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How to Fix the Person You Love
The New York Times: At the heart of the American ideal of marriage lurks a potential conflict. We expect our spouse to make us feel loved and valued, while also expecting him or her to help us discover and actualize our best self — to spur us to become, as Tom Cruise’s titular character in “Jerry Maguire” puts it, “the me I’d always wanted to be.” The problem is that what helps us achieve one of these goals is often incompatible with what helps us achieve the other. To make us feel loved and valued, our spouse must convey appreciation for the person we currently are.
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Cooperation Driven by Reciprocity, Not Conformity
Our desire to reciprocate another person’s cooperative gestures outweighs our desire to conform with group norms.
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When It Comes To Romantic Attraction, Real Life Beats Questionnaires
NPR: Dating sites claim to winnow a few ideal suitors out of a nigh-infinite pool of chaff. But the matches these algorithms offer may be no better than picking partners at random, a study finds. Researchers asked about 350 heterosexual undergrads at Northwestern University to fill out questionnaires assessing their personalities and romantic preferences.
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New Research From Psychological Science
A sample of new research exploring cost-benefit arbitration and reinforcement learning, race and weight-based stereotypes, and testosterone and cognitive reflection.
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How To Use Games To Improve Performance At Work
Forbes: Earlier this year I wrote about the motivational power games can play in the workplace. A new study, published in Psychological Science, underlines the power of having targets to aim for, even if the targets themselves are largely meaningless. The only caveat is that your scores have to be improving. “We all know that people like high scores, but what is less known is how to give scores,” the authors say.
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The Myths That Persist About How We Learn
Science Friday: Do you consider yourself a visual learner? When you see something, do you commit it to memory? Or do you perhaps learn faster by hearing new information? The idea of “learning styles” has been around since the 1950s, and the theory is still widely believed by educators and the public, according to a recent study in Frontiers in Psychology. But there’s not much evidence that indicates the theory is true. “If it were true, this should be really easy to find in the laboratory,” says Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. “And we don’t see it.” Read the whole story: Science Friday
