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Stanley Milgram taught us we have more to fear from zealots than zombies
The Guardian: If you were a reporter instructed by your editor to hack into a grieving parent's phone, would you do it? If you were a Syrian soldier ordered to fire on unarmed protesters, would you obey? What if you were asked by a white-coated scientist to deliver lethal electric shocks as part of an experiment? Your answer to all of these questions will undoubtedly be "no" – or at least, "I hope not". Certainly when Stanley Milgram put the last question to 110 Americans — psychiatrists, students and middle-class adults — all of them insisted that they would defy anyone in authority who asked them to do such a terrible thing. But Milgram was not satisfied with this answer.
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The Check-Up: Wash Your Hands, Doc
Philadelphia Magazine: In the department of “things I wish I hadn’t read”: “Compliance rates for hand washing in American hospitals are only around 40 percent.” Geez. Thanks a lot, New York Times. Apparently it’s really, really hard to get doctors and nurses to wash their hands between patients, despite sign after posted sign that tells them they have to. Turns out, those signs are the problem! According to a study coming out in the journal Psychological Science, changing the wording from “Wash your hands to protect yourself” to “Wash your hands to protect your patients” might be enough to spur hospital workers to wash their hands more frequently.
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People Think The “Typical” Member Of A Group Looks Like Them
What does a typical European face look like according to Europeans? It all depends on which European you ask. Germans think the typical European looks more German; Portuguese people think the typical European looks more Portuguese. That’s the conclusion of a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The results shed light on how people think about groups they belong to. Other studies have found that, when people choose typical characteristics for a group they’re in, they’ll pick characteristics more like themselves. But that research was done using words.
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Will Work For . . . Well, That Depends.
It’s going to be a gloomy Labor Day for many this year. The national unemployment rate, now 9.1 percent, won’t seem to budge, and many states are doing worse than that. The unemployment rate in California exceeds 12 percent, with some communities registering staggering rates of more than 30 percent. Yet jobs go begging. I see jobs advertised in store windows of my hometown, Washington, DC, where one in ten workers is out of work. Many working Americans find this perplexing. Isn’t it simple economics that the unemployed would take these jobs—indeed welcome any job—when times are rough?
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Creativity Not as Well Received as We Think
Discovery News: Using creativity to solve problems is usually encouraged and championed as companies' secret to success. But researchers have questioned whether people actually welcome creative tastes with open arms. At least among adult college students, the team found somewhat the opposite. Because creative ideas are also new, they seem to give rise to uncertainty or even discomfort for others who depend on the tried-and-true way of doing things. To reduce uncertainty, subconsciously rejecting a creative idea may be easier than accepting it. Even in cases in which creative ideas show promise, it's still hard for other people to accept them, researchers say.
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Working Moms: Work-Life Balance Affected By Language Used, Kellogg Study Finds
Huffington Post: Very few employers have figured out how to make work -- and life -- manageable for working mothers, but what if it's not just our work-life policies that are flawed? What if even the language we use to discuss working motherhood is problematic and making it more difficult for women to navigate office and family life? That's the argument made by Nicole Stephens, an assistant professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, based on research she conducted from April to November 2010.
