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Your Friends Are More Important Than You Think
Yahoo: On May 14, 1998, my life changed quite substantially: "Seinfeld" ended. At that time, I felt like I lost some of my closest friends. In fact, until I discovered that I could watch an unlimited amount of re-runs, I felt like I was missing a part of myself. Maybe you've felt this way about a TV show-perhaps the recent ending of "The Office" has spurred these feelings. More seriously, I am sure you've felt this sense of emptiness when a friend has moved or when someone has passed away or even after a breakup. ... Indeed, psychological science has known for quite some time that we define ourselves-that is, we come to know who we are as a person-through our closest relationships.
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Le métro parisien rend-il honnête? (Does the Paris Metro make you honest?)
Slate: Et si l’honnêteté était une question de place? C'est la question que pose une récente étude publiée dans la revue Psychological Science. Selon les chercheurs à l'origine de l'étude, un environnement physique étendu et large (un siège auto plus large, un bureau plus grand) pourrait favoriser les comportements malhonnêtes, rapporte Quartz.
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The Happiness of Pursuit
TIME: If you’re an American and you’re not having fun, it just might be your own fault. Our long national expedition is entering its 238th year, and from the start, it was clear that this would be a bracing place to live. There would be plenty of food, plenty of land, plenty of minerals in the mountains and timber in the wilderness. You might have to work hard, but you’d have a grand time doing it. That promise, for the most part, has been kept. There would be land rushes and gold rushes and wagon trains and riverboats and cities built hard against cities until there was no place to build but up, so we went in that direction too.
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Why Brainteasers Don’t Belong in Job Interviews
The New Yorker: Imagine that you are the captain of a pirate ship. You’ve captured some booty, and you need to divide it among your crew. But first the crew will vote on your plan. If you have the support of fewer than half of them, you will die. How do you propose to divide the gold, so that you still have some for yourself—but live to tell the tale? ... This phenomenon is broadly known as “thin-slice” judgment. As early as 1937, Gordon Allport, a pioneer of personality psychology, argued that we constantly form sweeping opinions of others based on incredibly limited information and exposure.
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Emotional Cues Alter Perceptions of Time and Number
Emotionally charged information dilates our perception of time and interferes with our numerical intuition, though it does so in different ways. Previous findings on how we process time and numbers have been mixed -- some studies propose a common mechanism, while others suggest that the two domains are distinct. Psychological scientists Laura Young and Sara Cordes of Boston College sought to further investigate this issue by having 38 participants observe emotionally charged stimuli -- in this case, angry, happy, or neutral faces -- and then estimate either the number of dots that appeared or the amount of time that an oval was shown on a screen.
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From the Mouths of Babes and Birds
The New York Times: Babies learn to speak months after they begin to understand language. As they are learning to talk, they babble, repeating the same syllable (“da-da-da”) or combining syllables into a string (“da-do-da-do”). But when babies babble, what are they actually doing? And why does it take them so long to begin speaking? Insights into these mysteries of human language acquisition are now coming from a surprising source: songbirds.
