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ScienceShot: Want to Understand This Article?
Science Magazine: Does reading faster mean reading better? That’s what speed-reading apps claim, promising to boost not just the number of words you read per minute, but also how well you understand a text. There’s just one problem: The same thing that speeds up reading actually gets in the way of comprehension, according to a new study. When you read at your natural pace, your eyes move back and forth across a sentence, rather than plowing straight through to the end. Apps like Spritz or the aptly named Speed Read are built around the idea that these eye movements, called saccades, are a redundant waste of time.
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Justifying Atrocities Alters the Memory
LiveScience: Torture and atrocities are often downplayed by those inflicting the pain. Now, research reveals how attempting to justify the behavior of one's own group literally alters memory. In the new study, people from the United States listened to accounts of torture and war crimes shared by Afghani or American soldiers. Researchers found that the listeners clung to their memories of the justifications for these crimes only if they heard another American telling the tale. Read the whole story: LiveScience
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To Get Help From A Little Kid, Ask The Right Way
NPR: Motivating children to stop playing and help out with chores isn't exactly an easy sell, as most parents and teachers will attest. But how you ask can make all the difference, psychologists say. If you say something like, "Please help me," the kids are more likely to keep playing with their Legos. But ask them, "Please be a helper," and they'll be more responsive, researchers report Wednesday in the journal Child Development. Being called a helper makes kids feel like they're embodying a virtue, says Christopher Bryan, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego and one of the researchers behind the study. Read the whole story: NPR
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The Ways Food Tricks Our Brains
The Atlantic: In 1998, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania published a study that might strike you as kind of mean. They took two people with severe amnesia, who couldn’t remember events occurring more than a minute earlier, and fed them lunch. Then a few minutes later, they offered a second lunch. The amnesic patients eagerly ate it. Then a few minutes later, they offered a third lunch, and the patients ate that, too. Days later, they repeated the experiment, telling two people with no short-term memory that it was lunch time over and over and observing them readily eat multiple meals in a short period of time.
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So Much for Your Gut
Inc.: A recent study, led by a Harvard professor and published in the April edition of Psychological Science, found that the ability to discern if others are trustworthy, dominant, and competent just by looking at them is not a skill honed over time and with experience. Read the whole story: Inc.
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Ignoring an Inequality Culprit: Single-Parent Families
The Wall Street Journal: Suppose a scientific conference on cancer prevention never addressed smoking, on the grounds that in a free society you can't change private behavior, and anyway, maybe the statistical relationships between smoking and cancer are really caused by some other third variable. Wouldn't some suspect that the scientists who raised these claims were driven by something—ideology, tobacco money—other than science?
