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Hope, the Quintessential Sports Fan Emotion
Pacific Standard: With the National Football League's first game of the season now behind us and the usual slew of games coming Sunday, psychologists have a helpful reminder for all the fans out there: Your team probably won't be as good as you think. That's because, as a new study reports, football fans collectively believe their favorite teams will win more than 300 games—something that's arithmetically impossible. Important an observation as that is, psychologists Bradley Love, Łukasz Kopeć, and Olivia Guest weren't primarily interested in football.
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Why the U.S. Government Is Embracing Behavioral Science
Harvard Business Review: For anyone interested in human behavior and decision making, September 15 will likely be a day to remember. On that day, President Obama ordered government agencies to use behavioral science insights to “better serve the American people.” In his executive order, Obama instructed federal agencies to identify policies and operations where applying findings from behavioral science could improve “public welfare, program outcomes, and program cost effectiveness,” design strategies for using behavioral science insights, and recruit behavioral experts whenever considered necessary or helpful.
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New Research on Overcoming Loneliness
The Wall Street Journal: I was feeling lonely one recent weekend. I craved company, but friends and family all seemed to be on vacation or busy. So I arranged to chat with a friend who lives in another city, signed up for a group kayak outing, and decided I’d take myself to Sunday brunch at a new restaurant nearby. Then I canceled my plans, ignored my phone when it rang and read for two days. It didn’t make me less lonely. I was relieved Monday morning when the rhythm of work started up again.
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The Aging Advantage
Pacific Standard: At the San Francisco offices of the global design firm IDEO, overlooking the blue expanse of San Francisco Bay, 150 people spend each workday bettering how we live by re-thinking everyday tangibles like IKEA kitchens, Tempur-Pedic mattresses, and, years ago, Crest toothpaste tubes. More recently, though, IDEO has started to think more widely about how we might engineer large cultural shifts in areas that aren’t traditionally thought of as “designable”—how we approach topics like religion, aging, and even death.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: An Enhanced Default Approach Bias Following Amygdala Lesions in Humans Laura A. Harrison, Rene Hurlemann, and Ralph Adolphs Monkeys that have amygdala lesions -- a part of the brain involved in memory, emotion, and learning -- show a tendency to approach stimuli that are normally considered threatening. The researchers examined whether amygdala lesions produce a general default bias to evaluate stimuli positively or a specific positivity bias -- in this case, a face-approach bias.
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Telecommuting Works Best in Moderation, Science Shows
Organizations are increasingly offering employees a variety of work-from-home options despite sometimes conflicting evidence about the effectiveness of telecommuting. A comprehensive new report reveals that telecommuting can boost employee job satisfaction and productivity, but only when it’s carefully implemented with specific individual and organizational factors in mind. A key factor in determining the success of a telework plan, for example, is the proportion of time that an employee works remotely versus in the office.
