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Children Who Speak Multiple Languages May Be More Empathetic
Science Magazine: A new study suggests that children who speak or hear multiple languages may be better at placing themselves in others’ shoes, Pacific Standard reports. The research, published in Psychological Science, describes how children who had at least some exposure to foreign languages better understood how to follow directions that required them to take the perspective of the speaker. That ability to see the world from someone else’s point of view could lead to more effective communication, the researchers say. Read the whole story: Science Magazine
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How to Get People to Pitch In
The New York Times: LAST month Jerry Brown, the Democratic governor of California, issued the drought-racked state’s first-ever mandatory water reductions. “As Californians, we must pull together and save water in every way possible,” he said. Conserving water requires large-scale cooperation, just like reducing carbon emissions or eradicating measles through vaccinations. When you water your garden less, take public transportation instead of your car or vaccinate your children, you’re taking on personal cost (an uglier garden, a slower commute, a grumpier child) for the benefit of society.
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Imagination Beats Practice in Boosting Visual Search Performance
Practice may not make perfect, but visualization might. New research shows that people who imagined a visual target before having to pick it out of a group of distracting items were faster at finding the target than those who did an actual practice run beforehand. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Customer Loyalty May Depend on the Race of a Company’s Leader
Franklin Raines was appointed CEO of Fannie Mae in 1999 -- making him the first black CEO in America to lead a Fortune 500 company. Since then, only 14 other black CEOs have assumed the top leadership role within America's most powerful companies. For years, researchers have found evidence that managers show bias against black personnel, particularly when they’re in positions that involve customer contact. But new research explores how this racial bias extends all the way to the most senior leadership roles of a company.
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Do Bilingual Homes Raise Better Communicators?
Futurity: Young children who hear more than one language spoken at home become better communicators, a new study finds. Effective communication requires the ability to take others’ perspectives. Researchers discovered that children from multilingual environments are better at interpreting a speaker’s meaning than children who are exposed only to their native tongue. The most novel finding is that the children don’t even have to be bilingual themselves—it’s the exposure to more than one language that is the key for building effective social communication skills. Read the whole story: Futurity
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The Simple Mind Trick That Will Boost Your Savings in No Time
TIME: Human nature being what it is, probably the best strategy to ensure you’ll sock money away and achieve long-term savings goals is to involve your fickle, easily distracted brain as little as possible. As renowned economist Richard Thaler explained in a recent Q&A with MONEY, it’s very difficult for humans to control our impulses, and therefore the wisest approach to saving is to remove it as a choice. Invariably in our lives, stuff comes up, and if it’s an option, we’ll find more pressing and seemingly good uses for money other than incrementally trying to hit goals that won’t be realities for decades.
