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A girlfriend he never met? Seems silly, but Te’o among many who claim online wishful thinking
The Washington Post: It started out a stunner: The Heisman Trophy runner-up had told heartbreaking stories about a dead girlfriend who didn’t exist. Then it became unreal: The All-American linebacker said he had been duped, and theirs was a relationship that existed only in phone calls and Internet chats. The reaction was predictable: Unbelievable. Couldn’t happen. ... “If we shake the tree, we would find hundreds of thousands of people falling out of the tree who are experiencing something like this,” said Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the California-based American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science. Attentional-Tracking Acuity Is Modulated by Illusory Changes in Perceived Speed Welber Marinovic, Samuel L. Pearce, and Derek H. Arnold Researchers know that attentional tracking is affected by the speed of an object, but is it the actual object speed or the perceived object speed that makes the difference? In this study, after viewing either a fast or a slow adaptor (a stimulus that increases or decreases the perceived speed of a target stimulus), participants were asked to track one of 12 dots that rotated around a fixation point.
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When You Don’t Do What You Meant To, and Don’t Know Why
The New York Times: HOW many times has this happened to you? You firmly decide what you’re going to do — whether it be going to the gym or asking your boss for a raise or placing a much-delayed call to a friend. But then, you end up doing exactly what you did not intend to: sitting on the couch eating ice cream, letting one more day go by without speaking to your boss or calling your friend. Issues of procrastination and will power come into play, of course. But how we decide what to do, and why our decisions often go the wrong way, are more complicated than that.
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To land that job, be among the first interviewed, study shows
TODAY: Want to ace that interview and increase your chances of actually landing the job? A new study says the best thing to do is interview on a different day than your strongest competition. Or, if you think you're a strong candidate, at least try to schedule your own meeting for the morning. According to new research published in the journal Psychological Science, interviewers have trouble seeing the forest from the trees. They often make their decisions based on the ratings they’ve given the interviewees directly before the interview, as opposed to someone’s true merits.
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Lying becomes automatic with practice, study says
NBC: You can get better at lying with more practice, a recent study suggests. Researchers found that with a little training, people can learn to tell a lie more automatically and efficiently. It gets easier for folks to repeat the lies and becomes harder for them to differentiate deception from telling the truth. The idea that lying becomes easier with more practice comes on the heels of news from the sports world of two high-profile athletes publicly admitting their tall tales.
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There’s No Such Thing as Everlasting Love (According to Science)
The Atlantic: In her new book Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become, the psychologist Barbara Fredrickson offers a radically new conception of love. Fredrickson, a leading researcher of positive emotions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents scientific evidence to argue that love is not what we think it is. It is not a long-lasting, continually present emotion that sustains a marriage; it is not the yearning and passion that characterizes young love; and it is not the blood-tie of kinship.
