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How Not To Name Your Baby
NPR: Six weeks ago today, I gave birth to a baby girl. Like her older sister, she spent the first few days of life without a name. You see, my husband and I wanted to get our children's names just right, and that meant taking some time to consider the options and get a feel for how well they fit each new baby. But we also happen to be cognitive scientists of an evidence-based persuasion so, for us, it also meant gathering and analyzing some data. The first round of data collection was of the usual, informal sort, and it happened long before our first baby was due. We perused lists of baby names on websites, investigated name meanings and origins and looked up name frequencies over time.
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Jimmy Fallon Scores One for the Nice Guys
TIME: Last night, Jimmy Fallon took over the host chair on The Tonight Show. Judging from the early reviews — “brilliant” and “smashing success” were being thrown around — score one for the good guys. Is a man that GQ called “joyful, easy, breezy” simply a talented entertainer getting the chance to slow-jam the news on a big stage? Or is he a network bet that America is ready for some nice? Fallon’s affable goofiness — topical humor that pokes rather than cuts — seems to play well in a culture where nice can be risky. ... Research indicates there is a financial cost for being nice.
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Orphans’ Lonely Beginnings Reveal How Parents Shape A Child’s Brain
NPR: Parents do a lot more than make sure a child has food and shelter, researchers say. They play a critical role in brain development. More than a decade of research on children raised in institutions shows that "neglect is awful for the brain," says Charles Nelson, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital. Without someone who is a reliable source of attention, affection and stimulation, he says, "the wiring of the brain goes awry." The result can be long-term mental and emotional problems.
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Can You Boost Your Self-Control?
Fast Company: As far as examples of willpower go, one of the most impressive you'll ever find is the "incredible Buddha boy"chronicled in GQ a few years back by George Saunders. The boy had been meditating under a tree for seven months, evidently without food or water. It was a display of self-control so haunting that readers couldn't help but wonder how such a person could exist while the rest of us find it so hard--really, impossible--to rise from the couch and go to the gym, or read a book, or in some cases just reach the remote. The prevailing scientific wisdom says that people operate with a finite supply of self-control.
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Dishonesty Can Foster Creativity
Pacific Standard: Want to be more creative? As we have noted, there are many ways to achieve that laudable goal, ranging from dimming the lights to sitting at a disorderly desk. Or you could just lie and cheat. After Harvard Business School researcher Francesa Gino reported in 2011 that that highly creative people are more likely to engage in unethical activities, she began to wonder whether dishonesty could actually enhance creativity. Her latest paper suggests the answer is yes.
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People Are More Moral in the Morning
Scientific American Mind: Most of us strive to do the right thing when faced with difficult decisions. A new study suggests that our moral compass is more reliable when we face those decisions in the morning rather than later in the day. In a series of studies at Harvard University and at the University of Utah, 327 men and women participated in tasks designed to measure cheating or lying behavior either in the morning or in the afternoon. For instance, in one study the subjects attempted to solve math problems, some of which were impossible, knowing they would be paid five cents for every solved problem.
