-
It’s All In Your Head: Director Pete Docter Gets Emotional In ‘Inside Out’
NPR: Why do songs get stuck in your head? Where did that weird dream come from last night? The new Disney Pixar film Inside Out takes an animated peek into the inner workings of our minds. The film follows 11-year-old Riley, who is uprooted from her home in Minnesota when her father starts a new company in San Francisco. This normally joyful girl becomes sad and angry when she's forced to leave the house, the friends and the hockey team she loves.
-
How the Poor Make Better Financial Decisions Than the Wealthy
Slate: People often assume that the poor are less competent than the wealthy. Some even suggest that the poor have flawed values or ways of thinking. But my colleagues and I have recently found that the poor outperform the rich at some financial decisions. Under poverty, people develop a unique expertise. To appreciate this expertise, we should first come to terms with a mistake nearly everyone makes. Consider this question, which I regularly pose to my MBA students: Imagine you are buying a $300 tablet, but the salesman says the same tablet is available for $50 less at a store 20 minutes away. Would you travel for the discount? Almost certainly. Now imagine that the tablet costs $1,000.
-
Cognitive Costs of Crossing the Street Increase with Age
On average, a pedestrian in the US is killed in a car-related accident every 2 hours and injured every 7 minutes, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But children aren’t the ones at greatest risk of a deadly collision with a car– seniors are. A CDC analysis of pedestrian traffic deaths from 2001-2010 concluded that the risk of death actually increases with age. Children under age 15 had the lowest risk of dying as the result of a collision with a vehicle; people over the age of 75 were more than twice as likely to be killed by a car compared to pedestrians overall.
-
Why Do Former High-School Athletes Make More Money?
The Atlantic: This project was a slam dunk, that one was a home run, and it’s just the way the ball bounces—the last thing the business world needs to catalogue its accomplishments is another facile sports metaphor. But it’s not just athletic metaphors that proliferate in the business world—it’s also athletes themselves. A recent study documented just how much the labor market smiles upon people who played sports as children: Former high-school athletes generally go on to have higher-status careers than those who didn’t play a sport. On top of that, former athletes’ wages are between 5 and 15 percent higher than those of the poor trombonists and Yearbook Club presidents.
-
Who Are You? Identity and Dementia
The Huffington Post: Phineas Gage is arguably the most famous case study in the history of neuroscience. Gage was a railroad worker who in the autumn of 1848 was helping to prepare a new roadbed near Cavendish, Vermont, when an accidental explosion sent a three-foot tamping iron through his head. The missile entered the left side of his face, passed behind his left eye, and exited through the top of his skull. Gage, remarkably, lived to tell about the mishap. But friends said he had changed -- that he was "no longer Gage" -- and this is what has intrigued psychological scientists.
-
Pride and Prejudice: Reducing LGBT Discrimination at Work
Employers are likely to abide by laws barring discrimination against gay workers not because they are necessarily afraid of being punished for violating the law, but because these laws send a clear message about acceptable moral behavior in the community, a study suggests.
