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Authors Retract Study That Says Sadness Affects Color Perception
NPR: In September, we reported on a charming little study that found people who feel blue after watching sad videos have a harder time perceiving colors on the blue-yellow axis. Now the researchers may be feeling blue themselves. On Thursday they retracted their study, saying that errors in how they structured the experiment skewed the results. Shortly after the study was published online, commenters started looking skeptically at the results. And because the researchers had posted their data online, those commenters were able to run the numbers themselves. They didn't like what they found. Read the whole story: NPR
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Don’t Delay: Having to Wait Doesn’t Help Young Kids Exercise Self-Control
The idea that natural urges “die down” with time seems intuitive, but research shows that it’s being reminded about what not to do, not the passage of time, that actually helps young children control their impulsive behavior.
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Why We Lie to Ourselves When We Make Mistakes
TIME: It’s a no-brainer to understand why we lie to others when we’ve been caught making a mistake or doing something wrong: to avoid losing a job, a spouse, a reputation; to avoid a fight, a fine, a prison term; to pass responsibility to someone else. But self-justification occurs when people lie to themselves to avoid the realization they did anything wrong in the first place. It’s the reason that many people justify sticking with a mistaken belief or a disastrous course of action even when evidence shows they are dead wrong.
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Googling Might Make People Feel Smarter Than They Actually Are
New York Magazine: Google makes it easy to pull up just about any information that's available, but some psychological researchers think it comes with a cost. The "Google effect," as one team dubbed it, is our tendency to forget information that can be easily looked up. Now a new study adds a new layer to the question of what effects our endless Google-searching might have on us: There's a chance it's making us overconfident about stuff we don't know as well. ... Overall, "the participants who had used the internet to search for answers were more likely to overestimate their own internal knowledge in unrelated areas." Read the whole story: New York Magazine
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A Simple Solution for Distracted Driving
The Wall Street Journal: Someday soon, cars may drive themselves, and perhaps we will be better off for it. Until then, driving remains a human task, subject to fundamental limits on our ability to pay attention. The National Safety Council estimates that in 2013 alone, 1.1 million crashes involved using a phone, and the Transportation Department counted more than 3,000 deaths and 400,000 injuries caused by distracted driving that same year. ... Driving Mode will be useful only if people use it, and various insights from the behavioral sciences can increase the chances that they will.
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Why Is Scaring People So Much Fun?
Pacific Standard: For some children, sleepovers are bonding experiences between friends where the night’s pajama-inducing tranquility and intimacy facilitates more meaningful connections. For other children, sleepovers are dystopian nightmares spent in the residential equivalent of that hotel in the Shining. These children find their daylight friends transformed into sadists under cover of night. In a mix of partial shame and partial pride, I must admit that sleepovers with me were like the latter. I loved (and still love) to scare the devil out of people (not infrequently by convincing them the devil was already inside them).
