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Praising a Preschooler for Being Smart Can Backfire, International Study Finds
Telling a child how smart he or she is comes naturally to a lot of parents and early-childhood educators, but a new study of preschool children in China suggests that may do more harm than good. The study was published in September in the journal Psychological Science. It found that praising young children for their intelligence promoted cheating. A team of international researchers led by Li Zhou, a professor at Hangzhou Normal University in the Zhejiang Province in east China, conducted an experiment with 300 preschool children in eastern China. Half of the children were 3 years old, and the other half were 5 years old.
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Kids, Would You Please Start Fighting?
When Wilbur and Orville Wright finished their flight at Kitty Hawk, Americans celebrated the brotherly bond. The brothers had grown up playing together, they had been in the newspaper business together, they had built an airplane together. They even said they “thought together.” These are our images of creativity: filled with harmony. Innovation, we think, is something magical that happens when people find synchrony together. The melodies of Rodgers blend with the lyrics of Hammerstein. It’s why one of the cardinal rules of brainstorming is “withhold criticism.” You want people to build on one another’s ideas, not shoot them down. But that’s not how creativity really happens.
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Hearing an Opinion Spoken Aloud Humanizes the Person Behind It
We attribute more humanlike qualities to people whose contentious opinions we listen to as opposed to those we read.
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Humans Are Bad at Predicting Futures That Don’t Benefit Them
Between 1956 and 1962, the University of Cape Town psychologist Kurt Danziger asked 436 South African high-school and college students to imagine they were future historians. Write an essay predicting how the rest of the 20th century unfolds, he told them. “This is not a test of imagination—just describe what you really expect to happen,” the instructions read. Of course, everyone wrote about apartheid. Roughly two-thirds of black Africans and 80 percent of Indian descendants predicted social and political changes amounting to the end of apartheid. Only 4 percent of white Afrikaners, on the other hand, thought the same. How did they get it so wrong?
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BELIEF IN A NOBLE ‘TRUE SELF’ MAY HELP HEAL OUR DIVISIONS
Down deep, people are basically good. That's a debatable proposition, but a widely held one, and it could be key to reducing the hostility toward perceived outsiders that is threatening the social fabric of the United States. Two Harvard University psychologists make that intriguing argument in a newly published study. They write that, while the familiar my-group-good, your-group-bad mindset may be firmly implanted in the human psyche, there's an even deeper belief that is far more benign—and can potentially be harnessed to reduce hate and hostility.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research from Clinical Psychological Science: What Drives False Memories in Psychopathology? A Case for Associative Activation Henry Otgaar, Peter Muris, Mark L. Howe, and Harald Merckelbach Memories play an influential role in both clinical and legal settings because memory anomalies are characteristic of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. For example, PTSD has been shown to incorporate poorly elaborated and integrated memories, which may lead to problems with intentional recall, whereas depression has been linked to distinct autobiographical memory problems.
