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Watching Cat Videos at Work Could Make You More Productive
TIME: Go ahead and watch that supercut of cats freaking out when they see a cucumber one more time: Scientists say it could make you more productive at work. In a paper for the Journal of Business and Psychology, an Australian study found that when experiment subjects were given a boring job to do, then exposed to something funny, they worked twice as long as subjects who watched videos about nature or business management. Read the whole story: TIME
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If You Set High Expectations For Your Marriage, Is It Doomed?
NPR: Psychologists disagree on whether expecting your marriage to be a deeply fulfilling relationship makes it more likely that the union will thrive, or that it will doom you to disappointment. So, psychologists, should we just go ahead and expect the worst after the honeymoon? Only if that matches your capacity to deliver on expectations, according to a study published Wednesday in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin with the deflating title, "Should Spouses Be Expecting Less From Marriage?" Read the whole story: NPR
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Lean In to Crying at Work
The Atlantic: When the president of CBS News fired correspondent Mika Brzezinski a decade ago, she cried. And she regrets it. “There was no place for those tears in that moment,” she told the Huffington Post two years ago. “If anything, when you cry, you give away power.” Of the 15 other high-profile women the news site interviewed about crying at work, the majority expressed negative views of some sort. Frances Hesselbein, former CEO of the Girl Scouts, put it most bluntly: “Tears belong within the family.” ... When women encounter these “problem situations” and react with overt anger, they are often punished for it.
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How Schools Are Failing Their Quietest Students
New York Magazine: In 2013, educator and writer Jessica Lahey wrote a convincing piece for The Atlantic in which she argued that her introverted students needed to learn to speak up in class. In it, she defended her decision to keep class participation as a small but significant portion of her students’ grades. The quieter kids in the class simply needed to learn how to speak up in “a world where most people won’t stop talking,” she wrote. Two years later, she changed her mind. ... One of their central arguments is that introverts are different from extroverts not just on a behavioral level — their physiology is distinct, too, in a real, measurable way.
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Donald Trump, Con Artist?
The New Yorker: Late last month, on “Good Morning America,” “CBS This Morning,” and other political talk shows, Marco Rubio called Donald Trump “a con artist.” (“We’re on the verge of having someone take over the conservative movement and the Republican Party who’s a con artist,” he said, on “Today.”) Trump, Rubio argued, has made a career of “sticking it to working Americans”; several of his businesses had gone bankrupt and some, like Trump University, may have been fraudulent. Rubio implied that Trump’s Presidential campaign was another instance of intentional deception. It’s a message we’ve heard not just from Rubio, but from Ted Cruz and Mitt Romney, as well as various pundits.
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Does a “Triple Package” of Traits Predict Success?
What makes one person more successful than another? For decades, social scientists have been trying to identify the factors that lead some people, but not others, to land dream jobs in high-paying, prestigious careers. While there’s certainly no set formula for becoming a success, researchers have identified several social factors that can certainly help your chances. Educational attainment, general intelligence, and the Big-Five personality trait of conscientiousness have all been shown to consistently predict job performance, income, wealth accumulation, and status attainment. But what about other social factors?
