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Why Smart People Are Stupid
The New Yorker: Here’s a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? The vast majority of people respond quickly and confidently, insisting the ball costs ten cents. This answer is both obvious and wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and a dollar and five cents for the bat.) For more than five decades, Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate and professor of psychology at Princeton, has been asking questions like this and analyzing our answers. His disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way we think about thinking.
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Diamond Jubilee: Why The ‘Right Kind Of Patriotism’ Benefits Health
Huffington Post: Ignore those twinges of cynicism and embrace your inner patriot this weekend, as studies regularly show that nationalism makes people happy. However, how happy you feel also depends on what you’re taking pride in, noted researchers earlier this year. In a report for Psychological Science, Matthew Wright, a political scientist at American University, and Tim Reeskens, a sociologist from Catholic University in Belgium found that more national pride correlated with greater personal wellbeing. But they also noticed that those individuals who connected nationalism with respect for a country’s institutions and values, rather than race or religion, were the most content.
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Looks Overshadow Reputation When Deciding Who To Trust
LiveScience: When faced with a decision of who to trust with money, people will often choose the face that looks the most trustworthy, shunning those who they deem look sketchy. Interestingly, a new study shows that the person's track record doesn't impact this choice — people will still choose the most trustworthy face, even if they are told that the owner of that face has a bad reputation. "The temptation to judge strangers by their faces is hard to resist.
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The Healthy Poor: Demystifying John Henry
The Huffington Post: John Henry is one of the big men of American folklore, a former slave and "steel drivin' man" who helped pioneer the American frontier in the 19th century. According to legend, John Henry was a man of extraordinary physical prowess who wielded a sledge hammer to clear the way for the nation's expanding railroads. He was also a man of extraordinary determination. When the railroad owner threatened to replace men and their muscles with a new steam-driven hammer, John Henry challenged owner and machine to a contest of strength. He won, but lost, dying of exhaustion. That's the John Henry story most Americans know.
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Training People to Inhibit Movements Can Reduce Risk-Taking
New research from psychological scientists at the Universities of Exeter and Cardiff shows that people can be trained to become less impulsive, resulting in less risk-taking during gambling. The research could pave the way for new treatments for people with addictions to gambling, drugs or alcohol as well as impulse-control disorders, such as ADHD. Recently published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the study assessed whether asking people to stop making simple movements while in a simulated gambling situation affected how risky or cautious they were when betting.
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Why We Make Dumb Choices
Yahoo Health: Decisions, decisions. From the time you wake up (should I hit the snooze?) until you go to bed (should I eat that midnight snack?), you’re making decisions all day long—and some of them turn out to be the wrong ones. Afterward, there’s nothing left to do but shake your head and wonder what you could have been thinking. If you catch a bad decision before you act, however, there’s still time to correct it. That’s where an awareness of common pitfalls comes in handy. Luckily, in the last few years, researchers have learned a lot about psychological factors that can lead smart people to make dumb choices. Here’s what you need to watch out for. Read the whole story: Yahoo Health
