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Love People, Not Pleasure
The New York Times: ABD AL-RAHMAN III was an emir and caliph of Córdoba in 10th-century Spain. He was an absolute ruler who lived in complete luxury. Here’s how he assessed his life: “I have now reigned above 50 years in victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity.” Abd al-Rahman’s problem wasn’t happiness, as he believed — it was unhappiness. If that sounds like a distinction without a difference, you probably have the same problem as the great emir.
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Preschoolers With Special Needs Benefit From Peers’ Strong Language Skills
The guiding philosophy for educating children with disabilities has been to integrate them as much as possible into a normal classroom environment, with the hope that peers’ skills will help bring them up to speed. A new study provides empirical evidence that peers really can have an impact on a child’s language abilities, for better or worse. While peers with strong language skills can help boost their classmates’ abilities, being surrounded by peers with weak skills may hinder kids’ language development. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Recognizing The Illusion Of ‘Homo Economicus’
NPR: Standard economic theory assumes that humans behave rationally and are able to objectively calculate the value (or cost) of the different choices they are presented with. In fact, we pride ourselves on our rationality. Different from the animals, we humans have the unique capacity for logical thought and rational decision making. Or do we? According to behavioral economist Dan Ariely, we should be less proud of ourselves. In his entertaining book Predictably Irrational, Ariely describes case studies of everyday irrational human behavior. His simple but clever scientific experiments often require nothing more than a box of chocolates.
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New Research From <em>Clinical Psychological Science</em>
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: Personality Predicts Individual Variation in Fear Learning: A Multilevel Growth Modeling Approach Femke J. Gazendam, Jan H. Kamphuis, Annemarie Eigenhuis, Hilde M. H. Huizenga, Marieke Soeter, Marieke G. N. Bos, Dieuwke Sevenster, and Merel Kindt Studies examining fear learning have generally focused on average responses and have treated individual variation as noise.
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Sometimes, Early Birds Are Too Early
The New York Times: Since the advent of the deadline, procrastinators have suffered society’s barbs for putting off until later what needs doing now. But it turns out that many people appear to be finishing things sooner than they need to get them done. They are “precrastinators,” researchers say. “There is an overwhelming tendency to precrastinate,” according to a paper published in May in the journal Psychological Science. The behavior might include answering trivial emails, for example, or paying bills far ahead of time. “It’s an irrational choice,” the paper said, but it also reflects the significant trade-offs people make to keep from feeling overwhelmed.
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Practice makes… some difference
The Boston Globe: IN HIS BEST-SELLING BOOK “Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell popularized the notion—based on a 1993 article in a psychology journal—that top performers were mainly differentiated by extensive practice (10,000+ hours), and not innate ability. However, a new analysis of dozens of studies on the matter does “not support these strong claims,” finding instead that “practice explained 26% of the variance in performance for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports, 4% for education, and less than 1% for professions.” The importance of practice was particularly reduced for activities with low predictability, and when practice and performance were measured more objectively.
