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Little Boxes of Decision Avoidance
The New Yorker: Life would be easier if everything you needed were sent to you in a box. A few months ago, I subscribed to Quinciple, a service that sends me a box of groceries once a week, which I pick up at a store a few blocks from my apartment. It saves me a little time and maybe a little money—but, mostly, it spares me from the so-called paradox of choice, or the paralysis that comes with having too many options while shopping. I have wasted hours of my life reading the fine print on cereal boxes, lipstick boxes, and sneaker boxes. I am forever looking for a reason to choose one loaf of bread or one brand of shampoo over countless others.
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Big Seat, Bad Behavior
If you’ve stacked up a lot of speeding tickets or parking fines in the last several months, you might consider how the size and interior of your vehicle is contributing to the points on your driver’s license. Research has shown how our posture can significantly affect our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. And a study published last year showed that these postures can affect our conduct behind the wheel. The study, led by behavioral researcher Andy J. Yap of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, involved a series of experiments and revealed that open postures boost our feelings of power, and those feelings can cause us to act dishonestly.
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Science Says There’s No Such Thing as ‘Comfort Food’. We All Beg to Differ
The Guardian: Most of us know this intuitively – that comfort and junk foods are subtly distinct. The former is an emotional as well as a nutritional unit, and the latter is merely a sugar rush. Besides which, no cookbook would dare put the word "junk" in its title, but whole shelves are devoted to the art of the comfort food. If, after a hard day, you make yourself mashed potatoes with gravy, or mac and cheese with brown sauce, or scrambled eggs with the consistency of an Ultimate Frisbee, it is probably because someone once made it for you exactly that way.
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What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades
The New York Times: Does handwriting matter? Not very much, according to many educators. The Common Core standards, which have been adopted in most states, call for teaching legible writing, but only in kindergarten and first grade. After that, the emphasis quickly shifts to proficiency on the keyboard. But psychologists and neuroscientists say it is far too soon to declare handwriting a relic of the past. New evidence suggests that the links between handwriting and broader educational development run deep. Read the whole story: The New York Times
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The Future Is Long, For the Healthy, Wealthy and Wise
I have a 65-year-old friend who is planning on retiring soon, and he is also planning on being dead by age 80. That’s his financial plan. He has enough money in savings to finance 15 golden years in some comfort, and he is wagering on the fact that men in his family are not long-lived. That’s one kind of financial planning, but what if he’s wrong? Paradoxically, this friend is healthy and fit, and works hard to stay that way. So maybe he will defy the longevity statistics and live a long—and destitute—life. The fact is, retirement planning is a riddle, and millions of Baby Boomers are learning that they simply don’t have enough information to make sound decisions.
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Surnames Not Linked to Career Status After All
Last fall, we reported on a study indicating that people with noble-sounding last names had a slightly heightened chance of working in management positions. But after conducting further analysis, the researchers behind that study have changed their conclusions. In the original study, published in November in the journal Psychological Science, Raphael Silberzahn of the University of Cambridge and Eric Luis Uhlmann of HEC Paris analyzed 84 different surnames among nearly 223,000 private-sector employees and managers in Germany.
