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Extreme Political Attitudes May Stem From an Illusion of Understanding
Having to explain how a political policy works leads people to express less extreme attitudes toward the policy, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The research suggests that people may hold extreme policy positions because they are under an illusion of understanding -- attempting to explain the nuts and bolts of how a policy works forces them to acknowledge that they don’t know as much about the policy as they initially thought.
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Study: Green Space Means More for Satisfaction Than a Neighborhood’s Average Income
The Atlantic: PROBLEM: As we've seen again and again, people are generally happier when they have access to grass, trees, and flowers. In terms of the many other things required to have a satisfying life in urban settings, how important is living near parks and gardens? METHODOLOGY: Researchers at the University of Exeter looked at 18 years of data covering almost 10,000 U.K. citizens living in urban areas.
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How Therapy Can Help in the Golden Years
The New York Times: Marvin Tolkin was 83 when he decided that the unexamined life wasn’t worth living. Until then, it had never occurred to him that there might be emotional “issues” he wanted to explore with a counselor. “I don’t think I ever needed therapy,” said Mr. Tolkin, a retired manufacturer of women’s undergarments who lives in Manhattan and Hewlett Harbor, N.Y. ... But those attitudes have shifted over time, along with the medical community’s understanding of mental illness among seniors. In the past, the assumption was that if older people were acting strangely or having problems, it was probably dementia.
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Narrowing the Achievement Gap with a Psychological Intervention
Scientific American: There is an academic achievement gap in the United States. Compared to their White peers, African American and Latino American students earn lower grades and are more likely to drop out of school. Compared to “the haves”— that is, students with greater economic means, “the have nots” also have lower grades and higher drop-out rates [1]. These achievement gaps are there when students come to school in the fall and widen as the year goes on. ... This new research, led by David Sherman, replicates Cohen’s findings with a population of Latino American students, a group that had received relatively little attention in stereotype threat research, despite its growing numbers.
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A handy tip
The Economist: A POKER face. It is the expressionless gaze that gives nothing away. To win at poker, the face must be mastered, and master it is what the best players try their best to do. But a study just published in Psychological Science by Michael Slepian of Stanford University and his colleagues suggests that even people with the best poker faces give the game away. They do so, however, not with their heads but with their hands. Mr Slepian made his discovery when he showed 78 undergraduate volunteers video clips of players placing bets at the 2009 World Series of Poker.
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How Powerful People Think
TIME: Successful leaders often seem to have sharper minds than the rest of us — isn’t that how they got to the top in the first place? While we often assume that people become powerful because of their superior thinking skills, research shows that the relationship flows in the other direction as well: Power changes the way a person thinks, making them better at focusing on relevant information, integrating disparate pieces of knowledge, and identifying hidden patterns than people who are powerless. People who feel powerful also show improved “executive functioning”: They are better able to concentrate, plan, inhibit unhelpful impulses and flexibly adapt to change.
