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When Praise Hurts: The Psychology Of Gushing
Search the Internet for “101 Ways to Praise a Child” and you’ll find a poster--actually many variations of a single poster. Some are available to download, or if you want quantities, you can purchase the posters from a discount school supply house, laminated if you choose. Some are simple black-and-white typography, while others have bright, four-color, illustrated borders. They are available for classroom teachers, for speech and language therapists, for drug educators—and of course for parents. I don’t know the precise origins of the “101 Ways to Praise a Child” poster, but it was no doubt a product of the self-esteem movement that began to sweep the nation’s schools in the ‘90s.
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‘I Shall Wear The Bottoms of My Trousers Rolled’
The Huffington Post: What do those words evoke for you? For me, because I still have fragments of T.S. Eliot's poetry bouncing around my neurons, those lyrical words trigger the idea of growing old, with all its associated aches and pains and slowing down. Other words might do the same for you -- Florida, lonely, RV, Social Security -- depending on your experiences. Mere words have the power to shape our thinking and our judgments in hidden ways every day. And not just our thinking -- our actions as well.
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Why an Invisible Gorilla Is a Security Threat
Pacific Standard: You may have seen a video online somewhere, or in a Psych 101 class perhaps, of a group of people wearing black and white shirts passing a basketball back and forth. When you watch, you are prompted to count how many times the players wearing white shirts pass the ball. What you may not see, though, even though it is right in front of you, is that after a half a minute of the basketball-passing and feet-shuffling, someone wearing a gorilla suit strolls into the center of the screen, thumps her chest, and then walks away.
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These 2 Words Will Make You More Selfish
The Atlantic: Don't think about Wall Street. Did you think about Wall Street? Of course you did. You can't stop yourself from thinking about something you're told not to think about. But I didn't just conjure images of stocks, suits, and a bronze bull. I primed you to be more selfish. It's science. ... Well, it depends on what you call it. At least that's what a 2004 paper by Varda Liberman, Steven Samuels, and Lee Ross found when they tested Stanford undergraduates. These researchers set up a simple Prisoner's Dilemma with money prizes, but added a wrinkle.
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Science and Its Skeptics
The New Yorker: Science has been taking a lot of punches lately. A recent cover story for The Economist argued, with cause, that “modern scientists have done too much trusting, and not enough verifying.” A few days ago, the science writer-provocateur John Horgan wrote a dark reflection, in Scientific American, on a litany of failures in science that he has seen over his thirty-year career.
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Seeing In The Pitch-Dark Is All In Your Head
NPR: A few years ago, cognitive scientist Duje Tadin and his colleague Randolph Blake decided to test blindfolds for an experiment they were cooking up. They wanted an industrial-strength blindfold to make sure volunteers for their work wouldn't be able to see a thing. "We basically got the best blindfold you can get." tells Shots. "It's made of black plastic, and it should block all light." Tadin and Blake pulled one on just to be sure and waved their hands in front of their eyes. They didn't expect to be able to see, yet both of them felt as if they could make out the shadowy outlines of their arms moving. Being scientists, they wondered what was behind the spooky phenomenon.
