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‘This Is How Rats Work.’ Why Twitter’s Emphasis on Follower Counts Could Be Backfiring
Online follower counts have become a fashionable form of currency, numbers people use as evidence of personal and professional clout. Media outlets treat it as news when celebrities amass big followings, and an entire industry has ascended around “influencers” who endorse goods via popular feeds. It’s a metric increasingly ingrained in modern life. It’s also under the microscope at Twitter. CEO Jack Dorsey has expressed a willingness to rethink not just policies but the platform’s fundamental design as Twitter continues to grapple with issues ranging from hate speech to disinformation campaigns.
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Toddlers Like Winners, But How They Win Matters
Everybody loves a winner — even toddlers, according to a study published Monday. But even though kiddos tend to like high-status individuals, they don't like those who win conflicts by using force. "It seems like toddlers care about who wins, but they also care about how they win," says Ashley Thomas, now a researcher in cognitive development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. In recent years, scientists have devised experiments to show that babies and young toddlers not only notice the social interactions happening around them, but also actively evaluate them.
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How to Help Teenagers Embrace Stress
Now that the school year is in full swing, many young people are feeling the weight of academic demands. But how much strain students experience may depend less on their workloads and more on how they think about the very nature of stress. Stress doesn’t deserve its bad rap. Psychologists agree that while chronic or traumatic stress can be toxic, garden-variety stress — such as the kind that comes with taking a big test — is typically a normal and healthy part of life. In a 2013 article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology on stress mind-sets, the researchers Alia J.
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Reminder: Claims about millennials, and every other generation, are BS
You’ve probably heard that millennials (many of whom, by the way, are entering their mid-thirties) are self-obsessed, or obsessed with others, or coddled and conceited, or idealistic and energetic. Forget about it. It’s all bullshit. The idea that we can assign universal characteristics to generations is largely false; research published online last year and recently cited by Sanjay Srivastava, a University of Oregon psychologist, bolsters the case. In 2010, as media attention on millennials reached a fever pitch, psychologists Kali Trzesniewski and M. Brent Donnellan examined surveys of nearly 500,000 high school seniors between 1976 and 2006.
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People Like You More Than You Think, a New Study Suggests
You may not get a second chance at making a first impression — but a recent study suggests that you probably don’t need one anyway. The research, published in the journal Psychological Science, finds that people often underestimate how much another person likes them after they meet for the first time.
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Why It’s So Hard to Put ‘Future You’ Ahead of ‘Present You’
I have this awful, corny joke I trot out whenever I’m glossing over details for future plans with friends or brushing off something I don’t want to deal with: “That’s Future Tim’s problem. Let that chump deal with it.” Poor, poor Future Tim. Constantly set up for failure by that jerk Past Tim. As Present Tim — who, ahem, is always on top of things — I can say that Past Tim isn’t bad. He’s just wired that way. And I’m sure as you’re reading this, a few instances come to mind of when Past You has, quite inconsiderably, set up Future You for failure. Why do we do this to ourselves? What makes us act against our own self-interest, even when we are acutely aware we’re doing so?
