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Want to Achieve Your Biggest Long-Term Goals? Science Says Avoid the Dreaded Negative Lumping Effect
Imagine you want to increase sales by 70 percent this quarter. Big jump, sure, but you think you can do it. Instead, you finish the quarter up 67 percent. How do you feel? According to research recently published in Psychological Science, you definitely feel disappointed. Worse, you're a lot less likely to work to match -- much less increase -- those results next quarter. Even though a 67 percent increase was a huge gain in sales and revenue. The reason? We tend to think of progress that doesn't reach our expectations -- no matter how significant that progress may have been -- as total failure.
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A Paradox in the Field: Mental-Health Disorders Among Psychologists
What do we know about the prevalence of mental health difficulties among psychological scientists? APS member Sarah Victor, a clinical psychologist and professor at the Texas Tech University, joined APS’s Ludmila Nunes to discuss mental health among psychologists.
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There Are Too Few Women in Computer Science and Engineering
Only 20 percent of computer science and 22 percent of engineering undergraduate degrees in the U.S. go to women. Women are missing out on flexible, lucrative and high-status careers. Society is also missing out on the potential contributions they would make to these fields, such as designing smartphone conversational agents that suggest help not only for heart attack symptoms but also for indicators of domestic violence. Identifying the factors causing women’s underrepresentation is the first step towards remedies. Why are so few women entering these fields? A common explanation is that women are less interested than men in computer science and engineering.
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Don’t Let Ageism Define You. How to Enjoy Life at Every Stage
What comes to mind when you think of aging? Is it wrinkles and gray hair? Trouble with technology? Crankiness, achy bones or being hard of hearing? It's said that age is just a number, but Becca Levy, Yale researcher and author of Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long & Well You Live, says that how we think about aging can impact us on behavioral, psychological and even physiological levels. Through research spanning over 20 years, "I found that older people with more-positive perceptions of aging performed better physically and cognitively than those with more-negative perceptions," Levy writes.
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Adam Grant to Entrepreneurs: It’s Time to Rethink ‘Best Practices’
Almost everyone is thinking about the future of work and the new tools businesses will use. But less thought is given to the tools and strategies they'll stop using. Adam Grant hopes the concept of "best practices" will be on the list. The term used to describe a preferred method of performing a given task or procedure can be limiting, says the organizational psychologist, who was speaking at an American Express Business Class Live conference earlier this month. ...
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How Do Students Decide When to Submit SAT Scores to Colleges?
The COVID-19 pandemic may have fundamentally altered many aspects of education. One less appreciated area of focus is on how the college admissions process has been affected. Recent books by Jeffrey Selingo on who gets in and why, Ron Lieber on the price you pay, and Colin Diver on the influence of the ranking industry, all provide current overviews of the landscape, economics, psychology, and politics of higher education, at least up to the point when the pandemic entered our lives. However, what is really needed is solid research on how the pandemic might have impacted higher education and the admissions process.
