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Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others
The New York Times: ENDLESS meetings that do little but waste everyone’s time. Dysfunctional committees that take two steps back for every one forward. Project teams that engage in wishful groupthinking rather than honest analysis. Everyone who is part of an organization — a company, a nonprofit, a condo board — has experienced these and other pathologies that can occur when human beings try to work together in groups. But does teamwork have to be a lost cause? Psychologists have been working on the problem for a long time. And for good reason: Nowadays, though we may still idolize the charismatic leader or creative genius, almost every decision of consequence is made by a group.
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Meet the woman who can’t feel fear
The Washington Post: Fear is one of our most basic evolutionary instincts, a sudden physical jolt to help us react to danger more quickly. In the modern world, fear often seems excessive -- in the absence of wild animals to flee, we're left screaming over roller coasters and scary movies. But for at least one woman, fear is unobtainable. And while she lives a normal life, her fearlessness is actually a handicap. The researchers who study her keep her closely guarded, using the code-name "SM" when publishing papers about her brave brainpower. And until this year, she'd never been interviewed. On this week's episode of "Invisibilia," a new podcast from NPR, that changed.
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In Charge, and Sounding the Part
The New York Times: Science has not proved the trope that power changes everything. But it does suggest, at least, that it changes the vocal cords. As people gain authority, their voice quality changes, becoming steadier in pitch, more varied in volume and less strained. Power sounds distinctive, creating hierarchies measurable through waves of sound. That is the finding of research published last year in the journal Psychological Science, adding weight to the idea that a speaker’s power comes not just from words but also acoustics. Crucially, it’s not about being loud; just turning up the volume can actually be a sign of relative weakness.
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Notable & Quotable: What About Political Diversity?
The Wall Street Journal: Abstract: Psychologists have demonstrated the value of diversity—particularly diversity of viewpoints—for enhancing creativity, discovery, and problem solving. But one key type of viewpoint diversity is lacking in academic psychology in general and social psychology in particular: political diversity.
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Exploring Targeted Cognitive Training for Clinical Disorders
A series of articles examines how to help enhance current treatments for mental illnesses and spur the development of new intervention and prevention approaches.
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A circus of the senses
Aeon: Vladimir Nabokov once called his famed fictional creation Lolita ‘a little ghost in natural colours’. The natural colours he used to paint his ‘little ghost’ were especially vivid in part because of a neurological quirk that generated internal flashes of colour whenever letters of the alphabet appeared within his mind. In his memoir Speak Memory (1951), he described a few of them: ‘b has the tone called burnt sienna by painters, m is a fold of pink flannel, and today I have at last perfectly matched v with “Rose Quartz” in Maerz and Paul’s Dictionary of Color’.
