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The Upside of Uncertainty
Scientific American: Who is more persuasive: A person who expresses great certainty about his or her views, or a person who is less sure? If you are like most people, your intuition is that certainty makes you more persuasive. And this makes sense. A person who expresses certainty seems better informed; perhaps more credible. Most of us have had the experience of being persuaded by someone simply because they were so sure about what they were saying. Read the whole story: Scientific American
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Some People Are Great At Recognizing Faces. Others…Not So Much
NPR: Every day, Marty Doerschlag moves through the world armed with what amounts to a low-level superpower: He can remember a face forever. "If I spend about 30 seconds looking at somebody, I will remember their face for years and years and years," he says. ... "I think nobody really knew until the last few years just how bad we all are with unfamiliar faces," says Mike Burton, a professor of psychology at the University of York UK. Burton has run a number of facial recognition studies and has concluded that most people are remarkably bad at recognizing the faces of those they know only slightly. And to make matters worse, most people think they are good at this skill when they are not.
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AMERICA’S SURPRISING VIEWS ON INCOME INEQUALITY
The New Yorker: As a whole, the population of the United States is wealthier today than it has ever been. But, as has often been reported, the relative increases haven’t been uniform. In 1970, the top ten per cent of the population earned a third of the total national income. By 2012, it earned half. According to estimates by Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, income inequality has grown by record amounts since the 2008 recession: between 2009 and 2012, incomes for the top one per cent of the population rose by more than thirty per cent, while those for the rest of the country—the bottom ninety-nine per cent—increased by less than half of one per cent.
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Most Students Don’t Know When News Is Fake, Stanford Study Finds
The Wall Street Journal: Preteens and teens may appear dazzlingly fluent, flitting among social-media sites, uploading selfies and texting friends. But they’re often clueless about evaluating the accuracy and trustworthiness of what they find. Some 82% of middle-schoolers couldn’t distinguish between an ad labeled “sponsored content” and a real news story on a website, according to a Stanford University study of 7,804 students from middle school through college. The study, set for release Tuesday, is the biggest so far on how teens evaluate information they find online.
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Does Chess Make You Smarter?
The Wall Street Journal: It’s a popular notion that learning chess can make you smarter. Chess clubs and federations around the world promote the game for inclusion in school curricula, especially at the elementary level. In Armenia, every second-, third- and fourth-grader takes a chess class. American “tiger parents” often see chess lessons in the same light as music and computer classes—a way to give their children a leg up in the quest for better grades and admission to an elite college. The game of kings has long been associated with intelligence, and chess grandmasters are capable of astounding mental feats.
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A Lesson For Preschools: When It’s Done Right, The Benefits Last
NPR: Is preschool worth it? Policymakers, parents, researchers and us, at NPR Ed, have spent a lot of time thinking about this question. We know that most pre-kindergarten programs do a good job of improving ' specific skills like phonics and counting, as well as broader social and emotional behaviors, by the time students enter kindergarten. Just this week, a study looking at more than 20,000 students in a state-funded preschool program in Virginia found that kids made large improvements in their alphabet recognition skills. ...
