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Can a divided America heal?
TED: How can the US recover after the negative, partisan presidential election of 2016? Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt studies the morals that form the basis of our political choices. In conversation with TED Curator Chris Anderson, he describes the patterns of thinking and historical causes that have led to such sharp divisions in America — and provides a vision for how the country might move forward. Listen to the whole story: TED
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Preschoolers’ Expectations Shape How They Interpret Speech
When someone misspeaks or forgets a word, we use our past experience with language to hear what we expect them to say — research suggests 4- and 5-year-old children show this adaptive ability to the same degree that adults do.
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Cultivating Employee Curiosity is Good for Business
New research suggests that a strong sense of curiosity may be one personality trait that can enhance people’s creative problem-solving abilities.
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The Upside of Uncertainty
Scientific American: Who is more persuasive: A person who expresses great certainty about his or her views, or a person who is less sure? If you are like most people, your intuition is that certainty makes you more persuasive. And this makes sense. A person who expresses certainty seems better informed; perhaps more credible. Most of us have had the experience of being persuaded by someone simply because they were so sure about what they were saying. Read the whole story: Scientific American
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Some People Are Great At Recognizing Faces. Others…Not So Much
NPR: Every day, Marty Doerschlag moves through the world armed with what amounts to a low-level superpower: He can remember a face forever. "If I spend about 30 seconds looking at somebody, I will remember their face for years and years and years," he says. ... "I think nobody really knew until the last few years just how bad we all are with unfamiliar faces," says Mike Burton, a professor of psychology at the University of York UK. Burton has run a number of facial recognition studies and has concluded that most people are remarkably bad at recognizing the faces of those they know only slightly. And to make matters worse, most people think they are good at this skill when they are not.
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AMERICA’S SURPRISING VIEWS ON INCOME INEQUALITY
The New Yorker: As a whole, the population of the United States is wealthier today than it has ever been. But, as has often been reported, the relative increases haven’t been uniform. In 1970, the top ten per cent of the population earned a third of the total national income. By 2012, it earned half. According to estimates by Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, income inequality has grown by record amounts since the 2008 recession: between 2009 and 2012, incomes for the top one per cent of the population rose by more than thirty per cent, while those for the rest of the country—the bottom ninety-nine per cent—increased by less than half of one per cent.
