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Patients’ Health Motivates Workers To Wash Their Hands
Can changing a single word on a sign motivate doctors and nurses to wash their hands? Campaigns about hand-washing in hospitals usually try to scare doctors and nurses about personal illness, says Adam Grant, a psychological scientist at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. “Most safety messages are about personal consequences,” Grant says. “They tell you to wash your hands so you don’t get sick.” But his new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that this is the wrong kind of warning. Hand-washing is an eternal problem for hospitals.
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What Determines A Company’s Performance? The Shape Of The CEO’s Face!
Believe it or not, one thing that predicts how well a CEO’s company performs is - the width of his face! CEOs with wider faces, like Herb Kelleher, the former CEO of Southwest Airlines, have better-performing companies than CEOs like Dick Fuld, the long-faced final CEO of Lehman Brothers. That’s the conclusion of a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Elaine M. Wong at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her colleagues study how top management teams work. But they have to do it in indirect ways.
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In Remembrance of William K. Estes
National Medal of Science recipient William K. Estes passed away on August 17th at the age of 92. His long and productive career encompassed the science of learning and memory from behaviorism to cognitive science, with seminal contributions to both. He was also an active member of APS and was the founding editor of the journal Psychological Science. Estes (born June 17, 1919) began his graduate studies under the tutelage of B. F. Skinner during the early 1940s. Together, Estes and Skinner developed a conditioning paradigm, called conditioned suppression, which represented a new technique for studying learned fear (Estes & Skinner, 1941).
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50th Anniversary of Stanley Milgram’s Obedience Experiments
Stories of torture, corporate greed, fraud, and misconduct are regular features of daily news coverage. For years, psychological scientists have tried to understand why ordinary and decent people are driven to commit such atrocious acts. Much of what we know on this topic can be traced to the work of one man: Stanley Milgram. Fifty years ago, Milgram, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University, began a famous and controversial series of experiments to test the boundaries of people’s obedience to authority and determine how far normal people would go in inflicting pain on others just because they were told to.
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How Do I Remember That I Know You Know That I Know?
“I’ll meet you at the place near the thing where we went that time,” says the character Aaron in the 1987 movie Broadcast News. He and the woman he’s talking to have a lot of common ground, the shared territory that makes conversations work.
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Economic Inequality Is Linked To Biased Self-Perception
Pretty much everybody thinks they’re better than average. But in some cultures, people are more self-aggrandizing than in others. Until now, national differences in “self-enhancement” have been chalked up to an East-West individualism-versus-collectivism divide. In the West, where people value independence, personal success, and uniqueness, psychologists have said, self-inflation is more rampant. In the East, where interdependence, harmony, and belonging are valued, modesty prevails. Now an analysis of data gathered from 1,625 people in 15 culturally diverse countries finds a stronger predictor of self-enhancement: economic inequality.
