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Nudging Works. Now, Do More With It.
Bloomberg: Last Wednesday was a historic day for behavioral science. The White House released the annual report of its Social and Behavioral Sciences Team. The U.K.’s Behavioural Insights Team released its own annual report on the same day. With the recent creation of similar teams in Australia, Germany, the Netherlands and Qatar, the two reports deserve careful attention. Outlining dozens of initiatives, the reports offer two general lessons about uses of behavioral science by governments. First, both teams are enlisting behavioral science not for controversial purposes, but to encourage people to benefit from public programs and to comply with the law.
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Sophisticated Communication from 8-Month-Old Babies
Scientific American: New parents love the developmental milestones – the first smile, crab-like crawl, and “ma-ma-ma” are unforgettable. Around their first birthday, babies start pointing, a communicative gesture that is universally, and uniquely, understood by humans. More than ever before, parents have insight into precisely what their babies are interested in; Oh, you want the Snoopy doll next to the book? Sure, here you go. But, what if babies are communicating with us about objects even earlier? According to new findings in the Journal of Psychological Science, babies younger than one year can also communicate through gestures.
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Effect of Commitment on Forgiveness Investigated in Large-Scale Replication Project
After a betrayal of trust, what motivates an aggrieved partner to try and resolve the problem instead of walking away or seeking revenge? Many studies have indicated that how people respond to a partner's betrayal is associated with how committed they feel to their relationship, raising the possibility that boosting people’s feelings of commitment may lead them to choose less destructive responses. A new multi-lab research project aimed at replicating the primary evidence for a causal link between commitment and betrayal confirmed the association between feelings of commitment and responses to betrayal.
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Job Satisfaction Tends to Increase with Age
As we get older, does our work become more satisfying? New research illuminates an intriguing conundrum: Job satisfaction tends to improve as we get older but also tends to decrease the longer we stay at a particular job. “We demonstrated that age and tenure have opposite relationships with job satisfaction, such that job satisfaction increased as people aged yet decreased as tenure advanced — and received a boost when people moved to a new organization, thus starting the cycle anew,” writes psychological scientists Shoshana Dobrow Riza (London School of Economics and Political Science), Yoav Ganzach (Tel Aviv University), and Yihao Liu (University of Florida).
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How To Watch A Debate Without Bias
NPR: The first of three debates between Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will take place Monday night. The debates, sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates, have the stated mission of offering "the best possible information to viewers and listeners" in the lead-up to the general election. There's just one problem. Decades of research suggests that voting decisions are influenced by quite a few factors beyond the "best possible information." For instance, people's perceptions of politicians can be influenced by their height: Taller men are, on average, perceived to be more competent. Using data from past U.S.
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Get Yourself to Do Stuff by Appealing to Your Own Sense of Pride
New York Magazine: A story at the start of Take Pride, a forthcoming book by University of British Columbia psychologist Jessica Tracy, is a typical one of youthful aimlessness, at least at first. Tracy writes about her post-college life in the late 1990s, when she moved across the country to San Francisco and got a job as a barista in a cozy cafe. It was a pleasant life, filled with lots of people to talk to and lots of time to read, along with few anxieties or responsibilities.
