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Why Are We Still on Facebook?
The New Yorker: I joined Facebook fifteen days after it launched, becoming the five-thousand-two-hundred-and-fifty-eighth user. I remember the early Facebook well. Back then, it was still called thefacebook.com, and you had to have a Harvard e-mail address to join. You could browse profiles. You could request friendships. You could “poke” people. But you couldn’t do much of anything else. At the time, Facebook event invitations hadn’t yet been invented. Still, students browsed profiles to determine whom they wanted at their dorm-room bashes. One evening, one of my old college roommates was invited to a party by someone she had never met; he’d liked her profile picture.
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Go ahead and gossip. It’s good for society.
The Washington Post: An experiment to study the nature of gossip and ostracism suggests both serve important roles in society: reforming bullies and encouraging cooperation. “Groups that allow their members to gossip,” says Matthew Feinberg, a Stanford University postdoctoral researcher, “sustain cooperation and deter selfishness better than those that don’t. And groups do even better if they can gossip and ostracize untrustworthy members.
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Virtual Avatars May Impact Real-World Behavior
How you represent yourself in the virtual world of video games may affect how you behave toward others in the real world, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Our results indicate that just five minutes of role-play in virtual environments as either a hero or villain can easily cause people to reward or punish anonymous strangers,” says lead researcher Gunwoo Yoon of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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Mental Health On The Go
Journalist Scott Stossel was so anxious at his own wedding that he had to hold on to his new bride in order to steady himself at the altar. His clothes were by then soaked through by torrential sweat. At the birth of his first child, with his wife in the throes of labor, the nurses had to turn their attention to the expectant father, who had gone pale and keeled over. He has also had breakdowns in the middle of job interviews, dates and plane flights. Even ordinary activities like talking on the phone can trigger pervasive dread, accompanied by nausea, shaking, and vertigo.
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Russia at home
The Economist: Despite the scandals, Sochi’s winter Olympics will open on Friday amid pomp and ceremony. Athletes from a record 88 countries (including Zimbabwe, Togo and Morocco for the first time) will compete for 98 medals in 15 different sporting disciplines. Views differ over whether Norway, America or Germany will come out at the top of the medals table—but Russia may still have a trick up its sleeve as the host nation. A new study, just published in Current Directions in Psychological Science by Mark S. Allen from London South Bank University and Marc V. Jones from Staffordshire University, reviews research into the advantages of the home team in athletic competitions.
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How to Get More Early Bloomers
The New York Times: WHEN New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, went to Albany earlier this week to talk about his program for universal preschool, the discussion reportedly focused on funding, not on whether or how preschool would actually help children. President Obama seemed equally confident when he introduced his plan for universal preschool last year, flatly stating, “We know this works.” But the state of research is actually much murkier. And unless policy makers begin to design preschool programs in ways that can be evaluated later, the situation won’t get any clearer. ...
