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Cynicism isn’t as smart as we think it is
In the fourth century BC, cynics wanted to live like dogs. The Cynics were Greek philosophers who rejected conventional ideas about money, power, and shelter. Instead, they advocated living simply, aligned with nature. The founder of this school of thought, Antisthenes, purportedly lived on the streets of Athens, ate raw meat, and preached a life of poverty (though sometimes he just barked at people from a platform). The word cynic even stems from the Greek word for dog—”kynos.” Today, cynicism has come to mean something very different than it did to the ancient Greeks.
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Seeking fictional first memories
47 percent: That’s the proportion of people who have a first memory that’s actually fictional, according to a new study in Psychological Science by researchers in London. Our first memories usuall date from about age 3, research shows. But in a survey of 6,641 people, 38.6 percent said they had memories from when they were age 2 or younger, while 893 said their first memories dated from their first year of life. Researchers suspect that these cases of fictional memory may result from fragments of experience combined with seeing photographs or hearing stories of infancy and early childhood.
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Actually, Republicans Do Believe in Climate Change
It is widely believed that most Republicans are skeptical about human-caused climate change. But is this belief correct? In 2014 and 2016, we conducted two national surveys of more than 2,000 respondents on the issue of climate change. We found that most Republicans agreed that climate change is happening, threatens humans and is caused by human activity — and that reducing carbon emissions would mitigate the problem. To be sure, Democrats agreed more strongly than Republicans did that climate change is a concerning reality. And among climate skeptics there were more Republicans than Democrats.
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You 2.0: Rebel With A Cause
A few years ago, social scientist Francesca Gino was browsing the shelves at a bookstore when she came across an unusual-looking book in the cooking section: Never Trust a Skinny Italian Chef by Massimo Bottura. The recipes in it were playful, quirky — and improbable. Snails were paired with coffee sauce, veal tongue with charcoal powder. Francesca, who is Italian, says remixing classic recipes like this is a kind of heresy in Italian cooking. "We really cherish the old way," she says. But this chef — one of the most influential in the world — couldn't resist circling back to one, big question: Why do we have to follow these rules? It's the kind of question Gino loves.
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Nobody likes a freeloader—including four-year-old kids
It may come as a shock to parents of young children, but preschoolers are more cooperative than we realize. In a novel study to find out how early our instinct for cooperation begins, Yale researchers performed an experiment with kids between the ages of four and 10. The goal was to find out how kids felt about “free riders”—people who fail to contribute to a common project, but reap the benefits from it. The result? Starting as young as four, kids turn out to dislike free riders intensely, “punishing” those who freeloaded even if they had good reason not to contribute.
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‘Find your passion’? That’s bad advice, scientists say.
"Find your passion" is a mantra dictated to everyone from college students to retirees to pretty much anyone seeking happiness. But according to a forthcoming study from Stanford and Yale-NUS College in Singapore, it's actually bad advice - and may actually make it harder for people to figure out what they love to do. Why? The idea of "finding" one's passion implies that people have built-in interests just waiting to be discovered, and if you can simply figure out what they are you will magically be able to embrace them, says the study, which will be published in the journal Psychological Science.
