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What Your Junk Drawer Reveals About You
NPR: The Great American Junk Drawer can be an accidental time capsule, a haphazard scrap heap, a curious box of memories and meaninglessness. It can also serve as a Rorschachian reflection of your life. You know what we're talking about: The drawer of detritus. The has-been bin. That roll-out repository where you toss your odds and ends. Sometimes very odd odds and ends. Sometimes whatnot never to be seen again. Various places on the Internet, such as The Junk Drawer Project and House Beautiful, showcase people's messes and miscellanies. We found a few images of junk drawers on Flickr. And if you don't have enough junk of your own, you can purchase a Junk Drawer Starter Kit on Ebay.
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A Tiny Good Deed Can Go a Long Way
New York Magazine: You already know the “secret” to happiness: Do something nice for someone else. Now, some new research takes that idea one step further, finding that getting more specific about the random act of kindness you’re planning can actually end up making you even happier. For example: Aiming to make someone smile (and succeeding) will ultimately make you happier than the comparatively abstract goal of trying to make them happy. In one experiment,University of Houston marketing professor Melanie Rudd and colleagues gave a group of 50 adults a 24-hour challenge: Some were told to do something in the next day to make someone happy, while others were told to make someone smile.
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WHY NIGHT OWLS ARE MORE ETHICAL IN THE AFTERNOON
Fast Company: Whether you are a morning person or a night owl might dictate what time of day you should make your ethics-testing decisions. It turns out the time of day you feel least productive and alert is also when you’re most likely to lie. A new study by Christopher M. Barnes of the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, Brian Gunia of Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School, and Sunita Sah of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, shows morning people become more unethical at night, while night owls are more unethical during the day.
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Even Kindergarteners Can Rate Their Own Confidence
Discover Magazine: Do you remember on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire—apparently this show is still on, but I’ll assume no one else has seen it this decade—how after contestants picked an answer, Regis Philbin sometimes asked, “How sure are you?” They’d pull a number seemingly out of the air: “Oh, eighty-five percent.” This trick of estimating our own confidence is a psychological phenomenon called metacognition. And if you ask in the right way, even kids as young as 5 can do it. Adults aren’t randomly picking numbers when we say we’re 85% sure of something. We may be overconfident in ourselves, but in general we can sense when our knowledge is stronger or weaker.
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Book Review: ‘The Organized Mind’ by Daniel J. Levitin
The Wall Street Journal: More than a century ago, Sigmund Freud wrote the "Psychopathology of Everyday Life." Over two decades ago, Donald Norman published the "Psychology of Everyday Things." Three years ago, David Myers called a new edition of his textbook "Psychology in Everyday Life." The word "everyday" has a special appeal in such titles, since so many psychology books, especially of the self-help variety, are written for the self with major problems to contend with—love, illness, grief, identity, conflict—leaving the small tasks of mundane functioning to common sense, or perhaps to business writers who purvey "habits" and "disciplines." In "The Organized Mind," Daniel J.
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Anticipating Experience-Based Purchases More Enjoyable Than Material Ones
To get the most enjoyment out of our dollar, science tells us to focus our discretionary spending on trips over TVs, on concerts over clothing, since experiences tend to bring more enduring pleasure than do material goods. New research shows that the enjoyment we derive from experiential purchases may begin before we even buy. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
