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Virgin Atlantic just used behavioral science to ‘nudge’ its pilots into using less fuel. It worked
The Washington Post: In an unusual experiment that could have major implications for the role of corporations in fighting climate change, Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic Airways recently teamed up with economists to try to “nudge” the company’s pilots to use less fuel, using a variety of behavioral interventions. And it apparently worked. The intervention was so cost effective, the researchers say, that it “outperforms every other reported carbon abatement technology of which we are aware.” Read the whole story: The Washington Post
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The Cheater’s High And Other Reasons We Cheat
NPR: This week on Hidden Brain, we take on cheating. Lying and deception are part of being human. And it begins from a very young age. In fact, YouTube is filled with videos of imaginative children trying out little lies, usually to get out of trouble. We at Hidden Brain were taken with this brother/sister duo, Jackson and Reagan, as their mom interrogated them to find out who marked up the wall. ... Professor Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School has found in her research that people tend to be more forgiving of unethical behavior if it is creative (or in this case, cute). This is something she's also found in her own life as the mother of a 3-year-old.
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Working parents have two jobs — and both are important to the economy
PBS: Nearly one in five workers work part-time in the U.S. By 2020, that figure is expected to rise to 40 percent. By 2030, “a majority of workers will be on their own,” according to Berkeley economist and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. The common assumption is that part-time workers want to work full time, but can’t find full-time employment due to a dearth of jobs and stiff competition. But deeper analyses suggest a very different interpretation: Employees are willing to sacrifice earnings if it means achieving a better balance of their personal and professional lives. Read the whole story: PBS
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Study Supports Suspicion That Police Are More Likely to Use Force on Blacks
The New York Times: The vast majority of interactions between police officers and civilians end routinely, with no one injured, no one aggrieved and no one making the headlines. But when force is used, a new study has found, the race of the person being stopped by officers is significant. The study of thousands of use-of-force episodes from police departments across the nation has concluded what many people have long thought, but which could not be proved because of a lack of data: African-Americans are far more likely than whites and other groups to be the victims of use of force by the police, even when racial disparities in crime are taken into account.
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Playing Action Video Games Boosts Visual Motor Skill Underlying Driving
Playing action-based video games may boost players’ ability to coordinate incoming visual information with their motor control, a skill critical to many real-world behaviors including driving, new research shows. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Our research shows that playing easily accessible action video games for as little as 5 hours can be a cost-effective tool to help people improve essential visuomotor-control skills used for driving,” says researcher Li Li of New York University Shanghai, lead author on the study.
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Daredevil-like ability allows us to size up rooms—even when we can’t see them
Science: The blind comic book star Daredevil has a highly developed sense of hearing that allows him to “see” his environment with his ears. But you don’t need to be a superhero to pull a similar stunt, according to a new study. Researchers have identified the neural architecture used by the brain to turn subtle sounds into a mind’s-eye map of your surroundings. The study appears to be “very solid work,” says Lore Thaler, a psychologist at Durham University in the United Kingdom who studies echolocation, the ability of bats and other animals to use sound to locate objects. ...
