-
Do You Know What Your Time Is Really Worth?
The Wall Street Journal: What is your time really worth? It is a day-to-day trade-off. We are constantly confronted with opportunities to save time by paying more money, and vice versa. Should you send out your laundry? Take the faster, more expensive flight or train? Do additional freelancing or consulting work? Now, more than ever, with the creation of TaskRabbit and virtual concierge services, there are opportunities to outsource every task for a fee. But putting a dollar value on your time requires more than dividing your pay by hours worked. It requires thinking deeply about the trade-offs you are willing to make.
-
Burnout Leaves its Mark on the Brain
Chronic stress seems to dampen people’s neurological ability to bounce back from negative situations—causing even more stress.
-
Weiß ich doch (I know!)
Süddeutsche Zeitung: In Arztpraxen und Krankenhäusern sind sie gefürchtet, im sonstigen Leben gelten sie als elende Nervensägen. Die Rede ist von Menschen, die immer Bescheid wissen, überall den Durchblick haben - und dies andere auch deutlich spüren lassen. Sogar wenn sie medizinischen Rat suchen, sagen solche Zeitgenossen dem Arzt, was er gleich bei ihnen finden wird und wie sie am besten behandelt werden sollten. Was diese selbsternannten Experten jedoch nicht ahnen: Im Gefühl ihrer eigenen Überlegenheit bemerken sie oft nicht, wie sie sich grandios überschätzen und gerade in Gebieten, in denen sie sich besonders gut auszukennen meinen, fulminant danebenliegen.
-
What Your Face Looks Like Could Be a Matter of Life and Death
The Wall Street Journal: Criminal defendants who have faces that look less trustworthy are more likely to receive harsher sentences, according to a new study. Psychology researchers at the University of Toronto investigating the relationship between facial trustworthiness and real-life criminal sentences say the results reveal the power of facial appearance to affect punishments “even to the point of execution.” NPR reports on how researchers conducted the study, which was published this week in Psychological Science: Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
-
Self-proclaimed ‘experts’ more likely to fall for made-up facts, study finds
The Washington Post: If you consider yourself an expert in something or another, you might want to stop pretending you understand things you've never heard of. In a new study, researchers found that self-proclaimed "experts" in a topic were more likely than others to profess knowledge of terms that were actually made up for the purpose of the study.
-
The Kindness Cure
The Atlantic: How do you cultivate compassion? How do you ensure that at the end of the day, it’s your kindness and generosity for which you’ll be remembered? It’s a good question, for as much as we all agree that compassion is a virtue to be admired, as a society, we don’t seem to be very effective at instilling it. In fact, research by Sara Konrath at the University of Michigan suggests we’re actually getting worse on this score. In reviewing the results of a standard assessment of empathy and compassion taken by 13,000 college students between 1979 and 2009, Konrath discovered that self-reported concern for the welfare of others has been steadily dropping since the early 1990s.
