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Practice Does Not Make Perfect
Slate: A decade ago, Magnus Carlsen, who at the time was only 13 years old, created a sensation in the chess world when he defeated former world champion Anatoly Karpov at a chess tournament in Reykjavik, Iceland, and the next day played then-top-rated Garry Kasparov—who is widely regarded as the best chess player of all time—to a draw. Carlsen’s subsequent rise to chess stardom was meteoric: grandmaster status later in 2004; a share of first place in the Norwegian Chess Championship in 2006; youngest player ever to reach World No. 1 in 2010; and highest-rated player in history in 2012. What explains this sort of spectacular success?
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The Psychology Behind Costco’s Free Samples
The Atlantic: In 2010, a Minnesotan named Erwin Lingitz was arrested in a Supervalu grocery store after spending an excessive amount of time at the deli counter. In the words of a Supervalu spokesperson, Lingitz had violated “societal norms and common customer understanding regarding free-sample practices.” While the charges were later dropped, the evidence remains incriminating: After a search, Lingitz was found to have stored in his pockets about a dozen soy sauce packets and “1.46 pounds of summer sausage and beef stick samples.” Lingitz may have gotten carried away, but his impulse is more or less universal. People love free, people love food, and thus, people love free food.
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The Benefits of ‘Binocularity’
The New York Times: Will advances in neuroscience move reasonable people to abandon the idea that criminals deserve to be punished? Some researchers working at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience and philosophy think the answer is yes. Their reasoning is straightforward: if the idea of deserving punishment depends upon the idea that criminals freely choose their actions, and if neuroscience reveals that free choice is an illusion, then we can see that the idea of deserving punishment is nonsense.
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Steven Pinker’s Sense of Style
Scientific American: Writing guides tend to be pretty unsatisfying. They offer plenty of concrete rules, but why, a reader might ask, should the rules be followed? The answer is usually “because” — as in, “because I say so.” This, of course, is where humanity found itself before the advent of the scientific method: the mystics spoke, and everyone had to decide for themselves whom to believe. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker takes a different approach, one that is both more ambitious and more modest. In his new book, “The Sense of Style,” he draws on research, and particularly his deep knowledge of linguistics, to give his writing principles a scientific basis.
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Apple or Ice Cream? The Mechanics of a Healthy Choice
The Huffington Post: You've been trying to lose some weight, but you also get hungry for a snack in the evening. So imagine you go to the kitchen to check out your options, and you find apples and pears. You may have a slight preference one way or the other, but you are not going to agonize too much over this decision. Both are tasty, and even relatively healthful. But what if your options are a pear and a bowl of chocolate ice cream? Now you've got a real choice to make, because you're no longer comparing, well, apples and pears. The pear is clearly better for you than ice cream, no doubt of that, but the taste and richness of that ice cream is pulling you.
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Hearing That Things Can Change Helps Teens Dodge Depression
NPR: Depression is common in teenagers, with 11 percent being diagnosed by age 18, and many more having depressive symptoms. Social and academic stress can trigger depression, and rates of depression tend to peak in adolescence around the age of 16. It doesn't help that stressed-out teens often fall into hopelessness, says David Yeager, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. "When kids have hard things happen to them, they think it'll be like that way into the future." Researchers started noticing back in the 1980s that many teens felt that social and personality traits were immutable — that someone who is once a loser is always a loser.
