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A cure for Wall Street corruption? Science says thinking about time strengthens morality
National Monitor: Wall Street bankers, or really anyone whose job involves working in finance, has gotten a bad rap since the 2008 financial meltdown. It’s no surprise, because priming people to think about money makes them more likely to cheat and act dishonestly. Well, science may have found a “cure,” of sorts: According to new research published in Psychological Science, prompting people to think about time (which, depending on whom you ask, is either the exact same or total opposite of money) appears to strengthen their moral compass.
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The Ticking Clock
You’re sitting at your computer in the middle of a busy work day, merrily tapping away at your keyboard, when all of a sudden you look up at your clock, and panic strikes. That meeting you should have been in started 10 minutes ago! As you rush to join your colleagues you may wonder, What does my tardiness say about me as an employee? Will my colleagues think less of me? I hope I’m not the only one who’s late. So what does meeting lateness actually say about us as employees? Unfortunately, little research has specifically examined the definition, correlates, and implications of meeting lateness.
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Super Rare Items Are Most Likely to Be Missed
Various jobs in security, medicine, and other fields require employees to pick out a target item in the midst of lots of distracting information. To complicate matters, the targets that are are most important to find – say, a weapon or a malignant tumor – are also incredibly rare. So, how are we at picking out these kinds of ultra-rare targets? Not very good at all, according to new research from Stephen Mitroff and Adam Biggs of Duke University. The researchers took advantage of anonymous data provided by an app called “Airport Scanner,” developed by Kedlin Co.
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Why Your Name Matters
The New Yorker: In 1948, two professors at Harvard University published a study of thirty-three hundred men who had recently graduated, looking at whether their names had any bearing on their academic performance. The men with unusual names, the study found, were more likely to have flunked out or to have exhibited symptoms of psychological neurosis than those with more common names. The Mikes were doing just fine, but the Berriens were having trouble. A rare name, the professors surmised, had a negative psychological effect on its bearer. ... That view, however, may not withstand closer scrutiny.
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Meditation May Help Us Cut Our Losses
There are certain things that are notoriously hard for us to do: Leaving the theater halfway through a terrible movie, deciding to quit a craft project that doesn't look like it ought to, pushing away a less-than-exciting home-cooked meal. We have a hard time doing these things thanks to what researchers call the “sunk cost” bias: We feel compelled to continue with something just because we've already invested money, time, and/or effort into it. In these cases, we aren't rewarded for our perseverance -- the movie will still be bad, the craft project will still be sad-looking, and the food will still taste bland.
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‘Affluenza’: Is it real?
CNN: Attorneys for Texas teen Ethan Couch claimed that his "affluenza" meant he was blameless for driving drunk and causing a crash that left four people dead in June. Judge Jean Boyd sentenced him Tuesday to 10 years of probation but no jail time, saying she would work to find him a long-term treatment facility. ... But the term highlights the issue of parents, particularly upper-middle-class ones, who not only refuse to discipline their children but may protest the efforts of others -- school officials, law enforcement and the courts -- who attempt to do so, said Suniya Luthar, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University.
