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Why People Buckle Up in Cars, But Not in Cabs
In May, Nobel Prize-winning economist John F. Nash Jr. and his wife Alicia were tragically killed in a car accident on the New Jersey expressway. Investigators reported that they were not wearing seat belts at the time, and died after being thrown from the backseat of their taxi. Whether you’re in the front or back of a car, wearing a seat belt is often the most effective way to prevent serious injury in case of an accident. Yet, in some situations -- such as riding in the back of a cab -- people are far less likely to buckle up. In New York City, taxi drivers and their passengers are exempt from laws regarding car seats and seat belts.
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This Is Why You Feel Dirty After A Bad Day At The Office
The Huffington Post: In the 1999 cult comedy “Office Space,” dissatisfied office drone Peter Gibbons spends his days bored out of his mind, working for a boss he loathes doing work he doesn’t care about. To make matters worse, he then goes home to a loveless relationship with a girlfriend who cheats on him. Through it all, he bites his tongue, never expressing his true feelings about that useless TPS report coversheet or the unfairness of the weekend work schedule.
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Can science make you less sexist while you sleep?
The Washington Post: No matter how open-minded you think you are, you're chock-full of what scientists call implicit biases -- prejudices you don't even realize that you have that color your actions. But a fascinating new study suggests that these biases can be cut down in your sleep. By having subjects go through a bias-diminishing exercise just before taking a nap -- during which the things they'd just learned were cued up by special sounds -- researchers were able to lower their biases up to a week after the fact. The results were published Thursday in Science.
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In ‘Eating Lab,’ A Psychologist Spills Secrets On Why Diets Fail
NPR: As soon as Traci Mann's new book, Secrets From The Eating Lab, hit bookstores, I ordered my copy. As the author of a no-diet book myself, I was eager to read what one of the leading researchers on the psychology of eating, dieting and self-control had to say about why diets fail to bring about significant or sustainable weight loss. After all, Mann, who runs a lab at the University of Minnesota, has studied the scientific literature as well as her own diet subjects for two decades. She has concluded, among other things, that diets are unnecessary for optimal health. Read the whole story: NPR
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Are Poor Kids More Altruistic?
New York Magazine: Altruistic behavior toward strangers, a growing body of research has found, brings with it emotional and health benefits. This can help explain what has traditionally been seen as the "mysterious" aspect of the behavior — why help someone you don't even know or really care about? But as Jonas G. Miller, Sarah Kahle, and Paul D. Hastings of UC - Davis write in a new paper just published in Psychological Science, "less is known about the possible benefits ... of altruism in earlier childhood." To learn more about this, the researchers got a group of 74 preschoolers together for an experiment.
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Why Entrepreneurs Who Complain Are Setting Themselves Up to Fail
Entrepreneur: Your problems are proportional to the amount of time you spend complaining about your problems: The less you complain, the fewer problems you will have. This is because complaining about your problems keeps your attention on your problems. And attention generates force. ... The squeaky wheel doesn't get the grease. The squeaky wheel breaks down and gets replaced. If you want to attract failure, talk about your problems. If you want to attract success, talk about what makes you happy. A study published in the journal Psychological Science and reported in Science Daily examined how people responded to positive versus negative social media-status updates.
