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People Assume Sexists Are Also Racist and Vice Versa
The stigma associated with prejudice against women and people of color seems to transfer from one group to another, a series of experiments shows.
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Oldies but goodies
The Boston Globe: WE OFTEN ASSUME that people don’t want to hear the same old story. But psychologists at Harvard and the University of Virginia wondered if people “worry too much about boring their listeners and not enough about confusing them, and that they therefore tell novel stories to listeners who would have enjoyed hearing familiar stories a great deal more.” Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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To Please Your Friends, Tell Them What They Already Know
We love to tell friends and family about experiences we’ve had and they haven’t—from exotic vacations to celebrity sightings—but new research suggests that these stories don’t thrill them quite as much as we imagine.
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Couples, Friends Show Similarity in Personality Traits After All
Using behavioral data gleaned from social media, researchers find that people are more like their friends and partners than previously thought.
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Why Eating The Same Food Increases People’s Trust And Cooperation
NPR: And, you know, all over the world people say they make friends by breaking bread together. There's this assumption that when you sit down to eat with one another, you become closer. Well, let's talk about that with NPR social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam, who is going to break bread with me. Hey, Shankar. SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: (Laughter) Hi, David. How are you? GREENE: We've broken bread. We're already friends. VEDANTAM: Indeed. GREENE: Well, so what's this research you're looking at? VEDANTAM: Well, sitting down to eat together, David, obviously means you're sharing another person's company, but there's also something else.
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A New Way to Remember: The Power of Quirky Memory Jogs
Scientific American: Organizations spend millions of dollars each year trying to get their employees to be less absentminded. Businesses shell out significant funds for planning software and systems. Administrators tack up signs and send out emails reminding employees to fill out their timesheets, enroll in benefits programs, or prepare for meetings. And of course, individuals personally wrestle with overcoming forgetfulness. We have found that some of the costly digital and paper memory jogs widely used to solve the problem of forgetting could instead be replaced with a stuffed alien toy. Perhaps some explanation is in order.
