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Can Outrage Be a Good Thing?
Lately, it has started to feel as if outrage is everywhere. On both sides of the political aisle, people have taken to social media—and to the streets—to express their fury over perceived injustices. The religious right demands a boycott against a popular coffee chain for removing religious iconography from their holiday cups; meanwhile, the left rallies marches in protest against police brutality against young Black men. In the midst of all this anger, both liberal and conservative pundits have started raising the question: has outrage drowned out civil dialogue in America? The moment you read the title of this article, you likely had an immediate, gut-level reaction.
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Are you paying attention?
Earlier this summer, our team had the opportunity to join the Association for Psychological Science’s annual conference in San Francisco. And while we were there, we got to talk to a few psychologists about the application of their research. In our final episode of the series is a discussion on perception and attention with Daniel Simons, Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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American Immigrants and the Dilemma of ‘White-Sounding’ Names
“As a foreigner in the U.S., since the first day I arrived,” says Xian Zhao, “I have been constantly asking myself this question: Should I adopt an Anglo name?” Zhao, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, says that his cousin and his aunt changed their name from Pengyuan and Guiqing to Jason and Susan, respectively, upon moving to the U.S. Some of his grad-school peers made similar decisions, but after some deliberation while completing his Ph.D. in the U.S., he resolved to continue using his given first name, which means “significant” and “outstanding.” “Hearing people calling me Alex or Daniel doesn’t mean anything to me,” he told me.
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Marie Kondo – does tidiness really equal a clean mind?
If you haven't heard of Marie Kondo yet, it won't be long before you do. Thanks to her new Netflix programme, the Japanese tidying guru has become January's "It girl". Chance is, you already know someone who is using her "KonMari" method, which promises not only a de-cluttered house, but also a clean mind. "When you put your house in order, you put your affairs, and your past in order, too," Kondo explains in her 2014 book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying.
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Most Personality Quizzes Are Junk Science. Take One That Isn’t.
What’s your personality, and what can it tell you about your true self? Those questions have launched a thousand online personality quizzes. But you can do better than those specious — yet irresistible — quizzes. You can take a personality quiz backed by science. Meet the Big Five, the way most psychologists measure and test personality. It’s a system built on decades of research about how people describe one another and themselves. (You can read more about it in this article we published last year.) There are a couple of things that make it — and this quiz — different. First, the Big Five doesn’t put people into neat personality “types,” because that’s not how personalities really work.
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With new day-care inspection system, high caseloads and shorter visits
Over the past year, the state has launched a new day-care inspection system that requires more frequent visits to each facility, giving operators no notice at least once a year, the better to assess the true quality of each center. But it has come at a cost: The inspectors, who were already monitoring two to four times the caseloads specialists recommend, now spend far less time at most sites. State regulators and some providers say the system, which began in late 2017, will raise safety standards.
