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Does Wisdom Really Come with Age? It Depends on the Culture
“Wisdom comes with winters,” Oscar Wilde once said. And it’s certainly comforting to think that aging benefits the mind, if not the body. But do we really get wiser as time passes? There are many way to define what exactly wisdom is, but previous literature suggests that having wisdom means that you are also good at resolving conflict. But conflict is not handled the same way across cultures. Americans have been shown to emphasize individuality and solve conflict in a direct manner, such as by using direct persuasion.
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Having Heart: Can We Rethink Life’s Stresses?
Imagine that you are at the top of a ski slope, about to make a run. It’s a challenging slope, black diamond—steep and narrow, lots of trees. Plus it’s windy, and there’s that treacherous drop-off on the right. You’re an inexperienced skier, not a novice but not at all confident that you belong in such extreme terrain. Your heart is pounding and your gut is tight. Now imagine that you’re on top of the very same slope, but you are a skilled downhill racer, an Olympic contender. You’re sure you know how to attack this slope—you’ve done it many times before—but even so, your heart is pounding and butterflies are fluttering in your gut.
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Having to Make Quick Decisions Helps Witnesses Identify the Bad Guy in a Lineup
Eyewitness identification evidence is often persuasive in the courtroom and yet current eyewitness identification tests often fail to pick the culprit. Even worse, these tests sometimes result in wrongfully accusing innocent suspects. Now psychological scientists are proposing a radical alternative to the traditional police lineup that focuses on eyewitnesses’ confidence judgments.
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4 Telltale Signs of a Liar
Forbes: Nonverbal cues occur in what is called a “gesture cluster” – a group of movements, postures and actions that reinforce a common point. Trying to decipher body language from a single gesture is like trying to find narrative meaning in a single word. However, when words appear in sentences or gestures come in clusters, their meaning becomes clearer. For example, if you’re talking with someone who begins fidgeting, it may not mean much by itself. But if that person is also reducing eye contact and pointing his feet toward the door, there’s a very good chance that he’s finished with the conversation and wants to leave.
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Penny for your magical thoughts
Times Higher Education: We can't resist investing in karma and bargaining with fate, say researchers. Matthew Reisz reports Anyone awaiting the results of a job application, a court case, a medical test - or even a submission to the research excellence framework - knows what it's like for important decisions to be completely beyond their control. But to cope with this uncertainty, we tend to "invest in karma" by, for example, dropping a few coins in a collection box as if we believed that "the universe punishes sin and rewards virtue".
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How Americans view wealth and inequality
BBC Business: There have been lots of questions and discussions recently about inequality and economists often argue about what is the right level of inequality to have in society. But Mike Norton, professor at Harvard Business School, and I decided to take a different path and we decided to ask people what inequality they would want. Now, there are lots of ways to ask this question and we used the philosopher John Rawls. Rawls said that "a just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you'd be willing to enter it in a random place". And it's really a beautiful definition.
