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When You Don’t Do What You Meant To, and Don’t Know Why
The New York Times: HOW many times has this happened to you? You firmly decide what you’re going to do — whether it be going to the gym or asking your boss for a raise or placing a much-delayed call to a friend. But then, you end up doing exactly what you did not intend to: sitting on the couch eating ice cream, letting one more day go by without speaking to your boss or calling your friend. Issues of procrastination and will power come into play, of course. But how we decide what to do, and why our decisions often go the wrong way, are more complicated than that.
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To land that job, be among the first interviewed, study shows
TODAY: Want to ace that interview and increase your chances of actually landing the job? A new study says the best thing to do is interview on a different day than your strongest competition. Or, if you think you're a strong candidate, at least try to schedule your own meeting for the morning. According to new research published in the journal Psychological Science, interviewers have trouble seeing the forest from the trees. They often make their decisions based on the ratings they’ve given the interviewees directly before the interview, as opposed to someone’s true merits.
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Lying becomes automatic with practice, study says
NBC: You can get better at lying with more practice, a recent study suggests. Researchers found that with a little training, people can learn to tell a lie more automatically and efficiently. It gets easier for folks to repeat the lies and becomes harder for them to differentiate deception from telling the truth. The idea that lying becomes easier with more practice comes on the heels of news from the sports world of two high-profile athletes publicly admitting their tall tales.
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There’s No Such Thing as Everlasting Love (According to Science)
The Atlantic: In her new book Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become, the psychologist Barbara Fredrickson offers a radically new conception of love. Fredrickson, a leading researcher of positive emotions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents scientific evidence to argue that love is not what we think it is. It is not a long-lasting, continually present emotion that sustains a marriage; it is not the yearning and passion that characterizes young love; and it is not the blood-tie of kinship.
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Money Can Buy Happiness, If You Spend It On Other People!
Forbes: It’s easy to come to the conclusion that all of our technology, all of our wealth, all of our stuff is not really making us happy. It’s true that getting a new gadget can give you pleasure every day you use it, but having ten new gadgets is not ten times more fun. Although the notion that once ones material needs are met, income over a certain threshold (often stated as $75,000) does not make us any happier, this is only true if that additional money is spent selfishly. The research that Moffit and Brown have drawn on most directly is from a paper by Dunn, Gilbert and Wilson. Read the whole story: Forbes
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Best (and Worst) Ways to Study for a Test
Yahoo: Want to ace a school exam or bone up for a work presentation? Forget the highlighter, and make yourself some flashcards instead. That’s the upshot of a recent report in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The authors—a team of distinguished researchers led by John Dunlosky, PhD, of Kent State University—weighed the evidence for 10 simple learning strategies. Here’s what they found. Read the whole story: Yahoo
