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Money does buy happiness, but only if…
CNBC: In fact, it's even more important than your overall income or how much you spend in total, according to a study published online Thursday in Psychological Science. In other words, what matters more than your salary or how frequently you shop is whether you make purchases that match your personality. The University of Cambridge study examined approximately 77,000 U.K. bank transactions of 625 people and categorized purchases in different personality traits buckets — for example, eating out at a pub was put in the extroverted and impulsive spending category. Read the whole story: CNBC
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Attention, Students: Put Your Laptops Away
NPR: As laptops become smaller and more ubiquitous, and with the advent of tablets, the idea of taking notes by hand just seems old-fashioned to many students today. Typing your notes is faster — which comes in handy when there's a lot of information to take down. But it turns out there are still advantages to doing things the old-fashioned way. For one thing, research shows that laptops and tablets have a tendency to be distracting — it's so easy to click over to Facebook in that dull lecture. And a study has shown that the fact that you have to be slower when you take notes by hand is what makes it more useful in the long run. In the study published in Psychological Science, Pam A.
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Sorry, You Can’t Speed Read
The New York Times: OUR favorite Woody Allen joke is the one about taking a speed-reading course. “I read ‘War and Peace’ in 20 minutes,” he says. “It’s about Russia.” The promise of speed reading — to absorb text several times faster than normal, without any significant loss of comprehension — can indeed seem too good to be true. Nonetheless, it has long been an aspiration for many readers, as well as the entrepreneurs seeking to serve them. And as the production rate for new reading matter has increased, and people read on a growing array of devices, the lure of speed reading has only grown stronger. ...
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Why Luck Matters More Than You Might Think
The Atlantic: I'm a lucky man. Perhaps the most extreme example of my considerable good fortune occurred one chilly Ithaca morning in November 2007, while I was playing tennis with my longtime friend and collaborator, the Cornell psychologist Tom Gilovich. He later told me that early in the second set, I complained of feeling nauseated. The next thing he knew, I was lying motionless on the court. He yelled for someone to call 911, and then started pounding on my chest—something he’d seen many times in movies but had never been trained to do. He got a cough out of me, but seconds later I was again motionless with no pulse. Very shortly, an ambulance showed up. ...
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The Power And Problem Of Grit
NPR: Before she was a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, Angela Duckworth was a middle school math teacher. As a rookie teacher, she was surprised when she calculated grades. Some of her sharpest students weren't doing so well, while others who struggled through each lesson were getting A's. "The thing that was revelatory to me was not that effort matters—everybody knows that effort matters," Angela told Shankar. "What was revelatory to me was how much it matters." ... And psychologists find people at the tippy-top of their fields engage with their work differently.
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The Harsh Truth About Speed-Reading
The Kernel: For a long time, people have claimed to be able to read very quickly without any loss of comprehension—and many have claimed to teach this amazing skill. President Kennedy was one famous speed-reader, who could supposedly finish reading the New York Times in minutes; according to Time, he could read about 1,200 words a minute, or about three times the rate of a top college-level reader (he arrived at that number himself). More recently, “six-times World Speed Reading Champion” Anne Jones allegedly devoured J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in 47 minutes, Dan Brown’s Inferno in just under 42 minutes, and Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman in 25 minutes, 31 seconds.
