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Bad Times Bond Us Together
New York Magazine: Harry Potter nerds, remember the scene in the first book when the kids defeat the troll? There’s a great line at the end of the chapter that goes, “There are some things you can’t share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.” Now some new research delves into that notion, further solidifying the idea that sharing a stressful or painful experience with other people helps bond us together.
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Do We Have an Internal Calorie Counter?
The Huffington Post: Many explanations have been offered for the country's obesity epidemic, and one is nutritional ignorance. People simply don't know what a calorie is, so how can they be expected to know a calorie-rich food when they see one? Most of us don't even know what a gram of apple or an ounce of milk looks like, so how can we possibly calculate a sensible portion? Well, perhaps arithmetic is not required, and it may even be misleading. Psychological scientists in Canada have been studying how people make food choices, and it appears that our deliberate estimates and calculations may not be much use to us.
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Less Than 5 Hours of Sleep Leads to False Memories
TIME: Skimping on sleep wears down your body in so many ways: it worsens cognitive function, slows reaction time, and makes learning more difficult. (The list goes on and on: after reading our new feature about the power of sleep, you might just scare yourself sleepy.) That’s quite enough consequences without piling on the results of a recent study in Psychological Science, which found that sleep deprivation is linked to false memories. Among the 193 people tested, those who got 5 or fewer hours of sleep for just one night were significantly more likely to say they’d seen a news video when they actually hadn’t. There’s more than just fantastical daydreaming at stake.
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Is Income Inequality Destroying Trust In Our Society?
Fast Company: It makes sense that trust in corporations and government would plummet after a devastating global recession. But the idea of social capital--a concept that the World Bank started researching in the ‘90s--is a much bigger societal force than just faith in institutions. In one sense, social capital is a basic feature of democracy, the soil that nurtures people working together towards a common goal. In a neighborhood, for example, it could be the likelihood that your neighbors know you and have your back. Yet as Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam explained in his 2000 book Bowling Alone, social capital is on the decline and has been for several decades.
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Giving Meaning to ‘Art’
The New York Times: The psychologist George E. Newman of the Yale School of Management studies how people use “quasi-magical thinking” to intuitively determine the value of certain objects. By analyzing celebrity auctions of John F. Kennedy or Marilyn Monroe’s personal effects, he has shown that the price of a piece of memorabilia is connected to how often it was thought to be used or touched by a famous person — as if there’s a kind of real-world value placed on a celebrity’s “essence.” Recently, Mr. Newman has switched his attention to the art world. In his latest paper, published last month in the journal Topics in Cognitive Science and co-authored by Daniel M. Bartels and Rosanna K.
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How Does That Geometry Problem Make You Feel?
Slate: Human tutors—teachers who work closely with students, one on one—are unrivaled in their ability to promote deep and lasting learning. Education researchers have known this for more than 30 years, but until recently they haven’t paid much attention to one important reason why tutoring is so effective: the management of emotion. Studies show that tutors spend about half their time dealing with pupils’ feelings about what and how they’re learning. Now the designers of computerized tutoring systems are beginning to make sensing and responding to emotions key parts of the process, and they’re finding that users learn more as a result.
