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The Year of Practical Thinking
A new year, with its blank calendar pages, usually engenders widespread optimism, a feeling that this time around, things will be different. But this January comes with heavy baggage. After nearly two years of uncertainty, struggle, and loss due to the coronavirus pandemic, the future has many of us feeling more apprehensive than excited. Humans tend to view big temporal changes as moments of renewal and potential, according to Katy Milkman, a behavioral economist at the University of Pennsylvania. “We group life into chapters,” she told me, underscoring the idea that people commonly see themselves as characters in their own book.
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Neuroscience Says There’s No Such Thing as Free Will. A Psychologist Explains Why That Might Not Be True
The question of free will is still hotly debated. On the one hand, we clearly experience ourselves as able to make choices and freely act on them. If you fancy some crisps, you can choose to walk into a shop, buy a packet and eat them. Or you can choose to eat a pastry, a salad, or nothing at all. This certainly feels like free will. On the other hand, neuroscience evidence clearly shows that the brain usually initiates our actions before we’re aware of them. Here’s what I mean. Your brain’s primary task is to regulate the systems of your body to keep you alive and well.
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Sweden Sets Up Psychological Defense Agency to Fight Fake News, Foreign Interference
Sweden is launching a new agency to defend against a rising threat: disinformation — organized campaigns to spread false information. The Scandinavian country, home to about 10 million people, established the Swedish Psychological Defense Agency on Jan. 1, in a bid to safeguard its “democratic society” and “the free formation of opinion,” the agency said on its website. As the country heads into elections this year, the agency will work alongside the Swedish military and government on the new battleground of fake news and misinformation.
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The Myth of Tribalism
By now, even people who differ on nearly all issues seem to agree on at least one thing: American politics has become riven by tribal conflict. Tucker Carlson claims that “schools are creating tribalism in our kids.” Former President Barack Obama has warned that we risk “turning away from democratic principles in favor of tribalism and ‘might makes right.’” As the journalist George Packer, now of The Atlantic, once summarized the problem, “American politics today requires a word as primal as ‘tribe’ to get at the blind allegiances and huge passions of partisan affiliation. Tribes demand loyalty, and in return they confer the security of belonging.
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The Cost of Engaging With the Miserable
Every morning, I wake up and grab my doom machine. My phone is a piece of revolutionary technology that puts the entire world a scroll away, its every pixel an industrial miracle. It’s also a cataclysm-delivery device. I roll over and click the blue “f” logo to watch older friends and relatives grow angry and entrenched in their politics. I click on Twitter and drown in a torrent of terrible news delivered by shouting messengers. On apps like Citizen, push alerts warn me of violence and petty crimes happening right now in my area, while neighborhood narcs and NIMBYs feud and name-call on Nextdoor. On the doom machine, feeling helpless and hopeless is easier than ever.
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Aha! Moments Pop Up from below the Level of Conscious Awareness
Most of us have had the experience of struggling mightily to solve a problem only to find, while taking a walk or doing the dishes, that the answer comes to us seemingly from nowhere. Psychologists call these sudden aha! moments “insight.” They occur not only when we are faced with a problem but also when we suddenly “get” a joke or crossword puzzle clue or are jolted by a personal realization. Scientists have identified distinctive brain activity patterns that signal moments of insight, but there is still some debate about whether insight is simply the final, most satisfying step in a deliberative thought process or a wholly separate form of thinking.
