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Tight Times May Change Our Perceptions of Who ‘Belongs’
From the playground to the office, a key aspect of our social lives involves figuring out who “belongs” and who doesn’t. Our biases lead us -- whether we're aware of it or not -- to favor people who belong to our own social group. Scientists theorize that these prevalent in-group biases may give us a competitive advantage against others, especially when important resources are limited. Psychological scientist Christopher Rodeheffer and his colleagues at Texas Christian University wanted to examine whether resource scarcity might actually lead us to change our definition of who belongs to our social group.
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Playing It Too Safe?
The Wall Street Journal: The child who insists on running up the slide at the playground is doing it for a good reason. Chances are he's uninspired and trying to create more of a challenge for himself. And if the child is 9 or 10 years old, he is likely fully bored by the swings, slides and climbing gear. Some child-development experts and parents say decades of dumbed-down playgrounds, fueled by fears of litigation, concerns about injury and worrywart helicopter parents, have led to cookie-cutter equipment that offers little thrill.
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Breaking habits
The Miami Herald: You want to lose weight, but you can’t pass by the pastries and pastelitos that pop up at every desk, every cubicle, every dining room table at this time of the year. Before you go all the way, however, consider this. Research has shown that much of what we do in our lives is ultimately determined by habit. While changing those behaviors may not be a piece of cake so to speak, it may be easier than you think. In a bestselling new book, The Power of Habit (Random House, $28) , Charles Duhigg explores why we do what we do and how habits form and change. “What surprised me most was learning that any habit can be changed ... no matter how ingrained,” he said.
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The Shame of the Alcoholic
The Huffington Post: This month in Cleveland a woman was caught swerving her car onto a sidewalk, illegally passing a school bus full of children. A judge sentenced her to stand on the street corner wearing a sign that read, "Only an idiot would drive around a school bus." In Arlington, Tex., a billboard features mug shots of suspected johns, with the words, "This could be you." ... The scientists wanted to see if shameful body language correlated with mental and physical health, and especially with successful sobriety, four months later. This is the time window during which most newly recovered alcoholics will relapse, and indeed more than half the volunteers never made it back to the lab.
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Benevolent billionaires – why do they do it?
The Sydney Morning Herald: They have been hailed as the billion-dollar givers by Forbes in a new list of the world's most benevolent billionaires, but what inspires super-rich people to give most of their money away? Is it guilt, glory or simply the joy of giving? Topping the 23-strong list is Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who according to Forbes has so far given nearly half of his $US66 billion ($A63.5 billion) fortune away. His outlook on life seems to be a motivating factor. “We are impatient optimists by nature: we see the glass as 'half full' and are motivated to confront problems that others consider impossible to solve,” his foundation website states.
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We Can’t Blame Everything on Powerful Men
Scientific American: There’s certainly been no shortage of news headlines proclaiming that we can now add former CIA director General David Petraeus to the list of powerful men who have been brought down by very well-publicized sex scandals. It’s particularly dismaying to see how many of these headlines are broadly asserting, as news outlet headlines often do in these situations, that there must be some sort of inextricable link between power, masculinity, and infidelity. These claims imply (or sometimes even explicitly state) that there’s something inherent about masculinity that leads powerful men to behave unethically, whereas powerful women would never fall victim to such an effect.
