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How to Crush Your Habits in the New Year With the Help of Science
It’s the shiniest time of year: that hopeful period when we imagine how remarkable — how fit and kind, how fiscally responsible — our future selves could be. And while you may think “new year, new you” is nothing more than a cringey, magazine-cover trope, research supports its legitimacy. --- Imagine it’s the next New Year’s Eve. What change are you going to be most grateful you made? Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist and author of “The Willpower Instinct,” suggested asking yourself this question before making any resolutions. “It’s crazy to me how often people work from the opposite,” she said.
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Our Social Judgments Reveal a Tension Between Morals and Statistics
People make statistically-informed judgments about who is more likely to hold particular professions even though they criticize others for the same behavior, according to findings published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for
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Being friends with your boss has a downside
Given the hours invested, the intensity required, and the physical proximity forced upon us in this age of the open-floor-plan office, having friends at work may feel essential to one’s survival. Yet research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggests there’s one office friendship that can have a costly unintended consequence. University of Chicago’s Alex Shaw, Hebrew University’s Shoham Choshen-Hillel and UCLA Anderson’s Eugene M. Caruso (who conducted this research while affiliated with University of Chicago) find that in certain office situations, managers feel compelled to be extra hard on a colleague who is also a friend.
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Is our constant use of digital technologies affecting our brain health? We asked 11 experts.
With so many of us now constantly tethered to digital technology via our smartphones, computers, tablets, and even watches, there is a huge experiment underway that we didn’t exactly sign up for. Companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, even Vox (if we’re being completely honest) are competing for our attention, and they’re doing so savvily, knowing the psychological buttons to push to keep us coming back for more. It’s now common for American kids to get a smartphone by age 10. That’s a distraction device they carry in their pockets all the time. The more adapted to the attention economy we become, the more we fear it could be hurting us.
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New Research From Psychological Science
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Liberals and conservatives see sexual harassment claims very differently. This explains why.
Over this past year, the #MeToo movement has put sexual harassment claims front and center in the news. Most recently, accusations of assault and harassment against President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett M. Kavanaugh, prompted widespread public debate. Although a majority of the country opposed Kavanaugh’s confirmation, polls found that Democrats and Republicans perceived the issue very differently: While 91 percent of Democrats opposed the confirmation, only 6 percent of Republicans did. Perhaps this large gap is a result of the fact that Kavanaugh’s views are very conservative, or because he attacked Democrats during his testimony.
