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The Surprising Benefits of Gossip
Scientists have studied gossip for decades. That’s not surprising given the activity’s near universality in any social group, big or small. It’s estimated that more than 90 percent of people in workplaces in the U.S. and Western Europe indulge in such banter—defined as talking about someone not present. People in modern societies spend about an hour a day immersed in chin-wagging, one study reports. But investigators are now approaching this fixture of social life from a new perspective.
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How Much Screen Time Should Toddlers Have? None, Sweden Says.
Swedish public health authorities recommended this week that children under the age of 2 should not use any digital media, as parents, pediatricians and governments struggle to respond to the challenges of today’s tech-soaked world. ... “The most educational thing is another human being — who is not looking at a phone,” said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor of psychology at Temple University.
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Do Phone Bans Help Students Perform Better in School?
Millions of children who head back to school this fall will find their phones are now gadgets non grata. Chancellor of New York City public schools David Banks has said that he is considering a ban on classroom phone access that would affect 1.1 million students, though the ban will not be in place at the start of the school year. ... Better academic performance is one factor supporting the bans. But another—mental health—has also captured the attention of policymakers and the public. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business, has posited that social media (which young people primarily access on phones) is causing a teenage mental health crisis.
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To Play or Not to Play with Your Kid?
It shouldn’t be this hard to decide. ... Yet some parents seem to be absorbing the message—especially from social media, the great flattener of nuanced communications—that in playing with their kids, they might be doing them a disservice, and that all children, regardless of age, temperament, or ability, should be capable of initiating and sustaining play for long periods. I asked Roberta Golinkoff, a developmental psychologist and the founder of the Child’s Play, Learning, and Development Lab at the University of Delaware, if she has come across any research supporting such interpretations. “I’ve been in this business a long time,” she said—50 years.
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What Type of Templates Do We Use for Visual Processing? Caricatures Might Be the Answer
Podcast: This episode’s conversation reviews how our visual system uses templates and exaggerates the basic features of objects in memory.
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Your Cynicism Isn’t Helping Anybody
When I describe “cynics,” you might conjure up a certain type of person: the toxic, smirking misanthrope, oozing contempt. But they are not a fixed category, like New Zealanders or anesthesiologists. Cynicism is a spectrum. We all have cynical moments, or in my case, cynical years. Cynicism—the belief that all people are selfish, greedy, and dishonest—is a natural response to a world reeling from social division, rising sea levels, and countless other problems. But that doesn’t mean it helps us. Cynics suffer at basically every level scientists can measure.
