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Three Tactics for Tackling Unethical Behavior
Unethical behavior isn’t necessarily the price of doing business. An international research team highlights steps organizations can take to combat unethical behavior on the job.
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Virtue, Vice, and the U.S. Senate
NPR: To Aristotle, the ideal politician was a person of high virtue, one of the best and most capable members of society. Though Machiavelli also used the word "virtue" to describe his own ideal, he obviously meant something different, more akin to a paranoid, power-hungry psychopath. The contrast leads to an obvious question: Which of these two has more influence in the United States Senate? Good news: While the more Machiavellian may have power early in their careers, according to a new study, it's the courageous and wise senators who have the most influence as they move up the ranks. ...
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Why it’s good to show you’re embarrassed
The Washington Post: Maybe you asked a woman when she was due, only to learn that she wasn’t pregnant. Perhaps you accidentally "replied all" with an inappropriate remark, or walked right into a sliding glass door at a busy restaurant. We all have embarrassing moments. And in the age of the Internet, a lot of them are preserved for posterity — 50 Cent’s hilariously failed pitch at a Mets game, for example, or Katy Perry slipping over and over again in a pile of cake, and then having to crawl off stage.
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Loneliness Destroys Physical Health From The Inside Out
Forbes: Loneliness can increase the risk of premature death in older adults by 14%, claims a major new study supported by the National Institutes of Health. The results expand a growing understanding of the potential for loneliness to damage physical health along with psychological health. What the research team found is that perceived social isolation—the “feeling of loneliness”—was strongly linked to two critical physiological responses in a group of 141 older adults: compromised immune systems and increased cellular inflammation.
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Plight of the Funny Female
The Atlantic: A few years ago, Laura Mickes was teaching her regular undergraduate class on childhood psychological disorders at the University of California, San Diego. It was a weighty subject, so occasionally she would inject a sarcastic comment about her own upbringing to lighten the mood. When she collected her professor evaluations at the end of the year, she was startled by one comment in particular: “She’s not funny,” the student wrote. ... “Men are willing to take more risks [in humor], and they also fail more miserably,” Gil Greengross, an evolutionary psychologist with Aberystwyth University in Wales and author of the 2011 study. But for the man, “it's worth it.
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Your Adult Siblings May Hold The Secret To A Long, Happy Life
NPR: Somehow we're squeezing 16 people into our apartment for Thanksgiving this year, with relatives ranging in age from my 30-year-old nephew to my 90-year-old mother. I love them all, but in a way the one I know best is the middle-aged man across the table whose blue eyes look just like mine: my younger brother Paul. Paul and I kind of irritated each other when we were kids; I would take bites out of his precisely made sandwiches in just the spot I knew he didn't want me to, and he would hang around the living room telling jokes when he knew I wanted to be alone with the boy on the couch. ... The very presence of siblings in the household can be an education.
