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The Stanford professor who pioneered praising kids for effort says we’ve totally missed the point
Quartz: It is well known that telling a kid she is smart is wading into seriously dangerous territory. Reams of research show that kids who are praised for being smart fixate on performance, shying away from taking risks and meeting potential failure. Kids who are praised for their efforts try harder and persist with tasks longer. These “effort” kids have a “growth mindset” marked by resilience and a thirst for mastery; the “smart” ones have a “fixed mindset” believing intelligence to be innate and not malleable. But now, Carol Dweck, the Stanford professor of psychology who spent 40 years researching, introducing and explaining the growth mindset, is calling a big timeout.
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Couples’ Quality of Life Linked Even When One Partner Dies
When one spouse passes away, his or her characteristics continue to be linked with the surviving spouse’s well-being, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The findings also indicate that this link between the deceased spouse and surviving spouse is as strong as that between partners who are both living. “The people we care about continue to influence our quality of life even when we they are gone,” says lead researcher Kyle Bourassa, a psychology doctoral student at the University of Arizona.
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A New Way to Beat the Market: Invest in Workplace Wellness
In 1979, Jim Burke the chief executive of Johnson & Johnson started a state-of-the-art workplace wellness program in order to improve employee wellbeing and cut healthcare costs. The program’s goal was to make Johnson & Johnson employees “the healthiest in the world.” The expectation was that improving employees’ health and well-being would ultimately have a positive impact on the company's bottom line. It appears that Burke was onto something: A new study finds that companies that prioritize employee health also had significantly higher stock returns.
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Can You Spot a Liar?
The Atlantic: In November, I came across a story that made absolutely no sense to me. A 33-year-old consultant named Niall Rice gave $718,000, little by little, to two Manhattan psychics who promised to reunite him with an old flame. How could someone be so gullible? Rice himself didn’t even seem to know: “I just got sucked in,” he told The New York Times later. As it turns out, it’s much easier to fall for these types of cons than many people think.
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How Our Brains Respond to Race
The Wall Street Journal: When Barack Obama was elected president, there was talk of how America was becoming a post-racial society. Yet the news suggests abundantly that this is not the case. Why is progress on this issue so difficult? Recent research suggests that part of it has do with learning that occurs remarkably early in life. Scientists have used neuroimaging to study the responses of our brains to faces of different races and have uncovered a disquieting result called the “other-race effect,” or ORE. ...
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Basic Ratio Capacity May Serve as Building Block for Math Knowledge
Understanding fractions is a critical mathematical ability, and yet it’s one that continues to confound a lot of people well into adulthood. New research finds evidence for an innate ratio processing ability that may play a role in determining our aptitude for understanding fractions and other formal mathematical concepts. The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
