-
School Principals Shape Students’ Values Via School Climate
Principals’ values are linked with aspects of school climate which are, in turn, linked with students’ own values, research shows.
-
What Pigeons Can Teach Us About Multitasking
Evidence has long shown that humans are terrible at multitasking. People are prone to make more mistakes when they’re switching between different tasks, say answering emails and listening to a conference call, than when they
-
Faced With Ambivalence, Powerful People Are Less Decisive Than Others
Although powerful people often tend to decide and act quickly, they become more indecisive than others when the decisions are toughest to make, a new study suggests.
-
Why You Should Bet Against Your Candidate
The New York Times: When your favorite sports team is defeated, you’re disappointed, even dismayed. The same is true when your preferred political candidate doesn’t win. It hurts when your side loses. Fortunately, you can insure yourself against such unhappiness: just place a bet for your side to lose. This strategy, which has become easy to do with the rise of online prediction markets, creates a consolation prize — say, $1,000 (or whatever it takes) — to reduce your pain in the event of a defeat. ... But in practice, as my colleagues Richard P.
-
How ‘Bias’ Went From a Psychological Observation to a Political Accusation
The New York Times Magazine: In 2004, 57 police officers of different races were divided into two groups for a simple experiment. Half of them were shown two photo lineups, one with an array of white faces and one with black faces. This group was more visually attuned to the white faces. A second group looked at the same lineups after words like “violent,” “crime” and “shoot” flashed on their screens, at the edge of their field of vision. This group of officers’ eyes were mostly drawn to the black faces. In a similar test, using pictures of guns and knives instead of words, a group of white college students exhibited a similar shift in attention. ...
-
Peer-to-peer insurer Lemonade launches in New York
New York Post: A New York startup aims to disrupt the insurance industry — and the key, it says, is to get folks to behave. One-year-old Lemonade went live Wednesday in New York with a slick mobile app that offers homeowner’s insurance for as little as $35 a month and renter’s insurance starting at $5 a month. ... Lemonade’s solution is to charge a flat fee of 20 percent for coverage so it has no incentive to fight payouts. At the end of the year, Lemonade will instead give any excess cash from its monthly premiums to a charity chosen by the customer. “Our model suggests we’ll be giving more to charity than to our own profits,” Schreiber said. “But we do that not out of altruism.
