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Advice For Your Dinner Party Stories: Keep It Familiar
NPR: OK, I want you to think about the last time when you were at a dinner party and you were telling a story to your friends. Maybe you were talking about that exotic vacation you just got back from, maybe a brand new movie you saw that no one else had seen. Well, there's some new social science research suggesting that you might be better off talking about experiences that your audience also has had. And to understand why this is, we are joined by NPR's social science correspondent, Shankar Vedantam. Hey, Shankar. ... DAN GILBERT: They say, oh, there's this guy. He's a detective, and he lives in New York. And he's got this girlfriend. And then they go to this place.
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The Worst Part of Keeping a Secret
The Atlantic: The average person is keeping 13 secrets right now. Five of them are secrets they’ve never told another living soul. These stats come from a new paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which looked at more than 13,000 secrets over 10 different studies. The researchers asked participants if they were keeping any of 38 different common categories of secrets which ranged from infidelity to financial secrets to secret hobbies. The most common secrets that people shared with no one else were: extra-relational thoughts (thinking something romantic or sexual about someone other than your partner), romantic desire, sexual behavior, and lies. ...
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The Science of ‘I Was Just Following Orders’
The Wall Street Journal: There is no more chilling wartime phrase than “I was just following orders.” Surely, most of us think, someone who obeys a command to commit a crime is still acting purposely, and following orders isn’t a sufficient excuse. New studies help to explain how seemingly good people come to do terrible things in these circumstances: When obeying someone else, they do indeed often feel that they aren’t acting intentionally. Patrick Haggard, a neuroscientist at University College London, has been engaged for years in studying our feelings of agency and intention. But how can you measure them objectively? Asking people to report such an elusive sensation is problematic. Dr.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of new research exploring: distress, worry, and responses to the Ebola crisis; anxiety-linked attentional bias and mitigation of threat; and neural underpinnings of repetitive negative thinking in autism spectrum disorders.
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Why Your Sense Of Smell Is Better Than You Might Think
NPR: Smell, the thinking goes, is not our strongest sense. Our lowly noses are eclipsed by our ability to see the world around us, hear the sound of music and feel the touch of a caress. Even animals, we're taught, have a far more acute sense of smell than we do. But one scientist argues the idea of an inferior sense of smell stems from a 19th-century myth. When neuroscientist John McGann at Rutgers started comparing the sense of smell in rodents to what was known about the human sense of smell, he had an epiphany. "Actually we have a really excellent sense of smell," he says.
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Boredom Is Good for You
The Atlantic: Boredom has, paradoxically, become quite interesting to academics lately. The International Interdisciplinary Boredom Conference gathered humanities scholars in Warsaw for the fifth time in April. In early May, its less scholarly forerunner, London’s Boring Conference, celebrated seven years of delighting in tedium. At this event, people flock to talks about toast, double yellow lines, sneezing, and vending-machine sounds, among other snooze-inducing topics. What, exactly, is everybody studying? One widely accepted psychological definition of boredom is “the aversive experience of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity.” Read the whole story: The Atlantic
