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Memory Research Offers Clues to Preventing Human Error
An experiment shows that a specific type of memory aid can lower error rates in air traffic control.
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Everyone Agrees: CEOs Should Be Paid Less
Pacific Standard: The longest lasting impact of the Occupy movement might just be the conflict between the “99 Percent” and the “One Percent”—the term that has come to symbolize the vast wealth inequality that exists in this country. As it turned out, the one percent is something of a misnomer. The top 0.01 percent of Americans actually control the majority of wealth, and that very top slice is growing wealthier faster than anyone else in the economy The discrepancy between the one percent and 0.01 percent highlights both the negative branding of the idea of the one percent and the fact that our perceptions of inequality often don’t line up with reality.
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When You Shouldn’t Bring a Friend
The New York Times: Misery may love company, but new research suggests a corollary to that adage: Sometimes, having company could make misery even worse. For a paper published in the journal Psychological Science, Erica J. Boothby and her co-authors asked 23 female undergraduates to taste chocolate (“pretested to be pleasant tasting”) in the company of another person who was secretly working with the study authors. That person tasted one piece of chocolate along with them, and looked at a book of paintings while the participant tasted another piece. The undercover researcher didn’t talk to the participants about either task. Afterward, the participants rated both pieces of chocolate.
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Actually, People Still Like to Think
The New Yorker: This past July, Science published a paper with an alarming conclusion: most people would rather give themselves an electric shock than be alone with their thoughts. A slew of news stories followed, seizing on this dramatic evidence of our inability to be content without external distractions. “I was surprised that people find themselves such bad company,” Jonathan Schooler, a University of California, Santa Barbara, psychologist, who was not involved in the study, told the Boston Globe. The University of Virginia psychologist Timothy Wilson and his collaborators began the study with a simple question: When our minds turn inward, “is it a pleasing experience”?
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The Bare Walls Theory: Do Too Many Classroom Decorations Harm Learning?
NBC: To decorate her kindergarten classroom for the new school year, Lori Baker chose cheerful alphabet and number charts featuring smiling children of different races. In the reading corner, she hung three puffy paper flowers from the ceiling and posted dancing letters spelling “Welcome to Kindergarten.” Otherwise, though, the 20-year teaching veteran exercised restraint and deliberately left several walls bare in her room at Whittier Elementary School in Harvey, Ill., a predominately African-American, working-class city about 25 miles south of Chicago. The latest research suggests she’s onto something.
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Are Women Better Decision Makers?
The New York Times: RECENTLY, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York said that if we want to fix the gridlock in Congress, we need more women. Women are more focused on finding common ground and collaborating, she argued. But there’s another reason that we’d benefit from more women in positions of power, and it’s not about playing nicely. Neuroscientists have uncovered evidence suggesting that, when the pressure is on, women bring unique strengths to decision making. Mara Mather, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, and Nichole R.
