-
One Way to Win at Negotiations: Crack a Dumb Joke
New York Magazine: Here’s a move that pulls double duty: Next time you’re seated across from a potential new employer to hammer out salary details, try kicking things off with a silly wisecrack. One, it’ll break the ice; and two, it might just help you leave with a better offer. As the Association for Psychological Science explained in a recent blog post, past research has shown that opening with a joke about your desired salary can be a better strategy than playing it straight. ...
-
Let’s All Stop Babbling About ‘Talent’
Thrive Global: Katie Ledecky has been described as “an immense talent” but her own coach, Bruce Gemmell, has pointed out that Katie is “not a gifted athlete.” Whether the talent of Michael Phelps is a consequence of his genetically determined anatomy is a topic of perennial debate. And Usain Bolt recently referred to his “God-given talent” in the same interview in which he pointed out that “in Jamaica, we know we have to work hard. We do not get anything unless we work for it. My success is just a continuation of the great traditions left behind by past athletes.” Talent. What are we to make of this word that people define in such different ways?
-
You’ve probably been tricked by fake news and don’t know it
ScienceNews: If you spent Thanksgiving trying in vain to convince relatives that the Pope didn’t really endorse Donald Trump or that Hillary Clinton didn’t sell weapons to ISIS, fake news has already weaseled its way into your brain. Those “stories” and other falsified news outperformed much of the real news on Facebook before the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And on Twitter, an analysis by University of Southern California computer scientists found that nearly 20 percent of election-related tweets came from bots, computer programs posing as real people and often spouting biased or fake news. ...
-
Illusion Reveals that the Brain Fills in Peripheral Vision
What we see in the periphery, just outside the direct focus of the eye, may sometimes be a visual illusion, research shows.
-
The Psychological Key To Beating A Challenge
Forbes: In a famous study first conducted in 1960, psychologist Walter Mischel put 4 to 6-year-old children alone in a room with a marshmallow. Before he left the room, he’d tell them they could eat it now; or, if they waited a few minutes until he came back, they’d get two. The kids usually devoured the marshmallow immediately. Sometimes, however, Mischel told the children that one way to resist the marshmallow now and get two later is by pretending the marshmallow wasn’t there. By changing how he prepared them for the challenge, he dramatically changed their behavior: children could now wait 15 minutes without eating the marshmallow. Read the whole story: Forbes
-
The Benefits of Being Distracted
The Wall Street Journal: Most people are more easily distracted as they get older. There might be a benefit to that. Research is finding that greater distractibility and a reduced ability to focus—what scientists call decreased cognitive control—is often associated with greater creativity in problem solving. It also can facilitate learning new information, according to a review of more than 100 studies that was published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences earlier this month.
