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Can Having a Foreign Accent Hurt Your Career?
English is increasingly considered to be the global language of business. But people who speak it as a second language are generally passed over for top managerial jobs and executive positions, studies have shown. New psychological research reveals the factors underlying this glass ceiling. A trio of researchers led by Laura Huang, assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, hypothesized that non-native speakers of English are perceived as having weak political skills — which is considered essential for career success.
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How to Keep Your Resolutions
The New York Times: IT’S that time of year again. Maybe it’s your waistline you’re worried about, or maybe it’s the smoking habit you just can’t seem to kick. To improve your chances of keeping your New Year’s resolutions, we offer four tips inspired by recent research on behavioral economics and health. We focus on health, but our suggestions should help with other goals, too. First, make a concrete plan. When you do so, you both embed your intentions firmly in memory (which reduces forgetting) and make it harder to postpone good behavior, since doing so requires breaking an explicit commitment to yourself.
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Want to Stop Arguing and Change Spouse’s Behavior? Start With Mirror
The Wall Street Journal: Ever want to change something about your partner? Get him or her to eat better or work less? Exercise more? Stop nagging or yelling? Start with a mirror. Your best chance of transforming someone else—and the dynamic in your relationship—is to demonstrate your willingness to alter your own actions, experts say. The good news, this kind of change isn't as hard as you think. Studies show that when a person is motivated to be in a relationship and wants it to work, he or she will readily change to be more like their partner. Often, they don't even know they are adjusting their own behavior.
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Hyping Artificial Intelligence, Yet Again
The New Yorker: According to the Times, true artificial intelligence is just around the corner. A year ago, the paper ran a front-page story about the wonders of new technologies, including deep learning, a neurally-inspired A.I. technique for statistical analysis. Then, among others, came an article about how I.B.M.’s Watson had been repurposed into a chef, followed by an upbeat post about quantum computation. On Sunday, the paper ran a front-page story about “biologically inspired processors,” “brainlike computers” that learn from experience.
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Lavishing Kids With Praise Can Make Them Feel Worse About Themselves
The Atlantic: "Hollywood dishes out too much praise for small things," the great actor Jimmy Stewart once said. "I won't let it get me, but too much praise can turn a fellow's head if he doesn't watch his step." He was talking about the sick power compliments can have on a person's ego: You hear enough times that you're awesome and you start to believe that you're the awesomest. And then you become insufferable. A new set of studies shows that for kids, high praise can have the opposite effect on self-esteem: It can actually make some children feel worse about themselves.
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Religious Infusion Predicts Intergroup Conflict Around the World
For many people, religion is deeply ingrained in their day-to-day existence. It supports their faith and spirituality, and it provides friendship and a sense of community. But religion can also contribute to conflict, as in the Central African Republic, where Muslim and Christian groups are currently enmeshed in a violent struggle for power. Psychological scientist Steven Neuberg of Arizona State University and colleagues wanted to examine what effect religious infusion — the degree to which religion influences the everyday lives of groups and their individual members — might have on intergroup conflict. Their findings are published in the January 2014 issue of Psychological Science.
