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The Surprising Problem of Too Much Talent
Scientific American: Whether you're the owner of the Dallas Cowboys or captain of the playground dodge ball team, the goal in picking players is the same: Get the top talent. Hearts have been broken, allegiances tested, and budgets busted as teams contend for the best athletes. The motivation for recruiting peak performers is obvious — exceptional players are the key to team success — and this belief is shared not only by coaches and sports fans, but also by corporations, investors, and even whole industries. Everyone wants a team of stars.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: Jenny Yiend, Andrew Mathews, Tom Burns, Kevin Dutton, Andrés Fernández-Martín, George A. Georgiou, Michael Luckie, Alexandra Rose, Riccardo Russo, and Elaine Fox Studies examining anxiety-related attention bias have found differences in orienting mechanisms such as engagement and disengagement of attention for targets; however, much of this research has been conducted with subclinical samples.
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One Scary Boss Can Spook the Whole Office
Coping with an abusive boss can have major impacts on employee well-being, and research has even shown that a bad boss can make people sick, leading to increased rates of heart attack, high blood pressure, anxiety, and chronic stress among employees. But a scary boss doesn’t just impact his or her immediate subordinates – new research from a team of psychological scientists led by Mary Bardes Mawritz of Drexel University shows that an abusive boss’s bad behavior can trickle down throughout the entire office.
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You Can Recover From a Snippy Email, But Prepare to Grovel
The Wall Street Journal: Stephanie Freeman recently wrote an email to a friend to say she missed her and thought of her often. The two women had previously made lunch plans, but they hadn’t followed through. Ms. Freeman added that she’d still love to get together. The reply? “You always say you are thinking of me but never do anything about it,” her friend wrote. “You are all talk and no action.” Ms. Freeman, 45, got angry. “How dare she put all the responsibility of this relationship on me?” she recalls thinking. She fired off a reply telling her friend to be grateful that she thought of her in a positive way and reminding the friend that she was capable of taking action, too.
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Holy Safety Net! Religion and Recklessness
Moral instruction is a big part of religion. That’s why most faiths come with strict laws of personal conduct. Indeed, many believe that living a sober life, free of risk and excess and recklessness, is evidence of devotion to a higher power. But most instruction of this sort focuses on recklessness with a moral dimension: Don’t drink too much. Don’t gamble away your family’s security. Don’t let sexual temptations ruin your marriage. Don’t steal someone else’s property. And so forth. These transgressions are considered not only risky, but also wrong. So what about risk taking that has no connection to right or wrong? Sky diving, for example, or cycling without a helmet?
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Toddlers Copy Their Peers to Fit In, but Apes Don’t
From the playground to the board room, people often follow, or conform, to the behavior of those around them as a way of fitting in. New research shows that this behavioral conformity appears early in human children, but isn’t evidenced by apes like chimpanzees and orangutans. “Conformity is a very basic feature of human sociality. It retains in- and out-groups, it helps groups coordinate and it stabilizes cultural diversity, one of the hallmark characteristics of the human species,” says psychological scientist and lead researcher Daniel Haun of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the University of Jena.
