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How to Soften the Blow of Bad News
The Wall Street Journal: Imagine that you work at an enjoyable, meaningful job with just one catch: Every so often, you have to punch a colleague in the gut. Many American managers experience something similar: In November, U.S. companies laid off more than 26,000 workers, according to consultants Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Most people on the receiving end probably would have preferred the gut punch. There’s no easy way to tell people things that they don’t want to hear. A few core strategies, however, can help messengers deliver bad news in ways that are less stressful to themselves and more comforting to recipients. Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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Our growing fascination with boredom
University Affairs: A funny thing happened to Julian Haladyn while researching boredom and art. He got excited. The dull subject was conceptual artist On Kawara’s Today paintings, a series of hundreds of rectangular, solid-coloured canvases – he aimed to make one daily – featuring the day’s date in white. “It was a very boring experience. Your eyes start to glaze over,” says Dr. Haladyn, an OCAD University lecturer, of attending a Kawara exhibition in person. Dr. Haladyn was doing research for his 2012 PhD thesis, and it was during that work that he came across the image of a Kawara painting featuring his birthday – different year, but the right day.
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Bad People Are Disgusting, Bad Actions Are Angering
A person’s character, more so than their actions, determines whether we find immoral acts to be ‘disgusting,’ studies show.
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Awesomeness Is Everything
The Atlantic: october, Jeff Bezos’s space-flight company, Blue Origin, passed a crucial safety test when it successfully detached a crew capsule from a rocket. In the process, would-be space tourists came one giant leap closer to suborbital selfies. A joyride to 330,000 feet would be, quite literally, awesome. Research on awe (an emotion related to Edmund Burke’s notion of the sublime, Sigmund Freud’s oceanic feelings, and Abraham Maslow’s peak experiences) reveals both its triggers and its far-out effects. and may even adjust our worldview to accommodate it.
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Want to Feel Less Time-Stressed?
The Wall Street Journal: Here’s a novel suggestion for those who feel they are in a constant race against the clock to get things done: Make some time for others. While it might seem counterintuitive to sacrifice some of the very thing you think you don’t have enough of, our research shows that giving a bit of time away may, in fact, make people feel less pressed for time and better able to tick things off their to-do lists. With Americans feeling starved for time to such an extent that scholars have declared a “time famine,” we began searching for a cure by asking: When people feel pressed for time, what activities are they most likely to forgo?
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The Roots of Implicit Bias
The New York Times: During the first presidential debate, Hillary Clinton argued that “implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police.” Her comment moved to the forefront of public conversation an issue that scientists have been studying for decades: namely, that even well-meaning people frequently harbor hidden prejudices against members of other racial groups. Studies have shown that these subtle biases are widespread and associated with discrimination in legal, economic and organizational settings. Critics of this notion, however, protest what they see as a character smear — a suggestion that everybody, deep down, is racist.
