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How Reciprocity Can Magnify Inequality
A series of studies show that people tend to reciprocate others’ actions in ways that increase disparities in wealth.
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Is Fandom Really Worth It?
There’s a lot of losing in sports. Only one team can win at a time, and only one champion escapes the season without tears. But that doesn’t stop Americans from spending nearly $56 billion a year on sporting events, while dropping many billions more on jerseys, cable packages, buffalo wings—to say nothing of the substantial emotional costs incurred. (Having logged many fan-hours on behalf of the pre-success Cubs and post-success Arsenal FC, I’ve paid my fair share.) Is fandom worth it? At first glance, the evidence isn’t encouraging.
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Picture a Leader. Is She a Woman?
Tina Kiefer, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, fell upon the exercise accidentally, while leading a workshop full of executives who did not speak much English. Since then it has been adopted by organizational psychologists across the world. In terms of gender, the results are almost always the same. Both men and women almost always draw men. “Even when the drawings are gender neutral,” which is uncommon, Dr.
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If you want your kid to get a good job, let them play more
Fears about automation displacing workers around the world ranked high on the list of Things to Be Very Worried About at the World Economic Forum in January. “At the end of the day, we have to fire a lot of people,” said Ursula Burns, chairman of the supervisory board at telecom group VEON, and former CEO of Xerox—which, indeed, recently had to fire a lot of people. Most of the remedies on offer were the usual high-level suggestions: re-train workers, offer some kind of universal basic income, design a “new social contract” that requires companies to factor in the needs of workers along with maximizing shareholder value.
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In a Fight Against Depression, UCLA Relies on Technology
In what amounts to a research moonshot, the University of California at Los Angeles aims to "cut the burden of depression in half" by 2050 and to eliminate it by the end of the century. But before the university starts treating the world, it’s begun treating its own students. In a study conducted since last year as part of the Depression Grand Challenge — an interdisciplinary research project that adopts the popular "grand challenge" format to solve major social or scientific problems — UCLA researchers have used an online program to measure the anxiety and depression levels of nearly 4,000 students.
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John T. Cacioppo, scientist of loneliness who expanded psychology’s reach, dies at 66
John T. Cacioppo, whose research into human bonds and connections expanded the horizons of psychology, generating an entirely new discipline — social neuroscience — and key insights into loneliness, died March 5 at his home in Chicago. He was 66. The cause was not immediately known, said his wife, Stephanie Cacioppo, a fellow University of Chicago scholar with whom he shared an office desk and strikingly divergent research interests. While he studied loneliness, examining its neural, hormonal, cellular and genetic roots, she studied love and its effects on human health. An unlikely academic who became the first member of his family to graduate from college, Dr.
