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Study: Gossip can be good for society
WTOP: Mean girls, look out! Gossip can be used for good. A study conducted recently at Stanford University looked at the dynamics of people working within a group, and how problems occur when the classic egotistical and selfish bully takes over, derailing and damaging progress and equanimity fostered by the rest. The test was to see if a dose of their own medicine would change their bullying behavior and how this might benefit social situations across society. Published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the study explores the nature of gossip and ostracism.
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Charitable Giving Could Harm A Company’s Image, Study Says
The Huffington Post: Giving to charity may actually hurt a company’s reputation, a new study from the Yale School of Management has suggested. Interested in how people view donors who make a profit while doing good, Yale professors George Newman and Daylian Cain presented a number of charitable scenarios to their research participants. Their findings, which have been published in Psychological Science, suggest that people are quick to dismiss those who benefit in any way while engaging in philanthropy. "This work suggests that people may react very negatively to charitable initiatives that are perceived to be in some way 'inauthentic,'" Newman explained in a press release.
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Gordon Gekko on Handling Other People’s Money
In a scene from the 2010 film Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, financial trader Gordon Gekko — played by Michael Douglas — defines moral hazard as a situation in which “somebody takes your money and he is not responsible for it.” A team of European researchers cite this cinematic example in a recently published study on how people feel when they take economic risks on someone else’s behalf, rather than their own. Scientists from the Centre de Neuroscience Cognitive in France found that when we entrust our money to someone else, they tend to not handle it as carefully as they would their own.
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For Couples, Mutual Ambivalence Increases Cardiovascular Risk
Pacific Standard: Toxic relationships have long been linked to poorer health. But newly published research suggests that, to increase your chances of developing cardiovascular problems, you and your spouse don’t have to despise one another. Mutual ambivalence will do the trick. That’s the disturbing finding of a team of University of Utah researchers led by health psychologist Bert Uchino. Figuring that totally negative relationships are rare (at home, if not at the workplace), they decided to look at whether having mixed feelings about one’s partner presents a health risk.
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After Committing a Crime, Guilt and Shame Predict Re-Offense
Within three years of being released from jail, two out of every three inmates in the US wind up behind bars again -- a problem that contributes to the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. New research suggests that the degree to which inmates’ express guilt or shame may provide an indicator of how likely they are to re-offend. The findings show that inmates who feel guilt about specific behaviors are more likely to stay out of jail later on, whereas those that are inclined to feel shame about the self might not. This research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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A Solution for Bad Teaching
The New York Times: IT’S no secret that tenured professors cause problems in universities. Some choose to rest on their laurels, allowing their productivity to dwindle. Others develop tunnel vision about research, inflicting misery on students who suffer through their classes. Despite these costs, tenure may be a necessary evil: It offers job security and intellectual freedom in exchange for lower pay than other occupations that require advanced degrees. Instead of abolishing tenure, what if we restructured it? The heart of the problem is that we’ve combined two separate skill sets into a single job.
