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How Americans view wealth and inequality
BBC Business: There have been lots of questions and discussions recently about inequality and economists often argue about what is the right level of inequality to have in society. But Mike Norton, professor at Harvard Business School, and I decided to take a different path and we decided to ask people what inequality they would want. Now, there are lots of ways to ask this question and we used the philosopher John Rawls. Rawls said that "a just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you'd be willing to enter it in a random place". And it's really a beautiful definition.
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Speaking Two Languages Also Benefits Low-Income Children
Living in poverty is often accompanied by conditions that can negatively influence cognitive development. Is it possible that being bilingual might counteract these effects? Although previous research has shown that being bilingual enhances executive functioning in middle-class children, less is known about how it affects lower income populations. In a study forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychological scientist Pascale Engel de Abreu of the University of Luxembourg and colleagues examine the effects of speaking two languages on the executive functioning of low-income children.
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New Research on Judgment and Decision-Making From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research on judgment and decision-making published in Psychological Science and Current Directions in Psychological Science. Negotiation Topic as a Moderator of Gender Differences in Negotiation Julia B. Bear and Linda Babcock Although research has shown that women are less likely to initiate negotiations than men are, research in this area has focused mostly on negotiations of "masculine" issues, such as monetary compensation or legal situations.
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The Mind of a Flip-Flopper
The New York Times: Forget for a minute everything you know about politics. Barack Obama now openly supports gay marriage. Mitt Romney now opposes roughly the same kind of health care reform he fought for as governor of Massachusetts. What if they weren’t two politicians calculating how to win an election but instead just two guys who changed their minds? They didn’t “flip-flop”; they experienced, as social scientists say, an attitude change, the way any of us do when we become a vegetarian or befriend a neighbor we used to hate or even just choose to buy a new brand of toothpaste.
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Psychology Awe’s Good as It Gets
The Wall Street Journal: Feeling a sense of awe causes people to feel less rushed and impatient—and, at least briefly, happier about their lives. Researchers induced awe in participants through various means, including watching televised scenes of waterfalls, astronauts in space, and whales, and reading about gazing out over Paris from the Eiffel Tower. (Control groups watched people getting showered with confetti and other scenes.) People primed to feel awe reported less of a sense that "time is slipping away" and a stronger belief that there was enough time to get things done.
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How To Have More Self Control: Look At The Big Picture
The Huffington Post: Thinking about the big picture instead of the little steps required along the way can help to give us the self-control we need to reach a goal, according to new research. This finding could be especially useful for weight loss. For example, when confronted with the choice between a piece of fruit or an unhealthy snack, thinking of the end weight loss result could better help you pick the fruit, researchers said.
