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What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team
The New York Times: Like most 25-year-olds, Julia Rozovsky wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life. She had worked at a consulting firm, but it wasn’t a good match. Then she became a researcher for two professors at Harvard, which was interesting but lonely. Maybe a big corporation would be a better fit. Or perhaps a fast-growing start-up. All she knew for certain was that she wanted to find a job that was more social. ‘‘I wanted to be part of a community, part of something people were building together,’’ she told me. She thought about various opportunities — Internet companies, a Ph.D. program — but nothing seemed exactly right.
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Want To Make Better Predictions?
NPR: We constantly make predictions about the unknown, at scales both large and small. Which presidential candidates will win each party's nomination? Which stocks will go up in the next six months — and which down? Should I have a second child? Will I really enjoy the chocolate chip pancakes most, or should I order the pumpkin waffles instead? When it comes to geopolitical decisions, most of us aren't very good.
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Opposition to Same-Sex Marriage Linked to Self-Interest
Why do opponents of same-sex marriage really oppose it? A study concludes that many people believe gay men and women are more sexually promiscuous than heterosexuals, which they may fear could threaten their own marriages.
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Test Scores Drop as the School Day Drags on
Pacific Standard: You've probably noticed that it's harder to think clearly after a long day of reading, writing, and arithmetic—in short, after a long day of thinking. For the most part, that's not a particularly big deal, but a study out today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests it might matter to schools and their students. As it turns out, each hour that passes before starting a test drags scores down by a little bit, meaning students who take a test late in the day will perform noticeably worse. A core assumption underlying academic achievement testing is that the tests measure, at least roughly, how much students have learned.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: Positive Affectivity Is Dampened in Youths With Histories of Major Depression and Their Never-Depressed Adolescent Siblings Maria Kovacs, Lauren M. Bylsma, Ilya Yaroslavsky, Jonathan Rottenberg, Charles J. George, Enikö Kiss, Kitti Halas, István Benák, Ildiko Baji, Ágnes Vetró, and Krisztina Kapornai Depressed individuals often display a reduced ability to experience pleasure and joy, known as anhedonia. Although anhedonia has been extensively studied, several questions remain, such as whether it persists after depression remission and whether it constitutes a risk factor for depression.
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Confident Leaders Inspire Creativity
Confident leaders foster greater creativity among their employees, according to a new study. “Employees are more likely to produce creative outcomes when they are aware that creativity is expected from them and is encouraged by their leaders,” writes study authors Lei Huang (Auburn University), Dina Krasikova (University of Texas at San Antonio), and Dong Liu (Georgia Institute of Technology). In some of the most influential research in the history of psychology, Albert Bandura and colleagues demonstrated that our belief in our own capabilities determines whether or not we succeed.
