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They Fill a Tribal Need
The New York Times: In this era of mobility in professional sports, fans can sometimes feel like they are rooting for the color of the uniforms rather than the players that wear them. This is a complicated world with serious problems -- unemployment, gross economic inequality, violence raging across Syria and Ukraine -- and so it can feel silly and frivolous to get so wrapped up in sports rivalries. But, taking part in rivalries has some real psychological benefits. First, we all have a need to affiliate with other people. We are wired to be part of a group and to treat our group members (our ingroup) as privileged over everyone else.
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Kids Have an Instinct for Algebra—If They’re Taught Correctly
Motherboard: Given the fact that computers do all our computing for us now, I suspected that people would’ve given up trying to teach kids math. But as it turns out you can’t turn everything over to an engineer-bot yet, as building and programming robots turns out to require quite a bit of mathematics. And two studies this week have uncovered that, taught correctly, children seem to have a predilection for algebra. Researchers at Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts and Sciences found that preschoolers and kindergarteners could also do basic algebra, solving for a hidden variable that was hidden in either a stuffed gator or cheetah’s cup.
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Evolution Is Coming To A Storybook Near You
NPR: Young children are notorious for their surfeit of why questions, often directed at aspects of the biological world. Take a three-year-old to the zoo, for example, and you might be asked to explain why zebras have stripes, why elephants have trunks and why flamingos have such skinny legs. (Also: why you can't pet the lion, why another cookie is off limits and why it's really, really time to go home.) Yet this childhood curiosity about the adaptive traits of biological organisms, which Rudyard Kipling recognized with his whimsical "Just So Stories," is all but ignored by current education standards in the United States.
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Cheating is a Good Thing (Sometimes)
TIME: Want to compose a great symphony, write a classic novel, come up with a brilliant new app? Cheat on your taxes first—or on your spouse, or on your poker buddies. It’s easy—and fun, too. That’s the unsettling implication of a new study released by the Association for Psychological Science and conducted by business professors at Harvard University and the University of Southern California. The investigators recruited a sample group of volunteers and had them complete a math puzzle in which multiple columns of figures were added in multiple ways. The subjects were told they would be paid for each correct answer and, incidentally, that they’d be grading themselves.
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Can an Atheist Be in Awe of the Universe?
Scientific American Mind: A partial answer may be found in a 2013 study by psychologists Piercarlo Valdesolo of Claremont McKenna College and Jesse Graham of the University of Southern California, published in the journal Psychological Science. Research had shown that “awe” is associated with “perceived vastness” (like the night sky or an open ocean) and that “awe-prone” individuals tend to be more comfortable with uncertainty and are less likely to need cognitive closure in some kind of explanation. They “are more comfortable revising existing mental schemas to assimilate novel information,” the authors said in their paper.
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Hire like Google? For most companies, that’s a bad idea.
Los Angeles Times: Laszlo Bock, the head of human resources at Google, made quite a splash with his announcement last year that the technology firm has changed the way it hires people. Gone are the brainteaser-style interview questions that so many candidates abhorred. But also gone, it would seem, is any concern with discovering how smart applicants really are. "GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless.... We found that they don't predict anything," Bock told the New York Times.
