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Can You Trust a Eureka Moment?
Scientific American: Aha! moments are satisfying in part because they feel so right; all the pieces of a puzzle appear to fall into place with little conscious effort. But can you trust such sudden solutions? Yes, according to new research published in Thinking & Reasoning. The results support the conventional wisdom that this type of insight can provide correct answers to challenging problems. In four experiments, Carola Salvi, a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University, John Kounios, a psychologist at Drexel University, and their colleagues presented college students with mind teasers, such as anagrams and rebus puzzles.
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Intuition – It’s More Than a Feeling
Great leaders make smart decisions, even in difficult circumstances. From Albert Einstein to Oprah Winfrey, many top leaders ascribe their success to having followed their intuition. New research shows how going with our gut instincts can help guide us to faster, more accurate decisions. Intuition — the idea that individuals can make successful decisions without deliberate analytical thought — has intrigued philosophers and scientists since at least the times of the ancient Greeks. But scientists have had trouble finding quantifiable evidence that intuition actually exists.
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How to Boast on the Sly
The Atlantic: An essential quandary of social life is how to let others know we’re awesome, without letting them know we want them to know. Is there a way to harvest the reputational benefits of self-promotion while avoiding its costs? Research exposes boasting’s pitfalls. For example, when we brag, we miscalculate how others will react. In one study, self-promoters overestimated the extent to which their audiences would feel “proud” and “happy,” and underestimated their annoyance.
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Where’s the Magic in Family Dinner?
The New York Times: Like many families, we strive to eat dinner together as often as possible. And when my husband and I meet our tween and her younger sister at the table, we sometimes have worthwhile conversations or manage to crack each other up. But, at least as often, dinner devolves into a failing effort to find out what happened at school or a nag-fest over mealtime manners. After an especially short or harried supper, I can find myself wondering how the family gathering that just transpired could possibly help to raise my daughters’ grades, improve their psychological well-being or lower their risk of substance abuse. ...
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The Sad Truth About Speed-Reading: It Doesn’t Work
New York Magazine: In 2007, shortly after the final volume in the Harry Potter series was released, a woman named Anne Jones read all 784 pages in exactly 47 minutes. To prove that she’d actually read it, Jones — who has won the World Championship Speed Reading Competition six times — summarized the major plot points to a group of reporters. They were satisfied with her impromptu book report, which suggests Jones had successfully read the book at 4,200 words per minute. ... Treiman is a co-author on a paper in the May edition of the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest that reviews the evidence for speed-reading, and mostly finds it lacking.
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To Be More Persuasive, Repeat Yourself
The philosopher Plato wrote that there is no harm in repeating a good thing. Even better, a new study finds that repeating key points during your next meeting is a good way to sway colleagues’ decisions. Across two experiments, Stefan Schulz-Hardt (Georg-August-University) and colleagues demonstrated that repeating specific information during a discussion was enough to change someone’s mind. “From a rational point of view, information repetitions constitute redundancy and, hence, should not affect the recipient's decision,” the researchers write.
