
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How To Hate Your Job Less
Prevention: Remember that vocational test in high school that measured your career interests? You know, the one that told you to be an architect (which you then ignored and became a nurse)? Turns out they may have been onto something. How well your personal interests match with your job is a key factor in how happy you are, finds new analysis in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. Researchers from Bowling Green State University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign examined 60 previous studies to see just how much of a factor your personal interests play in your job happiness, performance, and likelihood you’ll stick with a position.
