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Public Trust Has Dwindled With Rise in Income Inequality
Trust in others and confidence in societal institutions are at their lowest point in over three decades, analyses of national survey data reveal.
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The Upside of Rivalry: Higher Motivation, Better Performance
How do great rivalries in sports and business drive the performance of the competitors? A recent study provides some answers.
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Kids’ Drawings May Paint a Picture of Later Intelligence
Live Science: How well can your 4-year-old draw? Their ability to draw a picture of a child may be linked to their intelligence at age 14, a new study suggests. The study, which involved more than 7,700 pairs of identical and nonidentical twins, found that genes play a role in the link between early drawing ability and later measures of intelligence. But the findings don't necessarily mean little Timmy's messy drawings are cause for concern. "The correlation is moderate, so our findings are interesting, but it does not mean that parents should worry if their child draws badly," Dr.
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Peace Through Friendship
The New York Times: WHEN two groups are in conflict, how can you improve relations between them? One strategy is to encourage positive personal contact among individuals from each group. If a Catholic and a Protestant in Northern Ireland would only sit down together to talk — learning about one another’s families, hearing about one another’s fears — the encounter, according to this approach, would foster understanding, humanize the enemy and lessen bigotry. The scholarly version of this idea is known as interpersonal contact theory. It’s an intriguing hypothesis, but does it work in reality?
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Why Access to Screens Is Lowering Kids’ Social Skills
TIME: People have long suspected that there’s a cost to all this digital data all the time, right at our fingertips. Now there’s a study out of UCLA that might prove those digital skeptics right. In the study, kids who were deprived of screens for five days got much better at reading people’s emotions than kids who continued their normal screen-filled lives. The California research team’s findings, published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior this month tries to analyze the impact digital media has on humans’ ability to communicate face-to-face.
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Here’s An Easy Way To Improve Your Writing Immensely
Business Insider Australia: Great writing requires clear thinking. Just ask Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. “There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking,” he has said. Writing, even though you’re most likely a long way removed from your college essay days, remains a key skill for success. Which is what makes new research out of George Mason University relevant to you. Something that you are probably doing every day is making you a much worse writer than you otherwise would be, the findings revealed. What is this simple activity that severely dips your writing skill? Simple, everyday interruptions. Read the whole story: Business Insider Australia
