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What Makes People Look Like Their Pets?
Slate: If ever you overhear someone comparing you to a dog, chances are it’s not a compliment. Yes, there’s the famous loyalty of dogs, their unbridled enthusiasm for life, their boundless love and devotion, their fierce protectiveness—qualities that any of us would be lucky to possess at even a modicum of their standard manifestation in the canine. Typically, though, it’s meant as a slight and a reference to some especially animalistic aspect of our four-legged friends. As much as we might quibble over the virtues and vices of Canis domesticus, however, and over whether human nature is any better or worse than dog nature, even dog fanciers don’t usually want to look like a dog.
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Group Identity Emphasized More by Those Who Just Make the Cut
People and institutions who are marginal members of a high-status or well-esteemed group tend to emphasize their group membership more than those who are squarely entrenched members of the group, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Research has long shown that people prefer to be in groups that are thought to have higher status or cultural value as a way of boosting self-image and projecting an impressive image to others.
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Steven Pinker: 10 ‘grammar rules’ it’s OK to break (sometimes)
The Guardian: Among the many challenges of writing is dealing with rules of correct usage: whether to worry about split infinitives, fused participles, and the meanings of words such as "fortuitous", "decimate" and "comprise". Supposedly a writer has to choose between two radically different approaches to these rules. Prescriptivists prescribe how language ought to be used. They uphold standards of excellence and a respect for the best of our civilisation, and are a bulwark against relativism, vulgar populism and the dumbing down of literate culture. Descriptivists describe how language actually is used.
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Thinking Like A Scientist Can Help Overcome Allure Of Appearances
NPR: Not long ago, Caren Walker, a PhD student at the University of California at Berkeley, was hiking in Tilden Park with her brother Michael when they came upon what looked like wild carrots. "Yum, yum, yum!" exclaimed Michael (with perhaps greater eloquence, but no less enthusiasm). "These will make a tasty soup!" Hours later at the hospital, drinking a thick black tar to prevent the effects of what turned out to be poison hemlock, Caren wished she'd heeded her initial skepticism about the wisdom of cooking up the colorful roots. "Silly brother," she could have said, but didn't, "don't you know that appearances can be deceiving?" Read the whole story: NPR
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What Makes a Family of Artists
The New Yorker: The debate over the nature of creativity is an old one: Is creative talent, be it novelistic, musical, or artistic, something that you’re born with, or is it something that anyone, with practice and dedication, can acquire? Anecdotally, the first option presents a strong case. The Waugh family produced three generations of novelists: Arthur, then Alec and Evelyn, then Auberon (Evelyn’s son). From the affair between H. G. Wells and Rebecca West came the novelist Anthony West.
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For Managers, Upholding Fairness Comes at a Cost
The French novelist Victor Hugo wrote that “being good is easy, what is difficult is being just.” A recent study on fairness in the workplace may lend support to his claim. Although fairness is typically heralded as something good, psychological scientists Russell E. Johnson (Michigan State University), Klodiana Lanaj (University of Florida), and Christopher M. Barnes (University of Washington) found that for those charged with enforcing it, workplace justice may actually come at a cost. Abiding by rules and procedures has been shown to drain mental resources, leading the researchers to hypothesize that enforcing the rules could also be mentally draining.
