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Don’t Delay! Impatient People are Also the Worst Procrastinators
Across a series of experiments, impatient people were more likely to put things off – even when it meant a financial penalty.
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Can Israelis And Palestinians Change Their Minds?
NPR: What makes people change their minds? About the really hard stuff. Covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the past three years, I've often wondered if people here ever do. This conflict is frequently described as "intractable," with neither side willing to give up their historical perspective or their entrenched positions to end it. And it does not take many interviews to hear repetitions of the same sweeping narrative repeated on each side. Palestinians from different places cite the same historical events to back their views. Israelis who have never met each other use similar turns of phrase.
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The Reason Our Minds Wander
The Atlantic: You probably aren’t living in the moment. Most people spend their leisure time in imaginary worlds—reading novels, watching television and movies, playing video games and so on. And when there isn’t a book or screen in front of us, our minds wander. This seems to be the brain’s natural state. Neuroscientists describe the brain regions involved in mind wandering as the “default network,” so-called because it’s usually humming along, shutting down only when something demands conscious attention. Read the whole story: The Atlantic
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Why We Think We’re Better Investors Than We Are
The New York Times: From their earliest days, the loosely confederated research efforts that came to be known as behavioral economics spawned a large quantity of studies centered on securities investment. This was not because the field’s pioneers were especially interested in stocks and bonds, nor was the early research commonly underwritten by financial services firms.
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The American Dream Is Alive and Well, Just Not So Much in America
TIME: Millions of immigrants have flocked to the United States in the hopes of making better lives for themselves. Nowadays, however, people hoping to achieve the iconic “American Dream” could be better off heading to Australia or Germany. That’s the central finding according to a recent study published in Psychological Science, which examined the influence of genetic factors on intelligence measures like aptitude and achievement, which are used to predict success at school and work. The researchers specifically wondered whether how these genetic influencers would differ between low and high levels of socioeconomic status, and whether the results would differ across countries.
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The Challenges of Driving While Dyslexic
Street signs are almost as old as roads themselves. Evidence for road signs goes at least as far back as ancient Rome, where milestones along roads were inscribed with information to help travelers navigating their way across the huge Roman Empire. Since the invention of the automobile, drivers have been lobbying for ways to make road signs easier to read at highway speeds. In 1895, the Italian Touring Club kicked off the call for better European road signs, and in 1905 the state of New York began systematically installing road signs throughout in the US. Virtually no research went into ensuring that these early road signs were actually legible for drivers.
