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Is Income Inequality Destroying Trust In Our Society?
Fast Company: It makes sense that trust in corporations and government would plummet after a devastating global recession. But the idea of social capital--a concept that the World Bank started researching in the ‘90s--is a much bigger societal force than just faith in institutions. In one sense, social capital is a basic feature of democracy, the soil that nurtures people working together towards a common goal. In a neighborhood, for example, it could be the likelihood that your neighbors know you and have your back. Yet as Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam explained in his 2000 book Bowling Alone, social capital is on the decline and has been for several decades.
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Giving Meaning to ‘Art’
The New York Times: The psychologist George E. Newman of the Yale School of Management studies how people use “quasi-magical thinking” to intuitively determine the value of certain objects. By analyzing celebrity auctions of John F. Kennedy or Marilyn Monroe’s personal effects, he has shown that the price of a piece of memorabilia is connected to how often it was thought to be used or touched by a famous person — as if there’s a kind of real-world value placed on a celebrity’s “essence.” Recently, Mr. Newman has switched his attention to the art world. In his latest paper, published last month in the journal Topics in Cognitive Science and co-authored by Daniel M. Bartels and Rosanna K.
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How Does That Geometry Problem Make You Feel?
Slate: Human tutors—teachers who work closely with students, one on one—are unrivaled in their ability to promote deep and lasting learning. Education researchers have known this for more than 30 years, but until recently they haven’t paid much attention to one important reason why tutoring is so effective: the management of emotion. Studies show that tutors spend about half their time dealing with pupils’ feelings about what and how they’re learning. Now the designers of computerized tutoring systems are beginning to make sensing and responding to emotions key parts of the process, and they’re finding that users learn more as a result.
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Yes, I’m a Good Person. But Did You Hear About Her?
Pacific Standard: Want to feel a sense of purpose in your life? Do a good deed for someone. On the other hand, if immediate happiness is your priority, let someone else do a good deed for you. Those are among the fascinating findings of a new study published in Science magazine, which analyzes how morality and immorality are expressed, and experienced, in the real world. This subject has been studied extensively by social psychologists in recent years, leading to important insights. We now know that liberals and conservatives live in somewhat different ethical universes, and that doing a good deed gives us license to cut a few ethical corners later in the day.
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Children capable of learning to control junk food cravings: study
NY Daily News: For children, the lure of cookies and fast food is distinctly more powerful than for adolescents and adults, although children's cognitive wiring is well suited to train such cravings, according to researchers hailing principally from Columbia University. "These findings are important because they suggest that we may have another tool in our toolbox to combat childhood obesity," says psychological scientist and lead researcher Jennifer A. Silvers, a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University in the laboratory of Professor Kevin Ochsner.
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Number Crunching May Make People More Selfish
In the 1970s, the Ford Pinto became synonymous with unethical management decisions. Although it was known that the car had an unfortunate tendency to explode in rear-end collisions, Ford went ahead with production after a cost-benefit analysis predicted savings of $11 per car, at a cost of only 180 burn deaths. As a result, several dozen people were injured or killed before the design flaw came to light. New research suggests that even basic math calculations may significantly increase people’s likelihood of engaging in selfish and unethical behavior. Researchers Long Wang (City University of Hong Kong) Chen-Bo Zhong (University of Toronto), and J.
