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The Limits of Practice
The New York Times: I started playing the French horn in sixth grade. I was a rule follower, and so I practiced regularly, in addition to performing at concerts and parades and all the other glamorous events to which a teenage French horn player is routinely invited. And yet, six years later, I was only marginally less terrible than when I began. Those who, like me, have failed to become proficient at something despite working at it for a long time can take heart from a new paper in the journal Psychological Science. Brooke N. Macnamara and her co-authors analyzed 88 studies of the impact of practice on people’s prowess in such areas as music, sports and professional jobs.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Moral Ties That Bind . . . Even to Out-Groups: The Interactive Effect of Moral Identity and the Binding Moral Foundations Isaac H. Smith, Karl Aquino, Spassena Koleva, and Jesse Graham Moral foundations can bind a group together, but in doing so they can also promote out-group hostility. To examine whether the adoption of binding moral foundations unavoidably leads to out-group hostility, the authors asked participants to rate the extent to which they believed torture was a justifiable technique for interrogating suspected terrorists.
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We dislike being alone with our thoughts
Nature: Which would you prefer: pain or boredom? Given the choice, many people would rather give themselves mild electric shocks than sit idly in a room for 15 minutes, according to a study published today in Science. The results are a testament to our discomfort with our own thoughts, say psychologists, and to the challenge we face when we try to rein them in. “We lack a comfort in just being alone with our thoughts,” says Malia Mason, a psychologist at Columbia University in New York, who was not involved in the study.
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You Look More Powerful When You Avoid Talking Details, Study Shows
People may see you as powerful based not only on your job title or your income, but on the very words you use in conversation and speeches. That’s the conclusion from a new study on how power is signaled in interpersonal communications. Building on studies showing that people in positions of power use more abstract language (such as interpretive or visionary descriptions) than those with less clout, a trio of psychological researchers explored how people who use abstract language are perceived by others. Over seven experiments, Cheryl J. Wakslak and Albert Han of University of Southern California and Pamela K.
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DID FACEBOOK HURT PEOPLE’S FEELINGS?
The New Yorker: It’s no secret that social media can affect your mood, making you experience certain feelings based on the information you see and the people you interact with. Those feelings are one of the reasons that people use sites like Facebook or Twitter to begin with. But what if you found out that what you felt was the result of a deliberate manipulation by the social network itself?
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How to Get Over Stage Fright, Jenny Slate Style
New York Magazine: What if you suddenly became intensely afraid of some integral part of your own career? In a recent interview with Fresh Air about her new film Obvious Child, Jenny Slate talked about her sudden-onset stage fright, a potentially career-killing phobia for a stand-up comic and actress. She says her fear, which took hold after she accidentally swore on Saturday Night Live and was subsequently dismissed from the show, lasted two long years.
