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The Science Behind South Korea’s Race-Based World Cup Strategy
Whenever you bring together dozens of different countries from around the globe, there's bound be some cross-cultural confusion. The World Cup is no exception. And if you're Shin Tae-yong, coach of the South Korean national team, you figure out how to work that confusion to your advantage. In a press conference Sunday, Shin explained the unusual tactic he'd employed against scouts from the Swedish team: He'd had his team members swap jersey numbers for the warm-up games, in hopes that scouts wouldn't be able to tell the players apart. "It's very difficult for Westerners to distinguish between Asians," Shin explained, as quoted by ESPN. He added, "We wanted to confuse the Swedish team ...
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The Language of Emotion
When people describe feeling “angry” or “distressed” or “dejected,” what do they really mean? Psychologists vigorously debate whether the words individuals use to describe their emotions actually reflect fixed states in the brain, or are merely convenient fictions for talking about feelings.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Structure and Implementation of Novel Task Rules: A Cross-Sectional Developmental Study Frederick Verbruggen, Rossy McLaren, Maayan Pereg, and Nachshon Meiran The authors tested how children and adolescents performed in new tasks that required learning instructions and structuring the tasks hierarchically. They presented images of cartoon characters that lived on the left or on the right side of the street on a computer screen.
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Gossiping Is Good
Word on the street is that gossip is the worst. An Ann Landers advice column once characterized it as “the faceless demon that breaks hearts and ruins careers.” The Talmud describes it as a “three-pronged tongue” that kills three people: the teller, the listener, and the person being gossiped about. And Blaise Pascal observed, not unreasonably, that “if people really knew what others said about them, there would not be four friends left in the world.” Convincing as these indictments seem, however, a significant body of research suggests that gossip may in fact be healthy. It’s a good thing, too, since gossip is pretty pervasive.
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One Year of School Comes With an IQ Bump, Meta-Analysis Shows
A year of schooling leaves students with new knowledge, and it also equates with a small but noticeable increase to students’ IQ, according to a systematic meta-analysis published in Psychological Science, a journal of the
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Does the Trolley Problem Have a Problem?
Picture the following situation: You are taking a freshman-level philosophy class in college, and your professor has just asked you to imagine a runaway trolley barreling down a track toward a group of five people. The only way to save them from being killed, the professor says, is to hit a switch that will turn the trolley onto an alternate set of tracks where it will kill one person instead of five. Now you must decide: Would the mulling over of this dilemma enlighten you in any way?
