-
To Seem Better at Your Job, Ignore the Office Dress Code
New York Magazine: Regardless of your office’s dress code, there’s something to be said for showing up at work in a power suit. The clothes, to a certain extent, make the employee: Past research has shown that dressing more formally can help you focus, make you more confident, and even give you an edge in abstract, big-picture thinking. This last one, though, was a relative effect: People who dressed more formally at work became better at thinking abstractly, but only when they were more dressed up than everyone around them.
-
Best Friends Build Shared Memory Networks
The Atlantic: I’ve known my two best friends since 9th grade. In that time, a lot has happened, and I’ve forgotten a lot of it. It’s not unusual now for one of them to say “Remember in high school, when this happened?” and for me to reply “Well now I do.” They’re always reminding me of things I’ve forgotten. They’re an extra hard drive for my limited memory capacity. In science, this is known as a transactive memory system. Transactive memory systems (TMS) are repositories of knowledge that are shared between two or more people. A shared memory of events, like with me and my friends, above, can be part of it, but it’s also a way of calling up facts that other people know.
-
This audacious study will track 10,000 New Yorkers’ every move for 20 years
Vox: Paul Glimcher is on the verge of launching an absurdly ambitious project in social science. The concept is simple, but the scope is spectacularly broad. Over the next few years, he and his team are going to recruit 10,000 New Yorkers and track everything about them for decades. By everything, I mean full genome data, medical records, diet, credit card transactions, physical activity, personality test scores, intelligence test scores, social interactions, neighborhood characteristics, loan records, time spent on email, educational achievement, employment status, sleep, GPS location data, blood work, and stool samples. And there's so much more.
-
Your Screen-Time Rules or Mine?
The Wall Street Journal: It can be a sticky situation for parents: Your 8-year-old’s new friend plays videogames for several hours every day, but you set tight limits on your own child’s screen time. Or your 9-year-old’s friends all use Instagram on their cellphones, years before you intend to even let your daughter have a phone. Can you control what happens on a play date? While families’ rules differ in many areas, they often seem especially divergent when it comes to children’s media use. What’s available for children, and what’s popular, changes all the time. And parents have differing levels of comfort and familiarity with new platforms. ...
-
Motivating Eco-Friendly Behaviors Depends on Cultural Values
The specific cultural values of a country may determine whether concern about environmental issues actually leads individuals to engage in environmentally friendly behaviors.
-
White Coat
NPR: Lulu Miller introduces us to a scientist who is trying to figure out if clothes can change us in concrete, measurable ways. In a Northwestern University study by Adam Galinsky and Hajo Adam, the mere act of wearing a doctor's coat made participants perform better on an attention task than participants who wore the same exact coat... but believed it was a painter's coat. Read the whole story: NPR
