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How to Deal With a Jerk Without Being a Jerk
A couple of years ago I was discussing a study of the habits of great musical composers when an audience member interrupted. “That’s not true!” he shouted. “You’re totally ignorant — you don’t know what you’re talking about!” Early in my career, I had let nasty people walk all over me. When a client berated me for my predecessor’s error on an ad, I gave in and offered him a full refund. When a boss threatened to fire me for defending a colleague who was treated poorly, I said nothing. But this time, I was prepared: I had trained as a conflict mediator, worked as a negotiator and become an organizational psychologist.
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It’s Not Your Salary That Counts – It’s How You Spend It
Consumption habits may play a stronger role than income itself in how people feel about their lives, a study suggests.
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Rein in the four horsemen of irreproducibility
More than four decades into my scientific career, I find myself an outlier among academics of similar age and seniority: I strongly identify with the movement to make the practice of science more robust. It’s not that my contemporaries are unconcerned about doing science well; it’s just that many of them don’t seem to recognize that there are serious problems with current practices. By contrast, I think that, in two decades, we will look back on the past 60 years — particularly in biomedical science — and marvel at how much time and money has been wasted on flawed research. How can that be? We know how to formulate and test hypotheses in controlled experiments.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research exploring pubertal timing and risk for psychopathology, probabilistic learning in generalized anxiety disorder, and links between psychopathology and cognitive ability in early childhood.
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Generous spending leads to increased happiness: SFU psychologist Lara Aknin in World Happiness Report
Generous spending leads to increased well-being, while volunteering shows no clear causal link to happiness, says Lara Aknin, social psychologist and associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Simon Fraser University. Aknin, along with researchers from Harvard Business School and the University of British Columbia, contributed a chapter to this year’s World Happiness Report where she explored the evidence surrounding prosocial behaviours and happiness. The World Happiness Report, released annually by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, is a landmark survey of the state of global happiness.
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People Underestimate How Fun It Is to Do the Same Thing Twice
A common, low-stakes living-room scenario: A couple is trying to decide on a movie to watch. There’s an option one-half of the relationship is thrilled about, but the other has already seen it. On those grounds, it’s ruled out. But a new study suggests that this notion that having already seen it—or read it, done it, visited it—automatically precludes a second go-around might be mistaken. Repeating something, it turns out, “may turn out to be less dull than people think,” writes Ed O’Brien, the author of the study and a behavioral-science professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.
