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Anticipation: The Psychology of Waiting in Line
We all spend a lot of time waiting in lines—way more than we’d like. We wait for motor vehicle registration, for tables at popular restaurants, for Black Friday sales, groceries—and of course, we wait on hold for the cable company. It’s fair to say that most of this waiting is tedious and unpleasant. But what if we’re waiting for something new and exciting—a new curved-screen TV or that vacation to Tulum? Doesn’t waiting for new purchases become a positive experience, where we actually savor the anticipation so much that it trumps our impatience?
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The Hidden Rules of Bigotry
Who is good? And who is better? We make these value judgments all the time, and for good reason, about individuals. But most of us have been taught not to make such judgments about groups of people. Equality is a core principle of American society, and it’s unjust—or at least politically incorrect—to subscribe to social hierarchies. But such explicit hierarchies have played a powerful role in American history, and many believe that they still do—in a more subterranean fashion. Indeed, some psychological scientists suspect that rules of superiority and inferiority are still alive and well in the American psyche, shaping our judgments of race and religion and even age in subtle ways.
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Insecurity at the Borderline
Republican Senator Thad Cochran, who has represented Mississippi since 1978, this week used a clever psychological strategy to fend off a primary challenge from the right wing of the party. “The Tea Party,” he confessed on a final campaign swing, “is something I don’t really know a lot about.” Nobody believes that. Cochran hasn’t been living in a cave. What he was doing, very effectively, was marginalizing his Tea Party rival, playing on the insecurities of a GOP “fringe” faction within the party’s establishment. And his opponent took the bait, reacting with hostility toward the powerful incumbent and behaving ungraciously in defeat.
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Virtuous Rhythms: Night Owls and Early Birds
I have been an early bird for as long as I can remember. Even in college and grad school, when circumstances more or less forced me to be a night owl—even then I secretly preferred being awake and alert as the morning dawned. You genuine night owls really don’t want to know what time I’m up and about these days. Psychological scientists are very interested in “chronotypes”—a jargony label for early birds and night owls. These preferences, or biological propensities, have important consequences, affecting school performance, work life choices, friendships, even romance.
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Redskin Psychology: The Origins of Cruel Caricature
On prime time TV this week, during halftime of the NBA playoff game, the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation of California ran a paid advertisement to protest cultural stereotyping of Native Americans. The 2-minute clip was a series of images, each associated with a spoken word: soldier, doctor, spiritualist, son, daughter, patriot, rancher, struggling, resilient, Sioux, Pueblo, Apache, Blackfoot, and more. The video ended with these words: “Native Americans call themselves many things. The one they don’t . . .” This sentence ended as the final image occupied the screen: the logo of the Washington Redskins.
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Wrapping a Present for the Future
I am the family documentarian, and have been since I got my first box camera back in childhood. As long as I can remember, I have taken snapshots, not just of birthdays and weddings and 4th of July picnics but also of siblings brushing their teeth and kids wrestling and grandparents cooking dinner. Really mundane stuff. I also write anecdotes and fragments of family memoir because . . . well, I don’t really know why. I just do. I’m not alone in this. And now, of course, everyone carries a camera and everyone is connected through social media, so our lives are more documented than ever before. Is this a good thing, or not?
