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Overdosing on Incentives
Stock options, gift certificates, and lump sums of cash are the tools of choice that employers use to motivate staff to strive for success. It’s widely assumed that the promise of a monetary bonus improves a worker’s drive, concentration, and performance. But a new study shows that these motivational rewards may have the opposite effect on some people. In these individuals, the potential for a bonus can send the brain’s reward centers into overdrive and interfere with their ability to process information, a team of American and European researchers has concluded. The chemical in question is dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays a variety of roles in the brain.
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A History of Humans Loving Inanimate Objects
Pacific Standard: Around mid-February, someone on Reddit posted a meme that declared the following: “Sometimes, when I grab a cup from my cabinet, I will grab one that’s in the back and never gets used because I think the cup feels depressed that it isn’t fulfilling it’s life of holding liquids.” The sentiment proved popular. “I used to work at a toy store and if anyone ever bought a stuffed animal I would leave its head sticking out of the bag.. so it could breathe,” commented one Redditor. “I actually cried when we switched microwaves when i was a kid. I felt like we should have given it a proper burial or something,” wrote another.
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The Powerlessness of Positive Thinking
The New Yorker: Since publishing “The Secret,” in 2006, the Australian author Rhonda Byrne has been writing self-help manifestos based on the idea that people who think positive thoughts are rewarded with happiness, wealth, influence, wisdom, and success. In November, 2013, she published “Hero,” the fourth book in the series. The book showcases the wisdom of twelve heroes—businesspeople, sports stars, writers, and philanthropists. Byrne’s idea isn’t new—it’s been a mainstay among greeting-card companies, motivational speakers, and school teachers for decades—but she’s become one of its most visible prophets. “The way to change a lack of belief is very simple,” Byrne writes.
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Why You Can’t Keep a Secret
The Atlantic: Though his 18-year-old patient Ida Bauer was “in the first bloom of youth,” Sigmund Freud wrote in 1905, she had come to him suffering from coughing fits and episodes of speechlessness. She’d become depressed and withdrawn, even hinting at suicide. During one session, as he tried to help her uncover the source of her sickness, Freud observed Bauer toying with a small handbag. Interpreting the act as an expression of repressed desire, Freud concluded, “No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” Read the whole story: The Atlantic
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Money, Sleep and Love: What Makes a Happy Parent?
LiveScience: Who is happier: Parents or non-parents? It's a conundrum that burns hot in the cultural discourse. Are parents made miserable by dirty diapers, long sleepless nights and needy kiddos? Or are they on cloud nine, because of the love and meaning their offspring bring to their lives? Or is it perhaps some mix of the two, as journalist Jennifer Senior argues in the new and much-buzzed-about "All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood" (Ecco, 2014)? Wrong questions. ... Beyond demographics, parental happiness may be linked to the goals parents have when caring for their children children.
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The Future Of The (Scared, White) GOP
When President Obama defeated Mitt Romney in 2012, handily winning a second term, he did so with only 39 percent of white voters. White men made up only a quarter of his votes. Even staunch Republicans had to take notice of these stark demographics. Some questioned the longtime GOP strategy of appealing to white voters, and others went so far as to question the party’s future. Have white voters, and the Republican Party itself, become irrelevant in the nation’s shifting 21st century political landscape? The 2012 election, according to sociologist Michael Kimmel, merely crystallized a much larger cultural and economic shift already taking place in the country.
