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When You Need to Face Facts in Your Life
The Wall Street Journal: I’ve been having pain in my right knee. It hurts to exercise or sit cross-legged. Sometimes the pain wakes me up at night. I know I should see a doctor. But I worry he’ll tell me to stop doing yoga, which I love. And what if he says I need surgery? So I try to ignore the pain. Why do we sometimes resist the facts, even when we know they’re important? ... First, spend some time thinking about what you really value in life. Psychologists call this an affirmation invention.
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Spoiler alert: most people want to remain in the dark, finds study
The Guardian: Whether anticipating good news or bad, it turns out that most people would prefer to remain in the dark than sneak a glimpse of the future. According to research involving more than 2,000 participants, more than 85% would not want to know if their marriage would end in divorce, while a similar proportion wanted to remain ignorant of when they would die. Even for happy events, ignorance was often prized, be it in the case of Christmas gifts, or the upshot of a football match. Read the whole story: The Guardian
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Predictable bias
The Boston Globe: IN A SERIES of experiments, people were asked about their impressions of a white man whose personality profile suggested that he was moderately racist or moderately sexist. Obviously, women should expect bias from a sexist individual, while African-Americans and Latinos should expect bias from a racist individual. But expectations of bias also crossed over. Compared with a nonprejudiced profile, the racist profile led white women to expect sexist bias, too, while the sexist profile led African-American and Latino men to expect racist bias. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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Language Lessons Start in the Womb
The New York Times: New research is teasing out more of the profoundly miraculous process of language learning in babies. And it turns out that even more is going on prenatally than previously suspected. By looking at international adoptees — babies who were adopted soon after birth and who grow up hearing a different language than what they heard in the womb — researchers can see how what babies hear before and soon after birth affects how they perceive sounds, giving new meaning to the idea of a “birth language.” Read the whole story: The New York Times
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Don’t be a Ross. Here’s how to keep your friends hooked when you speak
Hindustan Times: Do you feel like Ross Geller talking about dinosaurs every time you start narrating your personal experiences among friends? Does it look like your friends are getting bored while listening to your stories? If so, try saying things that are more familiar to them, suggests a research. “Our friends are actually a whole lot happier when we tell them what they already know because at least they understand what we’re talking about,” said Daniel T. Gilbert, psychological scientist at Harvard University. Read the whole story: Hindustan Times
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Preschool can provide a boost, but the gains can fade surprisingly fast
The Washington Post: States and the federal government spend more than $15 billion a year on preschool education. With that hefty price tag, we want early-childhood programs to work. And to reduce long-standing educational inequalities, we need them to work. So it’s encouraging when studies show that these types of interventions can give children a boost by the time they enter kindergarten. Unfortunately, our investments in many early-childhood programs may be based on an inflated sense of their promise. Even our best efforts often produce only ephemeral gains. Read the whole story: The Washington Post
