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Bonding through pain
The Boston Globe: HAZING HAS A BAD reputation, whether in the military, on sports teams, or in college fraternities, but it does serve a purpose, as demonstrated by psychologists in Australia. They randomly assigned small groups of students to experience pain together—by immersing their hands in cold water, maintaining a leg squat, or eating a hot pepper—and found that students in these groups reported bonding more with the group and were more cooperative in a game where individual and group payoffs conflicted. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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Teens’ Science Interest Linked With Knowledge, but Only in Wealthier Nations
It seems logical that a student who is interested in science as an academic subject would also know a lot about science, but new findings show that this link depends on the overall wealth of the country that the teen calls home. The research suggests that individual science achievement may be influenced as much by broad national-level resources as it is by personal interest and motivation.
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Logic Trumps Gut Instinct in Peer Reviews of Decision Makers
When faced with making a tough decision do you tend to trust your gut, or do you logically review all the facts? In a recent study, psychological scientists Nicole L. Wood and Scott Highhouse of Bowling Green State University examined whether we can distinguish between “good” decision makers and “bad” decision makers by analyzing people’s go-to decision making style. Are rational decision makers seen as making better choices than people who follow their intuition? One model for looking at decision-making, the General Decision-Making Style (GDMS), identifies five major styles that people use in making decisions: rational, intuitive, dependent, avoidant, and spontaneous.
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Crossing Class Lines
The New York Times: In a society as unequal as ours, people tend to interact almost exclusively with people who share similar educational histories, incomes and occupations — and when they do interact with others from different social classes, even as friends, those relationships seem fraught with misunderstanding and tension. That’s partly a matter of circumstance, but it’s also a matter of habit. As the comedian Kevin Hart jokes, “I stay in my lane, people. I stay in my financial lane.” In such a bifurcated society, what happens when people from one social class cross lanes? Can we speak to, engage with and understand those whose lives are more or less fortunate than our own?
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Are Workplace Personality Tests Fair?
The Wall Street Journal: Workers who apply online at RadioShack Corp. must say if they agree with the statement: "Over the course of the day, I can experience many mood changes." Lowe's Cos. asks job seekers if they "believe that others have good intentions." A test at McDonald's Corp. said: "If something very bad happens, it takes some time before I feel happy again." The use of online personality tests by employers has surged in the past decade as they try to streamline the hiring process, especially for customer-service jobs.
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Your Fellow Diners’ Size May Affect How Much You Eat
NPR: Your dining companion may have more influence over your eating habits than you realize. We've known that people often have friends with similar body weights, but new research suggests that dining with an overweight companion may make us more likely to eat more unhealthful food. A study in the appropriately named journal Appetite finds that undergraduates who were offered pasta and salad while eating near a 5-foot-5-inch, 126-pound woman would eat more pasta when she was zipped into a fat suit adding 50 pounds, or about 8 points, to her body mass index.
