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The Healthiest Typeface
The Atlantic: In a New York Times column in July 2012, the filmmaker Errol Morris took a few paragraphs to ponder the likelihood of death by asteroid. “NASA issued reassuring public statements [after an asteroid flew close to Earth in 2011], but I’m not so sure,” he wrote. “It’s about the size of an aircraft carrier. Okay. That seems pretty big to me. Do you mean I shouldn’t worry about being hit by a meteor the size of an aircraft carrier?” He then asked two questions of his readers: Did they agree, as the physicist David Deutsch put it, that—at least asteroid-wise—“we live in an era of unprecedented safety”? And how confident were they in their choice? Read the whole story: The Atlantic
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The Danger of Even Thinking You’re Overweight
Pacific Standard: The last three decades have brought an alarming rise in childhood obesity. Much of society's attention has centered on kids who've already put on a few too many pounds, but that overlooks one important group of kids: teens who think they're more overweight than they actually are. Turns out, their misperceptions greatly increase the chances they'll be obese as young adults.
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The Science Of Why You Should Spend Your Money On Experiences, Not Things
Fast Company's Co. Exist Most people are in the pursuit of happiness. There are economists who think happiness is the best indicator of the health of a society. We know that money can make you happier, though after your basic needs are met, it doesn't make you that much happier. But one of the biggest questions is how to allocate our money, which is (for most of us) a limited resource. There's a very logical assumption that most people make when spending their money: that because a physical object will last longer, it will make us happier for a longer time than a one-off experience like a concert or vacation. According to recent research, it turns out that assumption is completely wrong.
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No Easy, Reliable Way To Screen For Suicide
NPR: Even a careful psychiatric examination of the co-pilot involved in last week's Germanwings jetliner crash probably would not have revealed whether he intended to kill himself, researchers say. "As a field, we're not very good at accurately predicting who is at risk for suicidal behavior," says Matthew Nock, a psychology professor at Harvard. He says studies show that mental health professionals "perform no better than chance" when it comes to predicting which patients will attempt suicide. Read the whole story: NPR
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Happiness Gap May Favor Liberals
The New York Times: Conservatives are happier than liberals, or so decades of surveys that ask about life satisfaction would suggest. The existence of a so-called ideological happiness gap is so well established that recently social scientists have mostly tried to explain it. But a new series of studies questions the gap itself, raising the possibility that although conservatives may report greater happiness than liberals, they are no more likely to act in ways that indicate that they really are happier.
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Old (Commuting) Habits Die Hard
Convincing people to switch from driving their car to taking the bus to work isn’t easy. But when the environmental charity group WWF announced that it would be moving its United Kingdom headquarters to another town, psychological scientists Ian Walker, Gregory O. Thomas, and Bas Verplanken of the University of Bath saw a golden opportunity for studying the influence of habit on commuting behavior. Commuting the same way day after day, people don’t typically weigh the particular pros and cons of different modes of transit. Rather, people tend to carefully weigh their options when they first start using a particular route.
