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Born to Be Conned
The New York Times: THERE’S an adage you hear most any time you mention con artists: You can’t cheat an honest man. It’s a comforting defense against vulnerability, but is it actually true? No, as it turns out; honesty has precious little to do with it. Equally blameless is greed, at least in the traditional sense. What matters instead is greed of a different sort: a deep need to believe in a version of the world where everything really is for the best — at least when it comes to us. Robin Lloyd wasn’t looking to get rich. She was just a poor college student who thought she’d finally caught a break. It was 1982, and Ms. Lloyd was making her first trip to New York City.
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Kids Who Handle Money Work Harder, but There’s a Downside
Fortune: Money can make youngsters as little as three years old work harder, but there’s evidence it can also make them less charitable. Money makes the world go round. Even when you’re three years old. That’s the finding of a new international study, which found that children work harder around money, even before they understand how it works. The youngsters are activating something called “market mode”—a primal force that not only fosters persistence, but also makes them less charitable and less helpful.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: When Delays Improve Memory: Stabilizing Memory in Children May Require Time Kevin P. Darby and Vladimir M. Sloutsky The learning of new information often reduces memory for older information -- something called retroactive interference. Although retroactive interference is generally small in adults, children can experience catastrophic interference. In a series of studies, children learned connections between pairs of objects and a cartoon character during three learning phases.
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Why Office Jerks Get Ahead
People who score high on some sinister personality traits appear to have better career prospects, according to a scientific review.
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Risky Business: Teens Brains Behind the Wheel
Teen drivers are notorious for their bad decisions behind the wheel. According to the US Centers for Disease Control, the risk of car crashes is higher among 16-19-year-olds than among any other age group. In fact, per mile driven, teen drivers are nearly three times more likely than drivers aged 20 and older to be in a fatal crash. You might think that a more developmentally mature brain would guarantee more sensible decision-making in teen drivers, but a new study suggests just the opposite.
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The Arithmetic of Compassion
The New York Times: WE all can relate to the saying “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Our sympathy for suffering and loss declines precipitously when we are presented with increasing numbers of victims. In the 1950s, the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton studied survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and discovered that a condition he labeled “psychic numbing” enabled them to withstand the psychological trauma of this experience. Psychologists have since extended Dr.
