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The High School We Can’t Log Off From
It appears we’re in the midst of yet another Twitter backlash. Marquee users have been slowly backing away from their feeds (or slipping off the grid entirely); last week, Twitter’s stock plunged by more than 20 percent after the company reported a decline in monthly users. The arguments for defection are at this point familiar: Twitter is a dark reservoir of hatred, home to the diseased national id. It turns us into our worst selves — dehumanizing us, deranging us, keying us up, beating us down, turning us into shrieking outrage monkeys hellbent on the innocents of Oz.
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Smart companies hire people who don’t believe in their mission
In modern-day management, there’s a whole lot of hoopla around mission statements. Your mission should sit alongside unique values (see Mark Zuckerberg’s tips on that) that together offer a vision for a world changed, however narrowly, by whatever your company makes, sells, or promises. Believing in a mission is insufficient nowadays. Your employees (each and every one of them!) should ingest, live, and breathe said mission—preferably so much so that given one year left to live, they would choose to spend it working at your company, as Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has suggested. If your mission fails, you fail. And if an employee doesn’t rally around your mission, they’ll hold you back.
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Try to Resist Misinterpreting the Marshmallow Test
Watching a four-year-old take the marshmallow test has all the funny-sad cuteness of watching a kitten that can’t find its way out of a shoebox. The child sits with a marshmallow inches from her face. Most lean in to smell it, touch it, pull their hair, and tug on their faces in evident agony over resisting the temptation to eat it. Except, that is, for the blissful ones who pop it into their mouths. The marshmallow test, invented by Walter Mischel in the 1960s, has just one rule: if you sit alone for several minutes without eating the marshmallow, you can eat two marshmallows when the experimenter returns.
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Artificial intelligence has learned to probe the minds of other computers
Anyone who’s had a frustrating interaction with Siri or Alexa knows that digital assistants just don’t get humans. What they need is what psychologists call theory of mind, an awareness of others’ beliefs and desires. Now, computer scientists have created an artificial intelligence (AI) that can probe the “minds” of other computers and predict their actions, the first step to fluid collaboration among machines—and between machines and people. “Theory of mind is clearly a crucial ability,” for navigating a world full of other minds says Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the work.
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Why Hostility Can Bring People Closer Together
From family feuds to corporate conflicts, when people find themselves in difficult disputes, they often turn to mediation. Manuals on effective mediation suggests that a mediator should listen attentively to each person involved and express empathy with their viewpoints, no matter how different from one another they are. Mediators are advised to avoid appearing to favor the ideas of one side, and to make each person involved feel at ease and confident that they are being understood. Establishing this rapport is a commonly espoused “best practice” for gaining trust and facilitating conflict resolution.
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Why the Most Important Idea in Behavioral Decision-Making Is a Fallacy
Loss aversion, the idea that losses are more psychologically impactful than gains, is widely considered the most important idea of behavioral decision-making and its sister field of behavioral economics.
