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What Heroin Addiction Tells Us About Changing Bad Habits
NPR: It's a tradition as old as New Year's: making resolutions. We will not smoke, or sojourn with the bucket of mint chocolate chip. In fact, we will resist sweets generally, including the bowl of M&M's that our co-worker has helpfully positioned on the aisle corner of his desk. There will be exercise, and the learning of a new language. It is resolved. So what does science know about translating our resolve into actual changes in behavior? The answer to this question brings us — strangely enough — to a story about heroin use in Vietnam.
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The Paradox of the Free-Market Liberal
The New York Times: IN American politics, personality is, supposedly, destiny: Having a conservative personality makes us conservative on economic and social policy, and vice versa for liberals. Think of the stereotypes: the free-spending, libertine liberal; the rock-ribbed, free-market conservative. But there’s nothing natural about this pairing between personality and such broad ideologies. Instead, the structure of our ideological divide is shaped by political messaging rather than psychological differences.
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Shakespeare: One of the First and Greatest Psychologists
The Atlantic: Harvard linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker groups social reformers into two broad categories. The moralist condemns one behavior and promotes another; the scientist, on the other hand, tries to understand why human beings do the things they do, hoping self-knowledge will lead to positive change. In our conversation for this series, Pinker chose a favorite passage from Shakespeare’sMeasure for Measure that illustrates both points of view—in its critique of human nature, Isabella’s speech swivels from detached observation to plaintive complaint.
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The Discipline Gap: Race in the Classroom
I came of age in a Jersey shore community with high racial tension. A major road divided the town, and separated black homes from white homes. But we all met in the integrated schools, and that’s where I witnessed racial discrimination first-hand. I vividly remember this one incident from eighth grade. Word spread one morning through the corridors that there would be a fight in the boys’ lavatory in the afternoon, between a black boy and a white boy. This was not uncommon, and we all crowded around to witness the event, but in the end hardly a punch got thrown. Our eighth grade English teacher had gotten wind of the coming fight, and immediately broke it up.
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Despite Last Year’s Failures, Many Still Make Resolutions
NPR: Did you make a New Year's resolution? If you did, our data expert Mona Chalabi says you're in the 44 percent of Americans who did. She tells NPR's Rachel Martin that keeping to them is another story. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: 52. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: 452. UNIDENTIFIED MAN: 25. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: 6.112. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: 25,856. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Time now for some number crunching from our data expert Mona Chalabi from fivethirtyeight.com. She has given us this number of the week. Read the whole story: NPR
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The Curious Science of When Multitasking Works
Harvard Business Review: Trying to do two things at once is usually a recipe for doing both badly, according to a long line of research. We’re slower and less accurate when we try to juggle two things. Experts came to believe that there wasn’t much that could be done about this, so most of the advice in HBR has been to avoid multitasking as much as possible. But if giving up multitasking isn’t an option, a new study published in in Psychological Science offers some hope: your ability to multitask may depend on whether you were trained to do the two tasks separately or simultaneously. The first thing to know about multitasking is that the word is a misnomer.
