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5 Reasons Why You Give Such Awful Presents
Time: We’ve all suffered through that awkward silence at least once, the one that comes right after someone opens the holiday gift that you selected—and that’s somehow not quite right. In fact, it’s a horrible gift. It’s inappropriate, thoughtless, silly, or otherwise ill-considered. Depending on the manners of the recipient, the reaction to the presentation of such a gift might be a forced squeal of delight, an overly broad, stiff smile, or a quick, flat “thank you” tinged with a touch of confusion. Or something far worse. But there’s no getting around the fact that, as far as presents go, this one has been deemed pretty awful. How could this have happened, you wonder?
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Psychology: A simple trick to improve your memory
BBC: If I asked you to sit down and remember a list of phone numbers or a series of facts, how would you go about it? There’s a fair chance that you’d be doing it wrong. One of the interesting things about the mind is that even though we all have one, we don't have perfect insight into how to get the best from it. This is in part because of flaws in our ability to think about our own thinking, which is called metacognition. Studying this self-reflective thought process reveals that the human species has mental blind spots. One area where these blind spots are particularly large is learning. We're actually surprisingly bad at having insight into how we learn best. Read the whole story: BBC
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Bad Drivers? No, Just Bad Stereotypes
Ugly stereotypes about “bad drivers” creep into pop culture, jokes, and slurs on a regular basis. The pernicious stereotype of “bad Asian drivers” has made its way into popular TV shows like Family Guy and websites like Urban Dictionary. In August of 2014, an Australian politician publicly apologized for stating that Asian drivers had “no comprehension” of the road rules, according to The Guardian. However, research on traffic accidents actually shows that many of the groups who are often stereotyped as “bad drivers” -- women, Asians, and the elderly -- are actually less likely to get into accidents or break traffic laws than are people from other demographic groups.
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Americans are obsessed with parenting advice. So why are our kids so miserable?
The Washington Post: Americans are obsessed with parenting advice. Bloggers, magazines, whole Web sites urge us to do more. Or less. Be more Chinese, they implore. Or more French. But despite this constant flow of advice, we have very little idea how to make kids happy.
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Studying for the Test by Taking It
The New York Times: PROTESTS are flaring up in pockets of the country against the proliferation of standardized tests. For many parents and teachers, school has become little more than a series of workout sessions for the assessment du jour. And that is exactly backward, research shows. Tests should work for the student, not the other way around. In an experiment published late last year, two University of Texas psychologists threw out the final exam for the 900 students in their intro psych course and replaced it with a series of short quizzes that students took on their laptops at the beginning of each class. “They didn’t like it, at least at first,” said one of the professors, James W.
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How to Train Your Voice to Be More Charismatic
The Wall Street Journal: Scientists are tuning in on the power of the spoken word, seeking the secrets of charisma. By analyzing the harmonics of pitch, frequency and timbre, researchers at University of California, Los Angeles are discovering how charismatic public speakers use their voices to dominate, rouse and influence a large audience. They are finding that successful politicians in various countries, including Italy, France and Brazil, all share key vocal qualities that strongly affect how people respond to them, independent of the meaning of the words they say or the ideas they express.
