-
Women Do Like to Compete — Against Themselves
The New York Times: About 10 years ago, when we were both Ph.D. students at Harvard, we were invited to participate in an unofficial and largely secret wrestling tournament organized by a fellow student. The idea was to showcase a handful of competitive wrestling matches between graduate students in different departments to an invitation-only audience. Space and gym mats were rented, a referee and a master of ceremonies were appointed, and monetary bets were placed on individual matches. Each wrestler had his or her own costume, entrance song and fan base. Alcohol flowed freely among the spectators. ...
-
To Navigate a Challenge, Pretend You’re Giving Advice to a Friend
New York Magazine: Rebecca Rusch — a.k.a., the “queen of pain” — is arguably the best adventure athlete alive. She’s won a wide range of world championships, including in whitewater rafting, mountain-biking, and cross-country skiing. She’s also dominated preeminent events in orienteering, a sport in which someone is dropped off in the middle of nowhere, oftentimes in the middle of the night, and must navigate their way back to a specified point. Rusch has even ridden her bike to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. In other words, she’s an extreme outlier in a small community of extreme outliers. Surely, her body must be in tip-top shape.
-
Seven Steps to Reduce Bias in Hiring
The Wall Street Journal: Why is it that many of the world’s most advanced companies struggle to create diversified workforces, despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars on diversity training and recruitment? Implicit bias may be partly to blame, or the idea that even people with the best of intentions toward diversity can harbor attitudes and beliefs that affect their thoughts, feelings and actions outside of their awareness. Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
-
Why Mind Wandering Can Be So Miserable, According to Happiness Experts
Smithsonian: For you, it could be the drive home on the freeway in stop-and-go traffic, a run without headphones or the time it takes to brush your teeth. It’s the place where you’re completely alone with your thoughts—and it’s terrifying. For me, it’s the shower. ... Killingsworth and Gilbert tested their app on a few thousand subjects to find that people’s minds tended to wander 47 percent of the time. Looking at 22 common daily activities including working, shopping and exercising, they found that people’s minds wandered the least during sex (10 percent of the time) and the most during grooming activities (65 percent of the time)—including taking a shower.
-
Multilab Replication Project Examines Cooperation Under Time Pressure
A large-scale replication effort aimed to reproduce a 2012 study showing that people forced to decide quickly contributed more to a communal pot than did those who had to wait before deciding.
-
How Job Insecurity Impacts Personal Identity
The threat of job instability doesn’t just cause economic stress, it can also have a major impact on how we view ourselves and our sense of personal identity.
