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Feel Dumb Asking for Advice? You’ll Actually Appear More Competent.
Entrepreneur: The fear of looking dumb is a nearly universal human emotion, one that often translates into a staunch refusal to seek advice. Because doing so is just an admission of incompetence, right? Dead wrong, at least according to a series of studies by researchers from Harvard Business School and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, which finds that while most people hesitate to ask for advice out of a fear they'll be judged poorly for it, the opposite is true: Ask someone for advice, and he or she is likely to view you as more competent. ... Alison Wood Brooks, who led the research team, answered a few questions for Entrepreneur.com about the study and its implications.
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Do We Have an Internal Calorie Counter?
Many explanations have been offered for the country’s obesity epidemic, and one is nutritional ignorance. People simply don’t know what a calorie is, so how can they be expected to know a calorie-rich food when they see one? Most of us don’t even know what a gram of apple or an ounce of milk looks like, so how can we possibly calculate a sensible portion? Well, perhaps arithmetic is not required, and it may even be misleading. Psychological scientists in Canada have been studying how people make food choices, and it appears that our deliberate estimates and calculations may not be much use to us. Instead, we may implicitly know how fattening foods are, even when our estimates are way off.
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Better Self-Control May Pay Off for Older Workers
A recent study finds that older workers may have an advantage over their more youthful colleagues when it comes to one key skill—self-control. Psychological scientists Markus M. Thielgen and Guido Hertel of University of Münster and Stefan Krumm of the Free University Berlin found that older workers were better than younger workers at exercising self-control in the workplace, which gave them an edge in coping with challenging work environments. Some of us are motivated by a passion for our careers, while others show up to work in the hopes of a bigger paycheck or a corner office.
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Why You Should Want Your Kid to Be a Slow Learner
New York Magazine: We tend to assume that learning things easily is the same as learning them well. In school, teachers are pleased when children grasp a concept or a skill in one lesson, and so, of course, are children. The trouble is, when learning is too easy, we may not actually be learning much at all. We know Abraham Lincoln, for example, as an autodidact who made himself erudite in literature, history, and the law. But if you had been at school with him, you probably wouldn’t have marked him out as a future lawyer, let alone a future president. A cousin remembers him as “somewhat dull ...
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Can’t Take My Eyes off You—Your Face, That Is
Scientific American: When it comes to first impressions of a potential new love, the eyes may indeed be the window to the soul—because the direction of your gaze when looking at this person offers an unconscious, automatic giveaway of whether your initial reaction is romance or sex. That’s according to a study in the journal Psychological Science. [Mylene Bolmont et al: Love Is in the Gaze: An Eye-Tracking Study of Love and Sexual Desire] Heterosexual subjects looked at photographs on a computer of fully clothed, attractive strangers of the opposite sex.
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Laptop Note-Taking: External Brain-Booster or Memory Drain?
Education Week: As more and more districts roll out 1-to-1 laptop and tablet initiatives, new research suggests students may be better off sticking to traditional pen and paper longhand for taking and studying notes. In a series of experiments published in the June edition of Psychological Science, Pam Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel Oppenheimer of the University of California Los Angeles found that students taking notes on a laptop could include more material—but that wasn't neccessarily a good thing. Read the whole story: Education Week
