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Psychological Research May Offer a Route to Greener Travel
The researchers used a ‘stage-of-change’ model originally designed as a smoking cessation intervention.
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The Sunk Cost Fallacy Is Ruining Your Decisions. Here’s How
If you’ve ever let unworn clothes clutter your closet just because they were expensive, or followed through on plans you were dreading because you already bought tickets, you’re familiar with the sunk cost fallacy. “The sunk cost effect is the general tendency for people to continue an endeavor, or continue consuming or pursuing an option, if they’ve invested time or money or some resource in it,” says Christopher Olivola, an assistant professor of marketing at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business and the author of a new paper on the topic published in the journal Psychological Science.
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Don’t Find Your Passion — Cultivate It, Psychologists Say
When students enter college, many are told it’s an arena “to find your passion” -- that in classroom lectures, late-night debates with roommates, student clubs and/or literature, you will unearth the thing -- your career, your calling, an area that will sustain your mind and soul. It’s just waiting to be discovered, that thing you can explore with boundless motivation. But perhaps that’s poor advice, at least according to psychologists from Stanford University and Yale-NUS College, in Singapore. Passions are not necessarily inherent, waiting to be found, but rather they are cultivated, the researchers argue in a new paper to be published in the journal Psychological Science.
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Cynicism isn’t as smart as we think it is
In the fourth century BC, cynics wanted to live like dogs. The Cynics were Greek philosophers who rejected conventional ideas about money, power, and shelter. Instead, they advocated living simply, aligned with nature. The founder of this school of thought, Antisthenes, purportedly lived on the streets of Athens, ate raw meat, and preached a life of poverty (though sometimes he just barked at people from a platform). The word cynic even stems from the Greek word for dog—”kynos.” Today, cynicism has come to mean something very different than it did to the ancient Greeks.
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Seeking fictional first memories
47 percent: That’s the proportion of people who have a first memory that’s actually fictional, according to a new study in Psychological Science by researchers in London. Our first memories usuall date from about age 3, research shows. But in a survey of 6,641 people, 38.6 percent said they had memories from when they were age 2 or younger, while 893 said their first memories dated from their first year of life. Researchers suspect that these cases of fictional memory may result from fragments of experience combined with seeing photographs or hearing stories of infancy and early childhood.
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Actually, Republicans Do Believe in Climate Change
It is widely believed that most Republicans are skeptical about human-caused climate change. But is this belief correct? In 2014 and 2016, we conducted two national surveys of more than 2,000 respondents on the issue of climate change. We found that most Republicans agreed that climate change is happening, threatens humans and is caused by human activity — and that reducing carbon emissions would mitigate the problem. To be sure, Democrats agreed more strongly than Republicans did that climate change is a concerning reality. And among climate skeptics there were more Republicans than Democrats.
