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Reminder: Claims about millennials, and every other generation, are BS
You’ve probably heard that millennials (many of whom, by the way, are entering their mid-thirties) are self-obsessed, or obsessed with others, or coddled and conceited, or idealistic and energetic. Forget about it. It’s all bullshit. The idea that we can assign universal characteristics to generations is largely false; research published online last year and recently cited by Sanjay Srivastava, a University of Oregon psychologist, bolsters the case. In 2010, as media attention on millennials reached a fever pitch, psychologists Kali Trzesniewski and M. Brent Donnellan examined surveys of nearly 500,000 high school seniors between 1976 and 2006.
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People Like You More Than You Think, a New Study Suggests
You may not get a second chance at making a first impression — but a recent study suggests that you probably don’t need one anyway. The research, published in the journal Psychological Science, finds that people often underestimate how much another person likes them after they meet for the first time.
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NSF Announces New Policies to Protect Researchers From Harassment
The National Science Foundation has announced new efforts to combat harassment of members of the research community. Organizations that receive grants from NSF will be required to report findings of sexual harassment to NSF.
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Why It’s So Hard to Put ‘Future You’ Ahead of ‘Present You’
I have this awful, corny joke I trot out whenever I’m glossing over details for future plans with friends or brushing off something I don’t want to deal with: “That’s Future Tim’s problem. Let that chump deal with it.” Poor, poor Future Tim. Constantly set up for failure by that jerk Past Tim. As Present Tim — who, ahem, is always on top of things — I can say that Past Tim isn’t bad. He’s just wired that way. And I’m sure as you’re reading this, a few instances come to mind of when Past You has, quite inconsiderably, set up Future You for failure. Why do we do this to ourselves? What makes us act against our own self-interest, even when we are acutely aware we’re doing so?
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Why It’s So Hard to Put ‘Future You’ Ahead of ‘Present You’
I have this awful, corny joke I trot out whenever I’m glossing over details for future plans with friends or brushing off something I don’t want to deal with: “That’s Future Tim’s problem. Let that chump deal with it.” Poor, poor Future Tim. Constantly set up for failure by that jerk Past Tim. As Present Tim — who, ahem, is always on top of things — I can say that Past Tim isn’t bad. He’s just wired that way. And I’m sure as you’re reading this, a few instances come to mind of when Past You has, quite inconsiderably, set up Future You for failure. Why do we do this to ourselves? What makes us act against our own self-interest, even when we are acutely aware we’re doing so?
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The invisible people are shouting ‘We’re here! We’re corporeal! Get used to it!’
Several years ago, a pair of college-age women took turns walking on a well-traveled path across the campus of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. Upon encountering another pedestrian, the women did one of three things: met that person’s eyes; met that person’s eyes and smiled; or looked toward their eyes but past them — “looking at them as if they were air,” in the words of Eric D. Wesselmann. Wesselmann is a psychology professor, now at Illinois State University. The experiment that he and his colleagues conducted was created to study feelings of connection and exclusion.
