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Paying Do-Gooders Makes Them Less Persuasive
People who receive a financial incentive to raise money for a charity they care about are actually less effective in soliciting donations, even when potential donors have no idea that incentives were involved.
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Loneliness can be depressing, but it may have helped humans survive
The Washington Post: Loneliness not only feels nasty, it can also make you depressed, shatter your sleep, even kill you. Yet scientists think loneliness evolved because it was good for us. It still is — sometimes. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that being lonely ruins health. In one recent study, the risk of dying over a two-decade period was 50 percent higher for lonely men and 49 percent higher for lonely women than it was for those who did not experience feelings of isolation. According to some research, loneliness may be worse for longevity than obesity or air pollution.
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How to Motivate Your Employees: Give Them Compliments and Pizza
New York Magazine: It is Monday morning. You have just arrived at work, and you get one of the following three emails, each promising a different reward if you get everything done that day: One says you’ll get a cash bonus. Another says your boss will give you a rare compliment. A third says you’ll get a voucher for free pizza. Which of these would motivate you to get the most done? If you are like the subjects in a study led by Dan Ariely, the answer (obviously, I’d argue) will be pizza, with compliments coming in at a very close second. ... More to the point, what matters most to you when you are actually doing a task turns out to be pretty different from what you assume will matter.
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Why Facts Don’t Unify Us
The New York Times: According to the Pew Research Center, the nation is more polarized than at any time in recent history. While some of the issues dividing us boil down to ideology and preference, there is at least one on which hard science should have a strong say — climate change. But do numbers and figures change people’s opinions? Apparently, they do — they result in a deeper divide.
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Why Do We Judge Parents For Putting Kids At Perceived — But Unreal — Risk?
NPR: Many parents who grew up playing outdoors with friends, walking alone to the park or to school, and enjoying other moments of independent play are now raising children in a world with very different norms. In the United States today, leaving children unsupervised is grounds for moral outrage and can lead to criminal charges. What's changed? ... This may seem to get things the wrong way around, but it's supported by new research available Tuesday in the open access journal Collabra.
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The One Important Thing Missing From the Health Care Debate
Fortune: You may have seen the big news on health care: Aetna is going to stop offering individual health insurance policies on the health exchanges in 11 of the 15 states where it operates. Aetna AET -0.39% follows the lead of another large health insurer, United Health UNH -0.59% , which announced in April that it was withdrawing from almost all of the health insurance marketplaces where it operated. ... Language matters. Language focuses people’s attention. What senior managers talk about affects what their subordinates measure and emphasize, in the quest for leaders’ approval and individual career success.
