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Psst. I hear that gossip is not all bad.
When I was growing up, there was a woman in the neighborhood known as The Mayor. She was not a mayor in any official sense, and in fact held no political office. She was a busybody and a gossip, and she made it her mission to spread the word on other neighbors’ lives—who got a DUI last night, whose teenage daughter was pregnant, who got fired at the factory and whose car dealership was struggling. Her specialty was scandal mongering, but truth be told, she usually had her facts right. Gossips have a reputation for being trivial and petty and often meanspirited. But is it possible that such babbling serves some valuable social purpose?
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Q&A With Dieter Wolke
Dieter Wolke is a professor in the Department of Psychology and Division of Mental Health & Wellbeing at the University of Warwick, UK. His research focuses on social and emotional development, specifically school and sibling bullying. Below is a Q&A with Wolke on his recent study in Psychological Science, Impact of Bullying in Childhood on Adult Health, Wealth, Crime, and Social Outcomes. I found the gender differences between bully groups to be intriguing. Could you elaborate on those findings? Our paper is concerned with the relationship of childhood experience of bullying (victim, bully, bully-victim) and adult outcomes.
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The Family That Fights Together
The Wall Street Journal: It is a quandary every couple with children eventually faces: Should we fight in front of the kids? The answer is complicated. Child psychologists who study the issue tend to say yes—if parents can manage to argue in a healthy way. That means disagreeing respectfully and avoiding name-calling, insults, dredging up past infractions or storming off in anger, for starters. ... Even infants can be affected by angry disagreements—even when they're asleep.
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Losing Is the New Winning
The Atlantic: Now is the time for all good men to fail. Good women, too. Fail early and often, and don’t be shy about admitting it. Failing isn’t shameful; it’s not even failure. Such is the message of a growing body of self-help and leadership literature. “Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them?” asks the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, in which she argues that a willingness to court failure can be a precursor to growth. Dweck holds, persuasively, that successful people are not the ones who cultivate a veneer of perfection, but rather those who understand that failing is part of getting smarter and better.
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How Being Poor Makes You Poor
Pacific Standard: Why are the rich rich and the poor poor? It’s a question that gets asked a lot, and a question we should continue asking. Do the wealthy simply work harder and for longer hours? Are they more willing to take risks and make sacrifices, while the destitute tend to sleep in past 10:00 a.m. and splurge all their cash on Cool Ranch Doritos Tacos from Taco Bell? Or is it more circumstantial—meaning, are the haves forged in homes where education is valued and opportunity abundant, while the have nots come from generation after generation of just scraping by? According to the BBC, income inequality in the U.S.
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How do you get rid of that phobia? Watch someone else doing the very thing you’re terrified of
The Daily Mail: Researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden claim that dealing with it in this way could be more effective than facing your fears through personal experience. ‘Information about what is dangerous and safe in our environment is often transferred from other individuals through social forms of learning,’ said lead author Armita Golkar. ‘Our findings suggest that these social means of learning promote superior down-regulation of learned fear, as compared to the sole experiences of personal safety.’ Previous research has shown that other fears held by people in your social group could contribute to your own phobias.
