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Get Up, Stand Up! How to Get People to Quit Sitting
If you work a typical office job, you might be spending more than 10 hours a day sitting down. Across numerous studies, extensive sitting has been linked to diabetes, heart disease, cancer and even an early death. People are becoming increasingly aware of the health risks associated with sitting, but with many employees desk-bound, how do you convince people to get up and get moving at work? According to a new meta-analysis, interventions that specifically targeted sitting, rather than just getting people to exercise more often, were the most effective at getting people to be less sedentary at work.
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How Loneliness Wears on the Body
The Atlantic: Every Monday during the summer, some of the residents of Lyme, New Hampshire, gather up fruits and vegetables from their gardens to donate to Veggie Cares, a program that distributes local food to people living alone. Volunteers collect, sort, and package the produce, then head out in separate directions to deliver the food to some Lyme's most vulnerable, isolated residents. While the stated goal of the program is to provide people with healthy food, Veggie Cares volunteers also deliver companionship.
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The Surprising Benefits of Sarcasm
Scientific American: “Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit but the highest form of intelligence,” wrote that connoisseur of wit, Oscar Wilde. Whether sarcasm is a sign of intelligence or not, communication experts and marriage counselors alike typically advise us to stay away from this particular form of expression. The reason is simple: sarcasm expresses the poisonous sting of contempt, hurting others and harming relationships. As a form of communication, sarcasm takes on the debt of conflict. ... Consider the following example, which comes from a conversation one of my co-authors on the research (Adam Galinsky, of Columbia) had a few weeks before getting married.
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It Pays To Be Overconfident
The Huffington Post: The eye is an exquisite sensory device -- honed over hundreds of millions of years of evolution -- and yet people are incredibly biased in their perception. If you don't believe you're biased, think for a moment about the last time you saw a candid photo of yourself that you liked. If you're similar to most people, you probably think that 80 percent of the shots of yourself are poorly taken. But your friends are not bad photographers; you're just not as good looking as you think you are. And that's why you don't like their pictures of you, because they capture what you really look like.
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The psychology of political beliefs (or, why hard data isn’t always convincing)
The Washington Post: When Donald Trump declared last weekend that he saw television footage of thousands of Muslims cheering from New Jersey on the day of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, fact-checkers moved quickly. The Post's Glenn Kessler found no evidence of Trump's claim, awarding it four Pinocchios. Others came to the conclusion. And then something odd happened.
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Quick Thinkers Are Charismatic
Charisma may rely on quick thinking, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The research shows that people who were able to respond more quickly to general knowledge questions and visual tasks were perceived as more charismatic by their friends, independently of IQ and other personality traits.
