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Science Community Urges Action to Support Ukrainian Scientists
The letter identifies actions the government can take to better assist the thousands of students, researchers, and their families fleeing the country.
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2022 Spence Awards Mini Episode: Antonia Kaczkurkin on How We Internalize Disorders
Under the Cortex talks with 2022 Spence Award winner Antonia Kaczkurkin.
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Cowboy Culture Doesn’t Have a Monopoly on Innovation
What does culture have to do with creativity? The answer could be “a lot.” For decades, psychologists trying to understand the roots of creative imaginations have looked at the way two kinds of cultures affect artistic and inventive efforts. Individualistic (sometimes called “cowboy”) cultures encourage people to be unique and to prioritize their own interests, even if doing so costs the group overall. Collectivistic cultures are based on relationships and duties to other people, often sacrificing the individual’s wants for the needs of close others or the community. Individualism has long been thought to have a creative edge.
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Constellations Across Cultures
New research, as discussed by Charles Kemp and published in the journal Psychological Science, reveals that our visual processing system may explain the striking commonality of constellations across cultures.
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Managing a Polarized Workforce
One of the most difficult challenges leaders of all organizations face is managing diverse perspectives. Much has been written on the benefits for teams and organizations of engaging with opposing views, fostering productive disagreement, and creating “teams of rivals.” Yet anyone who has been involved in such work knows that disagreements on strongly held opinions, often related to personal identity, are always tough and frequently destructive. That’s truer today than ever before, as topics from the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements to environmentalism and remote work have elevated both the need for thoughtful discussion and the desire to avoid it.
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How Did This Many Deaths Become Normal?
The united states reported more deaths from COVID-19 last Friday than deaths from Hurricane Katrina, more on any two recent weekdays than deaths during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, more last month than deaths from flu in a bad season, and more in two years than deaths from HIV during the four decades of the AIDS epidemic. At least 953,000 Americans have died from COVID, and the true toll is likely even higher because many deaths went uncounted. COVID is now the third leading cause of death in the U.S., after only heart disease and cancer, which are both catchall terms for many distinct diseases. The sheer scale of the tragedy strains the moral imagination.
