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What Makes Rituals Special? Join Us For A Google+ Conversation
NPR: Click play on the video player above to watch my Google+ conversation with Harvard behavioral scientist and Slate's Human Nature correspondent about the role of ritual in human life. All over the world, people employ rituals. For millions, it's as simple as making a cup of coffee the same way, every day. Books and movies are filled with characters who employ lucky charms and superstitions. And some works explore the , when ritual spills into obsession and . Surprisingly, though, there has been little effort to examine rituals quantitatively.
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Do Children Make Us Happy?
Pacific Standard: Several months ago, the novelist Zadie Smith wrote an essay for the New York Review of Books on joy, a complicated emotion that lies at the heart of parenting she argued. In the essay, Smith captured the paradox of parenting: Children, so-called “bundles of joy,” can make parents profoundly unhappy. “Occasionally, the child, too, is a pleasure,” she wrote, “though mostly she is a joy, which means in fact she gives us not much pleasure at all, but rather that strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight that I have come to recognize a joy, and now must find some way to live with daily.” Smith went on to write, “Sometimes joy multiplies itself dangerously.
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Oh, the humanity. Putting faces on social causes.
Back in the 1940s, the U.S. Forest Service began a public service campaign aimed at preventing forest fires. It featured Smokey Bear, a humanized caricature of a bear wearing blue jeans and a ranger’s hat. In a kind, gravelly voice, Smokey enlisted public support with slogans, his most famous being: “Remember—only you can prevent forest fires.” Smokey’s effort is considered one of the most enduring and effective advertising campaigns of all time. I know the ads worked for me as a boy. I grew up in a heavily wooded area, and became extremely cautious about matches and campfires as a result of Smokey’s message, as did all my friends.
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Why Wanting Expensive Things Makes Us So Much Happier Than Buying Them
The Atlantic: The idea that you can't buy happiness has been exposed as a myth, over and over. Richer countries are happier than poor countries. Richer people within richer countries are happier, too. The evidence is unequivocal: Money makes you happy. You just have to know what to do with it. So what should you do with it? Stop buying so much stuff, renowned psychologist Daniel Gilbert told me in an interview a few years ago, and try to spend more money on experiences. "We think that experiences can be fun but leave us with nothing to show for them," he said.
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So Damn Superior: Parsing Partisan Politics
The Huffington Post: A new Gallup poll shows that Americans' confidence in the Congress is at an all-time low. A measly 10 percent of citizens express confidence in lawmakers, and most say they have little or no confidence. That is the worst rating of any American institution -- including the military, HMOs and labor unions -- since this polling began in 1973. A lot of this disaffection has to do with the extreme partisanship that has seemingly paralyzed Capitol Hill. Today's is not the first political stalemate in American history, but it is certainly one of the most maddening.
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Failure to Replicate the Mehta and Zhu (2009) Color Effect
Mehta and Zhu (2009) reported several studies in Science on the effects of the colors red and blue over a series of cognitive tasks. Red was hypothesized to induce a state of avoidance motivation which would cause people to become more vigilant and risk-averse in a task. Blue was hypothesized to induce a state of approach motivation which would cause people to use more innovative or risky strategies. Studies appear in high-impact journals, like Science, often because they report novel or far-reaching effects. Such studies need to be replicated in order to determine whether the finding is reliable.
